Lord Carteret had many
brilliant qualities: he was undaunted, enterprising, eloquent;
had considerable knowledge of continental politics, was a
great linguist, a master of public law; and though he failed
in his premature effort to terminate the dogeship of George
the Second, he succeeded in maintaining a considerable though
secondary position in public life. The young Shelburne
married his daughter. Of him it is singular we know less than
of his father-in-law, yet from the scattered traits some idea
may be formed of the ablest and most accomplished minister of
the eighteenth century. Lord Shelburne, influenced probably
by the example and the traditionary precepts of his eminent
father-in-law, appears early to have held himself aloof from
the patrician connection, and entered public life as the
follower of Bute in the first great effort of George the Third
to rescue the sovereignty from what Lord Chatham called "the
Great Revolution families." He became in time a member of
Lord Chatham's last administration: one of the strangest and
most unsuccessful efforts to aid the grandson of George the
Second in his struggle for political emancipation. Lord
Shelburne adopted from the first the Bolingbroke system: a
real royalty, in lieu of the chief magistracy; a permanent
alliance with France, instead of the whig scheme of viewing in
that power the natural enemy of England: and, above all, a
plan of commercial freedom, the germ of which may be found in
the long-maligned negotiations of Utrecht, but which in the
instance of Lord Shelburne were soon in time matured by all
the economical science of Europe, in which he was a
proficient.
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