awakened and kept awake to the interest of high studies, no external surroundings could have been more fatal. He threw up his reading and took to hounds, betting, and Newmarket, and to all which was then, even if not since, thought to be most natural, if not most proper, in a young nobleman.

As far as classical studies are concerned he probably lost nothing. He was through life very opaque to literary interests, and in his letters and speeches always used language in the clumsiest way. But he had-perhaps from his childish field sports a keen taste for animals and natural history, which nowa-days would have been developed into a serious pursuit. And as it was, he had an odd craving for figures, which might have been made something of in mathematics. He kept,' we are told,' an account of every shot he fired in the course of a year, whether he missed or killed, and made up the book periodically.' He would not pass the accounts of the Agricultural Society without hunting for a missing threepence; and when Chancellor of the Exchequer he used, it is said, 'to do all his calculations, however complicated, alone in his closet,' which his biographer thinks very admirable, and contrasts with the habit of Mr. Pitt, 'who used to take a Treasury clerk into his confidence,' but which was really very absurd. It is not by such mechanical work that great budgets are framed; and a great minister ought to know what not to do himself, and how to use, for everything possible, the minds of others. Still there is much straightforward strength in this, if also some comic dulness.

If Lord Althorp's relatives did not give him a very good education, they did not make up for it by teaching him light accomplishments. They sent him the grand tour,' as it was then called; but he was shy and awkward, seems to have had no previous preparation for foreign society, would not go into it, and returned boasting that he could not speak French. His mother a woman of great fashion and high culture- must have sighed very much over so uncourtly and so English' an eldest

son.

Then, in the easy way of those times—it was in 1804—he was brought into Parliament for Okehampton, a nomination borough, some 'Mr. Strange,' a barrister, retiring in his favour, and his interest being strong, he was made a Lord of the Treasury. But the same apathy to intellectual interests which showed itself at college clung to him here also. He showed energy, but it was not the energy of a man of business. He passed, we are told, the greatest part of his time in the country, and when he attended at the Treasury, which was very rarely, and only on particular occasions to make up a Board, he returned home immediately afterwards. Indeed, he used to have horses posted on the road from London to Althorp, and often rode down at night, as soon as the House had risen, in order that he might hunt with the Pytchley the next morning.' 'On these occasions,' says another account, he had no sleep, and often the hacks which he rode would fall down on the road.' And years afterwards the old clerks of the office used to tell of the rarity and brevity of his visits to the department, and of the difficulty of getting him to stay;-all which shows force and character, but still not the sort of character which would fit a man to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. But though he had much of the want of culture, Lord Althorp had none of the unfeelingness which also the modern world is getting somehow to attach to the character of the systematic sportsman. On the contrary, he was one of the many instances which prove that this character may be combined with an extreme sensibility to the sufferings of animals and man. He belonged to the class of men in whom such feelings are far keener than usual, and his inner character approached to the Arnold type,' 'for to hear of cruelty or injustice pained him' almost 'like a blow.'

He, it seems, kept a hunting journal, which tells how his hounds found a fox at Parson's Hill, and ran over old Naseby field to Althorp in fifty minutes, and then, after a slight check, over the finest part of Leicestershire;' and all that sort of thing. But probably it does not tell one the very natural conse

