George Ellis (1753-1815), the son of a West Indian planter, was already writing mock-heroics about Bath society in 1777, and next year published Poetical Tales by Sir Gregory Gander, which delighted Scott and the world, and are referred to in the fifth canto of Marmion, dedicated to Ellis. The young wit, having Whig connections, was one of the most effective members of the Rolliad group, and is believed to have written the attack on Pitt, quoted at page 671; but he afterwards changed sides and was a constant contributor to the AntiJacobin. Attached to a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands, he wrote a history of the Dutch revolution in 1785-87, travelled in Germany in 1791, and after 1796 sat in Parliament for Seaford. His labours as the first scholarly editor of Specimens of the Early English Poets have been already commemorated in this work (Vol. I. p. 30). The first edition (1790) was greatly extended in 1801, and 1851 saw a fifth edition. His Specimens of Early English Romances (1805; 2nd ed. 1811) conferred a further favour on students of literature; and he edited Way's translations of select Fabliaux of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1796; 3rd ed. 1815). He was a cherished friend of Sir Walter Scott's and a faithful correspondent.

Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824), a wealthy Herefordshire squire, virtuoso, and collector of ancient coins, marbles, and bronzes, was recognised at home and abroad as a high authority on ancient art, and wrote on Greek epigraphy, the symbolism of art, and the like. For a book on the worship of Priapus he was severely handled by Mathias in The Pursuits of Literature; his didactic poem on The Progress of Civil Society gave occasion to one of the cleverest burlesques in the Anti-Jacobin; and his other tedious poem, The Landscape, came also in for much uncomplimentary criticism. He made over his collections to the British Museum.

Thomas James Mathias (1754? - 1835), author of The Pursuits of Literature, was the son of a minor functionary in the queen's household, seems to have been at Eton, and was certainly educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was distinguished as Latinist and verse writer. From the university he passed in 1782 into the queen's service, becoming her treasurer. But in broken health he went to Italy in 1815, and there (mainly about Naples) remained till his death. He was the best Italian scholar England had produced, edited Italian authors, published collections of Italian poems, translated English verse into Italian, and himself wrote Italian poems. He also wrote and published much Latin verse, and he ruined himself by a magnificent edition of Gray's works (1814). From 1780 he made himself known as a satirist in English prose and verse, mainly on the Tory side, and against Whigs in Church and State. But it was by the Pursuits of Literature, in four verse dialogues, published anonymously between

1794 and 1797 (16th ed. 1812), that he brought himself to bear on his time by audacious satire of literary personages such as Joseph Warton, Parı, Godwin, Payne Knight, and Monk Lewis-several of them victimised also by the Anti-Jacobin. Like Gifford's Baviad and Mæviad, the text was overlaid with elaborate notes; and the poem, in spite of occasional piquant and telling lines or short passages, was ere long voted unconscionable and indiscriminate in its censures and tedious on the whole, and is now little read.

Henry Grattan (1746–1820), born in Dublin, at seventeen entered Trinity College, and embraced the reforming principles of Henry Flood with such ardour that his father, the Recorder of Dublin, disinherited him. At the Middle Temple in London he neglected law for the debates in the House of Commons. In 1772 he was called to the Irish Bar, and in 1775 entered the Irish Parliament as member for Charlemont. Flood had lost his popularity by accepting office under Government, and Grattan leapt at a bound into his place, strove to secure the removal of the restrictions upon Irish trade, and next plunged into a struggle for legislative independence. When in 1782, after the great Convention at Dungannon, the Rockingham Ministry surrendered, the Irish Parliament in gratitude voted Grattan £50,000. But it proved impossible for 'Grattan's Parliament,' so little representative and so much subject to corruption, to rise to real statesmanship. Grattan devoted himself mainly to advocating, in vain, the reform of special abuses. The corruption of the Castle government, the persistent repression of the agitation for Catholic relief (which Grattan, himself a Protestant, warmly supported), and the spirit of discontent generated by the French Revolution fomented the movement of the United Irishmen. Hopeless of his policy and broken by ill-health, Grattan retired on the eve of the rebellion, but returned to take his seat for Wicklow, and bravely to combat the Bill for the Union. Four years after the Union was carried out, he was elected to Westminster as member for Malton in Yorkshire, and for Dublin in the following year. The remaining energies of his life were devoted to the cause of Catholic emancipation. In December 1819 his health began to give way; in the following May he crossed from Dublin, a dying man, to speak once more for the cause; and, dying five days after his arrival, was buried in Westminster Abbey. In April 1782, a month before the English Parliament formally recognised the independence of the Irish Parliament, Grattan began thus one of his most famous speeches :

