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pen of Hallam, now stands in the inner hall at Bowood. Fortunate in all things, he enjoyed in his lifetime what is commonly a posthumous tribute; and he read in marble the chosen words, more lasting than marble, in which his name and memory will live for ages to come.

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LORD DALLING AND BULWER.

(FROM THE TIMES, JUNE 3, 1872.)

LITERARY and political aspirants of forty-five or fifty years ago may remember three competitors, constantly together, who attracted attention by their social position, their personal gifts, and their easy, careless, unmistakable air of latent superiority. They had hitherto done little or nothing to distinguish them from other young men of promise, although they looked and talked as if they could do anything or everything when they chose to set about it. But they had turned aside from College honours: they would hardly take the trouble of getting up a subject for a debating club; and the most admiring of their contemporaries would have been startled to be told that this sauntering, pleasure-loving, pococuranti trio were to become, one, Lord Chief Justice of England, the mainstay and ornament of the Judicial Bench: another, a cabinet minister and one of the first writers of the age: the third, the representative of Great Britain as chief of some half-dozen Embassies in succession ending with Constantinople, and a successful author to boot.

We need hardly say that we are speaking of Sir

Alexander Cockburn, Edward Lord Lytton, and his elder brother, Lord Dalling and Bulwer, familiarly known as Henry Bulwer, whose character has just been brought within the recognised domain of biography by death. If not the most distinguished, it was certainly not the least remarkable of the three careers; and proves, perhaps, more strikingly than either of the others what volition. and energy can effect, when ambition or the love of fame has become the master passion and a well-defined object is in view.

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His birth and parentage are well known. His paternal ancestry (in Burke) has been traced to a Danish rover or sea-king, named Bolver, and his maternal to a Welsh prince of the ninth century. Although a second son, he inherited a considerable fortune from a grandmother. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, but left the University without taking a degree, and became a cornet in the Life Guards. Nature never meant him for the military profession, and, finding the regimental duties very little to his taste, he speedily sold out, and, after an expedition which produced his Autumn in Greece,' became a diplomatist. He was attached to the Berlin Embassy in 1827, and taking Paris in his way, won there a large sum at play. This, curiously enough, became the starting-point of his diplomatic fortunes. There was then a whist-playing set at Berlin, mustering principally at Prince Wittgenstein's, and including the leading personages of the Court. The high stakes (500 louis the rubber was not uncommon) kept the members of the English Embassy aloof, with the exception of Bulwer, who fearlessly risked his recently

acquired capital. Although by no means a first-rate whist-player, he eventually came off a winner, and through the incidental intimacy with princes and ambassadors begun at the card-table, he learnt a great deal about important matters from which his official superiors were shut out: he also formed connections of permanent value. High play was then common in the highest continental circles, and he occasionally joined in it at other places, without having a decided turn for it at any time.

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He was transferred from Berlin to Vienna, and from Vienna to the Hague, from which, in 1830, when the Belgian Revolution broke out, he was despatched by Lord Aberdeen to watch its progress and report on the probability of its success. The insurrection (he wrote) broke out at Ghent when I was in the Grand Place, and the Commissaire of the Hotel was shot by my side.' In the performance of this duty he attended a public meeting, at which a well-known English Radical (Bowring) presented himself, and told the assembled Belgians that, come what might, they might reckon on the support of his countrymen. Bulwer rose directly afterwards to say that he himself, the member of an Embassy, was no great things (peu de chose): that his friend was nothing and nobody; and that the patriots whom he had the honour to address had better rely on their own patriotic efforts than on the promises of English co-operation, made without the semblance of authority by this gentleman.

In his Life of Lord Palmerston' he states that he obtained a full and complete knowledge not only of a

that was actually doing by the Belgian party throughout Belgium at that moment, but of all that was to be done during the next few days. He was informed of the officers who were gained, the regiments that would revolt, the fortresses on which the Belgian flag would be hoisted. As my information came to me in a way that imposed no secrecy, I returned home and communicated it. But my reports were not-and this was very natural—in conformity with Sir Charles Bagot's, who was in Holland, and they were received coldly and with no small degree of disbelief.' They were SO speedily and satisfactorily verified by events that, in little more than a week, Lord Aberdeen summoned him to London, complimented him, and sent him back to Brussels, to reside there and continue his reports. When Belgium became a kingdom, he was made Secretary of Legation at Brussels, where he subsequently acted as Chargé d'Affaires.

While the settlement of Belgium was still pending, he made an arrangement with the late Lord Pembroke for a seat in Parliament for the borough of Wilton, which he helped to disfranchise by his vote on the second reading of the first Reform Bill in 1831. This act of self-sacrifice was not approved by the electors, who would have nothing more to say to him at the ensuing election, whereupon he got chosen for Coventry, which he represented till the dissolution of 1832. He sat for Marylebone from 1833 to 1837, and made two or three speeches, especially one on Spanish affairs in 1836, which rescued his irregular and intermittent parliamentary career from the imputation of having been mute or commonplace.

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