by anxious tenderness for his children. But by the nation
he was regarded as a man of insatiable rapacity and desperate ambition;
as a man ready to adopt, without scruple, the most immoral and the most
unconstitutional manners; as a man perfectly fitted, by all his opinions
and feelings, for the work of managing the Parliament by means of
secret-service money, and of keeping down the people with the bayonet.
Many of his contemporaries had a morality quite as lax as his: but very
few among them had his talents, and none had his hardihood and energy.
He could not, like Sandys and Doddington, find safety in contempt. He
therefore became an object of such general aversion as no statesman
since the fall of Strafford has incurred, of such general aversion as
was probably never in any country incurred by a man of so kind and
cordial a disposition. A weak mind would have sunk under such a load of
unpopularity. But that resolute spirit seemed to derive new firmness
from the public hatred. The only effect which reproaches appeared to
produce on him was to sour, in some degree, his naturally sweet temper.
The last acts of his public life were marked, not only by that audacity
which he had derived from nature, not only by that immorality which he
had learned in the school of Walpole, but by a harshness which almost
amounted to cruelty, and which had never been supposed to belong to his
character. His severity increased the unpopularity from which it had
sprung. The well-known lampoon of Gray may serve as a specimen of the
feeling of the country. All the images are taken from shipwrecks,
quicksands, and cormorants. Lord Holland is represented as complaining
that the cowardice of his accomplices had prevented him from putting
down the free spirit of the city of London by sword and fire, and as
pining for the time when birds of prey should make their nests in
Westminster Abbey, and unclean beasts burrow in St. Paul's.

Within a few months after the death of this remarkable man, his second
son Charles appeared at the head of the party opposed to the American
War. Charles had inherited the bodily and mental constitution of his
father, and had been much, far too much, under his father's influence.
It was indeed impossible that a son of so affectionate and noble a
nature should not have been warmly attached to a parent who possessed
many fine qualities, and who carried his indulgence and liberality
towards his children even to a culpable e