generously paying his father's debts.* He was exceedingly fond of glory, and loved dearly the fame that should follow such great deeds as his; but he had no kind of envy, no jealousy of other men's greatness; and a better proof can hardly be given of his magnanimity than the extreme warmth of the praise which he lavished profusely on all the great commanders whom he employed. He earnestly pressed, but it is strange to say, vainly pressed, even their promotion to the peerage sixteen years before it took place, without ever harbouring a thought of the tendency which their elevation might have to eclipse his own fame in vulgar eyes.

Nothing could be more gentle and affectionate than his whole disposition; and during his latter years, next to his books, nothing so refreshed his mind as the intercourse with those friends in whose society and converse he delighted.

*The Corporation of Dublin unanimously voted him their freedom in token of the admiration which this conduct had excited.

LORD HOLLAND.

Ir is a very mournful reflection for me that, much as I might have expected the sacred duty to devolve upon me of paying a just tribute to Lord Wellesley's memory, I

should also be called to commemorate the excellence of one whom I might far less have looked to survive, and whose loss made all his friends feel that the value of their own lives was now greatly impaired. It may be doubted if any man in any age ever had so few enemies, so many attached friends, as Lord Holland; and no man certainly could better deserve the universal affection of which he was the object.

His succession to the peerage at a very early age, on his father's death, prevented him from ever sitting in the House of Commons, and thus passing through the best school of English statesmen. His own severe illness, while yet at Eton, gave his uncle, Mr. Fox, a double alarm; for he was not only on the point of losing a nephew whom he loved as if he had been his only child, but ran the imminent risk of being taken from the House of Commons in the zenith of his fame as a debater and a party chief. He was then in the North of Italy; and the messenger from Devonshire House, commissioned to summon him home on account of the King's illness, met him at Bologna. Mr. Fox had received intelligence of Lord Holland's dangerous illness; and the alarm occasioned by the appearance of the courier was speedily changed into despair by a few words which he dropped, intimating that "he must be dead by this time." Great was Mr. Fox's relief and joy, probably in more ways than one, upon finding that the King was the person alluded to. Many years after this period I saw his banker at Vicenza, who was acquainted with the circumstance of Mr. Fox's alarm; and I was much struck with the familiar notion of this great man's celebrity, which seemed to have reached that remote quarter, at a time when political intelligence was so much less diffused than it has been since the French Revolution. The banker mentioned having given professionally a very practical

proof of his respect for the name; he had cashed a bill for the expense of his journey home, though there was no letter of introduction presented; "but I knew him," said the Cambist," by the prints." The rapid journey home to join the fray then raging in the House of Commons laid the foundation of the liver complaint, which eighteen years later ended in dropsy, and terminated his life; but he was relieved on his arrival from all anxiety upon account of his nephew, whom he found perfectly restored to health.

Lord Holland went to Christ Church on leaving Eton; and passed his time more gaily than studiously, the companion of Mr. Canning, Lord Carlisle, and Lord Granville. But, like them, he laid both at school and college a broad foundation of classical learning, which through his after-life he never ceased successfully to cultivate.

Upon entering the House of Lords he found the prospects of the Whig party as gloomy as it was possible to contemplate. Before they had nearly recovered from the effects of the ill-starred coalition, their dissensions among themselves upon the great questions of the French Revolution and the war had split them in twain, leaving some of their most powerful families, as the houses of Cavendish, Bentinck, and Wentworth, and some of their most eminent leaders, as Burke, Windham, Loughborough, and North, to join the now resistless forces of Mr. Pitt. Their Parliamentary strength was thus reduced to a mere fraction of the already diminished numbers that had survived the defeat of 1784; and the alarm, not by any means unnatural or unfounded, which the progress of the French arms, and the excesses of the Revolution, had excited throughout the country seemed to marshal all the friends of our established institutions, whether in Church or in State, and even all men of property and all men of sound and moderate opinions, against those who were branded with the names of Rovolutionists, levellers, un-English, friends and disciples of the French. For the first time the Whig party, essentially aristocratic as it always had been in former ages, in some sort alien to all popular courses, and standing mainly upon patrician influence against both the court and the multitude, as it had proved itself in its very last struggle for power, had become mixed up with the very extremes of popular enthusiasm, extremes to which the people, even the middle orders, were very averse; and which were only favoured

