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when he retaliated, his sword was of a temper "that neither keen nor solid might resist its edge." In the great parliamentary contests, all gave way before him. But Opposition, having no hope of fixing any charge upon his public life, avenged itself in insinuating smaller scandals, when it whispered that the man whom neither the talents nor arts of the party could overcome, was often overcome by wine. Pitt's habits of seclusion gave an easy opportunity for charges which he took no trouble to refute, and the exhaustion of a mind and body, even in early life wearing themselves away in the public service, was readily exaggerated into the effects of indulgence at the table.

The well-known anecdote of his being fired at by the turnpike-keeper at Wimbledon, was a fertile source of pleasantry to the wits of Opposition. He had been dining with Jenkinson, afterwards Lord Liverpool, and on his return on horseback, not finding the gatekeeper at the turnpike, had rode on without paying. His companions were in high glee, and though not likely to be engaged in a frolic, for they were Thurlow (then Chancellor) and Dundas, President of the Board of Control, they went on laugh. ing at having thus evaded a tax. The turnpike-keeper, however, who evidently thought that it was no laughing matter, running out, called to them to stop; and finding that this produced no effect, had the folly or the frenzy to fire a carbine, loaded with slugs, after them. The fellow, probably to excuse himself, subse. quently said, that he had mistaken them for a gang of robbers, who had lately committed some depredations in the neighbourhood. On this promising topic, Morris wrote a song in the Yankee style, which had vast popularity, and was among the cleverest things of its time:

AMERICAN SONG.

"Sit down, neighbours all, and I'll tell a merry story,

About a British farmer, and Billy Pitt

the Tory;

I had it, piping hot, from Ebenezer Barber, Who sailed right from England, and lies in Boston harbour.

"This Billy Pitt is called Britannia's Prime ruler,

Though he be but a puppet, that's hung out to fool her;

But his name was a passport to let in older sinners,

So he deals out the cards that the knaves may be winners.

"Now it happ'd to the country he went, for a blessing,

And from his state dad to get a new lesson; He went to Daddy Jenky, by Trimmer Hal attended

Good lack in such company, how his morals must be mended!

"This Harry was always a prime foe to Boston;

With bowels so greedy, they yearn'd for Hindostan.

If I had him in our township, I'd feather him and tar him,

With forty lacking one, too, I'd lam him, and I'd scar him.

"With their skins full of wine, and their heads full of state tricks,

Sham reforms, commutations, and the rest of their late tricks,

He came back with Harry, two birds of a feather,

And, both drunk as pipers, they knock'd their heads together."

The story then proceeds to say that they were benighted, lost their way, and at length stumbled upon a cottage:

"Up sprily they march'd, while the fowls,

in confusion,

Thought all their lives were aim'd at by

this bold intrusion."

The countryman got up, and, putting a gun out of the window, warned them off the premises. Pitt tried his oratory, but in vain :—

"Now Billy began for to make an oration, As oft he had done to bamboozle the nation;

But Hodge cried-' Begone! or I'll crack
thy young crown for't!
Thou belong'st to a rare gang of rogues,
I'll be bound for't!""

Pitt failing, Dundas was called in, as usual, to his aid, but with equal ill

success:

"Then Harry stept up; but Hodge, wisely supposing

His part was to steal, while the other was prosing,

Let fly at Master Billy, and shot through

his lace coat!

Oh what a pity 'twas it didn't hit his waistcoat!"

The whole concluding with a Yankee moral:

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This ballad was so well timed, that it made its way every where. In po. pularity, the moment is every thing. It was even quoted in the House, in Pitt's presence, by two such men as Burke and Sheridan. One night, Burke, in rather significant allusion to Sheridan's habits of intemperance, finished some sarcastic remarks on his

political conduct, by repeating the lines,

"Solid men of Boston, banish strong po tations

Solid men of Boston, make no long orations,"

to the great laughter of the assembly. But Sheridan, always ready, started up, and, in allusion to some presumed negotiation between Burke and the Ministry, happily answered, from the same ballad:

"He went to Daddy Jenky, by Trimmer Hal attended

Good lack! in such company, how his

morals must be mended!'

