ART. VIII.-LORD HOUGHTON,

Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton. By T. WEMYSS REID. Second Edition, 2 vols. (London, 1890.)

It is much to be regretted that Lord Houghton did not write his own biography. Those who know his delightful Monographs, Social and Personal, can form some idea of how he would have treated it. From his early years Milnes lived in society-not merely the society to which his birth naturally opened the door, but a varied society of his own creating. He had an insatiable curiosity. It is hardly too much to say that in his long life he was present at every ceremony of importance, from the Eglinton Tournament to the Ecumenical Council; he knew everybody that was worth knowing, both at home and abroad-not merely as chance acquaintances, but as friends with whom he maintained a correspondence. He was both a politician and a man of letters, a friend of the unwashed and the associate of princes. What a book might have been written by such a man on such a subject! But, alas! though he often spoke of writing his own life, he died before he had leisure even to begin it; and, instead, we have to content ourselves with Mr. Reid's volumes. They are good -unquestionably good; they abound with amusing stories and brilliant witticisms; but we confess that we laid them down with a sense of disappointment which it is hard to define. They are at once too long and too short. They are encumbered with numerous details with which we could well dispense, and they fail to set before us a consistent view of Lord Houghton's character. In a word, they lack charm, and they lack dramatic power. Perhaps it was beyond the writer's ability to draw so complex a character—a man of many moods, a creature of contradictions, a master of what not to do and not to say, as a lady of fashion told him to his face; perhaps Mr. Reid was overweighted by his wish to bring into prominence those solid qualities in his hero which society often failed to discover, while judging only 'the man of fashion, whose unconventional originality had so far impressed itself upon the popular mind that there was hardly any eccentricity too audacious to be attributed to him by those who knew him only by repute.' We wish, too, that Mr. Reid had been more careful in the technical part of his work. We have detected some clerical errors, and not a few mistakes; and

why, we may ask, are we not allowed dates at the top of the page, or a list of Lord Houghton's works at the end of the volume? Such a list, if carefully drawn up, would have been of itself a literary biography. The index, too, is the very worst that we ever had the misfortune to consult. Here, however, let us turn to the more agreeable task of praise. As a contribution to the literary and social history of the last half-century, Mr. Reid's book will well repay a careful study. In what we have to say we shall attempt to sketch Lord Houghton's life with the help of the materials that he has brought together, and a few personal recollections.

Richard Monckton Milnes was born in London, June 19, 1809. His father, Robert Pemberton Milnes, then a young man of twenty-five, and M.P. for the family borough of Pontefract, had just flashed into sudden celebrity in the House of Commons by a brilliant speech in favour of Mr. Canning, which saved the Portland Administration, and would have made Mr. Milnes's political fortune, had he been so minded. But when Mr. Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or as Secretary of War, he exclaimed, 'Oh, no: I will not accept either; with my temperament, I should be dead in a year.' That he had entered Parliament with high hopes, and confidence in his own powers to win distinction there, is plain from the well-known story (which his son evidently believed) that he laid a bet of 100/. that he would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in five years. But, when the time came, he declined to 'take occasion by the hand,' and sat down under the oaks of Fryston to spend the rest of his life, just half a century, in the placid uniformity of a country gentleman's existence. My own order,' he proudly noted in a journal printed for private circulation, 'is one which no sovereign but ours of England has, and which kings and princes have no conception of-its supporters, the horse and the fox; its crest, my own, the wheatsheaf; its motto, hospi tality.' His abandonment of public life, and his refusal to return to it in any form, even when, late in life, Lord Palmerston offered him a peerage, was an unsolved riddle to his contemporaries. Those who read these volumes will have but little difficulty in finding an answer to it. He was endowed with a proud independence of judgment which could never bind itself to any political party, and a critical fastidiousness which made him hesitate over every question presented to him. These two qualities of mind were conspicuous in his son, and barred to some extent his advancement, as they had barred

his father's. It must not, however, be imagined that he was an indolent man. Far from it. He was a daring rider to hounds, a scientific agriculturist, an active magistrate, a stimulator of the waning Toryism of Yorkshire by speeches which showed what the House of Commons had lost when he left it, and ardently curious about men of note and events of interest-another characteristic which descended to his son. Occasionally, too, he yielded to a love of excitement which Yorkshire could not gratify, and revisited London, to tempt that fickle goddess who presides over high play-a taste which cost him dear, for it compelled him to pass several years of his life in comparative obscurity abroad, while the rents in his fortune, due to his own and his brother's extravagance, were being slowly repaired. We have been told, by one who knew him late in life, that he was a singularly loveable person -the delight of children and young people-full of jokes, and fun, and persiflage. 'You could never be sure whether he spoke in jest or in earnest,' said our informant. Here again one of the most obvious characteristics of his son makes its appearance.

