we can find no reason for refusing, to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain.'"[1] Of course it is impossible from single passages, even perhaps from single speeches, to infer that he was ever a great orator, but Horace Walpole has declared one of his speeches the finest that he had ever listened to, and, as Lord Mahon justly observes, "Horace Walpole had heard his own father; had heard Pitt; had heard Pulteney; had heard Windham; had heard Carteret; yet he declares in 1743 that the finest speech he had ever listened to was one from Lord Chesterfield."
He was, with the other "Patriots," in clamoring for war with Spain, pursuing Walpole with an opposition which has been characterized as "more factious and unprincipled than any that had ever disgraced English politics" (Green). In 1739, it will be remembered, Walpole bowed to the storm. The following extract from An Ode to a Number of Great Men, published in 1742, will show underneath its virulence who were expected to take the lead:
"But first to C[arteret] fain you'd sing,
Indeed he's nearest to the king,
Yet careless how to use him,
- ↑ Chesterfield says he had been accustomed to read and translate the great masterpieces to improve and form his style. His indebtedness to Milton in his Areopagitica in the above passage is obvious.
