epoch, that presented England at the same time with a corn law
and a public debt.. But on no subject was the magnetic
influence of the descendant of Sir William Petty more decided,
than in the resolution of his pupil to curb the power of the
patrician party by an infusion from the middle classes into
the government of the country. Hence the origin of Mr Pitt's
famous and long-misconceived plans of parliamentary reform.
Was he sincere, is often asked by those who neither seek to
discover the causes nor are capable of calculating the effects
of public transactions. Sincere! Why, he was struggling for
his existence! And when baffled, first by the Venetian party,
and afterwards by the panic of Jacobinism, he was forced to
forego his direct purpose, he still endeavoured partially to
effect it by a circuitous process. He created a plebeian
aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He
made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught
them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from
the counting-houses of Cornhill. When Mr Pitt in an age of
bank restriction declared that every man with an estate of ten
thousand a-year had a right to be a peer, he sounded the knell
of "the cause for which Hampden had died on the field, and
Sydney on the scaffold."

In ordinary times the pupil of Shelburne would have raised
this country to a state of great material prosperity, and
removed or avoided many of those anomalies which now perplex
us; but he was not destined for ordinary times; and though his
capacity was vast and his spirit lofty, he had not that
passionate and creative genius required by an age of
revolution. The French outbreak was his evil daemon: he had