s for success in public life. Carteret had large brains and
small affections; he had no friendships and no enmities. Like Fox, he
was a bad hater, but, unlike Fox, he had not a heart to love. He was
fond of books and of wine and of women; he was a great drinker of wine,
even for those days of deep drink. Beneath all the apparent energy and
daring of his character there lay a voluptuous love of ease and
languor. He was not a lazy man, but his inclination was always to be
an indolent man. He leaped up to sudden political action when the call
came, like Sardanapalus leaping up to the inevitable fight; but, like
Sardanapalus, he would have been always glad to lie down again and loll
in ease the moment the necessity for action had passed away. No doubt
his daily allowance of Burgundy--a very liberal and generous
allowance--had a good deal to do with his tendency to indolence.
Whatever the reason, it is certain that, with all his magnificent gifts
and his splendid chances, he did nothing great, and has left no abiding
mark in history. Every one who came near him seems to have regarded
his as a master-spirit. Chesterfield said of him, "When he dies, the
ablest head in England dies too, take it for all in all." Horace
Walpole declares him to be superior in one set of qualities to his
father. Sir Robert Walpole, {235} and in others to the great Lord
Chatham. "Why did they send you here?" Swift said to Carteret, with
rough good-humor, when Carteret came over to Dublin to be
Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. "You are not fit for this place; let them
send us back our boobies." Carteret's fame has always seemed to us
like the fame of Sheridan's Begum speech. Such poor records as we have
of that speech seem hardly to hint at any extraordinary eloquence; yet
the absolutely unanimous opinion of all that heard it--of all the
orators and statesmen and critics of the time--was that so great a
speech had never before been spoken in Parliament. Those men can
hardly have been all wrong, one would think; and yet, on the other
hand, it is not easy to believe that those who made such record of the
speech as we have can have purposely left out all the eloquence, the
wit, and the argument. In like manner, readers of this day may perplex
themselves about the fame of Carteret. All the men who knew him can
hardly have been mistaken when they concurred in giving him credit for
surpassing genius; and yet we find no evidence of that genius ei