Horace Walpole, an unsparing critic of his contemporaries, said of Chatham that he was "master of all the arts of dissimulation, slave of his passions, and that he simulated even extravagance to insure success." Under the smoke of gossip and tittle-tattle he hatches always a fire of truth. The second part of the portrait can apply as well to the granddaughter as to the grandfather. Lady Hester was enslaved by a redoubtable passion: ambition, and ambition without object. Well women incarnate almost always their aspirations, their desires, their admirations and their hatreds in living beings and real things: concrete which, after being the symbol of the abstract, is confounded with it to make only one. Lady Hester did not escape the common rule; solitude became little by little the means of getting herself still talked about; then became peopled by escorts, caravans and Arab chiefs; her ambition was not quicker than hatred of her enemies and disgust of England, and she determined upon this journey across the unknown East, journey which would serve at once her need of solitude and of celebrity in astonishing the world. Only, she possessed--as much on the side of Pitt as of Stanhope--a slight taste for eccentricity. She had no need to simulate an extravagance, which was natural to her; she was inclined to do nothing like other people. Unconsciously also, a mysterious reason urged Lady Hester to choose Syria, and particularly Jerusalem, for the theatre of her exploits. It was nothing less than a prediction of Brothers. A figure strange, this Brothers, who created a sensation towards the end of the eighteenth century. A former lieutenant in the Navy, his imagination became disordered in meditating upon the most obscure passages of the Apocalypse; the endless leisure which voyages permit are truly pernicious for feeble minds.... He soon abandoned his career and modestly assumed the title of "Nephew of God and Prince of the Hebrews," consecrating himself entirely to the divine mission which he believed he had received. He lived in an agreeable hallucination. "After which, being in a vision," said he, "I saw the angel of God by my side, and Satan, who was walking carelessly in the streets of London." Even when quite mad the English preserve a sense of humour! So long as Brothers contented himself with predicting the approaching destruction of London and the restoration of the Kingdom of Judea, the Government did not trouble, but the situation changed when the vague prophecies were transformed into imperious advice to the King: "The Eternal God commands me to make known to you, George III, King of England, that immediately after the revelation of my person to the Hebrews of London as their prince, and to all the nations as their governor, you must lay down your crown, in order that all your power and your authority may cease."