he interval between these
disgraceful epochs is filled--if we except the brief episode of
Chatham--by a series of struggles between different connections--one
cannot call them parties--which separate and combine, and fight and make
peace, till the plot of the drama becomes too complicated for human
ingenuity to unravel. Lads just crammed for a civil service examination
might possibly bear in mind all the shifting combinations which resulted
from the endless intrigues of Pelhams and Grenvilles and Bedfords and
Rockinghams; yet even those omniscient persons could hardly give a
plausible account of the principles which each party conceived itself
to be maintaining. What, for example, were the politics of a Rigby, or a
Bubb Dodington? The diary in which the last of these eminent persons
reveals his inmost soul is perhaps the most curious specimen of
unconscious self-analysis extant. His utter baseness and venality, his
disgust at the 'low venal wretches' to whom he had to give bribes; his
creeping and crawling before those from whom he sought to extract
bribes; his utter incapacity to explain a great man except on the
hypothesis of insanity; or to understand that there is such a thing as
political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction
that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspirations which
he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a
peerage, and differed from innumerable competitors only by superior
frankness. He is the fitting representative of an era from which
political faith has disappeared, as Walpole is its fitting satirist. All
political virtue, it is said, was confined, in Walpole's opinion, to
Conway and the Marquis of Hertford. Was he wrong? or, if he was wrong,
was it not rather in the exception than the rule? The dialect in which
his sarcasms are expressed is affected, but the substance is hard to
dispute. The world, he is fond of saying, is a tragedy to those who
feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. 'I have
never yet seen or heard,' he says, 'anything serious that was not
ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the
hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the Humes,
the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the
mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their
various ways. Fame or interest is their object, and after all their
parade, I