WILLIAM, EARL OF SHELBURNE.

Among the English statesmen of a century ago, William, earl of Shelburne, seems to us to have a peculiar claim upon the recollection of citizens of the United States—one, too, that involves none of those offensive associations that cluster round the names of, let us say, Grenville and North. For in looking at Lord Shelburne's career we see a man whose clear-sighted judgment from the first, and consistently, protested against that system of high-handed imperialism which drove thirteen reluctant colonies into a war of independence; who both in office and out of office did his utmost, first to avert, by a policy never of cowardly concession, but of just expediency, the impending storm, and then, when it had burst, to withstand and counteract its fury; and the last great act of whose public life was to conclude the struggle which he had always deprecated and deplored.

It is therefore with no ordinary interest that we welcome the first installment of a work[C] whose promise—and, we at once cordially add, performance—heralds a really satisfactory account, a realizable flesh-and-blood portraiture, of the English prime minister under whose administration the peace preliminaries of 1782 were signed. The present biographer comes before us with advantages for the treatment of his subject never before possessed. He has enjoyed access not only to his great-grandfather's papers at Lansdowne House, but to those of two other most important actors in the British drama of a century ago—Lord Bute, "the favorite," and Henry Fox; and these documents, pieced together and set side by side, throw upon the events to which they relate, and the motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches, his version of this or that historical transaction—to tell us, with the authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find the key to Mr. B.'s conduct in the knowledge that he was all along intriguing for that; but how often it happens that when, by good luck, the contemporaneous documentary evidence of correspondence, private memoranda and the like is forthcoming, the off-hand allegations of the memoir-writer are in infinite particulars tried and found wanting in correctness, and sometimes fall refuted altogether! More than one notable instance of this will strike the historical student in reading this first volume of Lord Shelburne's Life; and in the eventful and disputed years which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has yet to chronicle it may safely be assumed that he will have plenty to say in the way of correction and explanation of previous histories of the time.

An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, of my life" (he tells us) "in the remotest part of the south of Ireland, under the government of an old grandfather [Thomas Fitzmaurice, earl of Kerry], who reigned, or rather tyrannized, equally over his own family, and the neighboring country as if it was his family, in the same manner as I suppose his ancestors, lords of Kerry, had done for generations since the time of Henry II., who granted to our family one hundred thousand acres in those remote parts in consideration of their services against the Irish, with the title of barons of Kerry.... My grandfather did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character which can be imagined—obstinate and inflexible: he had not much understanding, but strong nerves and great perseverance, and no education except what he had in the army, where he served in his youth, with a good degree of reputation for personal bravery and activity. He was a handsome man, and, luckily for me and mine, married a very ugly woman, who brought into his family whatever degree of sense may have appeared in it, and whatever wealth is likely to remain in it." In 1741 the stern grandfather died, and in the course of the next ten years the grandson picked up such bits of education as an Irish public school of the period, supplemented by a clerical private tutor, might afford. At sixteen he went to Christ Church, Oxford (in those days boys were commonly taking their degrees at the universities at an age when they would now be well content to have won their way into a school sixth form), and there read law, history, Demosthenes, and "by myself a great deal of religion."

