This speech, so artful, elevated, so much in character, and so distressful to the Junto that were endeavouring to steal disgrace upon themselves and their country in the face of the world, by setting up one war against another, and dividing the attention of the public, till impotence and mismanagement should render peace welcome,--this speech did Colonel Barré attempt to answer; and did answer it, only in length. He was sensible that he had disgusted mankind by his indecent brutality to so great a statesman: his friends had told him that his invectives, illiberal as they had been, were reckoned the produce of study; and that he must shine in cool argument, lest he should be thought a bully rather than an orator. If they apprehended this, the result of their lessons was a proof that their apprehensions had not been ill-founded. Nothing could be more cold and dull than Barré’s reply to Mr. Pitt. It revenged the latter for the former insult. Calvert,[219] a mad volunteer, who always spoke what he thought, and sometimes thought justly, was so struck with Barré’s phlegmatic impropriety, that he told the House it had put him in mind of a poet, who being at sea in a tempest, and being missed while all hands were on deck, was found half asleep in the cabin; and, being asked why he did not assist to save the ship, replied, he was thinking how to describe the storm?[220] The money was voted, and nothing more of consequence passed that session in Parliament. Both Houses thus complaisant and submissive, there wanted but the office of prime minister to glut the Favourite’s ambition: and no wonder that he, who had dared to strike the name of the first monarch in military glory in Europe from the list of Great Britain’s pensioners, only to gratify the feminine piques of the backstairs; and who had ventured successfully to remove Mr. Pitt from the command of that country which he had saved, restored, exalted;--no wonder such a Phaëton should drive over a ridiculous old dotard, who had ever been in everybody’s way, and whose feeble hands were still struggling for power, when the most he ought to have expected, was, that his flattery and obsequiousness might have moved charity to leave him an appearance of credit. It was absurd for him to stay in place; insolent to attempt to stay there by force, and impudent to pretend to patriotism when driven out with contempt. Against his will he was preserved from having a share in the infamy of the ensuing peace.