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* * * * When the Duke of Grafton was at the Treasury, the seals were held by Lord Weymouth, the son of Earl Granville's daughter. With more than his grandfather's capacity for liquor, he had inherited a fair portion of his abilities; and anybody who cared to sit up with the secretary of state till the hours were no longer small might obtain a fair notion how Carteret used to talk toward the end of his second bottle. It would have been well for Lord Weymouth if his nights had been consumed exclusively in drinking, for he was an ardent and most unlucky gambler, and by the age of one-and-thirty he had played away his fortune, his credit, and his honor. His house swarmed with bailiffs; and when he sought refuge at the club, he found himself among people whose money he had tried to win without having any of his own to lose, and who had told him their opinion of his conduct in terms which he was not in a position, and (as some suspected) not of a nature, to resent. He was on the point of levanting for France when, as a last resource, his grandfather's friends bethought them that he had not yet tried public life. "He must have bread, my lord," wrote Junius; "or, rather, he must have wine;" and, as it was convenient that his first services to the state should be rendered at a distance from the scene of his earlier exploits, he was appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. The Dublin tradesmen, however, did not relish the prospect of having a bankrupt nobleman quartered upon them for five or six years, in order that at the end of that time he might be able to show his face again at White's. The spirit which, fifty years before, had refused to put up with the bad half-pence of the dominant country again began to show itself; Lord Weymouth's nomination was rescinded; and, to console him for the rebuff, he was made Secretary of State for the Northern Department, and intrusted with half the work that is now done by the Foreign Office, and with the undivided charge of the internal administration of the kingdom. He did not pay his new duties the compliment of making the very slightest alteration in his habits. He still boozed till daylight, and dozed into the afternoon; and his public exertions were confined to occasional speeches, which his admirers extolled as preternaturally sagacious, and which his severest critics admitted to be pithy. "If I paid nobody," wrote Walpole, and went drunk to bed every morning at six, I might expect to be called out of bed by two in the afternoon to save

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two or three sentences as profound and short as the proverbs of Solomon."

Lord Weymouth's successor as secretary of state was the most eminent, and possibly the most disreputable, member of the Bedford connection. The Earl of Sandwich was excellent as the chief of a department. He rose about the time that his predecessor retired to rest, and remained, till what then was a late dinner-hour, closely absorbed in methodical and most effectual labor. "Sandwich's industry to carry a point in view," says Walpole, "was so remarkable that the world mistook it for abilities;" and if genius has been rightly defined as the capability of taking trouble, the world was not far wrong. Like all great administrators, he loved his own way, and rarely failed to get it; but outside the walls of his office, his way was seldom or never a good one. He shocked even his own generation by the immorality of his private life, if such a term can be applied to the undisguised and unabashed libertinism that he carried to the very verge of a tomb which did not close on him until he had misspent three quarters of a century. He survived a whole succession of scandals, the least flagrant of which would have been fatal to any one but him. Nothing substantially injured him in the estimation of his countrymen, because no possible revelation could make them think worse of him than they thought already. When he was advanced in age, and at the head of what was just then the most important branch of the public service, he was involved in one of those tragedies of the police court by means of which the retribution of publicity sometimes overtakes the voluptuary who imagines that his wealth has fenced him securely from the consequences of his sin. But no coroner's inquest or cross-examination at the Old Bailey could elicit anything which would add a shade to such a character. The blood had been washed from the steps of the theatre; the gallows had been erected and taken down; the poor creature who had been the object of a murderous rivalry was quiet in her grave; and the noble earl was still at the Admiralty, giving his unhonored name to the discoveries of our most celebrated navigator, and fitting out expeditions which might reduce the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Philadelphia to the necessity of contributing to the taxes out of which he replenished his cellar and his seraglio. Corrupt, tyrannical, and brazen-faced as a politician, and destitute, as was seen in his conduct to Wilkes, of that last relic of virtue, fidelity toward the partners of his secret and pleasant vices, po

the turpitude of Sandwich.

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"Too infamous to have a friend;

Too bad for bad men to commend,

Or good to name; beneath whose weight
Earth groans; who hath been spared by fate
Only to show, on mercy's plan,

How far and long God bears with man."

