this weakness of hospitality was scarcely akin to that gentlemanlike old vice' avarice, of which he has been accused. The Bishop of Llandaff alludes slightly to this prevalent but most mistaken notion:

'His main infirmity, which increased with years, and with the accession of large property, consisted in a sensitive apprehension of being duped or over-reached in ordinary transactions: and this vigilant and over-nice jealousy was often construed into a closeness and parsimony unbecoming his great fortune. His expenditure was indeed carefully, but not sparingly regulated; and the duty of almsgiving, and of contributing to charitable and religious objects, was never forgotten. As an example, I may refer to one donation of 2001., bestowed unhesitatingly, at my recommendation, to a single family in distress.' Preface, p. xiv.

Lord Dudley succeeded to his immense wealth in mature life, after his habits had been formed on the limited though liberal allowance of his father. His delicate health debarred him from the expensive pursuits of Melton, yachting, &c.; his moral principles protected him from greater and more ruinous extravagances; his good sense taught him the wickedness of waste; his high-bred feelings revolted at the vulgarity of a servants' hall ale reputation for liberality. His personal wants were few, his wishes simple. He used to say that he thought the happiest life would be 1500l. a-year, and the first floor over a bookseller's shop.' The only great purchase he ever made, except of land, was that of an extensive Venetian library. No demon whispered, Dudley, have a taste.' He cared not for pictures, statues, nor the tribe of knicknacks, that preciosa supellex of affluence. He was moderate even in brick and mortar, the raw materials of ruination: he rebuilt his town and country houses rather substantially than architecturally. His remark on showing Mr. Gandy's Grecian elevation for the former was, 'Very fine, just the thing for a pagan god, but a private gentleman can't do quite so well without a scullery.' Custom became a second nature with him; he carried his little bed and old writing-table into his new house, and when an objection was raised to their comparative plainness, he said of the one, There may sleep eighty as well as three thousand a-year ;' and, of the other, I composed all my best things on that, and I will not write myself down an ass on a gold table to please Baldock.' This habit peeps out in his lamentation at the death of an old member of parliament:

'I had grown accustomed to him in the House of Commons, just as one grows accustomed to an old, clumsy, ill-contrived piece of furniture in an apartment, which one is loth to part with, though it only holds the place of something neater and more convenient.'-Letter 37.

Many

Many a time has he deplored his 'unfortunate fortune,'—' what a figure so and so would cut with it...I think I might perhaps spend fifteen, or even twenty thousand a-year, with comfort; all beyond that is a plague and a bore.' He would have cast away his gold, like the ancient in the desert, that his motions might have been more unfettered. It was not gold, filthy lucre, that he loved for its base self; it was the worries concomitant with the management and expenditure-the tares in the corn-that he hated. We need not tell our readers that

The climax of all earthly ills,

The inflammation of our weekly bills,'

is an evil sufficient in itself for days and years: with Lord Dudley it was the shape and form taken by greater evils-the pandemonium of an establishment-cooks, male and female, grooms of stable and chamber, butlers, upper and under, chaplains, agents, attorneys, and their correspondence: these exquisite luxuries formed no accession of delight to a quiet studious bachelor, contented with the companionship of a few old books and old friends, and never so happy as when he could escape from public care into private tranquillity. A great estate' (said Bacon, who had no abstract horror of ambrosial cash, although he did call it virtutis impedimentum) is a lure to birds of prey. To be cheated, alias to be robbed, to be duped, to be made a fool of, and laughed at, is barely agreeable to the most silly spendthrift; while to those whose heads are longer than their purses it becomes an insult. Lord Dudley, like Lord Byron, might pass his jest, and theorise about the noble feeling of cupidity,' yet were they no flinty-hearted, mean-spirited misers. I have lived long enough,' said Byron, to have an exceeding respect for the smallest coin of any realm, or the least sum, which, although I may not want it myself, may do something for others who may need it more than I. This self-denying parsimony, the fountain of generous actions, may indeed be devoid of the tinsel of world-honoured profusion, the unbounded extravagance of pure selfish indulgence and ostentation; but riches,' said Solomon, are in the distribution, all the rest is conceit.' We conceive that such liberality as that quoted by the Bishop of Llandaff, or such as we have mentioned in regard to the Vulpicide tutor, is close akin to that charity by which a multitude of sins will be covered. Such acts done in secret, and sedulously concealed from the world, formed part and parcel of Lord Dudley's life.