Irish Parliamentary Independence.

I am now to address a free people: ages have passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appellation. I have spoken on the subject of your liberty so often that I have nothing to add, and have only to admire by what Heaven-directed

steps you have proceeded until the whole faculty of the nation is braced up to the act of her own deliverance. I found Ireland on her knees; I watched over her with a paternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! spirit of Molyneux! your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation! in that new character I hail her! and bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto perpetua! She is no longer a wretched colony, returning thanks to her governor for his rapine, and to her king for his oppression; nor is she now a squabbling, fretful sectary, perplexing her little wits and firing her furious statutes with bigotry, sophistry, disabilities, and death, to transmit to posterity insignificance and war. Look to the rest of Europe, and contemplate yourself, and be satisfied. Holland lives on the memory of past achievements; Sweden has lost liberty; England has sullied her great name by an attempt to enslave her colonies. You are the only people-you, of the nations in Europe, are now the only people who excite admiration, and in your present conduct you not only exceed the present generation, but you equal the past. I am not afraid to turn back and look antiquity in the face: the revolution—that great event, whether you call it ancient or modern I know not, was tarnished with bigotry: the great deliverer (for such I must ever call the Prince of Nassau) was blemished with oppression; he assented to, he was forced to assent to, acts which deprived the Catholics of religious, and all the Irish of civil and commercial rights, though the Irish were the only subjects in these islands who had fought in his defence. But you have sought liberty on her own principle: see the Presbyterians of Bangor petition for the freedom of the Catholics of Munster. You, with difficulties innumerable, with dangers not a few, have done what your ancestors wished but could not accomplish, and what your posterity may preserve but will never equal; you have moulded the jarring elements of your country into a nation, and have rivalled those great and ancient commonwealths whom you were taught to admire and among whom you are now to be recorded: in this proceeding you had not the advantages which were common to other great countries; no monuments, no trophies, none of those outward and visible signs of greatness such as inspire mankind and connect the ambition of the age which is coming on with the example of that going off, and form the descent and concatenation of glory: no, you have not had any great act recorded among all your misfortunes, nor have you one public tomb to assemble the crowd, and speak to the living the language of integrity and freedom.

From the Philippic against Flood (1783). With regard to the liberties of America, which were inseparable from ours, I will suppose this gentleman to have been an enemy decided and unreserved; that he voted against her liberty; and voted, moreover, for an address to send 4000 Irish troops to cut the throats of the Americans; that he called these butchers 'armed negotiators,' and stood with a metaphor in his mouth and a bribe in his pocket, a champion against the rights of America, the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind.

Thus defective in every relationship, whether to con. stitution, commerce, toleration, I will suppose this man to have added much private improbity to public crimes; that his probity was like his patriotism, and his honour

