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voice had been heard only a few weeks before,* his premature death made a chasm which we all felt, but knew not how to supply; and when we observed old Bankes occupying the place where Windham generally sat, the chasm seemed to yawn wider than before. We looked thither with feelings not unlike the pious regrets of Cicero, when he missed Crassus from his usual seat in the forum. "Illa tanquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio, quam quasi expectantes, post ejus interitum, veniebamus in curiam, ut vestigium illud ipsum, in quo ille postremum institisset, contueremur."

Windham died in his sixtieth year, whilst he was doing much and projecting more, and long before his eloquence was enfeebled, or his imagination bedimmed, or his activity of frame impaired; and his death forms an interesting feature of his character, for it originated in an act of characteristic heroism, and was another instance of the total postponement of self, and every thing connected with self, that marked the whole tenour of his life. It was on the 8th of July 1809, about twelve at night that he was walking home from a party, and saw a house in Conduit Street on fire contiguous to that of his friend Frederick North, (then on a voyage in the Mediterranean,) and threatening its immediate destruction; a destruction which would also have involved the extensive library and the valuable manuscripts which that gentleman had expended all the taste and industry of his life in collecting. The preservation of this library instinctively struck him as an object for which no sacrifice ought to be declined, and a small volunteer corps, (a body of men to whom in his military plans and speeches he always avowed his decided objection,) being on the spot, he selected a few of the most robust and determined amongst them, to aid him in the enterprize, and succeeded at last in saving two-thirds of the books; nor did he pause from his labours till the flames rendered the continuation of them highly dangerous. During these efforts, by a fall owing to the slipperiness of the ground, he hurt his hip, and it was this injury, which produced the tumour, that subsequently rendered the fatal operation expedient. The next day he complained only of a cold, and smiled as he read in the papers some whimsical remarks on "the united labours of Mr. Windham and the volunteers." Two of the little party he had selected for the companions of his generous adventure, received considerable injury, and one of them died not long afterwards. To these persons he showed the kindest attentions, and rendered the most substantial aid to the unfortunate family of the poor fellow whose hurt had terminated fatally.

Nor was it till the spring of 1810 that he found it necessary to pay serious attention to the blow on his hip, from which he had hitherto felt very little pain, but which had gradually produced a considerable tumour. Cline urged an immediate operation, and four eminent surgeons confirmed his advice. Wilson and Philipps dissuaded it. Blane and Bailey concurred with the majority of the surgeons, and Windham determined to undergo it. The adage says, in the mul

He spoke for the last time on the 11th of May 1810, on the question of what course the House ought to take with respect to the civil actions brought by Sir Francis Burdett against the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-arms. Mr. Windham, on this occasion, supported the privileges of Parliament.

titude of counsellors there is safety. But adages represent only the floating opinions of mankind, and those opinions are not necessarily right. Where many are consulted, some will defer to the authority of him who first suggested the measure; and in questions of this kind it is pretty clear that, the knife abstractedly speaking being the only mode of eradicating the disease, a successful operator like Cline, calculating on the general run of hospital cases, might have excluded from the calculation the idiosyncracy, the constitutional tendencies, and the greater or less debility of the patient. Of these his family surgeon or apothecary would have been a better judge than the highest authority consulted pro hac vice, and unacquainted with Mr. Windham's specific constitution. No man looked death in the face with more composure. He had a strong presentiment of the sinister result of the operation, as may be inferred from a letter dated the 16th May, after he had determined on undergoing it. Protesting against certain opinions that were then abroad he observes to his friend "These are my first sentiments-I may add also my last and dying sentiments, for although the operation I am about to submit to is not a dangerous one, there cannot be so great pain as must, I fear, be gone through without some danger. It is, as far as I should collect, something of the same sort as that which poor John Gurney underwent and fell a victim to. I had thought at one time to defer it, till I might at last have entered my feeble protest against such madness, and have tried to satisfy men's minds that it was madness. But I find so long a delay could not be incurred, so I must only hope the best for the country and myself."

