become acquainted with many political secrets, and seen enough of
political baseness. He had considerable powers of observation, and
occasionally makes a profound remark, especially on the selfish tendencies
and the secret springs of the human heart. His characters are all drawn
from the life; and often with great power both of observation and
expression. But he had not sufficient steadiness of thought or purpose to
achieve any thing considerable, or draw any important conclusions even
from the multifarious information of which he was master, or the powers of
observation which he possessed. There was nothing grand or generous in his
composition. No elevated thoughts, no lofty aspirations, no patriotic
resolves, are visible in his writings. Political _insouciance_ was his
prevailing habitude of mind; an invincible tendency to "_laissez aller_"
the basis of his character. But he did not lie by and observe events, like
Metternich and Talleyrand, to become embued with their tendency, and
ultimately gain the mastery of them; he let them take their course, and in
reality cared very little for the result. He was an epicurean, not a
stoic, in politics. His character approaches very nearly to that which
common report has assigned to Lord Melbourne. He had strong party
attachments, and still stronger party antipathies; he seems to have
devoutly swallowed the creed so common to party men of every age, that all
those on his side were noble and virtuous, and all those against him, base
and selfish. He had much of the wit of Erasmus, but he had also a full
share of his aversion to martyrdom. But we shall find abundance of
patriotic declamation, cutting invective, and querulous complaint. The
misfortune is, that the declamation is always against the triumph of the
Tories; the invective against the astuteness of Lord Bute; the complaint
against the disunion of the Whig leaders, or the Tory influences at court.

There is class of readers considerable among men, numerous among women, in
whom the appetite for scandal is so strong, that it altogether overleaps
the bounds of time and faction, and seizes with nearly as much avidity on
the private gossip of the past as of the present age. With such persons,
the next best thing to discovering a _faux pas_ among their acquaintances,
is to hear of it among their grandmothers; the greatest comfort, next to
laying bare political baseness in their rulers, is to discover it in the
government which rul