on a level with his oath. He loves to deliver panegyrics on himself. I will interrupt him, and say: Sir, you are much mistaken if you think that your talents have been as great as your life has been reprehensible; you began your parliamentary career with an acrimony and personality which could have been justified only by a supposition of virtue: after a rank and clamorous opposition you became on a sudden silent; you were silent for seven years: you were silent on the greatest questions, and you were silent for money! In 1773, when a negotiation was pending to sell your talents and your turbulence, you absconded from your duty in parliament, you forsook your law of Poynings, you forsook the questions of economy, and abandoned all the old themes of your former declamation; you were not at that period to be found in the House; you were seen like a guilty spirit haunting the lobby of the House of Commons, watching the moment in which the question should be put, that you might vanish; you were descried with a criminal anxiety retiring from the scenes of your past glory; or you were perceived coasting the upper benches of this House like a bird of prey, with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note, meditating to pounce on its quarry. These ways-they were not the ways of honour-you practised pending a negotiation which was to end either in your sale or your sedition: the former taking place, you supported the rankest measures that ever came before Parliament, the embargo of 1776, for instance. 'O fatal embargo, that breach of law and ruin of commerce!' You supported the unparalleled profusion and jobbing of Lord Harcourt's scandalous ministry-the address to support the American war-the other address to send 4000 men, whom you had yourself declared to be necessary for the defence of Ireland, to fight against the liberties of America, to which you had declared yourself a friend;-you, Sir, who delight to utter execrations against the American commissioners of 1778, on account of their hostility to America ;-you, Sir, who manufacture stage thunder against Mr Eden for his anti-American principles ;-you, Sir, whom it pleases to chant a hymn to the immortal Hampden ;-you, Sir, approved of the tyranny exercised against America ;—and you, Sir, voted 4000 Irish troops to cut the throats of the Americans fighting for their freedom, fighting for your freedom, fighting for the great principle, liberty; but you found at last (and this should be an eternal lesson to men of your craft and cunning) that the King had only dishonoured you; the Court had bought but would not trust you; and having voted for the worst measures, you remained for seven years the creature of salary, without the confidence of Government. Mortified at the discovery, and stung by disappointment, you betake yourself to the sad expedients of duplicity; you try the sorry game of a trimmer in your progress to the acts of an incendiary; you give no honest support either to the Government or the people; you, at the most critical period of their existence, take no part, you sign no non-consumption agreement, you are no volunteer, you oppose no perpetual mutiny bill, no altered sugar bill; you declare that you lament that the declaration of right should have been brought forward; and observing with regard to prince and people the most impartial treachery and desertion, you justify the suspicion of your Sovereign by betraying the Government, as you had sold the people until at last, by this hollow conduct and for some other steps, the result of mortified ambition, being dismissed, and another person

:

put in your place, you fly to the ranks of the volunteers, and canvass for mutiny; you announce that the country was ruined by other men during that period in which she had been sold by you. Your logic is that the repeal of a declaratory law is not the repeal of a law at all, and the effect of that logic is an English act affecting to emancipate Ireland by exercising over her the legislative authority of the British Parliament. Such has been your conduct, and at such conduct every order of your fellowsubjects have a right to exclaim! The merchant may say to you the constitutionalist may say to you-the American may say to you-and I, I now say, and say it to your beard: Sir, you are not an honest man.

The best collection of Grattan's Speeches is by his son, Henry Grattan, M.P. (1822), who also edited his Miscellaneous Works (1822) and wrote the standard Life (1839-46). See too Lecky's Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (2nd ed. 1872), and an excellent study by Robert Dunlop ('Statesmen' series, 1889).

