a sad and terrible experience, till the pendulum, it may be, has swung too far in the opposite direction, and we are now as much too lax as we were formerly too strict. Dr. Denman and his wife both held firmly to the belief that it was in their power, by constant and careful supervision, to make their son, as the Doctor expresses it in a letter hereafter to be quoted, one of the wisest and best men that "ever lived; " and the degree of success that attended their strenuous endeavors may no doubt in some measure seem to justify the system they pursued.1 The boy grew up deeply attached to both his parents: his love and dutiful regard for his mother more especially seemed throughout life to grow with his growth and strengthen with his strength. His second daughter, the Hon. Mrs. Hodgson, in some notes kindly supplied by her for the purposes of this memoir, relates as an instance of this pious regard, a promise which he made to this beloved parent in his early boyhood, to read daily a chapter in the Bible, and which he never failed inviolably to observe throughout all the busiest periods of his after-life. "No one," adds Mrs. Hodgson, "ever had a more intimate knowledge of the Bible, or ever acted more thoroughly on Christian principles, in all the relations of life, than my dear father, though his horror of hypocrisy and cant made him very reserved in speaking of such subjects one of his favorite texts was Overcome evil with good.' 2 Dr. Denman's attachment to the child was not inferior to the mother's. He was never tired of devising schemes for his mental or physical improvement, and was never happier that when he could take the little fellow with him on his occasional professional excursions into the country. The following passages are from a chance-preserved letter written by the Doctor to his wife while on one 1 Lord Denman himself always deprecated an over-anxious watchfulness in the training of children, and was never fussy or fidgety with his own. 2 This was the text he chose for the first sermon preached by his youngest son, the Hon. and Rev. Louis Denman, who entirely confirms his sister's statement as to the deep and unaffected piety of their father. of these excursions when the child was in his eighth year. "Oxford: October 13, 1787. "My dear Love,-I am sitting by a good fire in the bed-room, and Thomas is in bed, though not yet asleep; and we both think that it would not be disagreeable to you to hear something of our transactions during the day. 66 'We arrived at Southall at the time mentioned in our first note, and proceeded with all the expedition which prudence would allow to Beaconsfield, where we got soon after four. While our veal cutlet was dressing we took a walk of a short mile to see Mr. Burke's house, which is the most elegant thing of the kind I ever saw. I had an idea of its being a farm, or something between a farm and gentleman's house, but I was quite mistaken. In the centre there are seven windows in a line, and from the two angles of the front, there are colonnades, consisting of seven or eight columns each, which lead to two considerable masses of building, which are, in proportion, as elegant as the centre. All the ground, and it seems a considerable domain, is well planted, and with much taste, and the whole you and the girls will have a good idea of, according to your old estimate, by my saying it would suit Sir Charles Grandison." It appears to have been partly from anxiety about the child's health, but still more, no doubt, from a desire of being able personally to watch over his physical and intellectual progress, that Dr. Denman removed him, when in his seventh year, from Mrs. Barbauld's at Palgrave to Dr. Thompson's at Kensington, at which latter place he remained till his tenth year, when he was sent to Eton.1 1 Dr. Thompson belonged more to the old school than Mrs. Barbauld, but he was a very respectable teacher. sent his son to Eton in September, D1788, and the boy remained there for nearly seven years, till the summer holidays of 1795-from his tenth to his seventeenth year. The records of his Eton career are very scanty; a few of his schoolboy letters have indeed been preserved by the pious care of his relatives-principally of his sister Mrs. Baillie, who was throughout life a constant and favorite correspondent-but they throw no light on his early pursuits or friendships, and, though creditable to his good sense and intelligence, are none of them of sufficient interest to justify transcription. He was frequently in the habit of passing part of his Eton vacations with Mr. Brodie and his young cousins at Winterslow, and on one of these occasions, when he was in his thirteenth year, we get a glimpse of him in a letter from one of his maternal aunts to her sister Mrs. Denman. "He pleases his uncle very much," she writes, "by going into the school-room and sitting down with his cousins to business. He is turning the Story of Sadak, the master of the horse, into Latin verse: it was quite his own suggestion, and my