“While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave her.  Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind—­I will remain anchored here—­with fidelity to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall.”

Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the Senate, was Grattan’s achievement with the pen.  His description of the great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics—­it not the most noble—­in the world.  No writer, before or since, has offered anyone such splendid homage as this—­that he never sunk “to the vulgar level of the great.”

“The Secretary stood alone.  Modern degeneracy had not reached him.  Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority.  No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—­his ambition was fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England.  The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity.  Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy.

“The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent—­those sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise—­were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and decide.

“A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.  Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories—­but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

“Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom—­not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres.