Foote and Smollett have left vivid caricatures of his ludicrous personality. The story of his conference with Pitt when Pitt was in bed with the gout, and of his getting into a vacant bed and discoursing from thence to his colleague, is one of the choicest pictures of his absurdity that survive. The two leading Ministers were found storming at each other from adjacent couches, disputing as to whether Hawke's fleet should put to sea or not.[128] Pitt fortunately prevailed. Newcastle's grotesqueness was part of his temperament, for all through his life his jealousy and suspicion kept him in a perpetual froth of nervous excitement. His jealousy was of power, his suspicion of those who aimed at it. And by power he meant patronage. Throughout his long life his god or goddess was patronage. Indeed his voluminous correspondence rather resembles the letter-bag of an agency for necessitous persons of social position than the papers of a Prime Minister or Secretary of State. To hold a crowded levee of placehunters, ecclesiastical and temporal, to thread his way about it coaxing, fawning, and slobbering, embracing and even kissing, promising and paying all with the base coin of cozenage, this was Newcastle's paradise. But it answered. It made him necessary to his party, and therefore necessary to those who would govern the country; for government was restricted to his party. So all statesmen in turn scorned and employed him. 'His name,' said Walpole, 'is perfidy.' But perfidy paid, and Walpole kept him to the end, fully aware that he was always ready for betrayal if expediency dictated it, and that in the closing months he was in fact busy at the work. At last, indeed, Walpole himself, under the name of the King, commissioned him to intrigue officially. Hardwicke, perhaps the greatest of our Chancellors, who furnished the brains for Newcastle, and condescended to act as his mentor and instrument, was joined with him to make terms with the enemy, and offer the reversion of the Treasury on condition of immunity for Walpole.