I
There is no period at which an eminent person is so little considered, so much forgotten and disregarded, as during the few years succeeding his decease. His name, no longer noised above that of others by the busy zeal of his partisans, or the still more clamorous energies of his opponents, drops away suddenly, as it were, from the mouths of men. To his contemporaries he has ceased to be of importance—the most paltry pretender to his place is of more;—while posterity does not exist for him, until the dead are distinctly separated from the living; until the times in which he lived, and the scenes in which he acted, have become as a distant prospect from which the eye can at once single out from amidst the mass of ordinary objects, those which were the memorials of their epoch, and are to become the beacons of after-generations.
The French, who are as fond of putting philosophy into action as we are coy of connecting theory with practice, marked out, at one moment, a kind of intermediate space between the past and the present, the tomb and the pantheon; but the interval of ten years, which they assigned for separating the one from the other, is hardly sufficient for the purpose.
We are, however, now arrived at the period that permits our considering the subject of this memoir as a character in history which it is well to describe without further procrastination. Every day, indeed, leaves us fewer of those who remember the clearly-chiselled countenance which the slouched hat only slightly concealed,—the lip satirically curled,—the penetrating eye, peering along the Opposition benches,—of the old parliamentary leader in the House of Commons. It is but here and there that we find a survivor of the old day, to speak to us of the singularly mellifluous and sonorous voice, the classical language—now pointed into epigram, now elevated into poesy, now burning with passion, now rich with humour—which curbed into still attention a willing and long-broken audience.
The great changes of the last half-century have, moreover, created such a new order of ideas and of society, that the years preceding 1830 appear as belonging to an antecedent century; and the fear now is—not that we are too near, but that we are gliding away too far from the events of that biography which I propose to sketch. And yet he who undertakes the task of biographical delineation, should not be wholly without the scope of the influences which coloured the career he desires to sketch. The artist can hardly give the likeness of the face he never saw, nor the writer speak vividly of events which are merely known to him by tradition.