William Pitt (1759-1806), second son of the great Earl of Chatham, and himself one of the chief of English statesmen, occupies also a high place among English orators. His home education (he never was at a public school) gave him a thorough knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, while the practice of extempore translation, in which he was exercised by his tutors, fostered greatly what was doubtless the native gift of eloquence. Consequently, when he entered the House of Commons at the age of twenty-one, he was already a finished orator-not so much, according to Burke, 'a chip of the old block,' as 'the old block itself.' Fox hailed him as one of the first men in the House,' and in less than three years he had justified the eulogy by becoming Prime Minister. Thenceforward for more than twenty years he remained one of the great triumvirate of English parliamentary orators, along with Fox and Sheridan; for Burke had never been a really popular speaker. The oratorical duels between him and Fox, recurring almost yearly between 1783 and 1801, are among the memorable things in the history of English eloquence. Macaulay, who was certainly no Pittite, acknowledges that while he had 'less amplitude of mind and less richness of imagination than Burke, less ingenuity than Windham, less wit than Sheridan, less perfect mastery of dialectical fence and less of that highest sort of eloquence which consists of reason and passion fused together than Fox,' he was yet, 'by the unanimous judgment of those who were in the habit of listening to that remarkable race of men, placed, as a speaker, above Burke, above Windham, above Sheridan, and not below Fox.' No English Prime Minister ever quoted Latin more copiously or more happily: his thrilling citation of two beautiful Virgilian lines at the close of a great speech on the slave-trade has obtained commemoration in history. The last of all his public utterances, made in the dark days after Austerlitz and Trafalgar, and only a few weeks before his own death, is a masterpiece of brevity. 'England,' he said, 'has saved herself by her energy, and will save Europe by her example.' His parliamentary

speeches, from one of which, delivered in 1785, the following extract is taken, were published in four volumes in 1806.

The King's Prerogative.

By what I am now going to say, perhaps I may subject myself to the invidious imputation of being the minister and friend of prerogative; but, Sir, notwithstanding those terms of obloquy with which I am assailed, I will not shrink from avowing myself the friend of the king's just prerogative. Prerogative, Sir, has been justly called a part of the rights of the people, and sure I am it is a part of their rights which the people were never more disposed to defend, of which they never were more jealous than at this hour. Grant only this, that this House has a negative in the appointment of ministers, and you transplant the executive power into this House. Sir, I shall call upon gentlemen to speak out; let them not come to resolution after resolution without stating the grounds on which they act; for there is nothing more dangerous among mixed powers than that one branch of the legis lature should attack another by means of hints and auxiliary arguments, urged only in debate, without daring to avow the direct grounds on which they go, and without stating in plain terms on the face of their resolutions, what are their motives, and what are their principles which lead them to come to such resolutions. Above all, Sir, let this House beware of suffering any individual to involve his own cause, and to interweave his own interests in the resolutions of the House of Commons. The dignity of the House is for ever appealed to: let us beware that it is not the dignity of any set of men: let us beware that personal prejudices have no share in deciding these great constitutional questions. The right honourable gentleman is possessed of those enchanting arts whereby he can give grace to deformity; he holds before your eyes a beautiful and delusive image; he pushes it forward to your observation; but as sure as you embrace it, the pleasing vision will vanish, and this fair phantom of liberty will be succeeded by anarchy, confusion, and ruin to the constitution. For in truth, Sir, if the constitutional independence of the crown is thus reduced to the very verge of annihilation, where is the boasted equipoise of the constitution? Where is that balance among the three branches of the legislature which our ancestors have measured out to each with so much precision? Where is the independence-nay, where is even the safety of any one prerogative of the crown, or even of the crown itself, if its prerogative of naming ministers is to be usurped by this House, or if (which is precisely the same thing) its nomination of them is to be negatived by us without stating any one ground of distrust in the men, and without suffering our. selves to have any experience of their measures? Dreadful, therefore, as the conflict is, my conscience, my duty, my fixed regard for the constitution of our ancestors, maintain me still in this arduous situation. It is not any proud contempt or defiance of the constitutional resolutions of this House; it is no personal point of honour; much less is it any lust of power that makes me still cling to office: the situation of the times requires of me, and I will add, the country calls aloud to me, that I should defend this castle; and I am determined, therefore, I will defend it.

Lord Stanhope's Life of Pitt (4th ed. 1879) is the best biography, but Lord Macaulay's Encyclopædia Britannica article and Earl Rosebery's monograph in the series of Twelve English Statesmen are notable estimates.