And here our autobiographer abruptly turns aside from the incidents of his own story to sketch the antecedents, existing condition and character of the politics and politicians of the time of his first entry into public life. No one, we take it, will be disposed to quarrel with the interruption, for it gives us, in the space of a few pages, a picture of men and manners which, painted as it is by the mature hand of a shrewd contemporary observer, cannot but form a most important addition to our stock of knowledge of those times. The literary style of this piece of writing shows Lord Shelburne to have had in him the making of a successful memoirist. Gossip, anecdote, passages of sarcasm and epigram are mingled in skillful proportions; and there is certainly no waste of the milk of human kindness. Pitt (Lord Chatham) is dissected with ruthless elaboration: half a dozen minor statesmen are scarified with a single sentence apiece. Horace Walpole himself, with all his sinister acidity, nowhere hits harder—we had almost said more bitterly—than does Lord Shelburne in this short sketch of his. But just as an English House of Commons loves nothing so well as a "personal explanation," so the personalities of literature have a way of attracting us in the direct ratio of their piquancy and severity. Lord Shelburne has quite a gift of killing two birds with one stone in his trenchant criticisms. He cannot crush George III.'s father without demolishing poor Lord Melcombe en passant. "The prince's life (he says) may be judged in some degree from the account given of it in Lord Melcombe's diary—a man who passed his life with great men whom he did not know, and in the midst of affairs which he never comprehended, but recites facts from which others may draw deductions which he never could. The prince's activity could only be equaled by his childishness and his falsehood. His life was such a tissue of both as could only serve to show that there is nothing which mankind will not put up with where power is lodged."

The elder Pitt—with whom, it will be remembered, Lord Shelburne acted in the memorable events that immediately preceded and accompanied the beginning of the war of independence—comes in for his full share of severe animadversion, but the portrait is undeniably vigorous and alive. Here is a specimen: "It was the fashion to say that Mr. Pitt was insolent, impetuous, romantic, a despiser of money, intrigue and patronage, ignorant of the characters of men, and one who disregarded consequences. Nothing could be less just than the whole of this, which may be judged by the leading features of his life, without relying on any private testimony. He certainly was above avarice, but as to anything else, he only repressed his desires and acted; he was naturally ostentatious to a degree of ridicule; profuse in his house and family beyond what any degree of prudence could warrant. His marriage certainly had no sentiment in it. The transaction at the time of his resignation does not carry with it an absolute indifference as to money or other advantages, nor did there appear in any of his subsequent negotiations, in or out of power, that he went beyond what was necessary to satisfy the people at the time or to secure his wished-for situation. In truth, it was his favorite maxim that a little new went a great way.... I was in the most intimate political habits with him for ten years, the time that I was secretary of state included, he minister, and necessarily was with him at all hours in town and country, without drinking a glass of water in his house or company, or five minutes' conversation out of the way of business. I went to see him afterward in Somersetshire, where I fell into more familiar habits with him, which continued and confirmed me in all that I have said. He was tall in his person, and as genteel as a martyr to the gout could be, with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect. He was very well bred, and preserved all the manners of the vieille cour, with a degree of pedantry, however, in his conversation, especially when he affected levity, I never found him when I have gone to him—which was always by appointment—with so much as a book before him, but always sitting alone in a drawing-room waiting the hour of appointment, and in the country with his hat and stick in his hand."

All this, it must not be forgotten, was written in the year 1801, long after the writer had finally retired from the battlefield of politics, upon which, at the period when his own account of his youth breaks off, he had not yet made his first essay. Some practical experience of actual battlefields was to be gained by the future statesman before his appearance in the parliamentary arena. Just before the time when, between nineteen and twenty years of age, he was leaving Oxford, the Seven Years' War broke out, and finding "home detestable, no prospect of a decent allowance to go abroad [he had a trifling six hundred pounds a year from his father, though], neither happiness nor quiet," he joined the army and went on foreign service. Here he had the good-fortune to come under the chivalrous General Wolfe, whom he eulogizes in terms the genuine warmth and heartiness of which is all the more striking from the contrast with his generally severe judgments upon his contemporaries. At the battle of Minden in 1759, and again at Kloster Kampen in the following year, he displayed conspicuous personal courage, which was rewarded, on his return to England, with the rank of colonel and the court appointment of aide-de-camp to the new king, George III.

