We are accustomed to consider WILKES merely as a political adventurer, and it may surprise to find this “city chamberlain” ranked among professed literary characters:  yet in his variable life there was a period when he cherished the aspirations of a votary.  Once he desired Lloyd to announce the edition of Churchill, which he designed to enrich by a commentary; and his correspondence on this subject, which has never appeared, would, as he himself tells us, afford a variety of hints and communications.  Wilkes was then warmed by literary glory; for on his retirement into Italy, he declared, “I mean to give myself entirely to our friend’s work, and to my History of England.  I wish to equal the dignity of Livy:  I am sure the greatness and majesty of our nation demand an historian equal to him.”  They who have only heard of the intriguing demagogue, and witnessed the last days of the used voluptuary, may hardly imagine that Wilkes had ever cherished such elevated projects; but mob-politics made this adventurer’s fortune, which fell to the lot of an epicurean:  and the literary glory he once sought he lived to ridicule, in the immortal diligence of Lord Chatham and of Gibbon.  Dissolving life away, and consuming all his feelings on himself, Wilkes left his nearest relatives what he left the world—­the memory of an anti-social being!  This wit, who has bequeathed to us no wit; this man of genius, who has formed no work of genius; this bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the chamberlainship; was indeed desirous of leaving behind him some trace of the life of an escroc in a piece of autobiography, which, for the benefit of the world, has been thrown to the flames.

Men who have ascended into office through its gradations, or have been thrown upwards by accident, are apt to view others in a cloud of passions and politics.  They who once commanded us by their eloquence, come at length to suspect the eloquent; and in their “pride of office” would now drive us by that single force of despotism which is the corruption of political power.  Our late great Minister, Pitt, has been reproached even by his friends for the contemptuous indifference with which he treated literary men.  Perhaps BURKE himself, long a literary character, might incur some portion of this censure, by involving the character itself in the odium of a monstrous political sect.  These political characters resemble Adrian VI., who, obtaining the tiara as the reward of his studies, afterwards persecuted literary men, and, say the Italians, dreaded lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate itself.[A]