He lived at one of the most exciting periods of our history; he assisted at debates in which constitutional and imperial questions of the highest moment were discussed by masters of eloquence and state policy, and he hardly appears to have been aware of the fact.

It was not that he despised politics as Walpole affected to do, or that he regarded party struggles as "barbarous and absurd faction," as Hume did; still less did he pass by them with the supercilious indifference of a mystic whose eyes are fixed on the individual spirit of man as the one spring of good and evil.

He never rose to the level of the ordinary citizen or even partisan, who takes an exaggerated view perhaps of the importance of the politics of the day, but who at any rate thereby shows a sense of social solidarity and the claims of civic communion.
He called himself a Whig, but he had no zeal for Whig principles.

He voted steadily with Lord North, and quite approved of taxing and coercing America into slavery; but he had no high notions of the royal prerogative, and was lukewarm in this as in everything.

With such absence of passion one might have expected that he would be at least shrewd and sagacious in his judgments on politics.