WILLIAM THE THIRD.

11

Scotland. Yet in England there was discontent enough tomake even a resolute prince uneasy. The time drew near'at which the Houses must reassemble; and how were theCommons to be managed ? Montague, enraged, mortified,and intimidated by the baiting of the last session, wasfully determined not again to appear in the character ofchief minister of finance. The secure and luxurious re-treat which he had, some months ago, prepared for him-self was awaiting him. He took the Auditorship, and re-signed his other places. Smith became Chancellor of theExchequer. A new commission of Treasury issued; andthe first name was that of Tankerville. He had enteredon his career, more than twenty years before, with thefairest hopes, young, noble, nobly allied, of distinguishedabilities, of graceful manners. There was no more brilliantman of fashion in the theatre and in the ring. There wasno more popular tribune in Guildhall. Such was the com-mencement of a life so miserable that all the indignationexcited by great faults is overpowered by pity. A guiltypassion, amounting to a madness, left on the moral char-acter of the unhappy man a stain at which even libertineslooked grave. He tried to make the errors of his privatelife forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a publiccause; and, having endured in that cause penury andexile, the gloom of a dungeon, the prospect of a scaffold,the ruin of a noble estate, he was so unfortunate as to beregarded by the party for which he had sacrificed every-thing as a coward, if not a traitor. Yet, even against

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