A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 2

[Sidenote: 1728--The college days of Dr. Johnson]

Chance sent the student of Petrarch to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he pa.s.sed two years eating the bitter bread of poverty in the bitter pride of youth. He was hungry, he was ragged, he was conscious of his great knowledge and his great gifts, and he saw all around him men in high places whose attainments he despised, and men seeking the same goal as himself whose happy ease of circ.u.mstances he affected to disdain and was compelled to envy. His wild soul rose in rebellion at the inequalities of life. He pa.s.sed for a mutineer.

His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst and ruined raiment. Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in nameless benevolence. Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud to be shod by another man's bounty. He drifted through his few and gloomy college days deriding and despising those in authority; seemingly wasting his time and yet not wasting it; translating Pope's "Messiah" into such n.o.ble Latin that Pope, moved by honest admiration, declared that future times would be unable to tell which was the original and which was the translation. Johnson could be nowhere without learning, and he learned something at Oxford; but in any case his stay was short, and he drifted back to Lichfield, leaving on the {42} banks of the Isis an amazing memory of a sullen savage creature, brimmed with the strangest miscellaneous learning. In Lichfield his father's death, following hard upon his return from Oxford, left him lonelier and poorer than ever, troubled by the grim necessity to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, and by the uncertainty how to set about it. He did set about it, earnestly, strenuously, if not very fruitfully.

[Sidenote: 1737--Johnson and his work]

He was ready to do anything, to turn to anything, to write, to translate, to teach. He fell in love with an amazing woman more than twenty years his senior, monstrously fat, monstrously painted, monstrously affected and absurd; he fell in love with her, and he married her. She had a little money, and Johnson set up an academy for the instruction of youth. But youth would not come to be instructed.

One youth came, one of the very few, a soldier's son and a grandson of a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick. The master and the pupil became friends, and the friends.h.i.+p lasted with life. Master and pupil resolved to make the adventure of the town together. The eyes of aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London. The priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very different fame and very different fortune. The great city had one kind of welcome to give to the man who desired to speak truth and another to the man who proposed to give pleasure. The chances for men of letters and for players were very unlike just then. The two strands of life ran across the web of London, the strand of Johnson iron-gray, the strand of Garrick gleaming gold. Through long years Johnson hid in dingy courts and alleys, ill-clothed, ill-fed, an uncouth Apollo in the service of Admetus Cave and his kind, while the marvellous actor was climbing daily higher and higher on the ladder of an actor's fame, the friend of the wealthy, the favored of the great, the admired, the applauded, the well-beloved. Garrick deserved his fame and his fortune, his splendid successes and {43} his s.h.i.+ning rewards; but the grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps, his ferocious hungers, his acquaintances.h.i.+p with sponging-houses, and all the catalogue of his London agonies. His struggle for life was a t.i.tan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ign.o.ble. He wanted to live and be heard because he knew that he had something to say that was worth hearing. He needed to live for the sake of his ardent squalid affections, for the sake of the people who were always dependent upon his meagre bounty, for the sake of the wife he loved so deeply, mourned so truly when she died, and remembered with such tender loyalty so long as life was left to him. Miserably poor himself, he always had about him people more miserable and more poor, who looked to him for the very bread and water of their affliction, dependents whom he tended not merely generously, but, what was better still, cheerfully. Under conditions of existence that would have seemed crus.h.i.+ng to men of letters with a t.i.the of Johnson's greatness of soul, Johnson fought his way inch by inch in the terrible career of the man who lived by his pen, and by his pen alone. He wrote anything and everything so long as it was honorable to write and promised to make the world better. But it was not what Johnson wrote so much as what Johnson did that commanded his age and commands posterity. In the truest sense of the word, he lived beautifully. "Ra.s.selas" and "The Idler," "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," "The Rambler" and the "Sessions of Lilliput," and the "Lives of the Poets," and even the famous "Dictionary," only claim remembrance because they were done by a man who would be as interesting a study and as enn.o.bling an example if he had never written a line of the works that bear his signature in every sentence of their solemn, even their portentous majesty. Johnson had the kindest heart wrapped in a rugged hide. One of the n.o.blest of the many n.o.ble stories about him relates how he and a friend, whose name of Burke was not then famous, found a poor woman of the streets houseless, hungry, and exhausted in the streets. Burke had a room which he could {44} offer the poor creature for a night's shelter; but Burke could not get the woman there. Johnson had no room--his dependents swarmed over every available s.p.a.ce at his command--but he had the strength of a giant, and he used it as a giant should, in carrying the poor wretch in his arms to the roof that Burke could offer her. Long years later, another man of letters, hungry, homeless, and friendless, sick almost unto death, found a kind friend and gentle nurse in a woman of the streets. In succoring De Quincey we may well think that Anne was repaying something of the debt owed by one of her unhappy cla.s.s to two of the glories of literature and of humanity.

