ad been seasoned to its pains. His
habits had not been such as were likely to fortify his mind against
obloquy and public hatred. He had reached his forty-eighth year in
dignified ease, without knowing, by personal experience, what it was to
be ridiculed and slandered. All at once, without any previous
initiation, he had found himself exposed to such a storm of invective
and satire as had never burst on the head of any statesman. The
emoluments of office were now nothing to him; for he had just succeeded
to a princely property by the death of his father-in-law. All the honors
which could be bestowed on him he had already secured. He had obtained
the Garter for himself, and a British peerage for his son. He seems also
to have imagined that by quitting the treasury he should escape from
danger and abuse without really resigning power, and should still be
able to exercise in private supreme influence over the royal mind.

Whatever may have been his motives, he retired. Fox at the same time
took refuge in the House of Lords; and George Grenville became first
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We believe that those who made this arrangement fully intended that
Grenville should be a mere puppet in the hands of Bute; for Grenville
was as yet very imperfectly known even to those who had observed him
long. He passed for a mere official drudge; and he had all the industry,
the minute accuracy, the formality, the tediousness, which belong to the
character. But he had other qualities which had not yet shown
themselves, devouring ambition, dauntless courage, self-confidence
amounting to presumption, and a temper which could not endure
opposition. He was not disposed to be anybody's tool; and he had no
attachment, political or personal, to Bute. The two men had, indeed,
nothing in common, except a strong propensity towards harsh and
unpopular courses. Their principles were fundamentally different. Bute
was a Tory. Grenville would have been very angry with any person who
should have denied his claim to be a Whig. He was more prone to
tyrannical measures than Bute; but he loved tyranny only when disguised
under the forms of constitutional liberty. He mixed up, after a fashion
then not very unusual, the theories of the republicans of the
seventeenth century with the technical maxims of English law, and thus
succeeded in combining anarchical speculation with arbitrary practice.
The voice of the people was the voice o