Hardly had camp been exchanged for court when circumstances offered the young Lord Fitzmaurice his first introduction to a kind of political employ which was to be thenceforward, through a series of years, his frequent and peculiar function. Lord Bute, the favorite, had begun to climb the ladder of ministerial office, and had cast his eyes upon that unscrupulous and greedy but undeniably able politician, Henry Fox, as the man most desirable for his purpose by way of a House-of-Commons ally. Owing, very possibly, to the fact that there existed some connection between Fox and Fitzmaurice's father, Lord Fitzmaurice fell into the place of intermediary between the parties to this negotiation, which had hardly passed out of its first stage when the death of his father removed him, now Lord Shelburne, to the House of Lords before he had ever taken the family seat, into which he had been elected at the last general election, in the lower House. The negotiation was successfully carried through. Fox named his price—a peerage for his wife—and after considerable haggling got it, and in return undertook a position which Shelburne announced to Bute in a letter dated October 31, 1761, as follows: "Mr. Fox will attend [the House of Commons] every day, and will, either by silence or by speaking, as he finds it prudent according to the occasion, do his best to forward what your lordship wishes, and will enter into no sort of engagement with any one else whatever." But before the year was out Bute found himself in want of a closer and more positive support on the part of Fox than he had in the first instance contracted for. The peace party, which he (Bute) headed, had at last the close of the continental war full in sight, peace preliminaries were about to be laid before Parliament, but there was a prospect of the war party fighting over the terms proposed by ministers, and Bute felt that he must have a strong leader to champion his treaty in the House of Commons. Fox was his man for the place, and Shelburne was again commissioned to treat with him. The details of a negotiation of this kind are not of a character to call for very particular attention a century afterward, but the letters between the parties—many of them now for the first time published—are not without considerable interest from the light they throw upon the characters and motives of their writers. The position of a go-between is always more or less perilous; his task, however well performed, is generally a thankless one; nor in such matters can the adeptest diplomacy, joined to the most thorough bona fides, always ensure the conduct of the common agent against misapprehension and sore feelings. Of this the particular negotiation of which we are now speaking is a typical instance. Bute's offer (through Shelburne) to Fox was the leadership of the Commons, with a peerage for himself to follow. Fox at the time held the very lucrative post of paymaster-general—lucrative, because in those days it was deemed a perfectly legitimate practice for the paymaster to make a private profit out of the investment of the public moneys for the time being under his control. Shelburne appears to have assumed—and so, indeed, it was only natural to assume—that Fox would not dream of accepting high office in the ministry without at the same time resigning his extra-ministerial berth at the Pay Office; and there is evidence that such—at first, at any rate—was Fox's own intention. The king was given to understand that Fox's resignation of the Pay Office would be a term of the proposed arrangements, and consented to them on that footing; and then all at once Fox came out in the character of Injured Innocent, protested that he had never meant to resign, that he had all along intended to have his cake as well as eat it, and that Shelburne had entrapped and betrayed him. The story goes, but on what authority history saith not, that Bute afterward owned to Fox that Shelburne's conduct in this transaction had been a "pious fraud," and that Fox retorted, "I can see the fraud plainly enough, but where is the piety?" The correspondence and the other evidence which, with a pardonable jealousy for his ancestor's fair fame, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice sets out with much detail in his biography, requires, we think, at the very least, that a verdict of "Not proven" should be entered in Shelburne's favor; but a man who chooses to make personal negotiation his specialty must not be surprised to find his tact sometimes called trickery, and his double agency set down as double dealing. It is certain that the part he played in the Bute-Fox negotiations entailed upon Shelburne imputations of duplicity which he never succeeded in entirely dissipating. The king himself wrote of him as "the Jesuit of Berkeley Square," alluding, no doubt, to the nickname "Malagrida" (the name of a prominent Italian Jesuit of the day) which somebody had fastened upon him, and which served Goldsmith as the text of that deliciously maladroit remark of his to the earl: "Do you know, I never could conceive the reason why they call your lordship Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man."