We are desirous of putting on record some other instances which have reached even our limited knowledge. The inha

bitants of Sedgely were collecting subscriptions for the building of a church and two chapels; they applied to Lord Dudley; he inquired what the church would cost; about 80007.: Then, gentlemen, perhaps I had better take that entirely on myself, and allow you to apply your subscriptions towards the chapels only.' His gifts were always doubled by their promptness, and sweetened by a delicacy, which gave to the acceptor the air of conferring a favour on the donor. Among the companions in whom his father took delight was Mr. Fitzgerald, whose laudatory tavern verses have been preserved in the amber of the Rejected Addresses.' The bard, like many of his tuneful tribe, was more favoured by (what he took for) Apollo than by Plutus.* Lord Dudley, on his father's dying without a will, wrote immediately to the unlegacied minstrel, stating that it was his imperative duty to carry out his father's intentions, which an accidental intestacy had prevented; and that, with a view of marking his grateful sense of Mr. Fitzgerald's kind friendship, he lost no time in discharging this sacred obligation.' A draft for 5000l. accompanied this letter to as mouldy a cheeseparing of affectation as ever it was our chance to contemplate. Of course real genius and merit were sure of princely treatment at such hands. When the imminent distress of Sir Thomas Lawrence was mentioned to Lord Dudley, he extricated him by the immediate advance of some thousands; and in order to make it appear a loan (not a gift, which it really was) he accepted two small pictures as a security.

There was always, as regarded his financial department, a degree of fun which disarmed it of any real parsimony. When his house in Park Lane was finished, some large detachments of his stabling were unoccupied; a rich city man begged a friend to ask Lord Dudley if he would let them. By all means,' said he, when he knew who the applicant was; but as I don't live by letting stables, we must have an exorbitant rent from the banker.' He hated what he called the worst oligarchy, that of wealth.' He was opposed to all candle-end saving, false economy in national expenditure, and encouraged such purchases as that of the Elgin Marbles, although he professed himself unable to appreciate them. He never was vain of his affluence: he was utterly free from upstart purse-pride; but he knew the value of wealth-Where there are no overgrown proprietors,' he says, 'official people take the first rank in society, and then there is an end of liberty. In the great civilised states of modern Europe, freedom must be content to lean upon aristocracy as its only firm support' (xxii.).

*Poor Fitzgerald, who took himself, as he said of himself in the Morning Post, for Vates, in both senses or nonsenses of the word.'-BYRON.

The

The aristocracy of rank soon ceases to be respected (vilius alga) when it is separated from the aristocracy of wealth' (viii.).

His father had not been dead twelve hours before he made a strict settlement of his property on the title which he had inherited. In the same spirit he purchased an estate in Roxburghshire, in order, as he said, to place a something at least under the security of a Scotch entail.' His anxiety was for the future rather than for himself. He anticipated the revolutionary storm. His own personal increase or diminution of income neither gladdened nor depressed him. A friend remembers his once remarking that his mining income had fallen off one year 30,000l.; but,' he added, I am a moderate man, and don't feel it. Lambton, they tell me, has not bread.'

His adhesion to Canning at the lamentable split of April, 1827, was followed by his elevation to the earldom of Dudley. He was thus enabled to drop the Ward, which had been a constant theme of his merriment, mingled however with dislike. That may

be all very well for Lord E-,' he would say; he is a grandee of the first class, but my ancestor was Humble Ward the goldsmith.'

