280.] [Footnote 107: That of April, 1831, after the defeat of the Government on General Gascoyne's amendment] [Footnote 108: Lord Macaulay, "Miscellaneous Essays," ii., 330.] [Footnote 109: Lord Macaulay, essay on William Pitt.] [Footnote 110: Alison ("History of Europe," xiii., 971) states the English force in the Netherlands in 1794 at 85,000 men.

Lord Stanhope calls the English at Minden 10,000 or 12,000.] [Footnote 111: An eminent living writer (Mr.Leeky, "History of England," ii., 474) quotes with apparent approval another comparison between the father and son, made by Grattan, in the following words: "The father was not, perhaps, so good a debater as his son, but was a much better orator, a greater scholar, and a far greater man." The first two phrases in this eulogy may, perhaps, balance one another; though, when Mr.Lecky admits that "Lord Chatham's taste was far from pure, and that there was much in his speeches that was florid and meretricious, and not a little that would have appeared absurd bombast but for the amazing power of his delivery," he makes a serious deduction from his claim to the best style of eloquence which no one ever made from the speeches of his son.

But Grattan's assertion that the man who, as his sister said of him, knew but two books, the "AEneid" and the "Faerie Queene," was superior in scholarship to one who, with the exception of his rival, Fox, had probably no equal for knowledge of the great authors of antiquity in either House of Parliament, is little short of a palpable absurdity.

We may, however, suspect that Grattan's estimate of the two men was in some degree colored by his personal feelings.

With Lord Chatham he had never been in antagonism.