Slowly and surely Johnson's fame spread. The "Dictionary," ma.s.sive fruit of many vigils, reward of many supplications, made him ill.u.s.trious. It might have been dedicated to Chesterfield, if Chesterfield had shown to the struggling author the courtesy he was eager to extend to the established writer. Chesterfield need not be blamed if he was reluctant to welcome a queer ungainly creature whose manners were appalling, and of whose genius no one save himself was a.s.sured. But he was to be blamed, and he deserved the stern punishment he received in Johnson's stinging letter of repudiation, for attempting, when Johnson was distinguished and beyond his power to help, to win the great honor of a dedication by a proffer of friends.h.i.+p that came too late. Johnson needed no Chesterfield now. London had learned to reverence him, had learned to love him. His friends were the best Englishmen alive; the club which Johnson established bore on its roll the most ill.u.s.trious names in the country; at the home of the Thrales Johnson tasted and appreciated all that was best in the home life of the time. He had a devoted friend in the person of a fussy, fantastic, opinionated, conceited little Scotch gentleman, Mr. James Boswell of Auchinleck, who clung to his side, treasured his utterances, cherished his sayings, and made himself immortal in immortalizing his hero. It is good to remember that when George the Third came to the throne a man like Johnson was alive. It is not so good to remember how seldom he found himself {45} face to face with the King, whom he might have aided with his wisdom, his counsel, and his friends.h.i.+p.

[Sidenote: 1763--Johnson's influence on literature]

Johnson's presence adorned and honored four-and-twenty years of a reign that was to last for sixty years. He was the friend or the enemy of every man worthy to arouse any strong emotion of love or scorn in a strong spirit. He had the admiration of all whose admiration was worth the having. The central figure of the literary London of his lifetime, he exercised something of the same social and intellectual influence over all Londoners that Socrates exercised over all Athenians. The affection he inspired survived him, and widens with the generations.

In the hundred years and more that have pa.s.sed since Johnson's death, his memory has grown greener. The symbol of his life and of its lesson is to be found in what Hawthorne beautifully calls the sad and lovely legend of the man Johnson's public penance in the rain, amid the jeering crowd, to expiate the offence of the child against its father.

Johnson was the very human apostle of a divine righteousness.

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CHAPTER XLIV.

THE "NORTH BRITON"

[Sidenote: 1763--John Wilkes]