His notions on names are best explained by himself; he had done a friend the honour to be godfather to a child—and there was a difference of opinion whether it should be christened John or William, or John-William, or Dudley :

'About the name, do as they like best; I am John and William, the common property of all the world. Dudley, which more peculiarly belongs to me, is equally at their service. I cannot, however, help telling you of a prejudice I have, without by any means wishing it adopted. About names I am a Romanist, and think that Christian men ought to be called Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Philip, &c., after the blessed saints in the Calendar, and not after the family names of profane persons. However, if they fancy an unsanctified appellation, Dudley is not the worst, being, as I flatter myself, rather a pretty name, and having besides (what I consider to be an advantage) been familiar to English ears, as a Christian name, for nearly three centuries; during the power of the then house of Northumberland it was adopted by several families.'

It was of this female descent that he was proud, nor could any one offend him more than by directing to the Earl of Dudley and Ward. Without one particle of vulgar vanity, he was fully sensible of his position. He stole a courtesy from heaven, and, by rendering to all their due, secured for himself that respect which he tendered readily, but in a manner which showed that he was accustomed to and expected a similar return. He was entirely free from that patronising condescension, more humiliating than coldHe abhorred pride without dignity, vain pomp, parade,

ness.

ostentation,

ostentation, and pretension of all kind, and those consequential airs which result from ignorance of good society. He never spared 'overweening, exclusive, vulgar insolence,' whether in the high or low. He laughs at the stars of a German watering-place:

'We had but few English, amongst others the. Between ourselves, they made themselves prodigiously hated by the others for what is commonly called, "sporting fine." To be sure, the other two English families there were nothing distinguished, and my excellent friend Sir is as ludicrous a personage as vanity and self-importance can make a man. But then they were all perfectly harmless, perfectly respectable in all the essential points of character, and as good-natured and obliging as possible; and if Lady- were a Montmorency, a Guzman, a D'Aremberg, or a Howard, which she is a long way from being, she might have come into contact with them without damaging a single quarter in her escutcheon. However, she thought it right to cut them dead, and seemed surprised that I did not do the same thing; they, of course, detest her, and the Court laughed.'

Yes, indeed! how Courts must laugh! With what pleasing scorn must the porcelain principalities of earth look down upon this bustle and fidget of jealousy between slightly differing shades of crockery!

Again, he delighted in literary and scientific society-but he thoroughly understood and most carefully shunned and baffled the most contemptible of all beings, your literary and scientific tuft-hunters and trencher-pets, album-sonneteers, and steamengine gossips, and Radical toadies.

However simple and unpretending was his own manner and exterior, yet a deep though not babbling current of aristocratical notions ran silently underneath. In fact, his extreme modesty, as to himself as an individual, made him peculiarly alive, in his own case, to the advantages of birth and station-which he therefore was pained to see put into any uncalled-for danger of deterioration. He grieved like Shakspeare's Henry IV. when he beheld poor, base, mean attempts' accompanying greatness of blood. He regretted that George IV., when visiting Hanover and Ireland, should be so forgetful of what was due to his position, making himself stale and cheap to vulgar company :

'It will not, on the whole, redound much to his honour or advantage. His manners, no doubt, are, when he pleases, very graceful and captivating. No man knows better how to add to an obligation by the way of conferring it. But on the whole he wants dignity, not only in the

Cervantes, the Shakspeare of Spain, puts this sentiment into the mouth of Don Quixote, who, albeit deprived of the sovereignty of reason on one subject, was in others the model of a high-bred man of the world, and, in fact, the mouthpiece of the opinions of Cervantes, himself a soldier and a gentleman:-'Do not imagine that I consider as vulgar those only of the poor and humble classes; but all who are ignorant, even be they lords or princes, they must be classed under this denomination—vulgar.'

seclusion