on the whole, as useful to an administration as his great rival; but he was one of the most unpopular men in England.  Then, again, Newcastle felt all that jealousy of Fox, which, according to the proverb, generally exists between two of a trade.  Fox would certainly intermeddle with that department which the Duke was most desirous to reserve entire to himself, the jobbing department.  Pitt, on the other hand, was quite willing to leave the drudgery of corruption to any who might be inclined to undertake it.

During eleven weeks England remained without a ministry; and in the meantime Parliament was sitting, and a war was raging.  The prejudices of the King, the haughtiness of Pitt, the jealousy, levity, and treachery of Newcastle, delayed the settlement.  Pitt knew the Duke too well to trust him without security.  The Duke loved power too much to be inclined to give security.  While they were haggling, the King was in vain attempting to produce a final rupture between them, or to form a Government without them.  At one time he applied to Lord Waldegrave, an honest and sensible man, but unpractised in affairs.  Lord Waldegrave had the courage to accept the Treasury, but soon found that no administration formed by him had the smallest chance of standing a single week.

At length the King’s pertinacity yielded to the necessity of the case.  After exclaiming with great bitterness, and with some justice, against the Whigs, who ought, he said, to be ashamed to talk about liberty while they submitted to the footmen of the Duke of Newcastle, his Majesty submitted.  The influence of Leicester House prevailed on Pitt to abate a little, and but a little, of his high demands; and all at once, out of the chaos in which parties had for some time been rising, falling, meeting, separating, arose a government as strong at home as that of Pelham, as successful abroad as that of Godolphin.

Newcastle took the Treasury.  Pitt was Secretary of State, with the lead in the House of Commons, and with the supreme direction of the war and of foreign affairs.  Fox, the only man who could have given much annoyance to the new Government, was silenced by the office of Paymaster, which, during the continuance of that war, was probably the most lucrative place in the whole Government.  He was poor, and the situation was tempting; yet it cannot but seem extraordinary that a man who had played a first part in politics, and whose abilities had been found not unequal to that part, who had sat in the Cabinet, who had led the House of Commons, who had been twice intrusted by the King with the office of forming a ministry, who was regarded as the rival of Pitt, and who at one time seemed likely to be a successful rival, should have consented, for the sake of emolument, to take a subordinate place, and to give silent votes for all the measures of a government to the deliberations of which he was not summoned.