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much, under his father's influence. It worse than theirs. He had one great was indeed impossible that a son of so advantage over them. He received affectionate and noble a nature should a good political education. The first not have been warmly attached to a lord was educated by Sir Robert Walparent who possessed many fine qua- pole. Mr. Fox was educated by his lities, and who carried his indulgence father. The late lord was educated by and liberality towards his children even Mr. Fox. The pernicious maxims early to a culpable extent. Charles saw that imbibed by the first Lord Holland, the person to whom he was bound by made his great talents useless, and the strongest ties was, in the highest worse than useless, to the state. The degree, odious to the nation; and the pernicious maxims early imbibed by effect was what might have been ex- Mr. Fox, led him, at the commencepected from the strong passions and ment of his public life, into great faults constitutional boldness of so high- which, though afterwards nobly exspirited a youth. He cast in his lot piated, were never forgotten. To the with his father, and took, while still a very end of his career, small men, when boy, a deep part in the most unjustifi- they had nothing else to say in defence able and unpopular measures that had of their own tyranny, bigotry, and imbeen adopted since the reign of James becility, could always raise a cheer by the Second. In the debates on the some paltry taunt about the election Middlesex Election, he distinguished of Colonel Luttrell, the imprisonment himself, not only by his precocious of the lord mayor, and other measures powers of eloquence, but by the vehe- in which the great Whig leader had ment and scornful manner in which he borne a part at the age of one or two bade defiance to public opinion. He and twenty. On Lord Holland no was at that time regarded as a man such slur could be thrown. Those likely to be the most formidable cham- who most dissent from his opinions pion of arbitrary government that must acknowledge that a public life had appeared since the Revolution, to more consistent is not to be found in be a Bute with far greater powers, a our annals. Every part of it is in per Mansfield with far greater courage. fect harmony with every other part; Happily his father's death liberated and the whole is in perfect harmony him early from the pernicious influence with the great principles of toleration by which he had been misled. His and civil freedom. This rare felicity mind expanded. His range of obser- is in a great measure to be attributed vation became wider. His genius to the influence of Mr. Fox. Lord broke through early prejudices. His Holland, as was natural in a person of natural benevolence and magnanimity his talents and expectations, began at had fair play. In a very short time a very early age to take the keenest he appeared in a situation worthy of his understanding and of his heart. From a family whose name was associated in the public mind with tyranny and corruption, from a party of which the theory and the practice were equally servile, from the midst of the Luttrells, the Dysons, the Barringtons, came forth the greatest parliamentary defender of civil and religious liberty.

interest in politics; and Mr. Fox found the greatest pleasure in forming the mind of so hopeful a pupil. They corresponded largely on political subjects when the young lord was only sixteen; and their friendship and mutual confidence continued to the day of that mournful separation at Chiswick. Under such training such a man as Lord Holland was in no danger of falling The late Lord Holland succeeded to into those faults which threw a dark the talents and to the fine natural dis- shade over the whole career of his positions of his House. But his si-grandfather, and from which the youth tuation was very different from that of of his uncle was not wholly free. the two eminent men of whom we have spoken. In some important respects it was better, in some it was

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On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as compared with his grandfather and his uncle, laboured under one

great disadvantage. They were mem- | distinguished in debate than any peer bers of the House of Commons. He of his time who had not sat in the became a Peer while still an infant. House of Commons. Nay, to find his When he entered public life, the House of Lords was a very small and a very decorous assembly. The minority to which he belonged was scarcely able to muster five or six votes on the most important nights, when eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had accordingly become a mere form, as it was in the Irish House of Peers before the Union. This was a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It was not by occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty solemn and unfriendly auditors, that his grandfather and his uncle attained their unrivalled parliamentary skill. The former had learned his art in "the great Walpolean battles," on nights when Onslow was in the chair seventeen hours without intermission, when the thick ranks on both sides kept unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen upon them, when the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the paralytic laid down in their bed-clothes on the benches. The powers of Charles Fox were, from the first, exercised in conflicts not less exciting. The great talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This was the more unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which belonged to him in common with his family required much practice to develope it. With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox. This hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It was only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland and his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of them overcame it completely.

