e Christian meekness
and Christian humility equalled the meekness and humility of his patient
and abject ambition. At length he was forced to understand that all was
over. He quitted that court where he had held high office during
forty-five years, and hid his shame and regret among the cedars of
Claremont. Bute became first lord of the treasury.

The favorite had undoubtedly committed a great error. It is impossible
to imagine a tool better suited to his purposes than that which he thus
threw away, or rather put into the hands of his enemies. If Newcastle
had been suffered to play at being first minister, Bute might securely
and quietly have enjoyed the substance of power. The gradual
introduction of Tories into all the departments of the government might
have been effected without any violent clamor, if the chief of the great
Whig connection had been ostensibly at the head of affairs. This was
strongly represented to Bute by Lord Mansfield, a man who may justly be
called the father of modern Toryism, of Toryism modified to suit an
order of things under which the House of Commons is the most powerful
body in the state. The theories which had dazzled Bute could not impose
on the fine intellect of Mansfield. The temerity with which Bute
provoked the hostility of powerful and deeply rooted interests was
displeasing to Mansfield's cold and timid nature. Expostulation,
however, was vain. Bute was impatient of advice, drunk with success,
eager to be, in show as well as in reality, the head of the government.
He had engaged in an undertaking in which a screen was absolutely
necessary to his success, and even to his safety. He found an excellent
screen ready in the very place where it was most needed; and he rudely
pushed it away.

And now the new system of government came into full operation. For the
first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party
was in the ascendant. The prime minister himself was a Tory. Lord
Egremont, who had succeeded Pitt as Secretary of State, was a Tory, and
the son of a Tory. Sir Francis Dashwood, a man of slender parts, of
small experience, and of notoriously immoral character, was made
Chancellor of the Exchequer, for no reason that could be imagined,
except that he was a Tory, and had been a Jacobite. The royal household
was filled with men whose favorite toast, a few years before, had been
the King over the water. The relative position of the two great national
seats of l