rch, in a spot
which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
defiance at her foes.

"The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
none a more splendid name."

It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character
as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb
tributes as these.

Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy
journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English;
but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote
an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be
searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He
possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly
taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised
his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.

Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted
pools of political intrigue.

We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an
honour to letters.

Your loving old
G.P.

15

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine
adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that never
exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes was
displayed by his contemporaries.

Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great speeches.

He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the third son
of the tenth Earl. After being in the