John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), another great Irish orator, was born at Newmarket in County Cork, and was far from studious at Trinity College, Dublin. From the Middle Temple in London he was called to the Irish Bar in 1775; and his wit and vehement eloquence soon brought him eminence and a large practice. K.C. and a member of the Irish Parliament, he was a strong supporter of Grattan, but was less successful in the House than with the juries, and his sarcastic speeches brought on him no less than five duels. A Protestant himself, he worked hard for the Catholic cause. Both before and after the Irish rebellion of 1798 he was powerful in his defence of those tried for sedition or treason, and his speeches were many of them masterly. He steadily opposed the Union. After Pitt's death and after the accession of the Whigs, Curran was Master of the Rolls in Ireland (1806-14). Thurlow's one famous speech was not more popular or effective than one sentence of Curran's in his speech in defence of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, prosecuted by the Government for a seditious libel in 1792. The libel contained this declaration: In four words lies all our poweruniversal emancipation and representative legislature.' 'I speak,' said Curran, 'in the spirit of the British law, which makes liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; which proclaims even to the stranger and sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of Universal Emancipation.' This memorable utterance may have been suggested by the passage on slavery in Cowper's Task (quoted above at page 607), in which occur the lines:

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. But oddly enough British writers seem never to remember that this virtue is not peculiar to British soil. Thus the eminent Scottish jurist, Lord Fountainhall, who was in 1665-66 studying law in Paris, records in his Diary the impression made on him by the fact that this maxim as to a slave was true of France: 'Be the lawes of France, let him be a Turk, slave to a Venitien or

Spaniard, no sooner sets he his foote on French ground but ipso facto he is frie.'

William Cobbett (1762-1835), one of the most skilful and effective writers of strong, racy English, was born at Farnham in Surrey, and brought up as a ploughman. In 1783 he came to London and enlisted; for six years (1785-91) he served as sergeant-major in New Brunswick. He entered on his literary career in Philadelphia as a political pamphleteer under the name of Peter Porcupine, and returning to England in 1800, continued to write as a decided loyalist and HighChurchman. But having, as is supposed, received some slight from Pitt, he attacked the Ministry with extraordinary bitterness in his Weekly Political

Register. Tory first, it altered its politics in 1804, till at last it 'became the most fierce and determined opponent of the Government, and the most uncompromising champion of Radicalism.' A great lover of the country, Cobbett settled at Botley in Hampshire, where he planted, farmed, and went in for manly sports; a true soldiers' friend, he got two years in Newgate (1810-12), with a fine of £1000, for his strictures on the flogging of militiamen by German mercenaries. In 1817 money muddles and dread of a second imprisonment drove him once more across the Atlantic. He farmed in Long Island, writing all the while for the Register, till in 1819 he ventured back again, and came bringing Tom Paine's bones. Botley had to be sold, but he started a seed-farm at Kensington; and bent now on entering Parliament, stood for Coventry (1821) and Preston (1826). Both times he failed; but his ill-advised trial for sedition (1831) was followed next year by

his return for Oldham to the first Reformed Parliament. His career there was signalised chiefly by a crack-brained attack on Peel; the late hours were too much for him, and three years later he died at Normanby farm near Guildford, his last home.

