A pension of 4000_l._ a year was offered to, and rejected by, the Duke of Newcastle, who with all his faults and weaknesses was never stained with avarice and rapaciousness. The deepest tinge of that dirty vice blotted the late Chancellor Northington, who sold the Seals for the President’s place, augmented by 5000_l._ a year, with the contingency of 2000_l._ a year if he should quit the place of President, and for the reversion of the Hanaper for two lives.[279] Grants so exorbitant, and so void of any colour of merit in the fool on whom they were showered, that if they cast a shade on the dawn of Mr. Pitt’s new Administration, or recalled the memory of his former waste, they reflected lustre on the fallen Ministry, who had been beyond example sparing of such shameless profusion. It was not lessened by another contingent pension to Lord Camden in case he should lose the Seals: yet as he quitted the place of Chief Justice of the Common Pleas for life, the boon was far more justifiable; especially in an age when men were paid alike for merit and demerit, for accepting or losing employments. The services of the discarded Ministers were set forth in a small, well written tract, called “A Short History of a late Short Administration.” It did justice to their integrity, and it could not do too much.[280] The nation felt and allowed their merit. Some counties and corporations complimented them in addresses. The Parliament followed the Court, and supported whoever was the actual Minister; uniform in its way of voting, though its votes of every year were inconsistent with those of the preceding. The glory with which the late Ministers retired was half of it plucked from the laurels of the new Earl of Chatham. That fatal title blasted all the affection which his country had borne to him, and which he had deserved so well. Had he been as sordid as Lord Northington, he could not have sunk lower in the public esteem. The people, though he had done no act to occasion reproach, thought he had sold them for a title, and, as words fascinate or enrage them, their idol Mr. Pitt was forgotten in their detestation of the Lord Chatham. He was paralleled with Lord Bath, and became the object at which were shot all the arrows of calumny. He had borne his head above the obloquy that attended his former pension--not a mouth was opened now in defence of his title; as innocent as his pension, since neither betrayed him into any deed of servility to prerogative and despotism. Both were injudicious; the last irrecoverably so. The blow was more ruinous to his country than to himself. While he held the love of the people, nothing was so formidable in Europe as his name. The talons of the lion were drawn, when he was no longer awful in his own forests.