Bute, however, obviously retained undiminished confidence in his favorite agent, for in his arrangements for the formation of a new ministry under the ostensible headship of George Grenville in the spring of 1763, he not only employed Shelburne in negotiations with no less than seven politically important personages, but he even wished to get him the seals of secretary of state. This, however, was more than Grenville would consent to. He objected that the old peers would be jealous of the elevation of the representative of a family which, however great its note in Ireland, was a comparatively recent addition to the peerage of Great Britain; and also—reasonably enough, one is inclined to say—that Shelburne's youth and total inexperience of office rendered it advisable that he should at least try his 'prentice hand in one of the lower administrative offices. Shelburne was at this time, it must be remembered, only five-and-twenty years of age. A man of his parts and rank and opportunities might rise rapidly in those days, but he had hitherto had absolutely no official training; and the English Parliament had not yet seen, what it was soon to see in the younger Pitt, a chancellor of the exchequer of the almost undergraduate age of three-and-twenty. However, Bute persisted in forcing upon his friend—who appears to have been not unwilling to stand for the time aside—a place in the new ministry, and he accordingly accepted the presidency of the Board of Trade, was sworn a privy councillor, and entered the cabinet of the so-called "Triumvirate" administration. Immediately he found himself called upon to face American questions in which he was destined to play so important a part. Some time before he took office, Fox, in one of his shrewd letters to Bute, had marked out Shelburne as a man pre-eminently fitted to effect "that greatest and most necessary of all schemes, the settlement of America;" and he had hardly been a month at the Board of Trade when a communication from Lord Egremont, the "Southern" secretary of state, directed his particular attention to this subject.

The North American colonies—or, as they were commonly called, plantations—labored in those days, in their relation with the home-country, under the inconveniences of a system of dual government. The Board of Trade was the working colonial office, framed instructions to the governors, gave information and advice, and carried on the every-day colonial business generally; but the secretary of state for the southern department, whose sphere of supervision embraced all the colonies wherever situate, had always a permanent right to interfere in and control the conduct of colonial affairs. It was in virtue of this right that in May, 1763, Secretary Lord Egremont took the initiative in setting the Board of Trade to work to solve the problem of how best to arrange for the administration of the wide area of North American territory that the peace had transferred from French to British rule. His instructions were short and pointed. "The questions (he wrote) which relate to North America in general are—1st, What new governments should be established there? what form should be adopted for such a government? and where the capital or residence of each governor should be fixed? 2dly, What military establishment will be sufficient? what new forts should be erected? and which, if any, may it be expedient to demolish? 3dly, In what way, least burdensome and most palatable to the colonies, can they contribute toward the support of the additional expense which must attend their civil and military establishments upon the arrangement which your lordships shall propose?" Mark the "3dly." It is interesting, as illustrating the ideas and circumstances which led to the famous Stamp Act, to see how completely Lord Egremont's question assumes not only the right of the mother-country to tax her colonies, but the probable expediency of her actually exercising that right. In his reply, Shelburne, while admitting the revenue question to be a "point of the highest importance," practically evaded it on the plea of the inability of the board to form a satisfactory opinion without further materials. With regard to the new territory, his advice, which was followed, was, in effect, not to attempt to annex the whole of the north-western acquisitions, but to form a new colony of Canada, limited by definite geographical boundaries.

"American historians," remarks Lord Shelburne's biographer, "have seen in the policy thus pursued a deliberate intention of closing the West against further emigration, from the fear that remote colonies would claim the independence which their position would favor. The statesmen of the eighteenth century have follies enough to answer for without charging them with this in addition. However impossible it was in practice to dam up the ever-advancing tide of the English race, it was equally impossible in theory openly to avow the intention of dispossessing the still powerful savage nations, which were bound to England by numerous conventions, and were regarded for the most part as subjects of George III., equally entitled with the inhabitants of Boston, or even of London, to the protection of his government. To adjust the relations between savage and civilized man during the period of the struggle which can have but one result is a task as difficult as it is thankless, but American Presidents have not been accused of attempting to prevent further colonization of their continent because they have from time to time issued proclamations ascertaining and attempting to protect the ever-retiring bounds of the Indian reservations."

