manner as at once to reward unfortunate merit, and to relieve the
country from a burden. For this disinterestedness he was repaid
by the enthusiastic applause of his followers, by the enforced
respect of his opponents, and by the confidence which, through
all the vicissitudes of a chequered and at length disastrous
career, the great body of Englishmen reposed in his public spirit
and in his personal integrity. In the intellectual qualities of a
statesman Montague was probably not inferior to Pitt. But the
magnanimity, the dauntless courage, the contempt for riches and
for baubles, to which, more than to any intellectual quality,
Pitt owed his long ascendency, were wanting to Montague.

The faults of Montague were great; but his punishment was cruel.
It was indeed a punishment which must have been more bitter than
the bitterness of death to a man whose vanity was exquisitely
sensitive, and who had been spoiled by early and rapid success
and by constant prosperity. Before the new Parliament had been a
month sitting it was plain that his empire was at an end. He
spoke with the old eloquence; but his speeches no longer called
forth the old response. Whatever he proposed was maliciously
scrutinised. The success of his budget of the preceding year had
surpassed all expectation. The two millions which he had
undertaken to find had been raised with a rapidity which seemed
magical. Yet for bringing the riches of the City, in an
unprecedented flood, to overflow the Exchequer he was reviled as
if his scheme had failed more ludicrously than the Tory Land
Bank. Emboldened by his unpopularity, the Old East India Company
presented a petition praying that the General Society Act, which
his influence and eloquence had induced the late Parliament to
pass, might be extensively modified. Howe took the matter up. It