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At this election, Parr was a constant attendant at Windham's committee-room, and generally took the pen. There is an address still extant, written by Parr in his name, which excited considerable attention at the time, as a specimen of Windham's powers of composition. Windham always disclaimed it, and sometimes with great emphasis; for it certainly did not accord with his theory of style. In truth, he cared very little about what is called fine writing. A few years before his death, he told me that he had a long dispute about the propriety of the word interest, in the sense Parr used it in the first paragraph of that address, and remarked that the latter defended it with a warmth and energy that made him suspect that he himself was not quite convinced of its propriety. "Here, you dog, Windham," said he, "if this word is scratched out, I will destroy the whole." Windham was glad to give up the point, and thought, besides, that it was rather indelicate to argue a matter of mere philology with a man whose peculiar vocation it was, and that it might injure the latter in the estimation of his friends and patrons if he strove for a mere verbal victory over him. The sentence ran thus:-"In compliance with the wishes which a large and respectable interest has long done me the honour to entertain towards me, I stand forth as a candidate for the city of Norwich."* Windham thought the word interest was improperly used to represent a collective or aggregate idea; and, I think, Windham was right. Windham told me, also, that Mr. Coke's addresses were written by Parr for many successive elections; and pointed out Sir George Saville's address to his constituents, in June 1784, as a masterpiece of the sort, observing that it was written by Mr. Burke.

I think I have already observed that Windham was not a professed jester, but I have witnessed frequently a somewhat dry species of humour that told very well. When the Cintra business was much agitated in conversation, somebody asked Windham what there was so remarkable in Sir Hew Dalrymple as to be appointed to such a command? "Nothing," he replied, " that I know of, unless it is that he spells his Christian name H-e-w, instead of H-u-g-h.”—I met him one forenoon at Sir John Hippisley's, in Grosvenor-street. William Elliot was there also. We were conversing very anxiously on the subject of Mr. Burke's illness, and William Elliot, who had just arrived from Beaconsfield, was giving some interesting details respecting his sufferings. Just at that moment, a consequential East Indian

There are antithetical passages in that paper (it is now before me) that are decidedly Parrian. For instance. "Scorning the mean arts of dissimulation, I have planted myself before the judgment of my friends and the prejudices of my enemies in open day. I may offend the unwary and even the well-disposed, but I cannot deceive them; nor will I sacrifice to any selfish views that openness of dealing which can alone secure to me the continuance of your esteem after success, or the approbation of my own heart under disappointment. The same conduct which procures me the honour of your support, shall justify you in bestowing it.

Reports have, I am aware, gone abroad, of which, groundless and extravagant as they are, it may be necessary to take some notice. Yet I will not wrong your candour and good sense by supposing that they are in any degree hurtful to that cause which is justly dear to us all. I feel indeed some sort of degradation in the very attempt to refute those dark and invidious insinuations, which have hitherto assumed no determinate form, which have been employed only on the credulity of those who know me not, and which are industriously circulated by the artifices of those whom, because they do know me, it is easier to convince than to silence."

General or Colonel Somebody, whose name I have forgotten, but rough and overbearing in his manners, entered the room unannounced, and made an abrupt attempt to join in the conversation. I question whether he knew Windham personally. The latter evidently did not like the man, and left us conversing together, he himself walking about the apartment, yet intimating pretty plainly what he thought of the intruder by carelessly humming a line of Caliban's ditty in "The Tempest:"

"Ban, Ban,-Ca-Caliban !"

A laboured invective would not have conveyed his opinion of the man half so expressively. Hippisley and I laughed immoderately; but Windham seemed quite unconscious of his application of the song till the self-important person left the room, when, as if he had got rid of an incubus, he again exclaimed with Caliban

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"Freedom, hey-day !-hey-day, freedom!"

When we assured him that we had instantly applied the burthen of the song, he joined in the laugh, comforting himself at the same time with the assurance, that the man was too secure in his own self-complacency to take it to himself; adding, “I much question whether he ever heard of his prototype." This little incident made the deeper impression on my remembrance, because I had never before heard him so much as hum a tune of any sort; for though his taste for the fine arts was peculiarly pure and discriminating, he had no relish for music-but he acknowledged that a simple ballad, as Miss Alderson sung it, he could endure with a degree of acquiescence almost amounting to pleasure. Yet, upon another occasion, when an interesting young lady was singing the old song of Barbara Allen, and making a considerable pause between the stanzas, I observed Windham more than half asleep. His excuse was that it was too long, and that it reminded him "of one of Mr. Drake's† speeches in the House, who made you believe twenty times that he was going to finish, but still went on." I have heard him observe, that the four greatest men he had ever known had no pleasure in music-Mr. Burke, Charles Fox, Dr. Johnson, and Mr. Pitt.

