a certain number of nods in a given time. His voice is weak; or if it does possess any power, he never calls his stentorian capabilities into effect. He speaks with some rapidity. Altogether, he appears to be one of those,-though, as already stated, he speaks with some frequency,—who either have no ambition to be considered orators, or who have sense enough to perceive that all their efforts to attain that distinction would be wholly fruitless.

Personally, there is nothing peculiar about the noble Marquis. He is of dark complexion, with hair of a brown colour; a small part of the crown of his head is bald. His features are somewhat strongly marked, but they do not express any decided quality of mind. His face has something of an angular conformation. One would take him to be at least fifty years of age, but he is only in his forty-fifth year.

119

EARL OF

CHAPTER VIII.

TORY PARTY-EARLS.

ELDON-EARL OF WICKLOW-EARL OF

LIMERICK-EARL OF WINCHELSEA-EARL RODEN -EARL OF ABERDEEN-EARL OF HADDINGTON -EARL OF HARROW BY-EARL OF ROSSLYNEARL OF MANSFIELD.

LORD ELDON, though his name has of late years been comparatively unheard of, filled for more than half a century too large a space in the public eye, and identified himself too much with the most important passing occurrences of that very eventful period, to be passed over in silence in a work of this kind. Few men have exerted a greater influence over the destinies of this country than did Lord Eldon during the first twenty-five or thirty years of the present century. After the death of Pitt he became the Coryphæus of Toryism. Though Lord Liverpool, from that time till 1826, filled the office of Prime Minister, there can be no question that Lord Eldon was looked on as the great cham

pion and supporter of that class of principles. That his talents were* of a very high order, no one but the most blinded partisan of opposite principles could ever have denied or doubted, and therefore his talents alone must always have made him a man of consideration with his party; but irrespective of mere talent, the circumstance of his occupying the highest judicial place in the land,—his being the Speaker of the Upper House of Parliament, and what, in common phraseology, is called the " Keeper of the King's conscience,”—was one which must have necessarily added greatly to any importance which mere talent could have given him. The zeal, too, which he invariably manifested for his principles and party, must have gone far to endear his name to the Tories. Toryism may be said to have been part and parcel of his existence: apart from it, he saw nothing in the world worth living for. His notion indeed was, that if in the struggle Toryism had to maintain during the whole of his career, but especially in the latter part of it, with Liberalism, or Revolution, as he always called the latter, it should be vanquished,—then things had come to such a pass as to call for the end of the world itself.

* In this, as in some other cases, I am obliged to speak in the past tense, because, though still alive physically, the noble Lord must be regarded as politically dead.

He could conceive of nothing more anomalous than Liberalism in the ascendant in the councils of the King. It is no exaggeration to say, that he would have considered physical calamities, whatever may have been their extent, evils of minor magnitude. The abstraction of Toryism was ever present to his mind: it had a sort of impersonation in his eye; and when he thought in private, or talked in public, of his political principles, he did both as if it had been of the dearest personal friend he had on earth. If you attacked Toryism, he felt precisely as if you had attacked himself. To have entertained any thing like cordial friendship for a person of opposite principles would have been utterly impossible for him: it was not in his nature. He hugged his principles to his bosom, with a sincerity and fulness of affection unsurpassed by that with which the most tender-hearted mother regards her children. Never was human being more devotedly attached to his creed than was Lord Eldon to Toryism. Nothing in the world, no temptation, however great, could ever have induced him to compromise it in the smallest iota. Had the alternative of an abandonment of his political principles, or martyrdom, no matter under what form, been on any occasion presented him, he would not have hesitated a moment

G

in making his choice: he would at once have avowed his preference for the latter.

The first severe shock which his feelings sustained on account of his principles, was when the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel openly avowed themselves proselytes to the expediency of conceding Catholic Emancipation. But in that case his spirits were partly sustained by the hope— a hope to which he fondly clung till the last moment -that the House of Lords would never accede to the second reading of a Bill having such an object in view. Even when disappointed here, he found some slight consolation from the possibility that the King might have his eyes opened to the peril to which, as he conceived, he would expose his person and his throne, should he assent to that measure, -and consequently that he would refuse his signature to it. When disappointed in this also, he was overwhelmed with grief. He felt as if some personal calamity of the first magnitude had overtaken him. This may be supposed by some, not sufficiently acquainted with the strength of Lord Eldon's political feelings and prejudices, to be a poetical licence of expression: it is not so. Those who know the noble Lord in private will bear their willing testimony to its truth. He mourned over the passing