racy of his views: and in the
rout of Jena, or the agony of Austerlitz, one cannot refrain from
picturing the shade of Shelburne haunting the cabinet of Pitt, as the
ghost of Canning is said occasionally to linger about the speaker's
chair, and smile sarcastically on the conscientious mediocrities who
pilfered his hard-earned honours.

But during the happier years of Mr Pitt, the influence of the mind of
Shelburne may be traced throughout his policy. It was Lansdowne House
that made Pitt acquainted with Dr Price, a dissenting minister, whom
Lord Shelburne when at the head of affairs courageously offered to
make his private secretary, and who furnished Mr Pitt, among many other
important suggestions, with his original plan of the sinking fund. The
commercial treaties of '87 were struck in the same mint, and are notable
as the first effort made by the English government to emancipate the
country from the restrictive policy which had been introduced by the
"glorious revolution;" memorable epoch, that presented England at the
same time with a corn law and a public debt.. But on no subject was the
magnetic influence of the descendant of Sir William Petty more decided,
than in the resolution of his pupil to curb the power of the patrician
party by an infusion from the middle classes into the government of
the country. Hence the origin of Mr Pitt's famous and long-misconceived
plans of parliamentary reform. Was he sincere, is often asked by those
who neither seek to discover the causes nor are capable of calculating
the effects of public transactions. Sincere! Why, he was struggling
for his existence! And when baffled, first by the Venetian party, and
afterwards by the panic of Jacobinism, he was forced to forego his
direct purpose, he still endeavoured partially to effect it by a
circuitous process. He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it
with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires
and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and
clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill. When Mr Pitt in an
age of bank restriction declared that every man with an estate of ten
thousand a-year had a right to be a peer, he sounded the knell of
"the cause for which Hampden had died on the field, and Sydney on the
scaffold."

In ordinary times the pupil of Shelburne would have raised this country
to a state of great material prosperity, and removed or avoided many
of those anomalies w