Grecque. Madame du Deffand is much pleased with the idea of your returning. She is faithful and steady to the English, though suffering persecution on that account.

"I am much concerned at what you tell me of Lord Holland, and shall be sorry to find him in such a situation. I am really coming, though I divert myself well enough, and have no sort of thirst after your politics. But lilac-tide approaches, and I long as much to see a bit of green, as a housemaid does that sticks a piece of mint in a dirty vial. I don't write to Mr. Williams, because writing to you is the same thing; and I forget him no more than I hope he forgets me. Adieu! "Yours ever,

"H. W.

"P. S. Have you not felt a fright lately? If you have not there is no sentiment in you. Why! the queen' has been in great danger, received the viatique, and had the prières des quarante heures said for her. But be easy! She is out of danger. La Maréchale de Luxembourg saw her the night before last, and congratulating her recovery, the queen said: 'I am too unhappy to die.'

'Maria Leczinska, queen of Louis the Fifteenth of France. In the "Selwyn Correspondence," George Selwyn is more than once mentioned as having been a personal favourite of the queen. The reader will probably not be displeased to find, in the Appendix to this volume, some further unpublished letters from Walpole to Selwyn.

Lord Chatham had only been a few weeks in office, when the failure of the harvest, and the consequent exorbitant increase in the price of bread, led to formidable tumults in various parts of the kingdom. The military in several places were called out, and many lives sacrificed. It was in this emergency that Lord Chatham, in order to prevent the exportation to the continent of the insufficient quantity of wheat which still remained in England, took upon himself the responsibility of dispensing with the customary sanction of Parliament, and, by the simple means of obtaining an order in Council, prevented for the present the sailing of grain-ships from the country. It was clearly a bold and irregular measure, which only necessity could justify, and that such a necessity existed was almost universally acknowledged. It suited, however, the purpose of party to denounce it as an usurping and unwarrantable act, and accordingly Parliament had no sooner assembled, than the laying on of the late embargo became a matter of furious discussion in both Houses. No one questioned the wisdom and justice of the measure; no one denied that, had the legislature been sitting, this was precisely the policy which it would have adopted. But on the other hand it was argued that a law of the land had been arbitrarily broken; that Parliament ought to have been expressly convened; and further that a precedent had been created which might be

pregnant with disastrous consequences to the Constitution.

It was in his own defence, on this occasion, that Lord Chatham for the first time spoke in the House of Lords. After having bowed to the

said, had just

throne, which, he been filled by Majesty, and from whence had flowed his present honours, he spoke feelingly and eloquently of his sensations at finding himself in that "unaccustomed place," addressing the hereditary legislators of the realm. He then proceeded to defend the recent irregular act of the government, alike on the plea of necessity and of common sense. Allowing it, he said, to have been practicable to assemble Parliament a fortnight or three weeks earlier, such a measure, instead of being of service, would have been highly detrimental to the interests of the country. Not only would it have occasioned great and unnecessary alarm, but, "by setting every member of Parliament in the kingdom upon a horse, to ride post up to London," it would have withdrawn them from their several counties, where their presence was of essential importance for the purpose of allaying popular discontents and suppressing popular tumults.

Lord Chatham, on finding himself invested with his new honours, would seem to have formed the good resolution of adapting his oratory to the sober and dignified style of speaking which characterised the debates in the Upper House, instead

"If

of having recourse to the inflammatory language and fierce invectives which had too often distinguished his eloquence in the Lower House. any man was personal to him," he said, in his first speech in the House of Lords, "or revived stories past, he should take no notice of them." His good intentions, however, scarcely outlasted the first provocation which he received. Ministers, for instance, having introduced a bill to indemnify the servants of the Crown who had acted under the order in Council, Lord Chatham, in defending his conduct, was incited to utter language which would have given offence even in the House of Commons. "When the people condemn me," he said, "I shall tremble." He would "set his face," he added, "against the proudest connection in the country." The Duke of Richmond-young, hot-headed, and still smarting on account of his recent expulsion from office-rose impetuously and bearded him to his face. "Were the nobility," he said, "to be browbeaten by an insolent minister?" "I challenge the noble duke," retorted Lord Chatham, "to give an instance in which I have treated any man with insolence. If the instance be not produced, the charge of insolence will lie with his Grace." The duke replied that, in order to prove his words, he must betray private conversation, but if he would meet him in private, he would satisfy him on the subject. Then, fixing his eye

upon Lord Bute, he exclaimed, sarcastically: "I congratulate the noble lord on his new connection."

In the House of Commons, party feeling ran no less high than in the Upper House. Here also, while the subject of the embargo was under discussion, there occurred a rather remarkable altercation. George Grenville, no longer overawed by the superior genius of Pitt, attacked the conduct of government with signal effect. Ministers, he said, had advised the sovereign to usurp a superiority over the laws, and ought therefore to be included in the Bill of Indemnity by which it was proposed to absolve from pains and penalties the inferior servants of the Crown who had carried into operation the provisions of the order in Council. "In times of danger," answered Alderman Beckford, "the Crown might dispense with law." Grenville, highly incensed at the enunciation of so dangerous and unconstitutional a doctrine, instantly desired that the clerk of the House should take down his words, on which the turbulent alderman, not without a sneer at Grenville's new zeal for liberty, made an attempt to explain his meaning. He had been interrupted, he said, be

1 "Close junction between Lord Bute and Lord Chatham, at least for the present." Wilkes, in his once celebrated letter to the Duke of Grafton of December 12, 1767, expresses himself convinced of Lord Chatham's alliance with Bute at this period. "I was," he writes, "the most acceptable sacrifice he could offer at the shrine of Bute."