But the march of events was soon to take the responsibility of the "settlement" (save the mark!) of American affairs out of the hands of Shelburne. He had joined the ministry more because of the insistance of his friend, Bute, the potent cabinet-maker, than from any general sympathy with the views of the men with whom he had to act; and every week put him more and more out of touch with them. He protested formally to Egremont against the dual government of the colonies, and when the latter tried to shelve the question by professing fatigue, curtly told him—what was true enough—that he must expect more if the affairs of America were to be put in order. He questioned the legality of the action of his colleagues, the Triumvirate (Grenville, Halifax and Egremont), in ordering the arrest of Wilkes of North Briton fame. But, oddly enough, considerations of a wholly different character appear to have influenced his actual resignation of office. Bute, nominally in retirement, but really playing the rôle of ministerial wirepuller-in-ordinary, had a surprising fancy for devising unlikely combinations; and now he was minded to conjure with the still potent name of Pitt. Once more, and, as it happened, for the last time, he sought the service of Shelburne as negotiator, and once more Shelburne, undeterred by past experiences, undertook the difficult position. Pitt nibbled, and for a time seemed about to bite, but in the end he drew off unhooked; whereupon (at the beginning of September, 1763) Shelburne immediately resigned the Board of Trade. What his real motive in taking this step was, his own letters do not at all clearly show. Doubtless he felt his uncordial relations with his colleagues irksome, but we can also hardly doubt that the attraction Pitt was beginning to exercise over him formed a material factor in his resolve. Freed from the trammels of office, Shelburne boldly stood forward as an opponent of the arbitrary and fatuous course which the Grenville ministry, all subservience to the king's wishes, adopted in the miserable business of Wilkes. Jeremy Bentham has said of Shelburne that he was the only statesman he ever heard of who did not fear the people. Certainly, Shelburne on this occasion showed, with an unmistakableness that simply infuriated George III., that he did not fear the court. The king made no secret of his displeasure. He dismissed the ex-minister even from his post of royal aide-de-camp, and when he appeared at court snubbed him pointedly by pretending not to notice his presence. Bute followed suit, and from this time all intercourse between him and Shelburne ceased.

For upward of a year after these events Shelburne kept entirely aloof from the world of politics, busying himself with the management of his estates in the country, collecting a vast number of historical documents (which are now in the British Museum), and every now and then coming up to London to enjoy the society of the "young orators" (as Walpole calls them) who frequented his house in Hill street, and the non-political clubs of littérateurs. Benjamin Franklin was among his visitors at this time, and the two, as Shelburne in a letter to Franklin nineteen years afterward reminds him, "talked upon the means of promoting the happiness of mankind."

But it was not in nature that a man of Shelburne's energetic and practical temperament should long be content to remain in his tent when a Grenville was afield with such (to say the least) debatable measures as the taxation of the colonies and the Regency Bill inscribed upon his banner. His marriage happening to occur just at the time when the famous Stamp Act was in the House of Lords kept Shelburne away from the debates on that measure, to which we may be sure he would, if present, have offered a persistent and uncompromising opposition; but at the end of April, 1765, he appeared in his place in Parliament to deliver a vigorous speech against the Regency Bill, and showed the courage of his opinions by leading a minority of eight into the lobby. To Rockingham, now at the head of the ministry, it was obvious that Shelburne, despite his years—he was barely eight-and-twenty—was a personage whose support was worth conciliating, and in July he offered to replace him in the Board of Trade. The offer was declined, and not unnaturally. Shelburne had always, with Pitt, protested against the policy of the Stamp Act, and could hardly have sat in a cabinet which, domineered over by the king, was preparing to carry it into execution. We may surmise, too, that he was not unalive to the advantages of a waiting game, and that, closely allied with Pitt as he had now become, and heartily believing in him, he was unwilling to take office on any other than what we may call the Pitt platform. Indeed, he himself says as much in writing to Pitt, a few months afterward, apropos of the Rockingham overtures: "My answer was very short and very frank—that, independent of my connection, I was convinced, from my opinion of the state of the court, as well as the state of affairs everywhere; no system could be formed, durable and respectable, if Mr. Pitt could not be prevailed on to direct and head it." In the same letter—the date is about December, 1765—he tells Pitt, "'Tis you, sir, alone, in everybody's opinion, can put an end to this anarchy, if anything can. I am satisfied your own judgment will best point out the time when you can do it with most effect. You will excuse me, I am sure, when I hazard my thoughts to you, as it depends greatly upon you whether they become opinions, but, by all I find from some authentic letters from America, nothing can be more serious than its present state; and though it is my private opinion it would be well for this country to be back where it was a year ago, I even despair of a repeal [of the Stamp Act] effecting that if it is not accompanied with some circumstances of a firm conduct, and some system immediately following such a concession."

