CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.

NEW SERIES.-No. 2.

SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, BART, M.P.

THE wise reflection is handed down to us from Pythagoras to the effect that it is grievously difficult to walk in many ways of life at once. It is probable, indeed, that if Pygmalion, the passionate sculptor, could have been snatched from his glowing creation and set to work for his daily bread as a representative of imported labour at the London Law Courts, he would have expressed himself still more strongly than Pythagoras. It may be doubted whether Galatea would have emerged from the marble as divinely as the story tells of, if her lover's hands had been busy all day in pulling down Temple Bar. There is an oldstanding consciousness that the artist, the poet, the idealist, the philosopher, the divine, if he would be whole-souled in his own sphere, must keep himself uncontaminated by lower work. And no doubt with those beings of rare and delicate organisation who have conveyed to the world its loftiest strains of music, its most transcendental pictures, its most exquisite poems, its most subtle observations, there is often a helplessness with regard to the more material of the needs of life. And this helplessness will be more or less felt according to the degree of the ideal element, whether the devotion take a scientific or an artistic direction. But while Shakespeare, who produced more seerlike utterances than many a minor prophet, could attend to his stage business, and gather a little fortune, it cannot be affirmed absolutely that there is incompatibility between the ideal and the real.

The notion that art-life cannot co-exist with the earning of a livelihood by trade is probably drawn from feudal times, when poetry and science lived only in the shadow and patronage of the great. Hucksters, on the other hand, have an evil repute due to their own untruth; and the Hebrews, the recognised dealers in money, no doubt intensified the old feeling against bargaining. In pre-Hebrew times we find little trace of contempt for the not only innocent, but necessary operations of distribution and exchange. In ancient Egypt the priests performed

the duties of the Civil Service, and administered the revenues so well that, as some say, the Pyramids were built to absorb the surplus 1 wealth.

It was but prejudice, then, that made Wilson Croker condemn Samuel Rogers as one who wrote "very well for a banker." Though Rogers might be thought to be reverting to the banker's function when he put poor Ginevra into the chest and left her there by way of personal security for his own poetic fame. The truth is this: that a man of little capacity who may be born to a trade will be absorbed by it and do nothing else; the man of real ability and power will do what business he may find he requires to maintain himself according to his ideas, and will have plenty of time and energy left for taking up any other pursuit, and following it, not as a mere amateur, but as a scientific student.

It is possible that Sir John Lubbock would be as little able to write "The Sensitive Plant" as Shelley would have proved capable of directing a great London bank; but while the poet saw by a flash of intuition the ways of the lovely flower and the loathly weed, the banker has been able to throw the light of scientific investigation upon the growth of both, and the distinction between them.

Sir John Lubbock has been fortunate in his immediate ancestors. His grandfather established a very pleasant heredity of land by purchasing the High Elms estate in Kent, where the naturalist may find occupation for his eyes in investigating near fifteen hundred acres full of various life. From his great granduncle came the title, while his father left him an intellectual heredity by being himself the author of a number of most recondite works.

With these advantages it may be thought that if it were not for his chosen pursuits and intellectual interests, Sir John Lubbock might have led the easy life of a country gentleman, and that, therefore, the maxim as to the difficulty of following different paths in life at the same time would not apply to him. For with the modern division of labour, the practical function of the monetary head of a wellordered banking establishment might be made very nominal, and his actual employment of time in Lombard Street might be limited to a few concentrated moments now and then. But facts as they took place are opposed to such a theory in the present case. The boy was educated first at a private school and afterwards at Eton; but instead of being able to continue his classical studies at the University in the usual way, he was removed from school before reaching the

age of fifteen.

Two of the partners in the banking firm were suddenly taken ill, and it became necessary that the boy should at once leap the gulf between Eton and Lombard Street. Perhaps the absence of a complete course at school and university has not injuriously affected him; it is said with some plausibility that if a boy is to become an original worker, his best chance of attaining that end lies in being kept out of any regular curriculum, which often supplies the mind with conv entionalities that destroy its primitive hunger, and tends to mould such as pass through the scholastic mill in a cultured but not an invariably striking pattern.

The practical work of the bank occupied the boy's daily attention, but in his leisure time he devoted many hours to the completion of his education, and at his pleasant home in Kent began those natural history pursuits with which his name is so distinctively associated.

Born in London, on the 30th April, 1834, in 1856 he married Miss Ellen Frances, daughter of the Rev. Peter Hordern, of Chorlton-cumHardy, Lancashire, by whom he has a flourishing family of both sons and daughters.

In 1865 his father died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. The class of works proceeding from the late Sir John William Lubbock will shew that he, too, was no amateur. In 1830 he published a treatise, "On Probability;" in the years immediately following appeared works, bearing his name, upon various astronomic subjects, the computation of eclipses, the determination of the distance of comets, the theory of the moon and planetary perturbation. His sense of order, which alone can have enabled his son to follow pursuits so multifarious as those which have engaged him, may be evidenced by a volume on the "Classification of Different Branches of Human Knowledge," published in 1838, and a work upon a system of clearing cheques for London bankers, published in 1860. Richard Lubbock, too, was a writer on chemical, botanic, and medical subjects, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and first half of this.

In 1865, Sir John Lubbock stood for West Kent as a Liberal, and was beaten. In 1868, he retired in favour of Mr. Lowe, after nomination for the representation of the University of London by a committee of men of the highest scientific eminence. After five years' patience, which included another unsuccessful attempt for West Kent, he was elected, in 1870, for the borough of Maidstone.

Sir John is not a voluminous writer on political topics, but he won attention not very long ago by an article (Nineteenth Century,