Jenky (Jenkinson) was said to be the immediate channel of communication between the King and the Minister, and to be in some degree also Pitt's political adviser. Trimmer Hal was Harry Dundas, who, however unjustly, was charged with political latitudinarianism, though the chief defender of the Minister's measures in Parliament. The story in the poem is evidently varied from the true state of the case; but poets have an original license to be as " picturesque" as they please.

But the poet could adopt a more finished style, and range through classic conceptions, in classic numbers, with equal feeling and elegance. The following is a copy of verses, in which he asserts his relationship to Horace, on the title of similarity of style:

"Folks often quote me and my lays, (A flattery I'm loth to refuse,) As the sample best shown in our days, Of Horace's manner and muse." He then proceeds to establish the connexion of bardship, from the features of their career :

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"He was often in love, too, it seems-
A resemblance that hits to a hair;
And he mingled, in sweetest extremes,
The joys of the flask and the fair.
Now all who've known me, must admit
The comparison faithful in this;
For Bacchus and Venus still sit

Close link'd in my picture of bliss.

"He with friendship imperial was graced :

Here my muse had, like his, her reward; For the hand where a sceptre is placed,

Often met the plain palm of the bard. He was calm, philosophic, and gay, Chequer'd life with his glass and his pen:

Thus do I sit, and scribble away,

And, by turns, muse and mingle with

men.

After observing that they had both been soldiers, and had alike retired, to indulge their love for quiet and letters; he gracefully alludes to the philosophie spirit with which the Roman poet lived in happy obscurity, and the English one followed his example:"He sat out of Vanity's glare,

Untitled, undeck'd, and unplaced; He wish'd for no tinsel, to wear

In the bower which the muses had

graced.

"Nor have I, fond of privacy's lap,

Though favour'd by Royalty's eye,
Sought a feather to stick in my cap,

Or a string on my button to tie." Morris was a devoted lover of London. It was a part of the fashion of his time, to speak with affected contempt of the country. This style was as old as the time of Charles II. Charles's manners were French, borrowed from a court where the absurd

policy of despotism had gathered all the nobles round the throne, and where the natural frivolity of the national character had aided the royal artifice, which thus separated the great landed proprietors from their tenantry. In heart much more a Frenchman than an Englishman, and copying the manners of that showy race, which, whenever it is not suffered to set the fashion

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in war or negotiation, resumes its natural right, and sets it in the matter of cooks and tailors, he always turned the life of the country gentleman into contempt. But the expulsion of the worn-out dynasty of the Stuarts, and still more, the national triumph over France in the wars of William and Anne, partially restored the good sense of the nation. Natural taste revived, the country gentleman returned to the country, and employed himself in those natural and vigorous pursuits which at once give health and wealth; and from that period England dates the origin of that agricultural skill which has covered her unfertile soil with luxuriance, and filled her mountains and valleys with that garden beauty, which it required even the genius of a Milton to predict and praise. But the courtiers still laughed, and Chesterfield made himself memorable, by saying of some person whom he particularly disliked, that all the punishment he wished him was, "to be married and settled in the country." Town was the paradise of wits and poets; and to men of small income, without families or establishments, of easy habits, and finding their chief indulgence in the daily triflings of society, it undoubtedly offered a strong contrast to the weariness of country solitude; but with Morris the excuse was still stronger. The chief part of his life had been passed in London; the gayest part of it had been spent between Piccadilly and Pall Mall. He was a fly on the gilded chariot-wheel of the Carlton House world.

He was

a bird who sang in the royal cage, and could no more have sung, or perhaps survived, any where else, than the petted goldfinch could live, if turned out to find its fare among the hedge-rows. His poem, entitled the "Contrast," is a pleasant defence of his taste in this matter, and a gay caricature of the calamities of living out of the smoke of London. The poem is too long to be given in full; and, though every verse has its point, we must limit ourselves to extracts:

"In London I never know what I'd be at,

Enraptured with this, and enchanted with that;

I'm wild with the sweets of variety's plan,

And life seems a blessing too happy for

man.

