pure, and that there was much in his speeches that was florid and meretricious, and not a little that would have appeared absurd bombast but for the amazing power of his delivery,” he makes a serious deduction from his claim to the best style of eloquence which no one ever made from the speeches of his son.  But Grattan’s assertion that the man who, as his sister said of him, knew but two books, the “AEneid” and the “Faerie Queene,” was superior in scholarship to one who, with the exception of his rival, Fox, had probably no equal for knowledge of the great authors of antiquity in either House of Parliament, is little short of a palpable absurdity.  We may, however, suspect that Grattan’s estimate of the two men was in some degree colored by his personal feelings.  With Lord Chatham he had never been in antagonism.  On one great subject, the dispute with America, he had been his follower and ally, advocating in the Irish House of Commons the same course which Chatham upheld in the English House of Peers.  But to Pitt he had been almost constantly opposed.  By Pitt he and his party, whether in the English, or, so long as it lasted, in the Irish Parliament, had been repeatedly defeated.  The Union, of which he had been the indefatigable opponent, and to which he was never entirely reconciled, had been carried in his despite; and it was hardly unnatural that the recollection of his long and unsuccessful warfare should in some degree bias his judgment, and prompt him to an undeserved disparagement of the minister by whose wisdom and firmness he had been so often overborne.]

[Footnote 112:  Massey’s “History of England,” iii., 447; confer also Green’s “History of the English People,” vol. iv.]

[Footnote 113:  Hallam ("Middle Ages,” ii., 386, 481), extolling the condition of “the free socage tenants, or English yeomanry, as the class whose independence has stamped with peculiar features both our constitution and our national character,” gives two derivations for the name; one “the Saxon soe, which signifies a franchise, especially one of jurisdiction;” and the other, that adopted by Bracton, and which he himself prefers, “the French word soc, a ploughshare.”]

[Footnote 114:  Lord Colchester’s “Diary,” i., 68, mentions that the officiating clergyman was Mr. Burt, of Twickenham, who received L500 for his services.  Lord John Russell ("Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,” ii., 284-389) agrees in stating that the marriage was performed in the manner prescribed by the Common Prayer-book.  Mr. Jesse, in his “Life of George III.,” ii., 506, gathering, as the present writer can say from personal knowledge, his information from some papers left behind him by the late J.W.  Croker, says:  “The ceremony was performed by a Protestant clergyman, though in part, apparently, according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church.”  Lord John Russell avoids discussing the question whether the marriage involved the forfeiture of the inheritance of the crown, an avoidance which many will interpret as a proof that in his opinion it did.  Mr. Massey’s language ("History of England,” iii., 327) clearly intimates that he holds the same opinion.]