gitation
reached its height. But a man of thirty was counted older than he
{193} would not be reckoned, in an epoch when it was possible for a
young man just come of age to lead the House of Commons. Lord George
Gordon had led a somewhat varied life. He had been in the navy, and
had left the service from pique, while the American war was still in
its earliest stages, in consequence of a quarrel with Lord Sandwich
concerning promotion. The restless energy which he could no longer
dedicate to active service he resolved most unhappily to devote to
political life. He entered Parliament as the representative of the
borough of Ludgershall, and soon earned for himself a considerable
notoriety in Westminster. He had very fierce opinions; he attacked
everybody and everything; his vehemence and vituperation were seasoned
with a kind of wit, and he made himself, if not a power, at least an
important factor in the House of Commons. Indeed, it passed into a
kind of proverb at St. Stephen's that there were three parties in the
State--the Ministry, the Opposition, and Lord George Gordon.
Parliament had seen before, and has seen since, many a politician
fighting thus like Hal o' the Wynd for his own hand, but no one so
influential for a season or so pernicious in his influence as Lord
George Gordon.

It seems quite clear to those who review so strange a career at this
distance of time that Lord George Gordon was of deranged intellect. It
does not need the alleged contrast between his professions and his
practice to enforce this conclusion. Many men have affected the
religious habit and the religious bearing while their lives were
privately profligate without deserving to be called insane except in
the sense in which any criminal excess may be regarded pathologically
as a proof of madness. Even if it were true that the long-haired and
black-habited George Gordon were the debauched profligate that Hannah
More and Horace Walpole maintained him to be, he might find
fellow-sinners of unquestioned sanity. But the conduct of his public
life goes to prove that his wits were diseased. His behavior in the
House, when it was not intolerably tedious, was characterized by a
grotesque buffoonery which men looked upon as laughable {194} or
pitiable according to their tempers, but which they had not yet learned
to look upon as dangerous. When he denounced the King as a Papist,
when he declared that the time would come when George Gordon