erical assaults upon the stage, the satirist
who could be the most devoted friend, the seducer who could be so loyal
to his victim, the spendthrift who could be generous, the cynic who
could feel and obey the principles of the purest patriotism, was one of
those strangely compounded natures in which each vice was as it were
effaced or neutralized by some compensating virtue. It may be fairly
urged that while Churchill's virtues were his own, his vices were in
large part the fault of his unhappy destiny. The Westminster boy who
learned Latin under Vincent Bourne, and who was a schoolfellow of
Warren Hastings, of Cowper, and of Colman, might possibly have made a
good scholar, but was certainly not of the stuff of which good
clergymen are made. An early marriage, an unhappy marriage contracted
in the Rules of the Fleet, had weighed down his life with encumbrances
almost before he had begun to live. Compelled to support an unsuitable
wife and an increasing family, Churchill followed his father's example
and his father's injudicious counsel and took Holy Orders. Men took
Orders in those days with a light heart. It afforded the needy a
livelihood, precarious indeed for the most part, but still preferable
to famine. Men took Orders with no thought of the sanctity of their
calling, of the solemn service it exacted, of its awful duties and its
inexorable demands. They wished merely to keep famine from the door,
to have food and fire and shelter, and they took Orders as under other
conditions they would have taken the King's shilling, with no more
feeling of reverence for the black cassock than for the scarlet coat.
Churchill was not the man to wear the clergyman's gown with dignity, or
to find in the gravity of his office consolation for the penury that it
entailed. The Establishment offered meagre advantages to an
extravagant man with an extravagant wife. He drifted deeper and deeper
into debt. He became as a wandering star, reserved for the blackness
of bailiffs and the darkness of duns. But the {54} rare quality he had
in him of giving a true friendship to his friend won a like quality
from other men. Dr. Lloyd, under-master of his old school of
Westminster, came to his aid, helped him in his need, and secured the
patience of his creditors. He was no longer harassed, but he was still
poor, and the spur of poverty drove him to tempt his fortune in
letters. Like so many a literary adventurer of the eighteenth centu