Cobbett's inconsistency as a political writer was so broad and undisguised as to become proverbial. He had made the whole round of politics, from ultra-Toryism to ultra-Radicalism, and had praised and abused nearly every public man and measure for thirty years. He loathed Whigs and 'mock gentlefolks,' 'loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers, Jews, and taxeaters of all kinds;' nor did he speak gently of 'great captains,' admirals, or parsons-'deans, I believe, or prebends (sic), or something of that sort.' He was always confident and boastful, often coarse and virulent; and one becomes tired of having his pet prejudices cited as maxims of universal acceptance, of hearing London always referred to as 'the Wen,' and of seeing the poverty of the labourers attributed simply to the existence of paper money. Colonies such as New Brunswick are a mere source of aimless expense, wildernesses useless save as places to which to send barrack-masters, chaplains, and commissioners at the public expense. So far from the population of England having increased during the last twenty years, as the census made out, it was evident, he said, to any rational mind, from deserted villages and empty country churches, 'that in the time of the Plantagenets England was out of all comparison more populous than it is now.' He truly sympathised with the poor, and denounced the Reformation for having made over the monastic provision for them to greedy nobles. He had a keen eye, a powerful intellect, and a sharp and frank tongue. And he loved to write of the meadows and green lanes of England, rejoiced in noble trees (not 'nasty firs') and beautiful landscapes, pined in America for the English singing birds, and keenly felt the poetry of nature. The idiomatic strength, copiousness, and purity of his English style are patent, and he is often extraordinarily happy in his natural descriptions. But his perversity in literary matters proceeded at least as much from obtuseness as from love of paradox. 'It has become of late years the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakespeare.' He wonders how Paradise Lost could have been tolerated by a people conversant with astronomy, navigation, and chemistry. And when in his old age he did set himself to try and read Shakespeare, he found some things to please him, but much more he did not like at all; and concludes, 'in short, I despised the book, and wondered how any one could like it.' Jeremy Bentham said of him : 'He is a man filled with odium humani generis; his malevolence and lying are beyond anything.' The philosopher (also a Radical) did not make sufficient allowance for Cobbett, who acted on

momentary impulse, and never calculated consequences to himself or others. No man in England was better known than Cobbett, down to the minutest circumstance in his character, habits, and opinions. He wrote freely of himself as he did of his fellows; and in all his writings there was overflowing natural freshness, liveliness, and vigour. He had the truly great writer's power of making every one who read him feel and understand completely what he himself felt and described.

Cobbett's unsurpassed Rural Rides (new edition, with notes by Pitt Cobbett, 1885) were a reprint (1830) from the Register, and followed or were followed by the excellent and entertaining English Grammar (1818), the savage History of the Refor mation in England and Ireland (1824–27), the Woodlands (1825), the shrewd, homely Advice to Young Men (1830), A Legacy to Parsons, Cobbett's Tour in Scotland, A History of George IV., and some thirty other works; and he was the originator of the publications ultimately known as Hansard's Debates (1803; passed to Hansard in 1812) and Howell's State Trials (1809).

The first extract is from the introduction to the Reformation, the following from the Rural Rides and other reminiscences.

A Valediction.

Here I had signed my name, and was about to put the date. It was on its way from my mind to my hand, when I stopped my hand all at once and exclaimed: "Good God! the ninth of July! the anniversary of my sentence of two years' imprisonment in a felon's gaol, with a fine of a thousand pounds to the King, and, at the end of the two years, with seven years' bail, myself in three thousand pounds and two sureties in a thousand pounds each; and all this monstrous punishment for having expressed my indignation at Englishmen having been flogged, in the heart of England, under a guard of German troops! Good God!' exclaimed I again. 'What! am I, on the anniversary of that day, which called forth the exultation of the Hampshire parsons, who (though I had never committed any offence, in private life, against any one of them) crowed out aloud, in the fulness of their joy, "Ha! he's gone for ever! He will never trouble us any more!" and who, in a spirit truly characteristic of their corps, actually had, as a standing toast, "Disgrace to the Memory of Cobbett."-What !' exclaimed I again, 'and am I, on the anniversary of that very day, putting the finishing hand; yea, sending from under my fingers to the press, the last, the very last words, the completing words, the closing point, of a work which does the Job for them and for all their tribe; of the former part of which work I, myself, have sold forty thousand copies, containing six hundred and forty thousand Numbers; and which work is now sold in English, in two Stereotyped Editions in the United States of America; which work has been published at Madrid and at New York in Spanish, at Paris, Geneva, and Alost in French, at Cologne in German, and at Rome in Italian; and all this took place just about sixteen years after these Hamp shire parsons had taken for a standing toast: "Disgrace to the Memory of Cobbett "!' And, then, feeling health and vigour in every vein and in every nerve; seeing,