Not content with being acknowledged as the first poet of the age, and a respectable orator in the House of Lords, he was aspiring to the eclat of a man of gallantry; so that many of the most ungracious peculiarities of his temper, though brought under better discipline, were again in full activity.

" Tallien, who has been wrestling with his ill fame for a transient popularity, has thought it advisable to revive the public attention by the farce of Pisistratusat least, an attempt to assassinate him, in which there seems to have been more eclat than danger, has given rise to such an opinion.

It must be affirmed, besides, that slavery is peculiarly odious on that soil where the equality of mankind has been inscribed with so much eclat at the head of a celebrated constitution.

In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life.