A writer in the Quarterly Review has called Sir James the “most accomplished and the most ill-used man of the Whig party.” He was all that. Not one of them could come near him in accomplishment, or in political knowledge, or in political wisdom. The Recordership of Bombay was but poor promotion; and afterwards, though with all the patronage of the State in their hands for years, he never obtained from the Whigs any higher, or indeed any other, employment. It is difficult to conceive how he could have been worse used. They might easily have made some proper provision for him on their advent to power in 1830, and they could have done so almost any day between this period and that of his decease. Was it that Mackintosh was but half a Whig, or, if a whole Whig, then the most measured, most moderate of them all? Many years before the Reform Bill agitation, Mackintosh had come to the conviction, and had openly proclaimed it, that the parliamentary franchise might be too much extended—that a mob could never govern a mob.
I first met Sir James at Mr. Henry Brougham’s, in the spring, or rather the
early summer, of 1829. I saw him rather frequently between that time and the beginning of
1833, when I went down to Scotland, and I would now gratefully bear testimony to his
engaging simplicity of manners, his goodness of heart, his exceeding great kindness to
young men of
| 110 | SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH | [CHAP. XI |
In all his latter years Sir James was in straitened circumstances, and frequently in pecuniary difficulties; beset by creditors in a way that to any man of feeling, or to any man who had a respect for virtue and genius, it was quite painful to witness or to hear of. He might have obtained a great deal more money from the booksellers; but though he was so fluent and quick in talk, I believe he was rather slow with the pen; and then his attention was distracted and so much of his time occupied by politics, by society, of which he was always fond, by the London University, and by other concerns and concernments, that he could have had but a limited leisure for literature.
He was always exceedingly gentle, patient, and polite with his duns; and
had, though in a rather different manner, some successes in this way that Sheridan himself might have envied; but he did not like to
see them come to his private house in Portland Place, and he used to make appointments with
them at a Life Insurance Office, of which he was an actuary, and from which he received an
inconsiderable annual stipend. It was not always when they called that he had the money to
satisfy them; and I was told that in these cases he would slip out at a back door, as they
were about to charge in at the front. I will not answer for this, but I well remember a
mot of Lord
Alvanley’s: “Every gentleman in money difficulties ought to
live in St. James’s
| CHAP. XI] | MRS. JAMESON AND CRAIK | 111 |
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