One of the most beautiful places on one of the most beautiful rivers in the world is Medmenham on the Thames, hard by Marlow. In the awakening of spring, in the tranquillity of summer, or the rich decline of August, the changing charm of the spot appeals with the special insistence that a.s.sociation lends to nature. Medmenham is a haunted place. Those green fields and smiling gardens have been the scenes of the strangest idyls; those s.h.i.+ning waters have mirrored the fairest of frail faces; those woods have echoed to the names of the light nymphs of town and the laughter of modish satyrs. It was once very lonely in its loveliness, a ground remote, where men could do and did do as they pleased unheeded and un.o.bserved. Where now from April to October a thousand pleasure-boats pa.s.s by, where a thousand pleasure-seekers land and linger, a century and a half ago the spirit of solitude brooded, and those who came there came to a calm as unvexed and as enchanting as the calm of Avallon. They made strange uses of their exquisite opportunity. They profaned the groves whose very winds breathed peace; they polluted the stream that a poet would have found sacred. The remains are there of a Cistercian abbey, the ruins of a ruin, twice fallen into disuse and decay. It was a ruin in the eighteenth century when a member of Parliament, who was also a baronet and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, took it into his evil head to repair it. Under the care of Sir Francis Dashwood it was restored for a new and altered life.

The abbey rose again, and once again was a.s.sociated with a brotherhood of monks. But where the quiet Cistercians had lived and prayed a new {47} brotherhood of St. Francis, named after their founder, devoted themselves to all manner of blasphemy, to all manner of offence. In a spot whose beauty might well be expected to have only a softening influence, whose memories might at least be found exalting, a handful of disreputable men gathered together to degrade the place, and, as far as that was possible, themselves, with the beastly pleasures and beastly humors of the ingrained blackguard.

The h.e.l.l-Fire Club was dead and gone, but the spirit of the h.e.l.l-Fire Club was alive and active. The monks of St. Francis were worthy pupils of the principles of the Duke of Wharton. They sought to make their profligacy, in which they strove to be unrivalled, piquant by a parody of the religious ceremonies of the Christian faith. The energy and the earnestness which other men devote to the advancement of some public cause, to the furtherance of their country's welfare, or even to the gratification of their own ambitions, these men devoted to a pa.s.sion for being pre-eminent in sin, conspicuous in infamy. If they succeeded in nothing else, they succeeded in making their names notorious and shameful, they succeeded in stirring the envy of men no better than they, but less enabled by wealth or position to gratify their pa.s.sions.

They succeeded in arousing the loathing not merely of honest men, but even of the knaves and fools whose rascality was not so rotten and whose folly was not so foul as that of the n.o.blemen and statesmen who rioted within the walls of Medmenham.

It is curious and melancholy to record that the leading spirits of this abominable brotherhood were legislators in both Houses of Parliament, men of old family, great position, large means, men holding high public office, members of the Government. Their follies and their sins would scarcely be worth remembering to-day were it not for the chance that gave them for companion and ally one of the most remarkable men of his age, a man whose abilities were in striking contrast to those of his a.s.sociates, a man who might almost be called a man of genius.

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John Wilkes was the son of a rich distiller and of a Presbyterian mother. He had received a good education in England and at Leyden, where so many of the Englishmen of that day went as students. He had travelled much in his youth upon the Continent. On his return he was induced by his father, he being then only two-and-twenty, to marry a lady who was exceedingly rich, but who had the misfortune to be at least ten years older than her husband. It is scarcely surprising to find that the marriage did not turn out happily. Wilkes was young, fresh from the bright Continental life, delighting in pleasure and the society of those who pursued pleasure. How far a happier marriage might have influenced him for good it were idle to consider. His marriage he regarded always and spoke of always as a sacrifice to Plutus, not to Venus, and he certainly was at no pains to make it any more of a sacrifice than he could help. His wild tastes, his wild companions soon sickened and horrified Mrs. Wilkes. The ill-matched pair separated, and remained separate for the rest of their lives.

Wilkes was delighted to be free. He was at liberty to squander his money unquestioned and unchallenged in the society of as pretty a gang of scoundrels as even the age could produce. No meaner, more malignant, or more repulsive figure darkens the record of the last century than that of Lord Sandwich. Sir Francis Dashwood ran him close in infamy. Mr. Thomas Potter was the peer of either in beastliness.

