that long
ears were a merit, and Windham met him by the authority of Xenophon
and Oppian in favour of short ones, and finally they went off into
what it was that Virgil meant when he called a horse's head _argutum
caput_. Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland together in 1785, and
their conversation fell as often on old books as on Hastings or on
Pitt. They discussed Virgil's similes; Johnson and L'Estrange, as the
extremes of English style; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to say
about Cicero's use of the word _gratiosus_. If they came to libraries,
Windham ran into them with eagerness, and very strongly enjoyed
all "the _feel_ that a library usually excites." He is constantly
reproaching himself with a remissness, which was purely imaginary, in
keeping up his mathematics, his Greek tragedies, his Latin historians.
There is no more curious example of the remorse of a book-man impeded
by affairs. "What progress might men make in the several parts of
knowledge," he says very truly, in one of these moods, "if they could
only pursue them with the same eagerness and assiduity as are exerted
by lawyers in the conduct of a suit." But this distraction between the
tastes of the book-man and the pursuits of public business, united
with a certain quality of his constitution to produce one great defect
in his character, and it was the worst defect that a statesman can
have. He became the most irresolute and vacillating of men. He wastes
the first half of a day in deciding which of two courses to take, and
the second half in blaming himself for not having taken the other. He
is constantly late at entertainments, because he cannot make up his
mind in proper time whether to go or to stay at home; hesitation
whether he shall read in the red room or in the library, loses him
three of the best hours of a morning; the difficulty of early rising
he finds to consist less in rising early than in satisfying himself
that the practice is wholesome; his mind is torn for a whole forenoon
in an absurd contest with himself, whether he ought to indulge a
strong wish to exercise his horse before dinner. Every page of his
diary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy disease. When the
Revolution came, he was absolutely forced, by the iron necessity of
the case, after certain perturbations, to go either with Fox or with
Burke. Under this compulsion he took one headlong plunge into the
policy of alarm. Everybody knows how desperately an habitua