fine and very delightful when I see an Alp, but what I do think of is barrenness, and cretinism.'-Letter 38.

This was very much the feeling towards nature of the ancient world. They loved and admired lætas segetes,' and spoke with no symptoms of satisfaction of the horrida Sylvani dumeta. Virgil was commissioned to do the Æneid; his own heart led him to his lowing herds, his busy bees, orchards, and vineyards:

Ille ego qui quondam-at nunc horrentia Martis.

There was no romantic, no morbid school in those days; the 'classicist' Spaniards, Italians, and French, still speak of Les belles horreurs;' they can but faintly comprehend the joy in the wild and terrible which forms the chosen banquet of AngloSaxon romancists, the lovers of Shakspeare and Byron. This inode of treating the aesthetics of nature is indeed modified by national peculiarities. The English take the lead; their bodies are enured from youth to manly sports; they are animated to out-of-door adventures by their personal activity, by their practical intellectual virility, which abhors sentimentality, affectation, or effeminacy. The Germans, more visionary, more transcendental, give vent to their wildness in their air, the element which belongs to them, as the land does to France and the sea to England. All foreigners, and most literary men, have a tendency to prefer the gastronomy and saloons of crowded capitals to short commons and long chamois tracks. London or Paris are fitter scenes for display or acquisition. If I recollect aright, poor Madame de Staël says, that Germany looks gloomy after France, a natural opinion enough for an exiled lady of fashion, torn much against her will from the drawing-rooms of Paris.' (Letter 34.) Sir,' said Dr. Johnson, there is no prospect like Fleet-street' we ourselves plead guilty to a partiality for the shady side of Pallmall. The French woman, banished to the sweet-aired mountains and clear torrents of Switzerland, sighed for the noisome sewer streets of muddy Lutetia-Ah!' exclaimed she to Lord Byron, 'pour moi il n'y a pas de ruisseau qui vaille celui de la rue du Bac.'

One of the secrets of our individual worth (and individuals compose nations) is that we have nothing in common with any foreigners. They all to a certain degree are homogeneous, homœopathic; there is a point of unison between Russian and Gaul, Spaniard and Italian. We are heterogeneous and allopathic, and long may we so continue.

'I think,' says Lord D., 'you hardly do me justice when you intimate that I ever expressed a preference of foreign to English society and manners. Some foreign habits are I think more reasonable and convenient than our own—and to them I have given their due praise. Our unpunc

tuality,

tuality, for instance, which fritters away so large a part of the English day in wearisome waiting and uncertainty-and our national insanity (I cannot call it by any other term) as to late hours, are luckily peculiar to ourselves. Great evils they are, and, added to the east wind, sometimes give one reasonable ground of discontent; but as to the materials of which society is composed, I do not think I ever dreamt of preferring the most favoured part of the Continent to this country. I am so fixed in my opinion, not only of English virtue and merit, but of English agreeableness, that I never mean again to give myself the smallest trouble to see any foreigners whatever. If they come in my way I shall not avoid them, but I shall never seek them; and even in foreign countries I shall always look to my countrymen for comfort and entertainment. If I go to Nice, all I pray for is two or three English families with whom one may pass the evening, and two or three English gentlemen with whom one may join in a morning ride. If there are any foreigners at all in the society,' I should wish them to be Polish or German ladies; they are for the most part pleasing and accomplished. As to French impertinence and Italian ignorance, they are not to be endured in either sex.'-Letter 53.

'I beg to say, at the same time, that there is no truer Englishman than myself. I infinitely prefer our manners, society, constitution, character, and even cookery, to those of the rest of Europe. Everything is excellent except the climate.'- Letter 25.