All three were members of Parliament; all three were partially responsible for the legislation of the country; two were especially so responsible. All three were bound at least to a decorous acknowledgment of the observances of the Church; one was in especial so bound. Sir Francis Dashwood and Lord Sandwich were, then or thereafter, members of the Government. Sir Francis Dashwood was remarkable as having been the worst and stupidest Chancellor of the Exchequer known to history. Lord Sandwich was made First Lord of the Admiralty. As for the third in this triumvirate of blackguards, Mr.

Thomas Potter was a son of the Archbishop {49} of Canterbury, and he was soon afterwards made Vice-Treasurer for Ireland. Into such honorable hands were the duties of government delivered less than a century and a half ago.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes's profligacy]

In this society Wilkes was made very welcome. He brought to their filthy fooleries something resembling wit; he brought an intelligence as far above that of his companions as that of the monkey is above that of the rabbit. While he had money he spent it as royally as the rest.

If he rivalled them in their profligacy, he outstripped them by his intellect. They were conspicuous only by their vices; he would have been a remarkable man even if it had pleased Providence to make him virtuous. It had not pleased Providence to make him attractive to look upon. There were few uglier men of his day; few who lost less by their ugliness. But though we are well a.s.sured that his appearance was repulsive, he redeemed his hideousness by his ready tongue and witty mind. He said of himself, truly enough, that he only wanted half an hour's start to make him even with the handsomest man in England.

Wilkes flung his money and his wife's money about recklessly, while he played his part as a country gentleman upon the estate at Aylesbury which his unhappy wife had resigned to him when they separated. Of this money some eight thousand pounds went in an unsuccessful attempt to bribe his way into the representation of Berwick, and seven thousand more went in the successful attempt to buy himself the representation of Aylesbury. It is probable that he hoped to advance his failing fortunes in Parliament. His fortunes were failing, failing fast. He made an ign.o.ble attempt to bully his wife out of the miserable income of two hundred a year which was all that she had saved out of her wealth, but the attempt was happily defeated by that Court of King's Bench against which Wilkes was to be pitted later in more honorable hostility.

It was perhaps impossible that Wilkes could long remain content with the companions.h.i.+p of men like Dashwood and Sandwich; it was certainly impossible that men {50} like Dashwood and like Sandwich could for long feel comfortable in the companions.h.i.+p of a man so infinitely their superior in wit, intelligence, and taste. The panegyrists of Sandwich--for even Sandwich had his panegyrists in an age when wealth and rank commanded compliment--found the courage to applaud Sandwich as a scholar and an antiquarian, on the strength of an account of some travels in the Mediterranean, which the world has long since willingly let die. But the few weeks or months of foreign travel that permitted Sandwich to pose as a connoisseur when he was not practising as a profligate could not inspire him with the humor or the appreciation of Wilkes, and a friends.h.i.+p only cemented by a common taste for common vices soon fell asunder. There is a story to the effect that the quarrel began with a practical joke which Wilkes played off on Sandwich at Medmenham. Sandwich, in some drunken orgy, was induced to invoke the devil, whereupon Wilkes let loose a monkey, that had been kept concealed in a box, and drove Sandwich into a paroxysm of fear in the belief that his impious supplication had been answered. For whatever reason, Wilkes and Sandwich ceased to be friends, to Wilkes's cost at first, and to Sandwich's after. Sandwich owes his unenviable place in history to his a.s.sociation with Wilkes in the first place, and in the next to his alliance with the beautiful, unhappy Miss Ray, who was murdered by her melancholy lover, the Rev. Mr. Hickman, at the door of Covent Garden Theatre. The fate of his mistress and his treason to his friend have preserved the name of Sandwich from the forgetfulness it deserved.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes as a Member of Parliament]