Whatever the faults and weaknesses of the Rockingham administration of 1765-66—and they were many—their moral courage in proposing and carrying through the repeal of the Stamp Act ought to stand weightily to their credit. The king was well known to be vehemently averse to the slightest tampering with the act; and it is difficult for any body of statesmen, even where—which here was anything but the case—public opinion unanimously admits that a false step has been taken, to face the obloquy and sneers sure to attend upon any proposal to retrace it. However, the repealing measure was proposed and carried, Shelburne supporting the ministers with all his might, though, doubting as he did even the abstract right of England to tax her colonies, he with only four other peers divided the House against them on the question of the well-known declaratory resolution. Sic vos non vobis. Though the Rockingham administration repealed the Stamp Act, it was the popular belief that Pitt had been the real moving cause in the matter. Pitt, and none other, was demanded by the national voice. The king reluctantly yielded. Pitt marched into the royal closet with words of profoundest deference upon his tongue and the stern triumph of a conqueror in his heart, and proceeded to form an administration in which there was not even the offer of a place for Rockingham. For Shelburne, on the other hand, he immediately sent, and offered him the seals of secretary of state. Such an appointment must have been a bitter pill indeed to George III., but Pitt stood firm, and the king had to swallow his dislike as best he might. What Choiseul, the French minister, thought of the new arrangement appears from an interesting letter from him to Guerchy in London, which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice quotes from a copy at Lansdowne House. His conclusion is: "Alors le ministère d'Angleterre aura une certaine consistance; sans cela, avec l'opposition de my Lord Temple, l'ineptie de M. Conway, la jeunesse et peut-être l'étourderie de my Lord Shelburne quoique gouverné par M. Pitt, il ne sera pas plus fort qu'il ne l'étoit ci-devant. My Lord Chatham à pris une charge trop forte d'être le gouverneur de tout le monde et le protecteur de tous." At this critical point, the mosaic administration (as Burke felicitously nicknamed it) just formed, Pitt entering the House of Lords as earl of Chatham, to the annoyed surprise of the multitude to whom he had so long been distinctively the Great Commoner, Shelburne at nine-and-twenty essaying the grave responsibilities of a secretaryship of state, the first volume of the biography before us comes, most tantalizingly, to a close. We stand on the threshold of the ever-memorable events of the war of independence, and our appetite is keenly whetted for the feast of freshly interesting details which, though Mr. Bancroft has enjoyed most liberal access to the papers at Lansdowne House, may confidently be expected to be brought to light by one possessed of the opportunities, and, as the volume before, us abundantly shows, the diligence and judgment of Lord Shelburne's present biographer. The main outlines of Shelburne's career throughout the war are familiar, doubtless, to most American readers. How he dissented from his colleagues' treatment of the American difficulty, and was driven, in consequence, to resign his office; how, in opposition, he struggled with all the energy of his character against the policy of North; how, when that policy received its deathblow in the surrender of Cornwallis, he had the quiet triumph of seeing the king come over to the views which he had so long vainly advocated; how, placed at the head of affairs, he arranged and got the king's consent to preliminaries of peace; and how, before he had time to finish his work, he was overthrown by the most disgraceful coalition that British parliamentary government has seen;—are not all these things written in a hundred history books? But pending the detailed and authentic narrative of these things that we shall look for in a future volume of this new life of Shelburne, we have here, by anticipation, a most powerful sketch, by Shelburne's own hand, of one of the principal—we cannot add famous—actors in the conduct of the war; we mean the notorious Lord George Sackville, who, after being cashiered for cowardice at Minden, was whitewashed by the first Rockingham ministry, and thenceforward so boldly held up his head again, and traded on his plausible gravity of manner and family connections, that in the heat of the war the court actually got him appointed to the peculiarly responsible post of American secretary. Shelburne is terribly severe upon his conduct. "He sent out (writes Shelburne) the greatest force which this country ever assembled, both of land and sea forces, which together perhaps exceeded the greatest effort ever made by any nation, considering the distance and all other circumstances, but was totally unable to combine the operations of the war, much less to form any general plan for bringing about a reconciliation. The best plan which was formed in the office was one which was given in by General Arnold. The inconsistent orders given to Generals Howe and Burgoyne could not be accounted for except in a way which it must be difficult for any person who is not conversant with the negligence of office to comprehend. Among many singularities he had a particular aversion to being put out of his way on any occasion. He had fixed to go into Kent or Northamptonshire at a particular hour, and to call on his way at his office to sign the despatches, all of which had been settled, to both these generals. By some mistake, those to General Howe were not fair copied, and, upon his growing impatient at it, the office, which was a very idle one, promised to send it to the country after him, while they despatched the others to General Burgoyne, expecting that the others could be expedited before the packet sailed with the first, which, however, by some mistake, sailed without them, and the wind detained the vessel which was ordered to carry the rest. Hence came General Burgoyne's defeat, the French declaration, and the loss of thirteen colonies." What, indeed, could have been, even a priori, greater fatuity than to entrust the direction of a war to a man who years before, on the continent of Europe, had over and over again proved himself to be utterly destitute of every military quality—of whose general repute the following lines, quoted by Shelburne (from a newspaper of the time of the Seven Years' War), with the caustic commentary, "It is feared there was too much foundation for what is insinuated, and more need not be said," are a sufficiently suggestive indication?—

