of his devotion to public affairs, to the business of his country, and, let us add, a zealous attendance on every prize fight within reach, was never happy unless he was working up points in literature and mathematics.  There was a literary and classical spirit abroad, and in spite of the furious preoccupations of faction, a certain ready disengagement of mind prevailed.  If Windham and Fox began to talk of horses, they seemed to fall naturally into what had been said about horses by the old writers.  Fox held that long ears were a merit, and Windham met him by the authority of Xenophon and Oppian in favour of short ones, and finally they went off into what it was that Virgil meant when he called a horse’s head argutum caput.  Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland together in 1785, and their conversation fell as often on old books as on Hastings or on Pitt.  They discussed Virgil’s similes; Johnson and L’Estrange, as the extremes of English style; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to say about Cicero’s use of the word gratiosus.  If they came to libraries, Windham ran into them with eagerness, and very strongly enjoyed all “the feel that a library usually excites.”  He is constantly reproaching himself with a remissness, which was purely imaginary, in keeping up his mathematics, his Greek tragedies, his Latin historians.  There is no more curious example of the remorse of a book-man impeded by affairs.  “What progress might men make in the several parts of knowledge,” he says very truly, in one of these moods, “if they could only pursue them with the same eagerness and assiduity as are exerted by lawyers in the conduct of a suit.”  But this distraction between the tastes of the book-man and the pursuits of public business, united with a certain quality of his constitution to produce one great defect in his character, and it was the worst defect that a statesman can have.  He became the most irresolute and vacillating of men.  He wastes the first half of a day in deciding which of two courses to take, and the second half in blaming himself for not having taken the other.  He is constantly late at entertainments, because he cannot make up his mind in proper time whether to go or to stay at home; hesitation whether he shall read in the red room or in the library, loses him three of the best hours of a morning; the difficulty of early rising he finds to consist less in rising early than in satisfying himself that the practice is wholesome; his mind is torn for a whole forenoon in an absurd contest with himself, whether he ought to indulge a strong wish to exercise his horse before dinner.  Every page of his diary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy disease.  When the Revolution came, he was absolutely forced, by the iron necessity of the case, after certain perturbations, to go either with Fox or with Burke.  Under this compulsion he took one headlong plunge into the policy of alarm.  Everybody knows how desperately an habitually irresolute man is capable of clinging to a policy or a conviction, to which he has once been driven by dire stress of circumstance.  Windham having at last made up his mind to be frightened by the Revolution, was more violently and inconsolably frightened than anybody else.