Note 163 — Chapter IX

He was called with reason the petty tyrant of the North, and the stories still related of his pride, caprice, and cruelty in Westmoreland and Cumberland, are almost incredible. If he possessed a virtue, it was as Peter Pindar said, in his well-known epistle to him, “A farthing rushlight to a world of shade.” His eccentricities were such as to cast doubts on the sanity of his intellect. He fought several duels for causes ludicrously inadequate. This did not prevent his making an impassioned appeal to the House of Commons in 1780, on the duel of Lord Shelburne and Colonel Fullarton, against the impropriety of duels arising out of language in the House of Commons, as interrupting the freedom of debate. Mr. Pitt owed to him his first introduction into public life—as his first seat was for Sir James’s borough of Appleby,—a favour amply returned, by Sir James being raised in 1784 to the Earldom of Lonsdale. He was more useful than creditable as a political adherent. No man of his day spent such large sums in election contests, or obtained greater success in them, notwithstanding his extreme personal unpopularity. It is said that above seven thousand guineas were found in his cassette at his death in 1802, destined for the approaching general election,—a vast sum to collect in gold at a time when even at the Queen’s commerce-table guineas were very rarely staked, and when specie could scarcely be procured by men of the largest fortune. (See more of him in Wraxall’s Posthumous Memoirs, vol. i. p. 28.)—E.