Henry Pelham, it is true, was by no means a contemptible person.  His understanding was that of Walpole on a somewhat smaller scale.  Though not a brilliant orator, he was, like his master, a good debater, a good parliamentary tactician, a good man of business.  Like his master, he distinguished himself by the neatness and clearness of his financial expositions.  Here the resemblance ceased.  Their characters were altogether dissimilar.  Walpole was good-humoured, but would have his way:  his spirits were high, and his manners frank even to coarseness.  The temper of Pelham was yielding, but peevish:  his habits were regular, and his deportment strictly decorous.  Walpole was constitutionally fearless, Pelharn constitutionally timid.  Walpole had to face a strong opposition; but no man in the Government durst wag a finger against him.  Almost all the opposition which Pelham had to encounter was from members of the Government of which he was the head.  His own pay-master spoke against his estimates.  His own secretary-at-war spoke against his Regency Bill.  In one day Walpole turned Lord Chesterfield, Lord Burlington, and Lord Clinton out of the royal household, dismissed the highest dignitaries of Scotland from their posts, and took away the regiments of the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, because he suspected them of having encouraged the resistance to his Excise Bill.  He would far rather have contended with the strongest minority, under the ablest leaders, than have tolerated mutiny in his own party.  It would have gone hard with any of his colleagues, who had ventured, on a Government question, to divide the House of Commons against him.  Pelham, on the other hand, was disposed to bear anything rather than drive from office any man round whom a new opposition could form.  He therefore endured with fretful patience the insubordination of Pitt and Fox.  He thought it far better to connive at their occasional infractions of discipline than to hear them, night after night, thundering against corruption and wicked ministers from the other side of the House.

We wonder that Sir Walter Scott never tried his hand on the Duke of Newcastle.  An interview between his Grace and Jeanie Deans would have been delightful, and by no means unnatural.  There is scarcely any public man in our history of whose manners and conversation so many particulars have been preserved.  Single stories may be unfounded or exaggerated.  But all the stories about him, whether told by people who were perpetually seeing him in Parliament and attending his levee in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or by Grub Street writers who never had more than a glimpse of his star through the windows of his gilded coach, are of the same character.  Horace Walpole and Smollett differed in their tastes and opinions as much as two human beings could differ.  They kept quite different society.  Walpole played at cards with countesses, and corresponded with ambassadors.  Smollett passed his life surrounded by printers’