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by two classes, alike void of influence in the practical affairs of state, the philosophic few and the mere vulgar. For the first time, they who had ever been reformers on the most restricted scale were fain to join the cry for unlimited reforms, both of Parliament and of all our institutions. The leaders might retain their ancient prejudices in favour of aristocracy and against reform, and might confine their Parliamentary efforts to exposing the misconduct of the war, endeavouring to restore peace, and resisting the measures of coercion adopted by Mr. Pitt unconstitutionally to protect the existing constitution. But the bulk of the party became more or less connected with the reformers, and even the few who in the House of Commons still adhered to the standard of Mr. Fox were for the most part imbued with the reform faith. The Whig party indeed was then wofully reduced in strength. Mr. Pitt could with certainty carry whatever measures he propounded; and at length, after wasting some years in fruitless attempts to resist his power, having been able to muster no more than 53 votes against suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, 38 for putting an end to the war, and 45 for censuring the illegal act of misapplying the money voted by Parliament, the Opposition, wearied of impotent efforts and impatient of unvaried defeat, retired from their attendance in Parliament, retaining the seats, and refusing to perform the duties of representatives. It was at this most inauspicious period in the whole Whig history, that Lord Holland entered the House of Lords, where there could hardly be said to remain even the name of an Opposition party. He joined himself, however, to the few supporters of his uncle's principles still to be found there lingering on the Opposition benches,-Lord Lauderdale, the Duke of Bedford, occasionally the first Lord Lansdowne, whose connexion with Lord Holland, and steady opposition to the war, had now wellnigh reconciled him with the party, although he always took a line more guided by general principles of policy, and more enlarged in its views, than suited the narrow-minded notions of factious men.

Lord Holland's course was now, as ever through his whole public life, one which did equal honour to his head and to his heart. The vigilant enemy of abuses; the staunch supporter of the constitution as established in 1688; the friend of peace abroad, and of liberty all over the world;

the champion, especially, of religious liberty and the sacred rights of conscience, and that upon sound principles of universal freedom, not from any tinge of fanaticism, from which no man, not even his illustrious kinsman, was more exempt; he soon obtained that respect in Parliament, and that general esteem among reflecting men in the country, which the mere exhibition of great talents can never command, and which is only to be earned by honest consistency in pursuing a course commendable for its wisdom, or by its sincerity extorting applause from those who disapprove it. During the period of above five and forty years that he continued before the eyes of his countrymen, sometimes filling high office, more frequently engaged in opposition to the Court and the Ministry of the day, it is certain that whensoever any occasion arose of peril to the great cause of toleration, the alarmed eye instinctively turned first of all to Lord Holland as the refuge of the persecuted; and as often as the constitution in any other respect was endangered, or any bad, exclusive, illiberal policy placed in jeopardy our character abroad and the interests of peace,* to him, among the foremost, did the supporters of a wise and catholic policy look for countenance and comfort in their efforts to arrest the course of evil.

To a higher praise still he was justly entitled-the praise of extraordinary disinterestedness in all questions of colonial policy. In right of Lady Holland, a great Jamaica heiress, he was the owner of extensive possessions cultivated by slave labour; but there was no more strenuous advocate of the abolition both of the slave-trade and slavery; and Lady Holland herself, the person more immediately interested in the continuance of those enormous abuses, had too much wisdom and too much virtue ever to interpose the least difference of opinion on this important subject.

Although he naturally felt towards his uncle all the warmth of filial affection, and looked up to him with the

*I may state what I firmly and with knowledge believe, that Lord Holland, in the lamentable defection from the cause of peace which was made by the Whig Government in 1840, was with the greatest difficulty prevented from resigning his office, and leaving the Ministry to prosecute, without the countenance of his high name, their disastrous course. Were I to add that his actual resignation was sent in to his colleagues, I think I should be guilty of no exaggeration. That he afterwards, during the short residue of his life, regretted not having persisted in this course, I also believe.