1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 457 by the opposition, depending partly on the two hundred odd placemen and pensioners who formed the solid nucleus of his majority and partly on the parliamentary skill and assiduity which led his enemies to declare that he dressed himself every morning for the debates of the house of commons with the care of a man about to visit his mistress. Lord Egmont himself used to say that Sir Kobert Walpole did everything and could do everything. If he desired to further the foundation of a new colony or the election of a mayor, to remove a commercial restric- tion on Irish trade or an obnoxious post office official, it was to Walpole or Walpole 's brother that he had ultimately and generally immediately to apply, and the measure of his estimation of the political effectiveness of the rest of the cabinet may be fairly gauged from his comment on the duke of Devonshire, the spectacle of whom kissing hands for the privy seal put him in mind of Caligula's making his horse consul. The development of the obsession by Walpole which affected so many politicians of his generation can be clearly traced in Lord Egmont. Though he hastens to explain that his entry into parliament was due solely to loyalty to his sovereign and to no ' motive of interest, place or pension ', the recorded activities of his brief political career seem to have been very largely concerned with obtaining an Irish earldom for himself and a pension for his niece, applying for a place for his brother and a seat for his son, and pressing the claims of his brother-in-law to some addition to the office of commissioner of the wine licence until Providence, as he observed on the epitaph which he himself composed, removed his relation from ' the Land of the Living and undoubtedly preferred him to a Higher Place '. But these considerations did not affect Lord Egmont 's independence or even prevent him, when conscience dictated, from voting against his party. He regarded them as a suitable testimony to the value of his services as a member of parliament and accepted the favours of the government without recognizing their implications. This view was unlikely to appeal to Sir Robert Walpole, the most business-like of men, and far from disposed to exhaust the resources of government for the sake of Lord Egmont's beaux yeux. It is consequently not surprising to find the diarist, in an eloquent passage, deploring the sordid tendency of the prime minister to make himself ' like the altars of refuge of old time, the refuge of little unworthy wretches ', ' tools ', ' scrubs ', ' pickthanks ', and ' dunghill worms ' in preference to ' men of birth, honour and property '. The occasion of this criticism was an election petition at which Walpole had displayed even less than the usual modicum of regard for the outward decencies of public life, but its peculiar bitterness cannot altogether be disassociated from the pangs of a digestive system permanently impaired, according to Lord Egmont, owing to his ' monstrous usage ' by the government, whose failure to declare immediately in his favour at the last general election had com- pelled him to remain two months in his constituency ' drinking and eating ', he complained, ' in a manner not natural to me, which ended in a sickness I have never yet wore off '. It was indeed over his constituency that he finally broke with Sir Robert Walpole. The entire economic dependence of the population of
