Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/176

 The eminent person alluded to appears to have been somewhat scantily rewarded for his services by his very good friends the Whig Aristocracy. If a very subordinate office was all the reward they thought fit to bestow, it shows that it was a better recommendation to high employment under a Whig Administration to be a "relation of Lord Grey's or a tool of Lord Brougham's" than to be "a consummate master of metaphysics and moral philosophy, a profound historian, and an accomplished orator." However, the Rev. Sydney Smith seems to think that it was not so much the possession of the qualities above indicated and the authorship of the Vindiciæ Gallicæ, as the want of certain other qualities that hindered the promotion of the individual alluded to, who, though he has been called "an accomplished orator," was not an orator—for orators are powerful and often arrogant and grasping. Whereas the Rev. Sydney Smith says of Sir James:—

"'If he had been arrogant and grasping; if he had been faithless and false; if he had been always eager to strangle infant genius in its cradle; always ready to betray and to blacken those with whom he sat at meat; he would have passed many men, who, in the course of his long life, have passed him.'"