CHAP. VI.} 1763. April. |
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be summarily thrust out of the office of secretary of
state, and had accepted another from avarice,1 and in the hope of still higher preferment.2
Yet Grenville was no venal adventurer, and in his love of money retained the cold austerity that marked his character.
He never grew giddy with the hazards of the stock-market, nor made himself a broker of office, nor jobbed in lottery-tickets and contracts.
His desire was for solid and sure places; a tellership in the exchequer, or the profits of a light-house, the rich sinecures which English law and English usages tolerated; so that even in the indulgence of his strongest passion, he kept a good conscience, and men regarded him as a model of integrity,3 and the resolute enemy of corruption.
Nor was he aware that the craving for wealth led him to penurious parsimony.
He was the second son; and his childless elder brother, whose title would fall to his family, could break the entail of some part of his great possessions;4 so Grenville saved always all his emoluments from public office, pleading that it was a disinterested act, which only enriched his children;5 as if a miser hoards money for any others than his heirs.
His personal deportment was always grave and formally solemn and forbidding; and in an age of dissoluteness, his apathy in respect of pleasure made him
1 Horace Walpole's George the Third, i.
2 Fragment in the Grenville Papers, i. 484.
3 Walpole's George III. i. 338, 339. Walpole then ‘entertained a most favorable opinion of his integrity.’ Soon afterwards he had a hitter quarrel with Grenville, and from that hour spoke very ill of him. Ibid i. 343. This must be borne in mind; towards no man of his time does Walpole show himself so peevishly bitter as towards Grenville, often coloring and distorting facts, and always swayed by an invincible disgust.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1860.
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