irits ready for the service of the King; there
was no one more unlovely.

Rigby's patron was as unadmirable as Rigby himself. He was fifty years
old when George the Third came to the throne, and he had lived his half
a century in the occupation of many offices and through many
opportunities for distinction without distinguishing himself. He had
still eleven years to live without adding anything of honor or credit
to his name, or earning any other reputation than that of a corrupt
politician whose private life was passed chiefly in the society of
gamblers, jockeys, and buffoons. He had been Governor-General of
Ireland, and had {38} governed it as well as Verres had governed
Sicily. He had been publicly horsewhipped by a county attorney on the
racecourse at Lichfield. His career, always unimportant, was
ignominious when it was not incapable, and it was generally both the
one and the other.

All the statesmen of the day were not of the school of Grafton. There
were numerous exceptions to the rule of Rigby. The Graftons and the
Rigbys gain an unnatural prominence from the fact that then and later
it was to such tools the King turned, and that he always found such
tools ready to his hands. There were many men who, without any show of
austerity or any burden of morality, were at least of a very different
order from the creatures whom the King did not indeed delight to honor,
but whom he condescended to employ. The Earl of Granville, with the
weight of seventy years upon his shoulders, carried into active
political life under his fourth sovereign the same qualities both for
good and evil that adorned or injured the name of Carteret. He
accepted Lord Bute's authority, and he did not live long enough to
witness Bute's fall. He accorded to the peace brought about by Bute
"the approbation of a dying statesman," as the most honorable peace the
country had ever seen. He died in the January of 1763, leaving behind
him the memory of a long life which had always been lived to his own
advantage but by no means to the disadvantage of his country. He left
behind him a memory of rare public eloquence and graceful private
conversation, of an elegant scholarship that prompted him to the
patronage of scholars, of a profound belief in his own judgment, and a
no less profound contempt for the opinions of others. His public life
was honest in an epoch when public dishonesty was habitual, and the
best thing to be said of him was t