entiment in it. The transaction at the time of his resignation
does not carry with it an absolute indifference as to money or other
advantages, nor did there appear in any of his subsequent negotiations,
in or out of power, that he went beyond what was necessary to satisfy
the people at the time or to secure his wished-for situation. In truth,
it was his favorite maxim that a little new went a great way.... I was
in the most intimate political habits with him for ten years, the time
that I was secretary of state included, he minister, and necessarily was
with him at all hours in town and country, without drinking a glass of
water in his house or company, or five minutes' conversation out of the
way of business. I went to see him afterward in Somersetshire, where I
fell into more familiar habits with him, which continued and confirmed
me in all that I have said. He was tall in his person, and as genteel as
a martyr to the gout could be, with the eye of a hawk, a little head,
thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect. He was very well
bred, and preserved all the manners of the _vieille cour_, with a degree
of pedantry, however, in his conversation, especially when he affected
levity, I never found him when I have gone to him--which was always by
appointment--with so much as a book before him, but always sitting alone
in a drawing-room waiting the hour of appointment, and in the country
with his hat and stick in his hand."

All this, it must not be forgotten, was written in the year 1801, long
after the writer had finally retired from the battlefield of politics,
upon which, at the period when his own account of his youth breaks off,
he had not yet made his first essay. Some practical experience of actual
battlefields was to be gained by the future statesman before his
appearance in the parliamentary arena. Just before the time when,
between nineteen and twenty years of age, he was leaving Oxford, the
Seven Years' War broke out, and finding "home detestable, no prospect of
a decent allowance to go abroad [he had a trifling six hundred pounds a
year from his father, though], neither happiness nor quiet," he joined
the army and went on foreign service. Here he had the good-fortune to
come under the chivalrous General Wolfe, whom he eulogizes in terms the
genuine warmth and heartiness of which is all the more striking from the
contrast with his generally severe judgments upon his contemporaries. At
the battle of Minde