lord and lady of Bowood, form part of the literary annals of the country.

Lord Lansdowne's literary acquirements were precisely of the kind required by his position and society. He was well versed in the Latin, English, French, and Italian classics; and he knew enough of most subjects to lead the conversation upon them till it was taken up by those who had made them an especial study. He was thoroughly at home in constitutional history, strong and sound in political economy. He had no particular liking for science, although he delighted in the society of such men as Lyell, Owen, Brewster, Wheatstone, and Murchison; and he was extremely amused with the matter-of-fact earnestness of one of them (Murchison) who-when a very eminent statesman (Lord Palmerston) laughingly remarked that, according to Darwin's theory, a star-fish might become an Archbishop of Canterbury, passing through the intermediate stage of a Bishop of Oxford-gravely assured his Lordship that no such transmutation could take place.

With all due respect to Swift, who said that there was no such thing as a 'fine old man,' the term is surely applicable to Lord Lansdowne, who without deep passions, high imagination, or wearing intensity of thought, retained his flow of mind, his taste, his memory, his sensibility, his attachments, his rational pleasures, his eagerness to give pleasure and confer benefits, at eightytwo. Any deduction to be made on the score of deafness was more than counterbalanced by his mode of bearing up against this infirmity. On a summer's

6

evening, soon after the appearance of the 'Idylls of the King,' he was seated on a lawn not far from Kensington between two handsome sisters, one of whom read Vivien' with that sweet clear voice which Shakespeare calls an excellent thing in woman.' Nor did the group strike anyone as incongruous. No one understood better the art of growing old; and if there be any truth in Rochefoucauld's maxim-on est plus heureux par la passion qu'on a, que par celle que l'on donne-most assuredly (fatuity apart) those that can admire, adore, love,-longest, have the best of it.

6

The week before the accident which caused his death, he was slowly wending his way to Jeff's, in Burlington Arcade, to order M. Van de Weyer's sparkling brochure, Cobden, Roi des Belges.' Three days before he died, he was reading and discussing Kinglake's History. He sank gradually without pain, and when he breathed his last, seemed rather to fall into a deep sleep than to die.

Johnson, following in the wake of the Roman satirist, indignantly proclaims

'See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,

To buried Merit raise the tardy bust.'

Lord Lansdowne's contemporaries are not open to this reproach. On his retirement from public life, a subscription (limited to a guinea each, in order to comprise the greatest number of subscribers) was set on foot, to present him with a bust of himself. It was executed by Marochetti, and, with a Latin inscription from the

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.

379

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.

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