I dined at Holland House yesterday, and sat next to old Sir Robert Adair, eighty-five years old, but with mind very fresh. He lived in great intimacy with all the 'great of old, who still rule our spirits from their own,' and I believe possesses a great store of anecdotes of bygone days. He gave me an account of young Burke's preventing the reconciliation between his father and Fox, which, however, is too well known to require repetition; but he told me how the Duke of Portland[64] came to be put at the head of the Whig party on the death of Lord Rockingham in 1782, which I had not heard before. There was a meeting of the party to choose their chief; the Duke of Richmond put forth his pretensions, but he was so great a Radical (having views of Parliamentary Reform not only far beyond those of any man of that day, but beyond the Reform we have actually got), that they were afraid of him; and Charles Fox got up and said that he thought he, as leader of the House of Commons, had claims at least as good as the Duke of Richmond's, but that they ought both of them to waive their own claims, and in his judgement the man they ought to place at their head was the Duke of Portland. This compromise was agreed to, but the Duke of Richmond was so disgusted that he joined Lord Shelburne. My grandfather was a very honourable, high-minded, but ordinary man; his abilities were very second-rate, and he had no power of speaking; and his election to the post of leader of the great Whig party only shows how aristocratic that party was, and what weight and influence the aristocracy possessed in those days; they would never have endured to be led by a Peel or a Canning. Adair told me that old Lord George Cavendish expressed the greatest indignation at their party being led by Burke in the House of Commons, and it was this prevalent feeling, together with the extraordinary modesty of Burke, who had no vanity for himself, though a great deal for his son, which accounts for the fact, so extraordinary according to our ideas and practice, that though Burke led the Whig party in the House of Commons for four or five years, when that party came into power he was not offered a place in the Cabinet, but put in a subordinate office, which he condescended to accept, seeing men so immeasurably inferior to himself occupying the highest posts. [Footnote 64: [William Henry Cavendish, third Duke of Portland, born April 14, 1738; died October 30, 1809, haying been twice Prime Minister. He was the father of Mr. Greville's mother, Lady Charlotte Greville.]]