aling with a class who honoured
tradition, he startled the members of that class by shattering all the
traditions which they had been taught to revere, and by endeavouring,
with the help of specious arguments which many of them only half
understood, to substitute others of an entirely novel character in their
place. Following much on the lines of those religious reformers who have
at times sought to revive the early discipline and practices of the
Church, he endeavoured to destroy the Toryism of his day by invoking
the shade of a semi-mythical Toryism of the past. Bolingbroke was the
model to be followed, Shelburne was the tutelary genius of Pitt, and
Charles I. was made to pose as "a virtuous and able monarch," who was
"the holocaust of direct taxation." Never, he declared, "did man lay
down his heroic life for so great a cause, the cause of the Church and
the cause of the Poor."[69] Aspiring to rise to power through the agency
of Conservatives, whose narrow-minded conventional conservatism he
despised, and to whose defects he was keenly alive, he wisely judged
that it was a necessity, if his programme were to be executed, that the
association of political power with landed possessions should be the
sheet-anchor of his system; and, strong in the support afforded by that
material bond of sympathy, he did not hesitate to ridicule the foibles
of those "patricians"--to use his own somewhat stilted expression--who,
whilst they sneered at his apparent eccentricities, despised their own
chosen mouthpiece, and occasionally writhed under his yoke, were none
the less so fascinated by the powerful will and keen intellect which
held them captive that they blindly followed his lead, even to the
verge of being duped.

From earliest youth to green old age his confidence in his own powers
was never shaken. He persistently acted up to the sentiment--slightly
paraphrased from Terence--which he had characteristically adopted as his
family motto, _Forti nihil difficile_; neither could there be any
question as to the genuine nature either of his strength or his courage,
albeit hostile critics might seek to confound the latter quality with
sheer impudence.[70] He abhorred the commonplace, and it is notably this
abhorrence which gives a vivid, albeit somewhat meretricious sparkle to
his personality. For although truth is generally dull, and although
probably most of the reforms and changes which have really benefited
mankind partake largely