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He took no active share in ministerial affairs, and is said to have spoken but twice in parliament; and then shortly, and on matters of no great moment. Indeed, he was too volatile for a counsellor, and too honourable for the tricks of party; the wit and bitter satire, however, which flowed from his pen, in a stream apparently of careless gaiety, rendered him a very important ally; nor did he confine the exercise of those talents to the censure of public men and measures, but frequently attacked with equal severity the faults and foibles of domestic conduct. The consequences of one of these flights of poetical intemperance,* on the marriage of Isabella, Dowager duchess of Manchester, to Mr. Hussey, afterwards Lord Beaulieu, caused him great and deserved vexation. That gentleman, whose reputation for personal courage was fortunately already well established,

* Vol. I. p. 90.

treated the injury with silent disdain; but his countrymen, the Irish, burst into a flame of anger, and many of them pledged themselves. to each other individually to provoke the offender to the field by repeated affronts. He is said (and in terms from which it might be inferred that he wanted resolution to defend himself), to have retired for a considerable time, to avoid this danger, but whither did he retire? To his house in Wales, within a day's journey of London. The truth is, that his carelessness of the event seems to have been not less remarkable than his imprudence in the cause. The right hon. Henry Fox, to whom the offensive poem had been addressed, and between whom and himself the most cordial attachment subsisted, mentioning these matters somewhat at large in a letter to him of the 6th of September 1746, says, "you may laugh at all this, but I do assure you, at the same time, that every body ridicules and condemns it; your serious

friends, and I in the first place, think it puts you in a disagreeable situation, and I am heartily and excessively concerned about it."

These heats, however, subsided without bloodshed, and he was in the same year installed a Knight of the Bath; appointed envoy to the elector of Saxony (king of Poland) and of course sworn of the privy council. "He had thrown up his place," says Lord Orford, in his Memoirs lately published, "on some disgusts; the loss of Mr. Winnington, and a quarrel with the Irish, occasioned by an Ode which he wrote on the marriage of the duchess of Manchester and Mr. Hussey, fomented by Lord Bath and his enemies, and supported with too little spirit,* had driven him to shelter his discontents in a foreign embassy, where he displayed great talents for negotiation, and pleased as much by his letters as he had formerly done by his poetry."

*

By whom?-Lord O. cannot mean by sir Charles, for he was in fact neither challenged nor insulted.

This success in a new character fixed the destiny of his future life, which was passed ably, though not always successfully, in continental diplomacy. In the spring of 1750, at the instance of Mr. Fox, he was named envoy extraordinary to Berlin, from whence he made an excursion to Warsaw, to engage the vote of the king of Poland, who was then holding the Diet there, for the archduke Joseph to be king of the Romans. He had the good fortune, about the same time, to become the chief instrument in reconciling the empresses of Germany and Russia; but, during this absence, a change of politics, together with some personal disgust in the mind of the king of Prussia, excited by the discovery of certain freedoms which he had used in descanting in his dispatches on the singularities of that prince's character and conduct, induced Frederick to receive him with extreme coldness. This ill disposition daily increased, and at length rendered his situation intolerable. He was, at his own request, re

called; sent again to Dresden in February 1751; and during his residence there transacted some important affairs at the Imperial Court with credit and success.

After an absence of more than two years he returned, for a time, to England, but was presently once more dispatched to the Saxon Court. In 1754, he attended the king to Poland, where his attachment to the interests of the family of Poniatowski, the heir of which was not long after elected to the Polish throne, produced an irreparable quarrel between himself and Count Bruhl, the favourite Saxon minister. This event terminated his mission to the court of Dresden, and the designs of France, in concert with the king of Prussia, on the electorate of Hanover having induced the English cabinet to form the design for a triple alliance between Great Britain, Austria, and Russia, Sir Charles was sent to St. Petersburgh, with instructions to use his utmost endeavours to further the plan at that court.

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