"But the country, Heaven help us! sets all matters right,

So calm and composing from morning till night;

Oh! it settles the spirits, when nothing is

seen,

But an ass on a common, or goose on a green.

"In town, if it rains, why it damps not our hope,

The eye has her choice, and the fancy her scope;

What harm though it pour whole nights or whole days?

It spoils not our prospects, it stops not our

ways.

"In the country what bliss, when it rains in the fields,

To live on the transports that shuttlecock yields;

Or go dawdling from window to window,

to see

A pig on a dunghill, or crow on a tree."

After playfully dilating on the miseries of a scene, which his muse rather unfairly invests in perpetual winter, and in which his only description is evidently that of a wet day, he gives a lively glance at the pleasures of

town;

"In London, how easy we visit and meet, Gay pleasure's the theme, and sweet smiles

are the treat;

Our morning's a round of good-humour'd delight,

And we rattle in comfort to pleasure at night.

"In the country, how sprightly! our visits we make,

Through ten miles of mud, for formality's sake;

With the coachman in drink, and the moon in a fog,

And no thought in our heads, but a ditch or a bog.

"In town, we've no use for the skies over head,

For when the sun rises, we're going to bed,

And as for that old-fashion'd virgin the

moon,

She shines out of season, like satin in June.

"Your magpies and stock-doves may flirt among trees,

And chatter their transports in groves, if they please;

But a house is much more to my taste

than a tree,

And for groves, oh! a fine grove of chimneys for me.

"In town let me live, and in town let me die;

For in truth I can't relish the country, not I.

If one must have a villa in summer to
dwell,

Oh, give me the sweet shady side of Pall-
Mall!"

musician; and his knowledge of literature was classic and extensive. We are to remember too, that, brief as his reign was, and feebly as he was seconded by the habitual sluggishness of that heaviest of ministers, Lord Liverpool; yet he was the source of all the admirable improvements which have changed the face of a large portion of London, and that he gave the impulse to all those which are in progress; that he was the first who established a "Royal Academy of Literature," and endowed it with a thousand pounds a-year out of his privy purse an endowment which the literature-loving Whigs took away under his successor, and whose loss, of course, cramped the efforts of a society which might, in a few years,

George IV. was too old when he came to the throne to give much animation to English society; growing infirmities had already unfitted him to enjoy the life of which he had so long been the leader; the bitterness of the party whom his long experience enabled him to know to the core, and whose ambition, once checked, was to be equalled only by their anger, disgusted him with public men; and his few years upon the throne taught him fully the royal lesson, of the joy-have equalled the fame of the" French lessness of having nothing to hope for. But his earlier years exhibited an elegance, a spirit, and an ardour for cultivating the accomplishments of princely rank, new among English princes. We are by no means inclined to be his indiscriminate panegyrists; we know that there were painful circumstances in his career, blots in his history, errors of judgment, and vices of fashion, wholly injurious to the conception of a great, or even a good

man. But we are to recollect the temptations of a rank which put all evil in his way; the necessary idleness of a life precluded from all political, military, and civil exertion; the total neutralization of his talents, in the midst of a people engaged in the most stirring crisis of the world; and, above all, his associates. With Fox, Sheridan, and the whole body of the leading Whigs constantly surrounding him-men whose boast it was, to plunge into every extravagance of high life-what could be expected from a prince, who fell into their hands a boy, and whose pecuniary embarrassments left him, broken down and helpless, in their hands, to the moment when he ascended the throne?a moment of which he boldly availed himself, to spurn the whole tribe from him at once and for ever.

But he had an original fondness for the brilliant and sparkling portions of life, which, if he had been called earlier into the place of power, might have given a new character to British society. He loved the arts; he collected paintings; he was a tasteful

Academy" of Louis Quatorze, and collected within it the chief literary names of England and of Europe; and that he was the chief patron and promoter of the first attempt made to place historical painting in England on a national footing, and to establish a National Gallery. It is unnecessary to say, how important those objects are in a national point of view; or in what manner they have since been pursued. But those services must not be forgotten, when the memory of George IV. is to be brought into judgment with posterity.