Even this masterpiece of truculence was no libel upon one who had still eight-and-twenty years to pass in living up to the character which Churchill had given him in his wrath. Such," cried Junius, "is the council by which the best of sovereigns is advised, and the greatest nation upon earth governed." The humiliation and resentment with which decent Englishmen saw this train of bacchanals scouring through the high places of the state is a key to the unexampled popularity of that writer who, under twenty different signatures drawn from the pages of Plutarch and Tacitus, lashed the self-will and selfdelusion of the king, and the rapacity and dissoluteness of his ministers. The spectacle of "the Duke of Grafton, like an apprentice, thinking that the world should be postponed to a horse-race, and the Bedfords not caring what disgraces we undergo, while each of them has three thousand pounds a year and three thousand bottles of claret and champagne," did more than his own somewhat grandiose eloquence and over-labored sarcasm to endow Junius with a power in the country second only to that of Chatham, and a fame hardly less universal than the notoriety of Wilkes. But in the eyes of George the Third the righteous anger of his people was only another form of its loyalty. Intent, heart and soul, on his favorite scheme for establishing a system of personal rule, under which all the threads of administration should centre in the royal closet, he entertained an instinctive antipathy to high-minded and independent men of all political parties. He selected his instruments among those who were willing to be subservient because they had no self-respect to lose.

THANATOPSIS

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;-
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around-
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air,-
Comes a still voice-Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,

Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone,-nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world-with kings,
The powerful of the earth-the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and poured roun all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-
Are but the solemn decorations all

of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.-Take the wings
Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings-yet-the dead are there.
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep-the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come,
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,

Our Laird was a very young man when his father died, and he gaed awa to France, and Italy, and Flanders, and Germany, immediately, and we saw naething o' him for three years; and my brother, John Baird, went wi' him as his own body-servant. When that time was gane by, our Johnny cam hame and tauld us that Sir Claud wad be here the next day, an' that he was bringing hame a foreign lady wi' him-but they were not married. This news was a sair heart, as ye may suppose, to a' that were about the house; and we were just glad that the auld lady was dead and buried, not to hear of sic doins. But what could we do? To be sure the rooms were a' put in order, and the best chamber in the hale house was got ready for Sir Claud and her. John tauld me, when we were alane together that night, that I wud be surprised wi' her beauty when

she came.

But I never could have believed, till I saw her, that she was sae very young-such a mere bairn, I may say; I'm sure she was not more than fifteen. Such a dancing, gleesome bit bird of a lassie was never seen; and ane could not but pity her mair than blame her for what she had done, she was sae visibly in the daftness and light-headedness of youth. Oh how she sang, and played, and galloped about on the wildest horses in the stable, as fearlessly as if she had been a man! The house was full of fun and glee; and Sir Claud and she were both so young and so comely, that it was enough to break ane's very heart to behold their thoughtlessness. She was aye sitting on his knee, wi' her arm about his neck; and for weeks and months this love and merriment lasted. The poor body had no airs wi' her; she was just as humble in her speech to the like of us, as if she had been a cotter's lassie. I believe there was not one of us that could help liking her,

for a' her faults. She was a glaiket creature; but gentle and tender hearted as a perfect lamb, and sae bonny! I never sat eyes upon her match. She had never any colour but black for her gown, and it was commonly satin, and aye made in the same fashion; and a' the perling about her bosom, and a great gowden chain stuck full of precious rubies and diamonds. She never put powder on her head neither; oh proud, proud was she of her hair! I've often known her comb and comb at it for an hour on end; and when it was out of the buckle, the bonny black curls fell as low as her knee. You never saw such a head of hair since ye were born. She was the daughter of a rich auld Jew in Flanders, and ran away frae the house wi' Sir Claud, ae night when there was a great feast gaun on,-the Passover supper, as John thought,-and out she came by the back-door to Sir Claud, dressed for supper wi' a' her braws.

Weel, this lasted for the maist feck of a year; and Perling Joan (for that was what the servants used to ca' her, frae the laces about her bosom), Mrs. Joan lay in and had a lassie.

Sir Claud's auld uncle, the colonel, was come hame from America about this time, and he wrote for the laird to gang in to Edinburgh to see him, and he behoved to do this; and away he went ere the bairn was mair than a fortnight auld, leaving the lady wi' us.

I was the maist experienced body about the house, and it was me that got chief charge of being with her in her recovery. The poor young thing was quite changed now. Often and often did she greet herself blind, blind, lamenting to me about Sir Claud's no marrying her; for she said she did not take muckle thought about thae things afore; but that now she had a bairn to Sir Claud, and she could not bear to look the wee thing in the face, and think a' body would ca' it a bastard. And then she said she was come of as decent folks as any lady in Scotland, and moaned and sobbit about her auld father and her sisters.

But the colonel, ye see, had gotten Sir Claud into the town; and we soon began to hear reports that the colonel had been terribly angry about Perling Joan, and threatened Sir Claud to leave every penny he had past him, if he did not put Joan away, and marry a lady like himself. And what wi' fleeching, and what wi' flyting, sae it was that Sir Claud went away to the north wi' the colonel, and the marriage between him and lady Juliana was agreed upon, and everything settled.