with loathing, and to detest, where it was impossible to
despise, the men who came to the service of their country with
characters that were clean from a privacy that was honorable. Many, if
not most, of the leading figures of that hour would have been more
appropriately situated as the members of a brotherhood of thieves and
the parasites of a brothel than as the holders of high office and the
caretakers of a royal conscience. There were men upon the highway,
rogues with a bit of crape across their foreheads and a pair of pistols
in their holsters, haunting the Portsmouth Road or Hounslow Heath, with
the words "Stand and deliver" ever ready on their lips, who seem
relatively to be men of honor and probity compared with a man like the
first Lord Holland or like Rigby. There were poor slaves of the stews,
wretched servants of the bagnios, whose lives seem sweet and decorous
when compared with those of a Sandwich or a Dashwood or a Duke of
Grafton. Yet these men, whose companionship might be rejected by Jack
Sheppard, and whose example might be avoided by Pompey Bum, are the men
whose names are ceaselessly prominent in the early story of the reign,
and to whose power and influence much of its calamities are directly
due.

[Sidenote: 1763--The Duke of Grafton]

It is not easy to accord a primacy of dishonor to any one of the many
statesmen whose names degrade the age. Possibly the laurels of shame,
possibly the palms of infamy {35} may be proffered to Augustus Henry
Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton. When George the Third came to the
throne the Duke of Grafton was only twenty-five years old, and had been
three years in the House of Lords, after having passed about twice as
many months in the House of Commons. Destined to live for more than
half a century after the accession, and to die while the sovereign had
still many melancholy years to live, the Duke of Grafton enjoyed a long
career, that was unadorned by either public or private virtue. There
is no need to judge Grafton on the indictment of the satirist who in a
later day made the name of Junius more terrible to the advisers of King
George than ever was the name of Pietro Aretino to the princes whom he
scourged. The coldest chronicle of the Duke's careers, the baldest
narrative of his life, proves him to have been no less dangerous to the
public weal as a statesman than he was noxious to human society as an
individual. He had not even the redeeming grace that