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Neither ever thought he had done serving his country while life lasted, even when bodily health and strength were gone. At eighty-four years of age Cato went on an embassy to Carthage; and Chatham, worn out by the gout and wrapped in flannels, never neglected to take his seat in the House and electrify it with his eloquence when any important question affecting the interests of the country or the liberty of the subject arose.

Notwithstanding their many virtues, they were both coarse-minded, violent men; proud, self-willed, and regardless of the common courtesies, and even decencies, of society. Both were perhaps indebted for some of their fame to the successful practice of the vice which has been happily designated as the deference paid to virtue.

It is not, therefore, only in the peculiar circumstances of his death, that Chatham resembles Cato, with whom he has therein been frequently compared.

It will be remembered that after Cato’s return from Carthage (the inveterate enemy and most powerful rival of Rome), Cato, then in the eighty-fifth year of his age, and the last year of his life, never spoke in the Senate without expressing his conviction of the dangerous power of Carthage, and concluding with the celebrated words “Delenda est Carthago.” Chatham, when peace with America was proposed on terms which he thought dishonourable to his country, expended his last strength in opposing it, and fell, to survive but a few days, senseless on the floor of the House of Lords.