In those days Wilkes made no very remarkable figure in Parliament. It was outside the walls of Westminster that he first made a reputation as a public man. In the unpopularity of Bute, Wilkes found opportunity for his own popularity. The royal peace policy was very unwelcome, and agitated the feeling of the country profoundly. Political controversy ran as high in the humblest cross-channels as in the main stream of courtly and political life. At that time, we are told by a contemporary {51} letter-writer, the mason would pause in his task to discuss the progress of the peace, and the carpenter would neglect his work to talk of the Princess Dowager, of Lord Treasurers and Secretaries of State. To win support and sympathy from such keen observers, the Ministry turned again for aid to the public press that had been so long neglected by the Whigs. Smollett, the remembered novelist, Murphy, the forgotten dramatist, were commissioned to champion the cause of the Government in the two papers, the _Briton_ and the _Auditor_.

The Government already had a severe journalistic critic in the _Monitor_, a newspaper edited by John Entinck, which had been started in 1755. The _Monitor_ was not at all like a modern newspaper. It was really little more than a weekly pamphlet, a folio of six pages published every Sat.u.r.day, and containing an essay upon the political situation of the hour. Its hostility to Bute goaded the minister into the production of the _Briton_, which was afterwards supplemented by the creation of the _Auditor_ when it was found that Smollett had called up against the Ministry a more terrible antagonist than the _Monitor_. For the _Briton_ only lives in the memories of men because it called into existence the _North Briton_.

Wilkes had entered Parliament as the impa.s.sioned follower of Pitt. He made many confessions of his desire to serve his country, professions which may be taken as sincere enough. But he was also anxious to serve himself and to mend his fortunes, and he did not find in Parliamentary life the advancement for which he hoped. Twice he sought for high position under the Crown, and twice he was unsuccessful. He wished to be made amba.s.sador to Constantinople, where he would have found much that was congenial to him, and his wish was not granted. He wished to be made Governor-General of the newly conquered Quebec, and again his desires were unheeded. Wilkes believed that Bute was the cause of his double disappointment. He became convinced that while the favors of the State lay in Bute's hands they would only be given to Tories, and more especially to Tories who were also {52} Scotchmen. If Bute could have known, it would have been a happy hour for him which had seen Wilkes starting for the Golden Horn or sailing for the St. Lawrence.

But Bute was a foolish man, and he did his most foolish deed when he made Wilkes his enemy.

The appearance of the _North Briton_ was an event in the history of journalism as well as in the political history of the country. It met the heavy-handed violence of the _Briton_ with a frank ferocity which was overpowering. It professed to fight on the same side as the _Monitor_, but it surpa.s.sed Entinck's paper as much in virulence as in ability. Under the whimsical pretence of being a North Briton, Wilkes a.s.sailed the Scotch party in the State with unflagging satire and unswerving severity. In the satire and the severity he had an able henchman in Charles Churchill.

[Sidenote: 1731-1764--The poet Churchill]

Those who are inclined to condemn Wilkes because for a season he found entertainment in the society of a Sandwich, a Dashwood, and a Potter, must temper their judgment by remembering the affection that Wilkes was able to inspire in the heart of Churchill. While the scoundrels of Medmenham were ready to betray their old a.s.sociate, and, with no touch of the honor proverbially attributed to thieves, to drive him into disgrace, to exile, and if possible to death, the loyal friends.h.i.+p of the poet was given to Wilkes without reserve. Churchill was not a man of irreproachable character, of unimpeachable morality, or of unswerving austerity. But he was as different from the Sandwiches and the Dashwoods as dawn is different from dusk, and in enumerating all of the many arguments that are to be acc.u.mulated in defence of Wilkes, not the least weighty arguments are that while on the one hand he earned the hatred of Sandwich and of Dashwood, on the other hand he earned the love of Charles Churchill.

Churchill's name and fame have suffered of late years. Since Byron stood by the neglected grave and mused on him who blazed, the comet of a season, the genius of Churchill has been more and more disregarded.

