ed,
yellow, and scarcely able to support himself. A fever came on in ten
days, mortification ensued, and carried him off. It is said that he had
concealed and tampered indiscreetly with an old complaint, acquired
before his marriage. This was his radical death; I doubt, vexation and
disappointment fermented the wound. Instead of the duchy he hoped, his
reception was freezing. He was a frank, gallant gentleman; universally
beloved with us; hated I believe by nobody, and by no means inferior in
understanding to many who affected to despise his abilities.

But our comet is set too! Charles Townshend[1] is dead. All those parts
and fire are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that
first eloquence of the world is dumb! that duplicity is fixed, that
cowardice terminated heroically. He joked on death as naturally as he
used to do on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers,
who wind up their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered.
With a robust person he had always a menacing constitution. He had had a
fever the whole summer, recovered as it was thought, relapsed, was
neglected, and it turned to an incurable putrid fever.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he
might have been added by Lord Macaulay to his list of men whom their
eloquence had caused to be placed in offices for which they were totally
unfit; for he had not only no special knowledge of finance, but he was
one of the most careless and incautious of mankind, even in his oratory.
In that, however, after the retirement of Lord Chatham, he seems to have
had no rival in either house but Mr. Burke. It was to his heedless
resumption of Grenville's plan of taxing our colonies in North America
that our loss of them was owing. In his "Memoirs of the Reign of George
III." Walpole gives the following description of him: "Charles
Townshend, who had studied nothing with accuracy or attention, had parts
that embraced all knowledge with such quickness that he seemed to create
knowledge, instead of searching for it; and, ready as Burke's wit was,
it appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so
abundant that in him it seemed a loss of time to think. He had but to
speak, and all he said was new, natural, and yet uncommon. If Burke
replied extempore, his very answers that sprang from what had been said
by others were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the
appearance of study an