Our view of Shelburne would be but a one-sided one if it regarded him solely and wholly as a public character, and took no count of the domestic and private side of him. We are proportionately grateful for some extracts from a diary kept at the time by his wife, Lady Shelburne, which her great-grandson has been able to lay before us. They picture to us a quietly-ordered, rather serious home, pretty constantly frequented, however, by company, as one would expect from the many interests and associations of its busy-minded master. He seems to have been in the habit of treating his wife, in private, to solid readings in history, politics and theology. One morning breakfast is followed by some chapters of Thucydides, the next by part of one of Abernethy's sermons, another day "Lord Shelburne read to us a paper concerning the Stamp Act in America;" while on a fourth occasion Lady Shelburne, after dining at the French ambassador's and going to a couple of gossipy assemblies afterward, comes home to her lord, who very appropriately reads to her "a sermon out of Barrow against judging others—a very necessary lesson delivered in very persuasive and pleasing terms." More of Lord Shelburne's private life we shall no doubt learn in the second volume of his biography, in which we are promised "a picture of the society of which Bowood [Lord Shelburne's country-seat in Wiltshire] was the centre during the latter part of the century." Here, for the present, we conclude by registering once more our cordial appreciation of the service that is rendered to history by the publication of such biographies of leading men as that treated of in this paper. Documentary evidence carefully collected, besides correcting the hasty and generally biased assertions of irresponsible contemporary chroniclers, forms the only trustworthy foundation for the judgment of the impartial historian.

W. D. R.

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