He bore the operation without a murmur. On the ninth day alarming symptoms appeared, and every hour the hope of his recovery became more faint. From the first he considered the case hopeless, and to Lynn, the attending surgeon, who endeavoured to argue him into a less gloomy opinion, he said, "Mr. Lynn, you fight the battle well, but it will not do." On the 26th of May he had a long interview with his relative, Mr. Lukin of the War-office, and kept up the conversation with his wonted felicity and spirit. He pointed out to him the drawer in which his mathematical manuscripts were deposited, and expressed a wish to have them examined, in order to ascertain whether certain portions of them might not be worth preserving. These papers were, I believe, shortly after his death, shown to Mr. Vince, the Cambridge Professor, who discouraged their publication; and when it is considered how mathematical science has advanced even since the death of Windham, and that a Cambridge Senior Optime knows more than Newton himself knew after half a century of meditation and study, perhaps Vince's suggestion will be allowed to be a sound one. It is singular that on the Friday before his death, he inquired the day of the month, and being told that it was the first of June, "Then I shall die," he replied, "on the King's birth-day." He died on that day a sincere Christian, and with the calm resignation of the Christian character.

It must not, however, be inferred, that the absence of all biographical notice of so extraordinary a man is to be attributed to a neglect of his memory; it was in a great measure accidental. For some years, it was generally understood that his friend George Ellis, to

whom his executors had confided his papers for that purpose, was preparing Windham's life for the press; and such a portion of his correspondence as could be easily collected was for that end freely supplied to him. The diary, however, in which, for many years, Windham had been in the habit of recording the incidents of the day, and which, in the hands of a discreet biographer, must have furnished ample illustrations of his familiar thinking, and interesting traces of his inexhaustible reading, as well as of the criticisms, both of men and books, in the very act of passing through a mind, cultivated perhaps beyond any extant example, was withheld from George Ellis, who delayed his undertaking in the hope of overcoming Mrs. Windham's scruples to part with it; scruples which were, no doubt, sincerely felt for it must be considered that the diary consisted, in a great degree, of written soliloquies, and of those communings with himself which no man wishes to see the light; and it is obvious that matters of that kind, indelicately or injudiciously revealed, must have in some sort affected a reputation so justly dear to her. Names, too, of families and individuals-domestic occurrences of every kind, and not a few of the gallantries in which unmarried persons of extensive worldly intercourse, however circumspectly their lives may be passed, may be supposed occasionally to have indulged-such topics could not, without justly offending the decorum of modern readers, (many of such passages he had himself veiled in the nominal mystery of Greek characters), have been submitted to public notice. Mrs. Windham's delicacy, therefore, with respect to so important a document was not overstrained, saving in the particular instance of George Ellis, in whose discreet and honourable use of it greater confidence ought to have been placed, yet it may be readily conceived what a havoc of private names and private things would have ensued if a mere hackney biographer had been entrusted with it. Admiral Windham, however, has at length confided it, with Ellis's preparations for the work to Mr. Amyot, formerly Windham's private secretary, and well qualified, it may be presumed, for the task. A life, then, of Windham may now be looked for; only we beg leave to bargain with Mr. Amyot for a real life of Windham, and one in which credit will be given to his readers for knowing something about the American and French Revolutions, instead of surfeiting them with a political history of those events after the usual manner of biographers, merely because Mr. Windham set out in his public career a determined opponent of the measures which produced the former, and shared largely in the councils which directed the war against the revolutionists of France. And why may not the Life of Windham be written by his letters, which are very numerous, and by no means inaccessible, just as Cicero's was compiled by Middleton, and that of Erasmus by Jortin? Yet it must be done by one who could accurately read the character of Windham whilst he lived; a qualification which the mere official intercourses of a private secretary do not necessarily imply; but, above all, he ought to hold in his hand the master-key that lets him into the soul of the individual, and solves all that is eccentric or problematical in the character he illustrates.

Yet too much is not to be expected from the diary, nor must Mr. Amyot be offended if it be hinted to him that the tangible parts of 2 P

Dec-VOL. XXXII. NO. CXXXII.

