issues of despotism; he possesses the convictions and the experience of various races and many ages, and reinforces his own mind by any amount that he may need of the immortal store laid up for us in Greek and Roman literature. Hence the calmness and dignity of a long series of great ministers in England, compared with the stolidity of the agents of Czars and Kaisers, or the screaming passion of revolutionary office-holders, or the big talk and solemn alarms, and petulant sensitiveness common in the Capitol at Washington.
Thus in early life have our great statesmen provided themselves for the future strife of political existence with inexhaustible supplies of calm and natural and elevating pleasure, and with an expansion of mind able to render them masters of most situations in which they can be placed; or, at worst, masters of themselves in any position. When we have honoured the greatness of Lord Grey, carrying his Reform Bill through a political tempest almost unequalled in fierceness and duration, we follow him into his home and study. He must have been more or less chafed in the House, however calm was his bearing; and now, alone, and deep in the night, he charms away his troubles before he sleeps with his Horace, or some other poet beloved in his youth. Pitt used to forget all cares of empire when he indulged for an hour in a play of Aristophanes, or when he and Canning read Lucan or recited Horace under the trees at Wimbledon. It was so with Fox under cares less creditable than those of state. When two friends followed him home, believing him in a suicidal mood from losses at play, and entered his study two minutes after him, they found him lying on his back on the hearth-rug,—not cutting his throat, but deep in an Ode of Horace. He had thrown off his coat, and taken up his book, and proved himself a robuster man than his friends gave him credit for. It is true Pitt died broken-hearted; but public affairs were never too much for him till he gave up the only chance of health by giving up temperance and prudence in his personal affairs. His debts worried him; and port wine killed him. The habits of his class and time were against him. Pitt could bear everything before he was harassed by debt and weakened by the maladies which grow out of excess in wine. The account of Fox must be somewhat different. The wonder is, not that he died dropsical at fifty-seven, but that he lived so long in reckless habits of wine, play, and debt. In these men scholarship could have no more than an ameliorating effect. To see its true operation, we must study the fine examples which modern history presents of aged statesmen who have triumphed over care and irritation, and kept their freshness of mind and serenity of mood to the last.
Another consequence of our great statesmen being generally drawn from the aristocracy is, that they become early trained and inured to hard official life. The first step taken by any Pitt or Grenville, when a rising young man choosing a political career, was to go into parliament, and the next was to enter a public office in some working capacity. There were plenty of idlers, no doubt; but, as I said before, I am now speaking only of the efficient men.
Their minds thus became familiarised with large affairs and with the diligent transaction of business, while their habits were early formed on the observances of political life; on the work and hours of parliament, and the incessant application required by the administration of government. While the homely middle-class family was uneasy at being out of bed after ten or eleven o’clock, our public men formed the habit of taking their sleep when they could get it. Some appeared at places of public amusement after the House was up: some supped at their club: one, as we know, used to sit down by his own fire, with two or three new quarterlies and half a dozen pamphlets, and then and there empty all these into his own brain, and the contents of two full decanters into his own stomach;—sometimes, we are told, not going to bed at all, but shaving and dressing for breakfast, and appearing in the law-courts, ready for business. It would perhaps be difficult to find three men in the whole nation who would not soon be killed, or driven mad, by such defiance of the laws of health. Nothing, of course, can justify it: but the lives of public men show us that the conditions of health range more widely than we are accustomed to suppose. One member of a recent cabinet cannot do his work unless he has eight hours of undisturbed sleep in the twenty-four; while another can sleep, like Lord Clyde, anywhere and at any moment, and may never need more than five hours altogether. It may be doubted whether men’s appetite for sleep does not differ as widely as their appetite for food. There can be no doubt, however, that the late hours of the modern House of Commons are a sin and a folly. Among the six hundred members there must be many who cannot suit their brains and nerves to such arbitrary arrangements as those which involve sittings after midnight. However convenient the practice may be for the dispatch of business, and however difficult it may now be to change it, the objection remains incontrovertible, that midnight debates are violations of the laws of the human constitution.
What are the special dangers to health of the class of statesmen, over and above those belonging to parliamentary life, with its irregular hours?
Judging by observation the perils are chiefly those which belong to moral anxiety.
It may be a question whether the old method of ruling the empire, or the new system of increased responsibility to parliament, involved the greater anxiety. In times when ministers made their own parliaments, and told them little more than was convenient to themselves, they had more responsibility, and less solicitude about the sayings and doings of parliament. What the wear and tear of the older time was, we partly learn from what Lord Liverpool said, towards the close of his career. He declared, in his own house on Wimbledon Common, that for twenty-five years of official life he had never for one day looked at that—pointing to a heap of official letters—without a qualm of apprehension, and a reluctance to break the seals—so keen was his sense of the probability of some misfortune having happened in some part or another of our empire, or our relations with other empires. Lord Liverpool had not