These dismals about climate are constantly recurring. His deranged nervous system rendered him susceptible to atmospheric change and influence as is the quicksilver in the barometer. At that time, moreover, there was a fashion in the complaint. Your climate kills me,' said Childe Harold. No doubt the palpable damp blanket which sometimes is substituted in Albion for the star-bespangled curtain of the east, is not more exhilarating, poetical, or picturesque, than the cover which appertains to the murky cauldron of a London November; yet, on the whole, we agree not with the nonsense of Montesquieu, but with the sense of our merry Charles, who never said a foolish thing, that there are more days in our calumniated climate in which a man can be out and about than in any other quarter under the firmament. The proof of climate is in the fruit. England will show complexion and muscle, fair faces, and strong heads against the world.

'Here is, at last, some delicious weather. If this could last, it would be quite paradise-English comforts-English society-English interests -and an Italian sun. But we shall probably have a thunder-storm in a day or two, and then begin again upon a course of eleven months and three weeks fearfully bad weather.'-Letter 51.

The truth is, that his and our notions of spring and summer are fallacies of the fifth form. We are catechised in Theocritus, not by the Rev. Doctor (late Arctic captain) Scoresby. Whilst thick

skinned,

skinned, warm-blooded youngsters, we read of Pæstum double roses and Tempe's perennial suns: as we grow older and colder, instead of calculating longitudes, we fall foul of the blessed sun, and fancy that his immortal radiance is going out, like the rushlight of our brief day.

Lord Dudley, like many hypochondriacs, felt better abroad, and attributed too much to climate those good effects which often are produced by mere change of scene: for some walls get infected with grief. The motion, novelty of travel, the occupation, the escape from study, from business, lawyers, and post-offices, formed the joy of his soul, quite as much as fine weather; for when the excitement wore off, he languished under the sun of Naples. He found, like all who run beyond the seas, that climes, not minds, are changed-that those who travel by land cannot prevent black care from perching behind the easiest best-built britzcha. No man, though many are left behind by others, can leave himself behind.

Lord Dudley, with all his love and nice perception of ancient literature, lacked the æsthetic organ, as regards art, whether ancient or modern. He could not fully feel beauty of form in sculpture, nor of colour in painting:

'One half of Rome is to me invisible. With respect to the fine arts, I am in a state of total irrecoverable blindness. I have caused myself to be carried round to all the fine pictures and statues, and placed in the full blaze of their beauty, but scarce a ray has pierced the film that covers my eyes. Statues give me no pleasure, pictures very little; and when I am pleased it is uniformly in the wrong place, which is enough to discourage one from being pleased at all. In fact, I believe that if people in general were as honest as I am, it would be found that the works of the great masters are in reality much less admired than they are now supposed to be. Not that I am at all sceptical about their merit, but I believe that merit to be of a sort which it requires study, habit, and perhaps even some practical knowledge of the principles of the fine arts, to perceive and relish. You remember that Sir Joshua tells us that he was at first incapable of tasting all the excellence of Raphael and Michael Angelo. And if he, already no mean artist, was still uninitiated in some of the higher mysteries of his art, and obliged at first to take upon trust much of that which was afterwards made clear to him by further study and labour, what shall we say about the sincerity of those who, knowing so much less, pretend to feel so much more? For my part, I think very much as I should think of anybody who, being just able to pick out the meaning of a Latin sentence, should affect to admire the language and versification of the Georgics. So much by way of apology--"Pro me ipso et pro omni Mummiorum domo."—Lett 13.

Lord Dudley constantly compared himself to this unæsthetic consul, with more humour perhaps than justice. Because he did

not

not enter into art with the same intensity as into literature, he had conceived that he would not feel it all. If, however, he could not relish all the beauties-and the more the eye is taught the greater the enjoyment-he at least could perceive bad taste, and carefully condemn the exhibition. He criticises sham abbeys, such as Fonthill; sham ruins, which, like rouge, convict themselves of forgery, which lose all their salt in the absence of reality and the religio loci.' He shuddered at the Pavilion at Brighton. An Italian nobleman lives upon a plate of macaroni and a glass of sugar and water, that he may rear a marble palace that will last as long as the world, in a grave, dignified, if not perfectly pure architecture; and this gimcrack is the only monument of the greatest sovereign in Europe.' (Lett. 47.)

