Letters of Horace Walpole — Volume II by Horace Walpole
page 70 of 309 (22%)
page 70 of 309 (22%)
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and fire are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that
first eloquence of the world is dumb! that duplicity is fixed, that cowardice terminated heroically. He joked on death as naturally as he used to do on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers, who wind up their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered. With a robust person he had always a menacing constitution. He had had a fever the whole summer, recovered as it was thought, relapsed, was neglected, and it turned to an incurable putrid fever. [Footnote 1: Mr. Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he might have been added by Lord Macaulay to his list of men whom their eloquence had caused to be placed in offices for which they were totally unfit; for he had not only no special knowledge of finance, but he was one of the most careless and incautious of mankind, even in his oratory. In that, however, after the retirement of Lord Chatham, he seems to have had no rival in either house but Mr. Burke. It was to his heedless resumption of Grenville's plan of taxing our colonies in North America that our loss of them was owing. In his "Memoirs of the Reign of George III." Walpole gives the following description of him: "Charles Townshend, who had studied nothing with accuracy or attention, had parts that embraced all knowledge with such quickness that he seemed to create knowledge, instead of searching for it; and, ready as Burke's wit was, it appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant that in him it seemed a loss of time to think. He had but to speak, and all he said was new, natural, and yet uncommon. If Burke replied extempore, his very answers that sprang from what had been said by others were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation; like beautiful translations, they seemed to want the soul of the original author. Townshend's speeches, like the 'Satires' of Pope, had a thousand times more sense and meaning |
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