But the Georgian epoch, so rich in its many and contrasting types {53} of men of letters, produced few men more remarkable in themselves, if not in their works, than Charles Churchill. The cleric who first became famous for most unclerical a.s.saults upon the stage, the satirist who could be the most devoted friend, the seducer who could be so loyal to his victim, the spendthrift who could be generous, the cynic who could feel and obey the principles of the purest patriotism, was one of those strangely compounded natures in which each vice was as it were effaced or neutralized by some compensating virtue. It may be fairly urged that while Churchill's virtues were his own, his vices were in large part the fault of his unhappy destiny. The Westminster boy who learned Latin under Vincent Bourne, and who was a schoolfellow of Warren Hastings, of Cowper, and of Colman, might possibly have made a good scholar, but was certainly not of the stuff of which good clergymen are made. An early marriage, an unhappy marriage contracted in the Rules of the Fleet, had weighed down his life with enc.u.mbrances almost before he had begun to live. Compelled to support an unsuitable wife and an increasing family, Churchill followed his father's example and his father's injudicious counsel and took Holy Orders. Men took Orders in those days with a light heart. It afforded the needy a livelihood, precarious indeed for the most part, but still preferable to famine. Men took Orders with no thought of the sanct.i.ty of their calling, of the solemn service it exacted, of its awful duties and its inexorable demands. They wished merely to keep famine from the door, to have food and fire and shelter, and they took Orders as under other conditions they would have taken the King's s.h.i.+lling, with no more feeling of reverence for the black ca.s.sock than for the scarlet coat.

Churchill was not the man to wear the clergyman's gown with dignity, or to find in the gravity of his office consolation for the penury that it entailed. The Establishment offered meagre advantages to an extravagant man with an extravagant wife. He drifted deeper and deeper into debt. He became as a wandering star, reserved for the blackness of bailiffs and the darkness of duns. But the {54} rare quality he had in him of giving a true friends.h.i.+p to his friend won a like quality from other men. Dr. Lloyd, under-master of his old school of Westminster, came to his aid, helped him in his need, and secured the patience of his creditors. He was no longer hara.s.sed, but he was still poor, and the spur of poverty drove him to tempt his fortune in letters. Like so many a literary adventurer of the eighteenth century, he saw in the writing of verse the sure way to success. Like so many a literary adventurer of the century, he carried his first efforts unsuccessfully from bookseller to bookseller. The impulses of his wit were satirical; he was not dismayed by failure; the stage had entertained him and irritated him, and he made the stage the subject of his first triumph. "The Rosciad" was in every sense a triumph. Its stings galled the vanity of the players to frenzy. At all times a susceptible brotherhood, their susceptibilities were sharply stirred by Churchill's corrosive lines and acidulated epigrams. Their indignation finding vent in hot recrimination and virulent lampoon only served to make the poem and its author better known to the public. Churchill replied to the worst of his a.s.sailants in "The Apology," which rivalled the success of "The Rosciad," and gained for the satirist the friends.h.i.+p of Garrick, who had affected to disdain the praises of "The Rosciad," but who now recognized in time the power of the satirist and the value of his approval. Churchill himself was delighted with his good fortune. He was the talk of the town; he had plenty of money in his pocket; he was separated from his wife, freed from his uncongenial profession, and he could exchange the solemn black of the cleric for a blue coat with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and a gold-laced hat.

[Sidenote: 1762--Newspaper polemics]

Lest the actors whom he had lashed should resort to violence for revenge, he carried with ostentation a st.u.r.dy cudgel. It was a formidable weapon in hands like Churchill's, and Churchill was not molested. For Churchill was a man of great physical strength. He tells the world in the portrait he painted of himself of the vastness of his bones, of the strength of his muscles, of his arms like {55} two twin oaks, of his legs fas.h.i.+oned as if to bear the weight of the Mansion House, of his ma.s.sive body surmounted by the ma.s.sive face, broader than it was long. The ugly face was chiefly remarkable, according to the confession of its owner, for its expression of contentment, though the observant might discern "sense lowering in the penthouse of his eye." Like most giants, he overtaxed his strength, both mentally and physically. Whatever he did he did with all his mighty energy. He loved, hated, worked, played, at white heat as it were, and withered up his forces with the flame they fed. In nothing did his zeal consume itself more hotly than in his devotion to Wilkes.

