The hour had found the
man. For the next four years this imposing figure towers supreme in
British history.
He had glaring faults, some of them of a sort not to have been expected
in him. Vanity, the common weakness of small minds, was the most
disfiguring foible of this great one. He had not the simplicity which
becomes greatness so well. He could give himself theatrical airs, strike
attitudes, and dart stage lightnings from his eyes; yet he was
formidable even in his affectations. Behind his great intellectual
powers lay a burning enthusiasm, a force of passion and fierce intensity
of will, that gave redoubled impetus to the fiery shafts of his
eloquence; and the haughty and masterful nature of the man had its share
in the ascendency which he long held over Parliament. He would blast the
labored argument of an adversary by a look of scorn or a contemptuous
wave of the hand.
The Great Commoner was not a man of the people in the popular sense of
that hackneyed phrase. Though himself poor, being a younger son, he came
of a rich and influential family; he was patrician at heart; both his
faults and his virtues, his proud incorruptibility and passionate,
domineering patriotism, bore the patrician stamp. Yet he loved liberty
and he loved the people, because they were the English people. The
effusive humanitarianism of to-day had no part in him, and the democracy
of to-day would detest him.
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