Morris was a Whig, but he was a generous and rational one; and he could see and honour the public spirit with which the Regent preferred the people to a party, and abandoned the worthless companions of his idle hours, when he was called on to fulfil

the duties of a throne. He celebrated this conduct in some bold and flowing lines:

"When Europe, released from fierce Tyranny's sway,

Saw the dark Reign of Terror chased proudly away,

While a demon, in mischief and madness, had shown

That to seek others' ruin leads sure to our

own;

Let the heart of Old England, just, generous, and brave,

Keep the meed of that blessing her con

stancy gave.

"Though the deeds of all nations, with emulous claim,

On the tablet of Glory have blazon'd their fame,

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Hath spread the blest mantle of Peace o'er the world!

'Twas this strong British prop that sus

tain'd the world's mind, Till the Earth's bravest heroes struck home for mankind."

But it is time to say a parting word of the writer of all those various verses. Captain Charles Morris had a kind of hereditary title to two pursuits, once closely allied-bardship and soldiership. His father was a captain, and a poet. He had also a collateral right; for his brother, Captain Thomas Morris, was also a poet, and a rather voluminous one. But the family fame has been eclipsed in his own; and, whatever might be the military laurels of his line, all its Parnassian laurels devolved upon his own head. Charles was one of four sons, and born in London. His father dying in his infancy, he was educated by his mother, an intelligent woman, who lived to the great age of 95. He entered the 17th foot at an early period, his brother being a captain in the corps, and the gallant regiment being almost a family one, three generations of his blood having served in it. The young officer went to America, where he served for some time, previously to the War of Independence. On his return to England, he exchanged into the cavalry, and obtained a commission in the Royal Irish dragoons. But his spirit, gay, courtly, and fashionable, evidently desired a closer intercourse with the town. He accordingly exchanged into the Life Guards, where he found the celebrated Captain Topham, then acting as adjutant, and as much distinguished for his attention to discipline, as he was afterwards for the pleasantry and eccentricity of his private life. This was exactly the intercourse suited to his taste. He was now in the midst of a circle of gallant

gentlemen, uniting the scholar with the soldier, and adorning their bold profession with the graces of accomplished life. In process of time he married a widow, the relict of Sir William Stanhope; and as war at this period had not yet shown his wrinkled front, and the routine duty of a regiment could not occupy much of his time, his original propensities flowed back upon him, and he plunged into poetry.

But a period soon arrived, in which politics occupied all minds. The struggles of Whig and Tory for power involv ed or interested every class of the community; and Captain Morris, always ardent and unhesitating, and captivated by the social manners of Fox, a leader eminently formed to please, poured out Whig verses with the rapidity, and not seldom with the power, of an enthusiast. But of this, too, there was an end. Fox, perpetually baffled, and become desperate, in his wild advo cacy of the French Revolntion, ran so far before even his own party, that he was left alone. All the manlier and better informed of the Whigs grew afraid to follow a leader, whose antics startled the sobriety of the empire. The question now was between England and France. The party was finally broken up, and Fox, with an affectation of disdain which he could not feel, and the consciousness of ruin, as a head of public council, from which even his subsequent momentary possession of power could not even restore him; abandoned Parliament, and declared himself to have abjured public life. All the chief Parliamentary Whigs now ranged themselves on the side of Ministers, for the national security. The principal private ones connected themselves more closely with the prince, for the sake of private friendship. Morris, whose habits had none of the bitterness of political strife, was now among the favourite associates of Carlton House, adopted the public feelings of the prince; and, when the final schism occurred with the Greys and Grenvilles, had no hesitation in making his choice between the prince and the party which had daringly professed its determination to rule. On this occasion he produced some of his bold and powerful songs. This connexion, too, ceased to exist. The misfortune of long life is, that it deprives man of all the associates who made its path pleasant, and leaves the

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