that he regarded Chatham with a feeling not far removed from dislike.  Chatham was undoubtedly conscious of his error, and desirous to atone for it.  But his overtures of friendship, though made with earnestness, and even with unwonted humility, were at first received by Lord Rockingham with cold and austere reserve.  Gradually the intercourse of the two statesmen became courteous and even amicable.  But the past was never wholly forgotten.

Chatham did not, however, stand alone.  Round him gathered a party, small in number, but strong in great and various talents.  Lord Camden, Lord Shelburne, Colonel Barre, and Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton, were the principal members of this connection.

There is no reason to believe that, from this time till within a few weeks of Chatham’s death, his intellect suffered any decay.  His eloquence was almost to the last heard with delight.  But it was not exactly the eloquence of the House of Lords.  That lofty and passionate, but somewhat desultory declamation, in which he excelled all men, and which was set off by looks, tones, and gestures, worthy of Garrick or Talma, was out of place in a small apartment where the audience often consisted of three or four drowsy prelates, three or four old judges, accustomed during many years to disregard rhetoric, and to look only at facts and arguments, and three or four listless and supercilious men of fashion, whom anything like enthusiasm moved to a sneer.  In the House of Commons, a flash of his eye, a wave of his arm, had sometimes cowed Murray.  But, in the House of Peers, his utmost vehemence and pathos produced less effect than the moderation, the reasonableness, the luminous order and the serene dignity, which characterised the speeches of Lord Mansfield.

On the question of the Middlesex election, all the three divisions of the Opposition acted in concert.  No orator in either House defended what is now universally admitted to have been the constitutional cause with more ardour or eloquence than Chatham.  Before this subject had ceased to occupy the public mind, George Grenville died.  His party rapidly melted away; and in a short time most of his adherents appeared on the ministerial benches.

Had George Grenville lived many months longer, the friendly ties which, after years of estrangement and hostility, had been renewed between him and his brother-in-law, would, in all probability, have been a second time violently dissolved.  For now the quarrel between England and the North American colonies took a gloomy and terrible aspect.  Oppression provoked resistance; resistance was made the pretext for fresh oppression.  The warnings of all the greatest statesmen of the age were lost on an imperious Court and a deluded nation.  Soon a colonial senate confronted the British Parliament.  Then the colonial militia crossed bayonets with the British regiments.  At length the commonwealth was torn asunder.  Two millions of Englishmen, who, fifteen years before,