January weather of the following year he died
suddenly and peacefully in the midst of his family. He was a great and
a good man. The serene purity of his life, his lofty purposes, his
nobility of nature, cause him to stand out very conspicuously in the
strange, cynical, cruel world of English life and English thought
during the first half of the eighteenth century. He was in that world,
but he was never of it. His friends were either noble of life and
mind, or else he saw in them only their nobler qualities, and took no
thought of or no harm from the rest. He seems to have been most
happy--and the fact is characteristic of the man--in the society of the
sweet, simple, and studious woman who made him a loving wife, and of
the children whom he loved with an affection for the excess of which he
sometimes reproached himself. All his contemporaries, says Sir James
Mackintosh, agreed with Pope in ascribing

"To Berkeley every virtue under heaven."

In 1754 Henry Pelham died. The important consequence of his death was
the fact that it gave Pitt at last an opportunity of coming to the
front. The Duke of Newcastle, Henry Pelham's brother, became leader of
the administration, with Henry Fox for Secretary at War, Pitt for
Paymaster-general of the Forces, and Murray, afterwards to be famous as
Lord Mansfield, for Attorney-general. There was some difficulty about
the leadership of the House of Commons. Pitt was still too much
disliked by the King to be available for the position. Fox for a while
refused to accept it, and Murray was unwilling {297} to do anything
which might be likely to withdraw him from the professional path along
which he was to move to such distinction. An attempt was made to get
on with a Sir Thomas Robinson, a man of no capacity for such a
position, and the attempt was soon an evident failure. Then Fox
consented to take the position on Newcastle's own terms, which were
those of absolute submission to the dictates of Newcastle. Later still
he was content to descend to a subordinate office which did not even
give him a place in the Cabinet. Fox never recovered the damage which
his reputation and his influence suffered by this amazing act; the only
explanation for which was found in the fact that he loved money better
than anything in the world, and that the office of Paymaster-general
gave almost limitless opportunities to a rapacious and unscrupulous man.

[Sidenote: 1757--Admiral Byng]

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