Churchill met Wilkes in 1762, and seems to have fallen instantly under the spell which Wilkes found it so easy to exercise upon all who came into close contact with him. Undoubtedly Churchill's friends.h.i.+p was very valuable to Wilkes. If Churchill loved best to express his satire in verse, he could write strongly and fiercely in prose, and the _North Briton_ owed to his pen some of its most brilliant and some of its bitterest pages. In the _North Briton_ Wilkes and Churchill laid about them l.u.s.tily, striking at whatever heads they pleased, holding their hands for no fame, no dignity, no influence. It was wholly without fear and wholly without favor. If it a.s.sailed Bute again and again with an unflagging zeal, it was no less ready to challenge to an issue the greatest man who over accepted a service from Bute, and to remind Dr. Johnson, who had received a pension from the King's favorite, of his own definition of a pension and of a pensioner.

Before the fury and the popularity of the _North Briton_ both the _Auditor_ and the _Briton_ had to strike their colors. The _Auditor_ came to its inglorious end on February 8, 1763. The _Briton_ died on the 12th of the same month, leaving the _North Briton_ master of the field. Week after week the _North Briton_ grew more severe in its strictures upon the Government, strictures that scorned the veil of hint and innuendo that had hitherto prevailed in these pamphleteering wars. Even the _Monitor_ had always alluded to the statesmen whom it a.s.sailed by initial letters. {56} The _North Briton_ called them by their names in all the plainness of full print, the name of the sovereign not being excepted from this courageous rule. But the fame of the _North Briton_ only came to its full with the number forty-five.

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CHAPTER XLV.

NUMBER FORTY-FIVE.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes's criticism of the King's speech]

When Bute disappeared from the public leaders.h.i.+p of his party, Wilkes, from professedly patriotic motives, delayed the publication of the current number of the _North Briton_, to see if the policy which Bute had inspired still guided the actions of the gentle shepherd, George Grenville. Wilkes wished to know if the influence of the Scottish minister was at an end, or if he still governed through those wretched tools who had supported the most odious of his measures, the ignominious peace, and the wicked extension of the arbitrary mode of excise. He declared himself that if Bute only intended to retire into that situation which he held before he took the seals, a situation in which he dictated to every part of the King's administration, Wilkes was as ready to combat the new Administration as he had been steady in his opposition to a single, insolent, incapable, despotic minister.

Any hope that Wilkes may have entertained of a reformation of the Ministry was dispelled by a talk which he had with Temple and Pitt at Temple's house, where Temple showed him an early copy of the King's speech. Wilkes, Pitt, and Temple were entirely in agreement as to the fatal defects of the speech, and Wilkes went promptly home and wrote the article which made the forty-fifth number of the _North Briton_ famous.

In itself the number forty-five was no stronger in its utterances than many of the preceding numbers. If its tone be compared with the tone of journalistic criticism of ministers or their sovereign less than a generation later, it seems sober and even mild. Wilkes's article started with a citation from Cicero: "Genus orationis atrox et {58} vehemena, cui opponitur genus illud alterum lenitatis et mansuetudinis." Then came Wilkes's comment on the speech. He was careful not to criticize directly the King. With a prudence that was perhaps more ironical than any direct stroke at the sovereign, he attacked the minister who misled and misrepresented the monarch. "The King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the public at large as the speech of the minister."

Starting from this understanding, Wilkes went on to stigmatize the Address as "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever attempted to be imposed upon mankind," and he doubted whether "the imposition is greater upon the sovereign or on the nation." "Every friend of his country," the writer declared, "must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures and to the most unjustifiable public declarations from a throne ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue."