management he was speedily tired, and before he was thirty he
was anxious to relinquish them. He was an opponent of mono-
polies, yet it was from his share in the theatrical monopoly that
he derived his income for thirty years, and all his numerous
financial embarrassments proceeded from his anxiety to pre-
serve his property against opposition. He hated to be reminded
of his theatrical connection, and in the House of Commons.
on no point was he more sensitive.

Yet in the strangest ways he was always thrown back
on the theatre. When he was Treasurer of the Navy, holding
one of the richest of Ministerial appointments, with a residence
in Somerset House, for his gentlemen out of livery he pressed
into service the inferior officers of the theatre. When he won
his seat at Westminster as the successor to Charles Fox he
staged his triumph, as Cobbett said, with a procession through
the streets like that in Blue Beard. At the end of every passage
in his life, there was somebody to cry "Harlequin."

The notion that he wasted his life by entering the House of
Commons appears to me as purely a literary prejudice. Stated
in the concrete, he might perhaps have completed his comedy of
Affectation as a second School for Scandal and his opera of The
Foresters as a second Duenna, at the cost of his Begum Speeches
at the trial of Warren Hastings, or of his long advocacy of
Catholic Emancipation. In both these political causes he fought
on the losing side. While history has confirmed the judgment
of the House of Lords in its honourable acquittal of Warren
Hastings, this impeachment -- however much it owed to the.
venom of Philip Francis -- determined the course of British
administration in India for future generations, and set a new
standard of public service. The cause of Catholic Emancipa-
tion was not won till after his death, but that does not make his
advocacy of it, though its inexpediency alienated him from his
friends, the less noble or the less disinterested. It may be that sub
specie aeternitatis it is much greater to be a writer of comedies than
to be for a quarter of a century a leader of His Majesty's Op-
position, with two years of minor office as a member of His Maj-
esty's Government. It depends entirely upon one's sense of values.

-viii-