thing but parts like his own were qualified
to preside. And while he less covertly arraigned the wild incapacity
of Lord Chatham, he excited such murmurs of wonder, admiration,
applause, laughter, pity, and scorn, that nothing was so true as the
sentence with which he concluded--when, speaking of government, he
said, that it had become what he himself had often been called--the
weathercock."

Walpole exceeds even his usual measure of admiration, in speaking of
this masterly piece of extravagance. "Such was the wit, abundance, and
impropriety of this speech," says he, "that for some days men could
talk or enquire of nothing else. 'Did you hear Charles Townshend's
champagne speech,' was the universal question. The bacchanalian
enthusiasm of Pindar flowed in torrents less rapid and less eloquent,
and inspired less delight, than Townshend's imagery, which conveyed
meaning in every sentence. It was Garrick acting extempore scenes of
Congreve." He went to supper with Walpole at Conway's afterwards,
where, the flood of his gaiety not being exhausted, he kept the table
in a roar till two in the morning. A part of this entertainment,
however, must have found his auditory in a condition as unfit for
criticism as himself. Claret till "two in the morning," might easily
disqualify a convivial circle from the exercise of too delicate a
perception. And a part of Townshend's facetiousness on that occasion
consisted in mimicking his own wife, and a woman of rank with whom he
fancied himself in love. He at last gave up from mere bodily
lassitude. Walpole happily enough illustrates those talents and their
abuse by an allusion to those eastern tales, in which a benevolent
genius endows a being with supernatural excellence on some points,
while a malignant genius counteracts the gift by some qualification
which perpetually baffles and perverts it. The story, however, of
Charles Townshend's tipsiness is thus contradicted by a graver
authority, Sir George Colebrook, in his Memoirs.

"Mr Townshend loved good living, but had not a strong stomach. He
committed therefore frequent excesses, considering his constitution;
which would not have been intemperance in another. He was supposed,
for instance, to have made a speech in the heat of wine, when that was
really not the case. It was a speech in which he treated with great
levity, but with wonderful art, the characters of the Duke of Grafton
and Lord Shelburne, whom, though his colleagues in off