To recur once more to Windham's notions of writing, his own practice was to take plain words in preference to learned ones; and he used to observe that the strength of the English language was in its ancient Saxon idiom-and this, he said, abounded more in the dialect of Norfolk than in that of any other part of England. He instanced many Saxon words used by Shakspeare, but now fallen into disuse and considered vulgar, which were still common in Norfolk. I recollect only one instance-I think it was, "for the nonce;" i. e. purposely, deliberately. He said that the ancient Greek authors (that is, all who were good for any thing) wrote in some specific dialect-that is, idiomatically. Thucydides, the best Greek historian, frequently render

Afterwards Mrs. Opie.

M. P. for Amersham, a most eccentric speaker at that period.

Sir James Mackintosh has the same apathy to music. He has been frequently dragged to the Italian Opera, and a more woeful figure in the pit of that theatre was never seen. Richard Sharpe proposed, as a thesis for the physiological schools at Edinburgh-what was the precise effect of music on the sensorium of Mackintosh ?

ed himself obscure by too much of the Attic peculiarity, (Artıkwraros.) He observed that, if his own ear was a true one, neither Thucydides nor Plato felt any solicitude about the artificial modulation of their sentences, though it was a current criticism that both writers affected it; remarking that harmonious sentences in prose authors were the ambition of quite a distinct æra of letters. It was true, the Athenians had a nice ear, which took offence at solecisms or barbarisms, but none of their orators indulged in the balance and sing-song of the Roman orators, such as that which Cicero so highly recommended— the ending a sentence with two trochaic feet. The affectation, however, began to creep in upon the decline of Greek letters, and Longinus is an example of it. With respect to the Greek dialects, he said that the charm of Thucydides and Herodotus with respect to mere language, was, in his opinion, chiefly derived from the two idioms in which they wrote; and that when the Greek language was written eclectically, that is, without any peculiarity of idiom or dialect, it was considerably enfeebled. The critics and grammarians of Alexandria wrote a species of Greek that was Greek generally, but without any of the peculiarities of the ancient dialects of the country.

Windham's disgust was uniformly excited by the modern affectation of French words and phrases; and he disliked them even as terms of art, if English ones could be found to supply their places. When he was at the War-office, he would always strike out the word sortie, and substitute "sally." "To rally round" any thing, such as a standard, &c. he called an unnecessary Gallicism. But nothing offended him so much as a careless or irreverent use of the name of the Creator. I showed him a few pages in manuscript of a political pamphlet I was then writing, and he struck out, with some little vehemence of gesture, the words, "God and nature;" observing that God was nature, and that the phrase was a derogation from the unity of that sacred name; and on Mr. Amyot's reading him a letter, in which the words, "My God!" had been used on a light occasion, he snatched up a pen hastily, and before he would hear the rest, blotted out the misplaced exclamation.

I have more than once remarked that Windham was no jester-that is, he did not deal in the species of anecdote so glibly retailed by talkers of a certain class, whose conversation reminds one of a leaf torn from Joe Miller. All his speeches, indeed, are full of humorous allusions, but they were illustrations of his reasoning, and singular characteristics of his peculiar style of speaking; and they were so dovetailed, as it were, into it, that you could not take away the joke without enfeebling the argument. Something like this may be perceived in the metaphysical writings of Tucker, author of the "Light of Nature," which was published under the assumed name of " Search." Of that work Windham was a great admirer, particularly "of its bright flashes of elucidation," as I have heard him say, that were perpetually throwing unexpected light on the most obscure of subjects. But Windham always seemed to slide into playfulness so naturally that you could scarcely perceive his intention, or at least you were unprepared for it; but when it did come, it was so just and natural an illustration of what he wished to establish, that it seemed as if you expected it, and as if the reasoning would have been incomplete with

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out it. The peculiar character of his eloquence, if not commanding, was, as Canning well observed, a most insinuating eloquence, and exclusively his own.