One word concerning his habit of talking to himself, which contributed not a little to extend his reputation for eccentricity: like many men of studious reflecting turn, he banqueted on his own ideas, and thought aloud. Words clearly were not given him to conceal what was going on within doors.** He told too often the whole truth, which, in polite society, has a tendency to be libellous. He was, in truth, more susceptible of bore than of fog: and fastidious refinement is too often the cause of more misery than enjoyment in this world, where perfection is the exception. Nothing,' observes Petrarch, is so tiresome as conversing with people who have not the same information as oneself.'Lord Dudley,' says Byron, was good when he liked.' He was never absent, never flagged, when pitted against opponents worthy of his steel, the fit audience of his wit and illustration. The anecdotes of his soliloquies are innumerable, -ab uno disce omnes.' He had a particular dislike to be asked to give any one a lift in his carriage, in which he thought over the occurrences of the day, more, perhaps, than half the members of the Royal College of Physicians. An ingenious tormentor of Brookes's begged him to give a cast to a homeward-bound, unconscious victim. It could not be refused. The unhappy pair set out in their chariot, and arrived silently near Mount-street, when Lord Dudley muttered audibly, What a bore! It would be civil to say something. Perhaps I had

* Talleyrand has the credit of being the first who defined speech as a faculty given to man for concealing his thoughts; but this sly recreant only twisted into an apophthegm what Young had thrown out [nearly a hundred years before] in very scorn, when speaking of courts

'Where Nature's end of language is declined,
And men talk only to conceal their mind.'

We owe this note to the author of a very elegant, learned, and instructive little volume lately published under the title of An Apology for Cathedral Service,' (London, Bohn, 1839.) See p. 121.

VOL. LXVII. NO. CXXXIII.

I

better

better ask him to dinner. I'll think about it.' His companion, a person of infinite fancy, and to whom Lord Dudley afterwards took a great liking, re-muttered, after a due pause, 'What a bore! Suppose he should ask me to dinner! what should

I do? I'll think about it.'

Lord Dudley was not the only pupil of Dugald Stewart who contracted this ventriloquism. The late Lord Ashburton, who, under an odd exterior and eccentric manner, contained a fund of humour and a chaos of ill-digested information, was still more absent. At a large dinner in Modern Athens, being placed high in honour, next to some first-rate lioness, during one of those conversational lulls which will creep over the grandest dinners, thus broke the awful silence- What, in the name of goodness, shall I to this horrid blue? I'll talk to her about the Edinsay burgh!"

We much doubt if Lord Dudley ever fell into any slip of this sort with a woman. His conduct to the fair sex was ever marked with uniform respect. It was the homage due to the sex, to woman for herself, not to beauty or talent, which attract or amuse the selfishness of man. How delicate is the sentiment expressed in his 23rd Letter:

'I can't imagine how people got into their heads that I was going to marry Lady M. B- Not but what she is a beautiful and accomplished girl, and would do me a great deal of honour by becoming my wife; only the fact ain't* so. I heard of it, however, from twenty people when I was last in England; and perhaps the story gained ground from my being at very little pains to contradict it. When a marriage is in question, any anxiety to have it contradicted looks like an incivility to the lady.'

A Frenchman (they have no word for our gentleman) would have boasted and blazoned : Il importait à mon amour propre qu'elle mourût de chagrin de ma perte!'

How elevated were Lord Dudley's views of the duties of husband to wife are detailed in his reflections on the painful trial of Queen Caroline. (Letter 43.) He was never married. The first decided symptom of his total aberration was his fancying he was married, or, which is a more common symptom, that he was about to be married. Though he never could make up his mind on that the most difficult of all subjects, he was always in a sort of love; and when he did set his Platonic affections on other men's wives, he never did so by halves. It was difficult

*Nothing surprised us so much in this book as the use of this and some other vile would-be colloquialisms in writing by such a purist as Lord Dudley. Absurd in any man's letters, they are peculiarly strange and offensive when mixed up with a rather stiff and formal style like his. to