the document, of which he is so vigilant a guardian, are but slender for biographical uses. The whole of it, though consisting of entries made for many years without interruption, can scarcely furnish five specimens of private feeling and reflection equivalent to that inserted by Mr. Croker in his new edition of Boswell on the death-bed parting with Dr. Johnson, which appears to have made a solemn and deep impression on Windham. There are, indeed, perpetual memoranda of his dinings-out, of the persons he met, and, now and then, hints of the conversation, and queries subjoined to them, as if questions had been started upon which he was desirous of obtaining further information. Of his reading, certain books are now and then specified; and if nothing else appears from his diary, the almost infinite variety of his studies is sufficiently manifest. He had made, it seems, great progress in toiling through the whole series of Byzantine historians; a task to which his taste could never have invited him, but it was probably undertaken with the double object of acquiring accurate historical information, and of becoming familiar with the Greek of the Lower Empire. The diary is not communicative in regard to politics; for during the three or four years of his official life, he made no entry, and here the diary is, in every respect, a blank. In a word, it seems to have been kept for the sole purpose of refreshing his own recollection of the by-gone passages of his life and for his own exclusive use, and therefore supplies little or no help to the portraiture of his mind and dispositions. Nor is there any doubt that if he had been spared more time to arrange his papers before his death, he would have left positive injunctions to destroy it. It is from his letters and conversations, therefore, that a Life of Windham is to be compiled. On any other principle, the work will not succeed better in the hands of Mr. Amyot, with all his oppor tunities, than if it had been confided to the most mechanical labourer of letters that ever offered his services to a bookseller, to make a book on a subject of which he was wholly ignorant. But conversations are seldom preserved, and few yet survive whose memory retains the smallest fragments of the wit and playfulness and sound sense of Windham. He had no Boswell ready to pick up the crumbs that fell from the intellectual table, as he enlivened it by his mirth or charmed it by the ease and gracefulness of his more serious discourse, or delighted it by the sparkling illustrations with which that discourse was inlaid, as with gems; and had Windham been conscious that he was haunted by a Boswell, he would never have opened his lips. Conversations also lose more than half their briskness by transfusion; and when Windham conversed, it was always without effort, or the slightest anxiety to display his own powers. I have heard it remarked by a lady, who was then highly distinguished both in the world of fashion and of letters, that he was always impatient of any species of deference to his opinion when the conversation called it forth, and observed that "if he could not converse on equal terms, he preferred being silent." No doubt the peculiar ease of his colloquial manner, in a great measure, resulted from his constant wish to divest the party with whom he was conversing of all sense of inferiority; and on every occasion, I have remarked, that he carefully avoided being considered as the first performer. The diners-out of that time,

who had the good-fortune of meeting Windham, may be safely appealed to for testimonies of the amiable meekness with which he bore his great faculties of conversation. There was nothing that resembled the elaborate disquisition of Mackintosh, who lectures rather than converses;-no tedious quotations-nothing but that light, tripping, unstudied discourse, running Camilla-like, over the field, which is of the very essence of conversation, and sets off to the greatest advantage the discursive and varied knowledge which it requires. The same remark is applicable to Canning, who, at least in the later years of his life, exhibited nothing like effort, or an anxiety to shine. I remember him whilst he was keeping his terms in Lincoln's-inn Hall, when he was recent from the University. But no man even then presumed less than Canning on the distinctions which his literary attainments had procured for him at Oxford; and although he soon became a frequenter of the best tables, and a member of the best societies, he had good taste enough to frame those modest estimates of his own powers that are so requisite to nurture them to perfection. He was not one of those persons, as Richard Sharpe said of Tweddell, who think "their University medals will pass for current coin in the metropolis."

Windham's conversation was richly impregnated with learning, where learning was necessarily displayed for the enforcement or elucidation of an opinion; and as to any thing polemic or controversial in his tone or manner, there was nothing of the sort. He used to discountenance quotations, as the heaviest and dullest of all pedantries. He observed to me more than once, that in ten cases out of twelve, it was no proof of learning, and that the most superficial pretenders not unfrequently got the credit of deep reading by cramming their memory with scraps of erudition, and contriving to give a dexterous turn to the conversation, in order to have a decent excuse for lugging them in. He said he liked Rousseau's answer to a lady, who complained to him of her son's total want of memory-" So much the better, Madame; then he will not be able to quote." When Windham was first elected member for Norwich (1784), he supped with Dr. Parr, then master of the Free-school in that city and a warm partisan of Windham's. Parr was well acquainted with Windham's extensive knowledge of Greek and Roman authors, and being not a little flushed with the successful issue of the contest, was in high talk, and quoted with great profuseness, to the astonishment of his guests, both learned and unlearned. As they walked home together, Mr. Pile,* a clergyman, who had supped there, complained of Parr's unmerciful citations from books, observing that no one was disposed to question his vast reading, and that he might as well have given his hearers credit for believing the fact, without tasking his memory with so many quotations to prove it. "Ay," returned Windham, "quotations do not prove it, for they do not necessarily bespeak real learning. Learning is a result, not a process. It reminds me of a passage in Epictetus, who observes somewhere, The way for a man to show the goodness of his daily diet is by the robustness of his frame and the healthiness of his face, not by emptying the contents of his stomach before you."

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Author of an admirable collection of Sermons.

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