we have no record; there is reason to believe that his
administrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove
that, if not supreme, he was eminent, in the art of
parliamentary disputation, while they show on all the
questions discussed a richness and variety of information with
which the speeches of no statesman of that age except Mr Burke
can compare.

Such was the man selected by George the Third as his champion
against the Venetian party after the termination of the
American war. The prosecution of that war they had violently
opposed, though it had originated in their own policy. First
minister in the House of Lords, Shelburne entrusted the lead
in the House of Commons to his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
the youthful Pitt. The administration was brief, but it was
not inglorious. It obtained peace, and for the first time
since the Revolution introduced into modern debate the
legitimate principles on which commerce should be conducted.
It fell before the famous Coalition with which "the Great
Revolution families" commenced their fiercest and their last
contention for the patrician government of royal England.

In the heat of that great strife, the king in the second
hazardous exercise of his prerogative entrusted the perilous
command to Pitt. Why Lord Shelburne on that occasion was set
aside, will perhaps always remain a mysterious passage of our
political history, nor have we space on the present occasion
to attempt to penetrate its motives. Perhaps the monarch,
with a sense of the rising sympathies of his people, was
prescient of the magic power of youth in touching the heart of