fe two men, both of whom were young, both of whom bore names that
were already familiar from an honorable parentage, and both of whom
were destined to play very conspicuous parts in the House of Commons.
One of the two men was known to his family alone, and his intimates, as
a youth of great promise and great knowledge, which gave to his twenty
years the ripened wisdom of a statesman and a scholar. The other, who
was eight years older, had been for some years in the public eye, had
been the hero of a romantic scandal which had done much to make his
name notorious, and had written some dramatic works which had done more
to make his name famous. It was a fortunate chance that when the House
of Commons stood in need of new blood and new men the same time and the
same year saw the return to Parliament of William Pitt and of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan.

It has been said that every reader of the "Iliad" finds himself
irresistibly compelled to take sides with one or other of the great
opposing camps, and to be thenceforward either a Greek or a Trojan. In
something of the same spirit every student of the reign of the third
George becomes perforce a partisan of one or other of two statesmen who
divided the honors of its prime between them, who were opposed on all
the great questions of their day, and who represented at their best the
two forces into which English political life was then, and is still,
divided. The history of England for the closing years of the
eighteenth century and the early dawn of the nineteenth century is
{212} the history of these two men and of their influence. Those who
study their age and their career are separated as keenly and as hotly
to-day as they were separated keenly and hotly a hundred years ago into
the followers of Charles James Fox or the followers of William Pitt.
The record of English party politics is a record of long and splendid
duels between recognized chiefs of the two antagonistic armies. What
the struggle between Gladstone and Disraeli, for example, was to our
own time, the struggle between Fox and Pitt was to our ancestors of
three generations ago. All the force and feeling that made for what we
now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in
the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around
the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of
Lord Chatham. The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that
the