that
any subject could desire. But Temple was impracticable; and Pitt, with
great regret, declared that he could not, without the concurrence of his
brother-in-law, undertake the administration.

The Duke now saw only one way of delivering his nephew. An
administration must be formed of the Whigs in opposition, without Pitt's
help. The difficulties seemed almost insuperable. Death and desertion
had grievously thinned the ranks of the party lately supreme in the
state. Those among whom the Duke's choice lay might be divided into two
classes,--men too old for important offices, and men who had never been
in any important office before. The cabinet must be composed of broken
invalids or of raw recruits.

This was an evil, yet not an unmixed evil. If the new Whig statesmen had
little experience in business and debate, they were, on the other hand,
pure from the taint of that political immorality which had deeply
infected their predecessors. Long prosperity had corrupted that great
party which had expelled the Stuarts, limited the prerogatives of the
Crown, and curbed the intolerance of the Hierarchy. Adversity had
already produced a salutary effect. On the day of the accession of
George the Third, the ascendency of the Whig party terminated; and on
that day the purification of the Whig party began. The rising chiefs of
that party were men of a very different sort from Sandys and Winnington,
from Sir William Yonge and Henry Fox. They were men worthy to have
charged by the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or to have exchanged the
last embrace with Russell on the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. They
carried into politics the same high principles of virtue which regulated
their private dealings, nor would they stoop to promote even the noblest
and most salutary ends by means which honor and probity condemn. Such
men were Lord John Cavendish, Sir George Savile, and others whom we hold
in honor as the second founders of the Whig party, as the restorers of
its pristine health and energy after half a century of degeneracy.

The chief of this respectable band was the Marquess of Rockingham, a man
of splendid fortune, excellent sense, and stainless character. He was
indeed nervous to such a degree that, to the very close of his life, he
never rose without great reluctance and embarrassment to address the
House of Lords. But, though not a great orator, he had in a high degree
some of the qualities of a statesman. He chose his friend