Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/186

 shows apparent levity and even want of penetration. He is less sagacious than Horace Walpole, whose extraordinary cleverness was wasted by frivolity. As an outside observer, he might have recognised the importance of the great issues, and shown himself at least on a level with the higher judges of his own time. He was apparently conscious of the gross blunders of George III. and Lord North, but was content to support Ministers, with a lazy indifference to the result. His letters, when they contain any reference to the American War, treat the matter almost as a jest, and plainly betray that his real interest was much more with Alaric than with Washington. He lived through the most exciting period of the century; he even took an actual, though a very subordinate, part in the operations which involved the foundation of the British Empire in the East and the expulsion of our rivals from the West. He supported the political course which led to the separation of our greatest colonies a few years later; and both at these periods and on the outbreak of the French Revolution afterwards, he seems to have regarded the greatest events of the time chiefly as they affected the comfort of a fat historian in his