In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief excellence lay in reply. He had the quick eye of his house for the unsound parts of an argument, and a great felicity in exposing them. He was decidedly more

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equal among persons similarly situated, we must go back eighty years to Earl Granville. For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville, Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we will not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed and matured in the Lower. The opinion of the most discerning judges was that Lord Holland's oratorical performances, though sometimes most successful, afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that, in an assembly of which the debates were frequent and animated, he would have attained a very high order of excellence. It was, indeed, impossible to listen to his conversation without seeing that he was born a debater. To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the mind in discussion was a positive pleasure. With the greatest good nature and good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. The word disputatious" is generally used as a word of reproach; but we can express our meaning only by saying that Lord Holland was most courteously and pleasantly disputatious. In truth, his quickness in discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies was such as a veteran judge might envy. The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they had split a hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into filaments still finer. In a mind less happily constituted, there might have been a risk that this turn for subtilty would have produced serious evil. But in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland there was ample security against all such danger. He was not a man to be the dupe of his own ingenuity. He put his logic to its proper use; and in him the dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.

Ilis political life is written in the chronicles of his country. Perhaps, as Q Q

we have already intimated, his opinions | on two or three great questions of foreign policy were open to just objection. Yet even his errors, if he erred, were amiable and respectable. We are not sure that we do not love and admire him the more because he was now and then seduced from what we regard as a wise policy by sympathy with the oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy so enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace, a love which in him was second only to the love of freedom, and by the magnanimous credulity of a mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of devising mischief.

To his views on questions of domestic policy the voice of his countrymen docs ample justice. They revere the memory of the man who was, during forty years, the constant protector of all oppressed races and persecuted sects, of the man whom neither the prejudices nor the interests belonging to his station could seduce from the path of right, of the noble, who in every great crisis cast in his lot with the commons, of the planter, who made manful war on the slave trade, of the landowner, whose whole heart was in the struggle against the

How sweet were once thy prospects fresh and fair,

Thy sloping walks and unpolluted air! How sweet the glooms beneath thine aged trees,

Thy noon-tide shadow and thine evening breeze!

His image thy forsaken bowers restore; Thy walks and airy prospects charin no more;

No more the summer in thy glooms allayed,

Thine evening breezes, and thy noon-day shade."

Yet a few years, and the shades and structures may follow their illustrious masters. The wonderful city which, ancient and gigantic as it is, still continues to grow as fast as a young town of logwood by a water-privilege in Michigan, may soon displace those turwith so much that is interesting and rets and gardens which are associated noble, with the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison. The time is coming when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of our generation, will in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations, for the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favourite resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philo

corn-laws. We have hitherto touched almost ex-sophers, and statesmen. They will then clusively on those parts of Lord Holland's character which were open to the observation of millions. How shall we express the feelings with which his memory is cherished by those who were honoured with his friendship? Or in what language shall we speak of that house, once celebrated for its rare attractions to the furthest ends of the civilized world, and now silent and desolate as the grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty years ago, a poet addressed those tender and graceful lines, which have now acquired a new meaning not less sad than that which they originally bore.

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remember, with strange tenderness, many objects once familiar to them, the avenue and the terrace, the busts and the paintings, the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical mottoes. With peculiar fondness they will recall that venerable chamber, in which all the antique gravity of a college library was so singularly blended with all that female grace and wit could devise to embellish a drawing-room. They will recollect, not unmoved, those shelves loaded with the varied learning of many lands and many ages, and those portraits in which were preserved the features of the best and wisest Englishmen of two generations. They will recollect how many men who have guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason and eloquence, who have put life into bronze and canvass, or who have left to posterity things so written as it shall not

WARREN HASTINGS.

(OCTOBER, 1841.)

Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of Bengal. Com piled from Original Papers, by the Rev. G. R. GLEIG, M.A. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1841.

willingly let them die, were there mixed | thing unworthy of men who were diswith all that was loveliest and gayest tinguished by the friendship of Lord in the society of the most splendid of Holland. capitals. They will remember the peculiar character which belonged to that circle, in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place. They will remember how the last debate was discussed in one corner, and the last comedy of Scribe in another; while Wilkie gazed with modest admiration on Sir Joshua's Baretti; while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to verify a quotation; while WE are inclined to think that we shall Talleyrand related his conversations best meet the wishes of our readers, if, with Barras at the Luxembourg, or instead of minutely examining this his ride with Lannes over the field of book, we attempt to give, in a way neAusterlitz. They will remember, above cessarily hasty and imperfect, our own all, the grace, and the kindness, far more view of the life and character of Mr. admirable than grace, with which the Hastings. Our feeling towards him is princely hospitality of that ancient not exactly that of the House of Commansion was dispensed. They will re-mons which impeached him in 1787; member the venerable and benignant neither is it that of the House of Comcountenance and the cordial voice of mons which uncovered and stood up to him who bade them welcome. They receive him in 1813. He had great will remember that temper which years qualities, and he rendered great services of pain, of sickness, of lameness, of con- to the state. But to represent him as a finement, seemed only to make sweeter man of stainless virtue is to make him and sweeter, and that frank politeness, ridiculous; and from regard for his which at once relieved all the embar-memory, if from no other feeling, his rassment of the youngest and most friends would have done well to lend timid writer or artist, who found him- no countenance to such adulation. We self for the first time among Ambassa- believe that, if he were now living, he dors and Earls. They will remember that constant flow of conversation, so natural, so animated, so various, so rich with observation and anecdote; that wit which never gave a wound; that exquisite mimicry which ennobled, instead of degrading; that goodness of heart which appeared in every look and accent, and gave additional value to every talent and acquirement. They will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning manners. They will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having done any

