adjourned; the members went to their Christmas festivities; the treaty with France was framed and ratified; and the chance of recovering the colonies was lost forever. Chatham did not live till the end of the war, but as soon as he learned that the treaty with France was signed, he knew that the fatal result was inevitable.

LORD MANSFIELD.

THE most formidable rival and opponent of Lord Chatham was William Murray, known in history as Lord Mansfield. In point of native talent it would not be easy to determine which had the advantage; but it is generally conceded that Mansfield's mind was the more carefully trained, and that his memory was the more fully enriched with the stores of knowledge. He was preeminently a lawyer and a lover of the classics; but Lord Campbell speaks of his familiarity with modern history as "astounding and even appalling, for it produces a painful consciousness of inferiority, and creates remorse for time misspent." His career is one of the most extraordinary examples in English history of an unquestioning acceptance of the stern conditions of the highest success.

Mansfield's education was characterized by a phenominal devotion to some of the severer kinds of intellectual drudgery. Though he was fourth son of Lord Stormont and brother of Lord Dunbar, the Secretary of the Pretender, he seems from the first to have been fully conscious that he must rely for distinction upon his own efforts alone. When he was but fourteen he had become so familiar with the Latin language that he wrote and spoke it "with accuracy and ease," and in after-life he declared that there was not one of the orations of Cicero which he had not, while at Oxford, written into English, and after an interval, according to the best of his ability, re-translated into Latin. Leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-two he was entered as a student of law at Lincoln's Inn in 1727. Lord Campbell says of him: "When he was admitted to the bar in 1730, he had made himself acquainted not only with the international law, but with the codes of all the the most civilized nations, ancient and modern; he was an elegant classical scholar; he was

thoroughly imbued with the literature of his own country; he had profoundly studied our mixed constitution; he had a sincere desire to be of service to his country; and he was animated by a noble aspiration after honorable fame."

The family of Murray was one of those Scotch families upon whom a peerage was bestowed by James I. It is not very singular therefore that Lord Stormont, the representative of the family, in the eighteenth century, should, like his predecessors, remain true to the Stuarts and the Pretender. William, the fourth son, grew up in the traditional political beliefs of his ancestors. While Pitt, therefore, was a Whig, Murray was a High Tory. In manner they were as different as in politics. Pitt was ardent and imperious, Murray was cool and circumspect. Pitt strove to overwhelm, but Murray strove to convince. Though Pitt was the great master of declamatory invective, Murray was vastly his superior in all the qualities that go to make up a great debater. The immediate in

fluence of Pitt's speeches was far more overwhelming, but the qualities of Murray's argument were more persuasive and more permanent in their influence. Pitt entered the House of Commons in 1735 at twenty-six; Murray in 1742 at thirty-seven. During fourteen years therefore, before 1756 they were each the great exponents of the political parties to which they respectively belonged. Murray entered the House of Lords as Chief Justice and with the title of Baron Mansfield in the same year in which Pitt began his great career as Prime Minister. The power of Pitt was in the House of Commons, while that of Murray was in the House of Lords. Pitt's influence was over the masses, whose devotion was such that "they hugged his footmen and even kissed his horses." Murray's power was over the more thoughful few who in the end directed public opinion and moulded public action.

The character of Murray, like that of his great rival, was not only above reproach, but was remarkable for its stern rejection of every thing