who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

"Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit."

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause
of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that
is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent
has his strong points, just as Mr. Chamberlain could not endure to be
told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If
we take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as Sir
William Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which all
party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William
Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is
inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and
disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all that is that we all