- His familiar letters also, will be found full of this species of quiet and unobtruded humour, and it always tells the more forcibly, because it appears quite unsought for, and to follow necessarily what goes before. If Mr. Amyot does not treat us in his meditated biography with copious extracts from the letters to his friend Hippisley during Windham's travels on the Continent, it will be a woeful hiatus. To one letter, I cannot help referring. It is addressed to his sisterin-law, Mrs. Lukin, and dated in September 1794. The occasion of it was this shortly after he had accepted the office of Secretary-atWar in that year, he undertook a mission to our army, then serving in Flanders under the Duke of York, for the purpose of explaining, I believe, certain arrangements the Government had in contemplation relative to the command and disposition of the forces. Windham had from early youth a strong taste for a soldier's life, having served in the Norfolk Militia, in which he had reached the rank of Major; and a more zealous and active officer never bore the King's commission. He remained, therefore, a short time at head-quarters, and entered with some delight into the military movements that were going on. The letter alluded to, is dated Camp near Bois-le-Duc, and, after telling his correspondent that he is lodged in the house of a Dutch attorney, he says:-"The country about is light and sandy, affording very pleasant rides, which are not the less so, from your occasionally meeting bodies of troops of different dresses and countries. The relief which all this gives after a summer's confinement in London, and to such business as that of the War-office, is more than you can conceive. It has given me a new stock of health, and the beauty of the autumn mornings joined to the general idleness, in which one lives by necessity, and therefore without self-reproach, has given me a feeling of youthful enjoyment, such as I now know but rarely. You cannot conceive," he adds slyly, "how you would like a ride here, with the certainty that if you wandered too far, you might be carried off by a French patrole. It is the enjoyment that George Faulkner was supposed to describe of a scene near Dublin, where the delighted spectator expects every moment to be crushed by the impending rocks.'"

Windham used to tell, with much glee, a laughable mistake during this mission, made by an elderly Dutch clergyman with whom he fell accidentally into conversation. Being in black, and having been pointed out to the Dutchman as an English minister (ministre Anglois), the honest parson instantly concluding that he was a clergyman, began to interrogate him closely as to the doctrines and discipline of the Church of England. For some time, Windham parried the examination with great success, till the other begged the favour of him to let him read one of his sermons, as he understood English well enough to peruse it. Here it was time for some explanation to take place, and when the Dutchman found his mistake, he exclaimed in a tone of disappointment:"Why, they deceived me then; they told me you were an English minister, but I learn now, that you are only an English statesman.”

After the dissolution of 1806, and not long after the meeting of the new Parliament in which Windham sate a short time for Norfolk, I saw him frequently; but I have in general indistinct recollections only of his conversations. I walked home with him from the Committee appointed to try the merits of Concannon's election for Appleby, of which he was chairman. Mackintosh appeared as counsel for Concannon, and made a powerful speech on the evidence, to which Windham listened with great attention. This was just after the foolish prosecution of Peltier in the foolish administration of Addington. Windham felt a strong interest for poor Peltier, and from his heart despised the imbecility of a Government that, in order to ingratiate themselves with Buonaparte, did not hesitate at his sug gestion to make a flagrant attack on the British press, and at a time too when the Moniteur under Napoleon's absolute dictation teemed with the foulest abuse of our name and character. It was said that Mackintosh had solicited the defence of Peltier, and that the brief was with some hesitation put into his hands. Be that as it may; the line of defence which he took, disappointed every body. It was a brilliant speech, but no defence of Peltier, who was sacrificed to studied sentences and refined disquisitions, his counsel seeming anxious merely to display his own powers, "considering," Windham observed, "the cause of his client and the principles involved in it, as so much ballast he might throw overboard, that his own boat might get more smoothly along." He said that "Mackintosh overlooked the patrocinium, the first duty of an advocate, in order to play the part of the rhetorician. But with regard to the speech he had made that morning before the Committee, it was that kind of speech precisely, which Peltier wanted; it was a defence and a defence only, and not a political lecture; at the same time exclaiming from Juvenal, si sic omnia dixisset!""

He talked rarely upon political subjects, but he deplored bitterly the peace of Amiens, and with more bitterness than was usual with him. He considered it from the first as a mere trick to obtain time, and foretold the shortness of its duration. Nor shall I easily forget the energy with which he expressed himself one morning when I called on him in Pall-Mall. I think that about this time he felt somewhat sore, for he had lost his election for Norwich on the express ground of his opposition to that treaty, and had been in consequence forced into an expensive contest for the county. The French papers considered his defeat at Norwich as a political triumph; and Addington had a few nights before made him the object of a narrow-minded attack, observing that, should the rupture unfortunately take place, it would be mainly attributable to the irritating language of Windham. He said, nothing could show more clearly the flimsy materials of such a Cabinet, than their having recourse to so unmanly a crimination, holding out by name an individual Member of Parliament, perhaps to a successful conqueror, as intent on blowing up contention between the countries. Never, he said, with strong emphasis, never was a more spiritless and cowardly course of debate pursued in the House of Commons; and this too whilst they were kicked black and blue by the power whom they strove to conciliate. It was saying to the