find safety in contempt.  He therefore became an object of such general aversion as no statesman since the fall of Strafford has incurred, of such general aversion as was probably never in any country incurred by a man of so kind and cordial a disposition.  A weak mind would have sunk under such a load of unpopularity.  But that resolute spirit seemed to derive new firmness from the public hatred.  The only effect which reproaches appeared to produce on him, was to sour, in some degree, his naturally sweet temper.  The last acts of his public life were marked, not only by that audacity which he had derived from nature, not only by that immorality which he had learned in the school of Walpole, but by a harshness which almost amounted to cruelty, and which had never been supposed to belong to his character.  His severity increased the unpopularity from which it had sprung.  The well-known lampoon of Gray may serve as a specimen of the feeling of the country.  All the images are taken from shipwrecks, quicksands, and cormorants.  Lord Holland is represented as complaining, that the cowardice of his accomplices bad prevented him from putting down the free spirit of the city of London by sword and fire, and as pining for the time when birds of prey should make their nests in Westminster Abbey, and unclean beasts burrow in St. Paul’s.

Within a few months after the death of this remarkable man, his second son Charles appeared at the head of the party opposed to the American War.  Charles had inherited the bodily and mental constitution of his father, and had been much, far too much, under his father’s influence.  It was indeed impossible that a son of so affectionate and noble a nature should not have been warmly attached to a parent who possessed many fine qualities, and who carried his indulgence and liberality towards his children even to a culpable extent.  Charles saw that the person to whom he was bound by the strongest ties was, in the highest degree, odious to the nation; and the effect was what might have been expected from the strong passions and constitutional boldness of so high-spirited a youth.  He cast in his lot with his father, and took, while still a boy, a deep part in the most unjustifiable and unpopular measures that had been adopted since the reign of James the Second.  In the debates on the Middlesex Election, he distinguished himself, not only by his precocious powers of eloquence, but by the vehement and scornful manner in which he bade defiance to public opinion.  He was at that time regarded as a man likely to be the most formidable champion of arbitrary government that had appeared since the Revolution, to be a Bute with far greater powers, a Mansfield with far greater courage.  Happily his father’s death liberated him early from the pernicious influence by which he had been misled.  His mind expanded.  His range of observation became wider.  His genius broke through early prejudices.  His natural benevolence and magnanimity had fair play.  In a very short time he appeared in a situation worthy of his understanding and of his heart.  From a family whose name was associated in the public mind with tyranny and corruption, from a party of which the theory and the practice were equally servile, from the midst of the Luttrells, the Dysons, the Barringtons, came forth the greatest parliamentary defender of civil and religious liberty.