The boyhood of Richard Milnes may be passed over in a sentence. A serious illness when he was ten years old put an end to his father's intention of sending him to Harrow, and he was educated at home, or near it, till he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1827. He was entered as a fellow-commoner-a position well suited to the training he had received, for it gave him the society of men older than himself, while he was looking out for congenial friends among men of his own age. His college tutor was the celebrated Whewell, afterwards Master, and it was doubtless at his suggestion that he went to read classics with Thirlwall, then one of the resident Fellows. On one of his later visits to Cambridge Lord Houghton told an interesting story of their relations as pupil and instructor After a few days' trial Thirlwall said to him: You will never be a scholar. It is no use our reading classics together. Have you ever read the Bible?' 'Yes, I have read it, but not critically,' was the reply. Very well,' said Thirlwall, 'then let us begin with Genesis.' And so the rest of the term was spent in the study of the Old Testament. Mr. Reid is, no doubt, right in saying that, for the making of his mind,' Milnes was more deeply indebted to Thirlwall than to any other man. But Thirlwall was not merely the Gamaliel at whose feet Milnes was willing to sit; he became the chosen friend of his heart. Lord Houghton was once asked to name the most remarkable man whom he

had known in his long experience. Without a moment's hesitation he replied 'Thirlwall'; and the numerous letters which Mr. Reid has printed show that the friendship was equally strong on both sides.

The most picturesque of Roman historians said of one of his heroes that he was felix opportunitate mortis; it might be said of Milnes, with regard to Cambridge, that he was felix opportunitate vitæ. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a period in which so many men who afterwards made their mark in the world have been gathered together there; and, with a happy facility for discovering and attracting to himself whatever was eminent and worth knowing, it was not long before he became intimate with the best of those who there

'held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land.'

Nearly forty years afterwards, in 1866, on the occasion of the opening of the new rooms of the Union Society, he commemorated these friends of his early years in a speech of singular beauty and sincerity :—

'There was Tennyson, the Laureate, whose goodly bay-tree decorates our language and our land; Arthur, the younger Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, the poet and his friend passing, linked hand in hand, together down the slopes of fame. There was Trench, the present Archbishop of Dublin, and Alford, Dean of Canterbury, both profound Scriptural philologists who have not disdained the secular muse. There was Spedding, who has, by a philosophical affinity, devoted the whole of his valuable life to the rehabilitation of the character of Lord Bacon; and there was Merivale, who—I hope by some attraction of repulsion-has devoted so much learning to the vindication of the Cæsars. There were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest warKemble as interesting an individual as ever was pourtrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion. There was Venables, whose admirable writings, unfortunately anonymous, we are reading every day, without knowing to whom to attribute them; and there was Blakesley, the "Hertfordshire Incumbent" of the Times. There were sons of families which seemed to have an hereditary right to, a sort of habit of, academic distinction, like the Heaths and the Lushingtons. But I must check this throng of advancing memories, and I will pass from this point with the mention of two names which you would not let me omit-one of them, that of your Professor of Greek, whom it is the honour of Her Majesty's late Government to have made Master of Trinity; and the other, that of

your latest Professor, Mr. F. D. Maurice, in whom you will all soon recognize the true enthusiasm of humanity' (vol. ii. p. 161).

Mr. Reid tells us that Tennyson sought Milnes's acquaintance because he looks the best-tempered fellow I ever saw.' Hallam proclaimed him to be 'a kindhearted fellow, as well as a very clever one, but vain and paradoxical.' Milnes himself put Hallam at the head of those whom he knew. 'He is the only man of my standing,' he wrote, 'before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.'

It was hardly to be expected that Milnes, with his taste. for the general in literature rather than the particular, would achieve distinction in the Cambridge of 1830. We have seen how Thirlwall disposed of his classical aspirations, and in mathematics he fared no better. He read hard, and hoped for distinction in the college examination. But he had overtaxed his energies; his health gave way, and he was forced to give up work altogether for some days. Happily, the benefit a man derives from his three years at a university need not be measured by his honours, and we may be sure that the experience of men and books that Milnes gained there was of greater service to him than a high place in any Tripos. He roamed in all directions over the fields of knowledge; phrenology, anatomy, geology, political economy, metaphysics, by turns engaged his attention; he dabbled in periodical literature; he acted Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, and Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals; he made an excursion in a balloon with the celebrated aeronaut, Mr. Green; he wrote two prize-poems, Timbuctoo and Byzantium, but only to be beaten by Tennyson and Kinglake; he obtained a second prize for an English declamation, and a first prize for an English essay, On the Homeric Poems; he became a member of the club called 'The Apostles,' in which he maintained a kindly interest to the end of his life; and last, but by no means least, he was a constant speaker at the Union. In this capacity he evidently achieved distinction, for he was one of the three members selected as a deputation to Oxford 'to assert the right of Shelley to be considered a greater poet than Byron.' The other two were Hallam, and Sunderland, whom Milnes considered to be the greatest speaker he had ever heard the man with the strongest oratorical gift'; but Sir Francis Doyle has recorded that it was Milnes himself who made the most favourable impression at Oxford.

Mr. Milnes had always wished that his son should become distinguished in that House of Commons where he had himself made so brilliant a début. With this object in view, he