ached. Believe me to be, with great truth and regard, my
dear sir, faithfully and sincerely yours,--W. PITT." Addington complied
with a part of the proposal, seconded the Address, and was considered to
have performed his task with effect. But the effort went no farther. His
ability lay in another direction; and though a clear, well-informed, and
influential debater in his more public days, and when the urgency of
office compelled the exertion, he left for four years the honours of
debate to the multitude of his competitors.

In the course of the memoir, there is a letter of Addington's, speaking
of Sheridan's famous speech on the Begum question. Addington voted in
the majority against Hastings; but, though he does not exactly say that
Sheridan's famous speech was the cause of his vote, he yet joins in the
general acclamation.

It has been the habit of late critics to decry the merits of this famous
oration, and even to charge it with being frivolous, outrageous, and
bombastic, an immense accumulation of calumny and clap-trap, which the
craft of Sheridan would not submit to the public ordeal, and which he
has therefore left to its chance of a fantastic and visionary fame. But
this we find it impossible to believe. That in a speech of five hours
and a half, there may have been--nay, there must have been, passages of
extravagance, and even errors of taste, is perfectly probable; but they
must have been overcome by countless passages of lustre and beauty,--by
powerful conceptions and brilliant examples of language; at once
resistless and refined,--by living descriptions, and thoughts of daring
and dazzling energy, sufficient to have made it one of the most
memorable triumphs of senatorial eloquence in the world. How, on any
other supposition, is it possible to account for the effects which we
know it to have produced?

Addington's letter, alluding to this subject, says "The papers will
convey but a faint idea of a speech, which I heard Fox declare to be the
most wonderful effort of the human mind that perhaps had ever been made.
Mr Pitt, and indeed the whole House, spoke of it in terms of admiration
and astonishment, scarcely inferior to those of Mr Fox."

The papers, indeed, convey a worse than inadequate idea of this
wonderful oration, for they give merely a few fragments, in which they
have contrived either to select their examples with the most curious
infelicity, or to blunder them into bombast. But nothing can be m