Elector of Hanover. He meant, again, that as a quick and cynical observer, he found the names of Brutus and Algernon Sidney very convenient covers for attacking the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Bute. But beyond all this, he meant something more, which gives the real spice to his writings. It was something not quite easy to put into formulas; but characteristic of the vague discomfort of the holders of sinecures in those halcyon days arising from the perception that the ground was hollow under their feet. To understand him we must remember that the period of his activity marks precisely the lowest ebb of political principle. Old issues had been settled, and the new ones were only just coming to the surface. He saw the end of the Jacobites and the rise of the demagogues. His early letters describe the advance of the Pretender to Derby; they tell us how the British public was on the whole inclined to look on and cry, 'Fight dog, fight bear;' how the Jacobites who had anything to lose left their battle to be fought by half-starved cattle-stealers, and contented themselves with drinking to the success of the cause; and how the Whig magnates, with admirable presence of mind, raised regiments, appointed officers, and got the expenses paid by the Crown. His later letters describe the amazing series of blunders by which we lost America in spite of the clearest warnings from almost every man of sense in the kingdom. The interval between these disgraceful epochs is filled--if we except the brief episode of Chatham--by a series of struggles between different connections--one cannot call them parties--which separate and combine, and fight and make peace, till the plot of the drama becomes too complicated for human ingenuity to unravel. Lads just crammed for a civil service examination might possibly bear in mind all the shifting combinations which resulted from the endless intrigues of Pelhams and Grenvilles and Bedfords and Rockinghams; yet even those omniscient persons could hardly give a plausible account of the principles which each party conceived itself to be maintaining. What, for example, were the politics of a Rigby, or a Bubb Dodington? The diary in which the last of these eminent persons reveals his inmost soul is perhaps the most curious specimen of unconscious self-analysis extant. His utter baseness and venality, his disgust at the 'low venal wretches' to whom he had to give bribes; his creeping and crawling before those from whom he sought to extract bribes; his utter incapacity to explain a great man except on the hypothesis of insanity; or to understand that there is such a thing as political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspirations which he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a peerage, and differed from innumerable competitors only by superior frankness. He is the fitting representative of an era from which