U

quence which happened to him from such a life. Being a somewhat uncouth person, addicted to dogs and horses—a 'man's man,' as Thackeray used to call it he did not probably go much into ladies' society, and was not very aggressive when he was there. But men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them; and so it was with Lord Althorp. He married a Miss Acklom, a 'Diana Vernon' sort of person, rather stout, and without pretension to regular beauty;' but nevertheless, it is said, 'with something prepossessing about her-clever, well read, with a quick insight into the character of others, and with much selfdependence.' And this self-dependence and thought she showed to her great advantage in the principal affair of her life. Lord Althorp's biographer is sure, but does not say how, that the first declaration of love was made by the lady; he was, it seems, too shy to think of such a thing. As a rule, marriages in which a young nobleman is actively captured by an aggressive lady are not domestically happy, though they may be socially useful, but in this case the happiness seems to have been exceptionally great; and when she died, after a few years, he suffered a very unusual grief. He went,' we are told, 'at once to Winton, the place where he had lived with her, and passed several months in complete retirement, finding his chief occupation in reading the Bible,' in which he found, at first, many grave difficulties, such as the mention of the constellation Orion' by the prophet Amos, and the high place (an equality with Job and David) given by Ezekiel to the prophet Daniel when still a young man, ' and before he had proved himself to be a man of so great a calibre as he certainly did afterwards.' On these questions, he adds, "I have consulted a Mr. Shepherd, the clergyman here, but his answers are not satisfactory.' Happily, however, such a man is not at the mercy of clergymen's answers, nor dependent on the petty details of ancient prophets. The same sensibility which made him keenly alive to justice and injustice in things of this world, went further, and told him of a moral government

in things not of this world. No man of or near the Arnold species was ever a sceptic as to, far less an unbeliever in, ultimate religion. New philosophies are not wanted or appreciated by such men, nor are book arguments of any real use, though these men often plod over them as if they were; for in truth an inner teaching supersedes everything, and for good or evil closes the controversy; no discussion is of any effect or force; the court of appeal, fixed by nature in such minds, is peremptory in belief, and will not hear of any doubt. And so it was in this case. Through life Lord Althorp continued to be a man strong, though perhaps a little crude, in religious belief; and thus gained at the back of his mind a solid seriousness which went well with all the rest of it. And his grief for his wife was almost equally durable. He gave up not only society, which perhaps was no great trial, but also hunting-not because he believed it to be wrong, but because he did not think it seemly or suitable that a man after such a loss should be so very happy as he knew that hunting would make him.

Soon after his marriage he had begun to take an interest in politics, especially on their moral side, and of course the increased seriousness of his character greatly augmented it. Without this change, though he might have thought himself likely to be occasionally useful in outlying political questions, probably he would have had no grave political career, and his life never would have been written. But the sort of interest which he took in politics requires some explanation, for though his time was not very long ago, the change of feeling since then is vast.

'If any person,' said Sir Samuel Romilly, the best of judges, for he lived through the times and was mixed up, heart and soul, in the matters he speaks of,- if any person be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some reforms on humane and liberal principles. He will then find not only

what a stupid spirit of conservation, but what a savage spirit, it has infused into the minds of his countrymen.' And very naturally, for nothing is so cruel as fear. A whole generation in England, and indeed in Europe, was so frightened by the Reign of Terror, that they thought it could only be prevented by another Reign of Terror. The Holy Alliances, as they were then called, meant this and worked for this. Though we had not in name such an alliance in England, we had a state of opinion which did the work of one without one. Nine-tenths of the English people were above all things determined to put down French principles;' and unhappily French principles included what we should all now consider obvious improvements and rational reforms. They would not allow the most cruel penal code which any nation ever had to be mitigated; they did not wish justice to be questioned; they would not let the mass of the people be educated, or at least only so that it came to nothing; they would not alter anything which came down from their ancestors, for in their terror they did not know but there might be some charmed value even in the most insignificant thing; and after what they had seen happen in France, they feared that if they changed a single iota all else would collapse.

Upon this generation, too, came the war passion. They waged, and in the main-though with many errors—waged with power and spirit, the war with Napoleon; and they connected this with their horror of liberal principles in a way which is now very strange to us, but which was very powerful then. We know now that Napoleon was the head of a conservative reaction, a bitter and unfeeling reaction, just like that of the contemporary English; but the contemporary English did not know this. To the masses of them he was Robespierre à cheval, as some one called him-a sort of Jacobin waging war, in some occult way, for liberty and revolution, though he called himself Emperor. Of course, the educated few gradually got more or less to know that Napoleon hated Jacobins and revolution, and liberty too, as much as it is possible to hate them; but the