the speed with
which he had mounted from a humble to a lofty position. They had,
without rendering any service to the State, without showing any
capacity for the conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest
dignities, in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere
partiality of the Sovereign. Montague owed every thing to his own merit
and to the public opinion of his merit. With his master he appears to
have had very little intercourse, and none that was not official. He
was in truth a living monument of what the Revolution had done for the
Country. The Revolution had found him a young student in a cell by the
Cam, poring on the diagrams which illustrated the newly discovered laws
of centripetal and centrifugal force, writing little copies of verses,
and indulging visions of parsonages with rich glebes, and of closes in
old cathedral towns had developed in him new talents; had held out to
him the hope of prizes of a very different sort from a rectory or a
prebend. His eloquence had gained for him the ear of the legislature.
His skill in fiscal and commercial affairs had won for him the
confidence of the City. During four years he had been the undisputed
leader of the majority of the House of Commons; and every one of those
years he had made memorable by great parliamentary victories, and by
great public services. It should seem that his success ought to have
been gratifying to the nation, and especially to that assembly of
which he was the chief ornament, of which indeed he might be called
the creature. The representatives of the people ought to have been
well pleased to find that their approbation could, in the new order
of things, do for the man whom they delighted to honour all that the
mightiest of the Tudors could do for Leicester, or the most arbitrary of
the Stuarts for Strafford. But, strange to say, the Commons soon began
to regard with an evil eve that greatness which was their own work. The
fault indeed was partly Montague's. With all his ability, he had not the
wisdom to avert, by suavity and moderation, that curse, the inseparable
concomitant of prosperity and glory, which the ancients personified
under the name of Nemesis. His head, strong for all the purposes of
debate and arithmetical calculation, was weak against the intoxicating
influence of success and fame. He became proud even to insolence. Old
companions, who, a very few years before, had punned and rhymed with him
in garrets, h