brother says he does it very well." Miss Brodie also mentions his love for music, and expresses some surprise at the extent of his accomplishments in singing. He has got together a choice collection of ballads," she says, "which he delights in singing for the amusement of his young cousins." taste for music, thus early developed, was a source of great enjoyment to Lord Denman throughout his life. The The boy's strong political opinions, which were even then of an ultra-Liberal cast, got him into many scrapes at Eton but he held to them, though then exceedingly unfashionable, with characteristic tenacity, and did manful battle against the young Pittites and anti-Jacobins of the school. His talent for speaking was also known at Eton, and, as Mrs. Hodgson records, one form of bullying adopted towards him when a fag was to insist on his unpremeditated exercise of this talent, under the most inconvenient circumstances; on one occasion he was roused from sleep and ordered instantly "to make a speech," and on his obstinate refusal to comply, was burned on the leg with a red-hot poker, the scar of which branding he carried with him to the grave. He was well grounded at Eton in Greek and Latin. scholarship, and one of his English verse translations from the Greek, executed while at school, "The Complaint of Danaë," was of sufficient merit to be afterwards inserted in the "Anthology." It is not known why Dr. Denman removed his son from Eton at an earlier age than usual-sixteen and a half; it may probably have been with a view to his health. A fever which had attacked him, in his sixteenth year, had a good deal weakened him, and the doctor may have wished to set him up by the bracing air of the North Wiltshire Downs. At any rate, Denman did not return to Eton after the summer vacation of 1795, but went instead to his uncle's at Winterslow. Mr. Brodie was himself an accomplished scholar, and the preparatory year that his nephew passed with him before going into residence at Cambridge no doubt tended to increase the accuracy and extent of his classical acquirements. At Winterslow, his great amusement was to make long rambles on foot among the breezy plains and uplands of North Wiltshire-frequently extending his excursions as far as Stonehenge, the solitary grandeur of which struck him profoundly, and set him at work among the antiquarians and early chroniclers, to solve, if possible, the mystery of its origin. The essay he wrote on this subject has been preserved, and is highly creditable to his early diligence and acuteness. At Winterslow also he indulged a good deal in the composition of English verse, which, as already stated, he had begun to cultivate with some success at Eton. Some of his translations from the classics are above the average, and some original lines on "Thorney Down" (a bold hill crowned with a clump of wood, which rises to a commanding eminence over Salisbury Plain), have a fair share of merit, though they naturally enough show strong traces of a mode in poetry which is less fashionable now than in the days when Darwin (of "the Botanic Garden") was regarded as a monarch of Parnassus.' From Winterslow, in October, 1796, being then well advanced in his eighteenth year, Denman went into residence at St. John's College, Cambridge, and he remained at the University rather more than three years-till February, 1800, when, soon after taking his degree, he left it for London. At Cambridge he devoted himself with considerable success both to scholarship and general literature. This is clear from the results, and, even in the absence of other proof, might be inferred from the nature of the friendships he formed or continued there. Merivale and Bland, the two principal writers, and the latter also the editor, of the "Greek Anthology; "Francis Hodgson 1 The lines to "Thorney Down," together with several translations and original pieces in verse, will be found in Appendix No. II. 2"The Anthology" has great merits: its full title is "Collections from the Greek Anthology, by the Rev. Robert Bland and others." John Herman Merivale, as the initial M. prefixed to his translations indicates, and as Bland candidly states in his preface (p. xlvi. Edition 1813), was the most copious, if not the most gifted, contributor. It is strange that this admirable collection, now very scarce, has not been reprinted. Byron, who, as his earlier letters show, was on intimate terms with Bland, Hodgson, Drury, and Merivale, was a great admirer of the "Anthology," and in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" thus apostrophises the contributors: And you associate bards who snatched to light And all their renovated fragrance flung To grace the beauties of your native tongue. 66 In one of his letters to Hodgson (Oct. 13, 1811), after his return from the East, he says, "I always bewailed the absence of the Anthology.' Of the young men whose names are mentioned in the text, John Herman Merivale (Commissioner of Bankrupts, 1832) Launcelot Shadwell (Vice-Chancellor of |