would have sufficient judgment and sufficient greatness of mind to wish to be shown as he was. He must have known that there were dark spots on his fame. He might also have felt with pride that the splendour of his fame would bear many spots. He would have wished posterity to have a likeness of him, though an unfavourable likeness, rather than a daub at once insipid and unnatural, resembling neither him nor any body else. "Paint me as I am," said Oliver Cromwell, while sitting to young Lely. "If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling." Even in such a trifle, the great Protector showed both his good sense and his magnanimity. He did not wish all that was characteristic in his countenance to be lost, in the vain at. tempt to give him the regular features and smooth blooming cheeks of the curl-pated minions of James the First

He was content that his face should go | last Hastings of Daylesford had preforth marked with all the blemishes sented his second son to the rectory of which had been put on it by time, by the parish in which the ancient resiwar, by sleepless nights, by anxiety, perhaps by remorse; but with valour, policy, authority, and public care written in all its princely lines. If men truly great knew their own interest, it is thus that they would wish their minds to be portrayed.

dence of the family stood. The living was of little value; and the situation of the poor clergyman, after the sale of the estate, was deplorable. He was constantly engaged in lawsuits about his tithes with the new lord of the manor, and was at length utterly Warren Hastings sprang from an ruined. His eldest son, Howard, a ancient and illustrious race. It has well-conducted young man, obtained been affirmed that his pedigree can be a place in the Customs. The second traced back to the great Danish sea- son, Pynaston, an idle worthless boy, king, whose sails were long the terror married before he was sixteen, lost his of both coasts of the British Channel, wife in two years, and died in the and who, after many fierce and doubt-West Indies, leaving to the care of ful struggles, yielded at last to the va- his unfortunate father a little orphan, lour and genius of Alfred. But the un- destined to strange and memorable doubted splendour of the line of Hast-vicissitudes of fortune. ings needs no illustration from fable. One branch of that line wore, in the fourteenth century, the coronet of Pembroke. From another branch sprang the renowned Chamberlain, the faithful adherent of the White Rose, whose fate has furnished so striking a theme both to poets and to historians. His family received from the Tudors the earldom of Huntingdon, which, after long dispossession, was regained in our time by a series of events scarcely paral-with whom he studied and played. leled in romance.

Warren, the son of Pynaston, was born on the sixth of December, 1732. His mother died a few days later, and he was left dependent on his distressed grandfather. The child was early sent to the village school, where he learned his letters on the same bench with the sons of the peasantry; nor did any thing in his garb or fare indicate that his life was to take a widely different course from that of the young rustics

But no cloud could overcast the dawn The lords of the manor of Dayles- of so much genius and so much amford, in Worcestershire, claimed to be bition. The very ploughmen observed, considered as the heads of this distin- and long remembered, how kindly guished family. The main stock, indeed, little Warren took to his book. The prospered less than some of the younger daily sight of the lands which his anshoots. But the Daylesford family, cestors had possessed, and which had though not ennobled, was wealthy and passed into the hands of strangers, highly considered, till, about two hun-filled his young brain with wild fancies dred years ago, it was overwhelmed by and projects. He loved to hear stories the great ruin of the civil war. The of the wealth and greatness of his proHastings of that time was a zealous cavalier. He raised money on his lands, sent his plate to the mint at Oxford, joined the royal army, and, after spending half his property in the cause of King Charles, was glad to ranson himself by making over most of the remaining half to Speaker Lenthal. The old seat at Daylesford still remained in the family; but it could no longer be kept up; and in the following generation it was sold to a merchant of London.

Before this transfer took place, the

genitors, of their splendid housekeeping, their loyalty, and their valour. On one bright summer day, the boy, then just seven years old, lay on the bank of the rivulet which flows through the old domain of his house to join the Isis.

There, as threescore and ten years later he told the tale, rose in his mind a scheme which, through all the turns of his eventful career, was never abandoned. He would recover the estate which had belonged to his fathers. He would be Hastings of

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