Part 11

Literary history will remember Lord Holland, on account of his biography of Lope de Vega. I am reminded by this work of an anecdote of the noble lord, which does much more honor to his politeness than to his generosity. In 1832, a poor refugee Spaniard, whose only property in the world consisted of three unpublished manuscript comedies of the celebrated Castillian poet, determined to go to London for the purpose of selling them to the illustrious whig commentator, whom he thought would naturally give more for them than any other person. However, in the presence of so great a nobleman, the timid emigrant did not dare to speak of any price for them; he simply offered him his three valuable manuscripts. The visit and the present were very graciously received, and in exchange for the one and the other, the stranger received the next morning Lord Holland's card and a copy of the life of Lope de Vega. There are some occasions on which the English are magnificent; but their liberality never exercises itself to any great extent but in public. For example, they would glory in throwing a set of diamonds to an Italian _chanteur_ in a crowded theatre.

Clearing the table of the ushers, at one leap, we find ourselves in the very head quarters of the tory opposition. Here are the ministers, belonging to the House of Lords, of the late conservative administration. All of them are past middle age, and (like the present whig ministers) are between fifty and seventy, the greater part being over sixty.

Let us proceed at once to the generalissimo, seated in the centre, on the second bench, his arms folded over his breast. He is asleep, I suppose; he breathes with difficulty, his body being pressed in by the black coat closely buttoned; but they wake him; he takes off his hat hurriedly, and exposes his white hair cut close to his head. Observe that thick chin which protrudes itself and works without ceasing, those retreating lips, that great crooked nose, those brilliant and steady blue eyes, that face yellow and bronzed; is it not the very countenance of Punch, only not quite so rubicund? Does not that lank and bony body resemble some wooden automaton, some old jointed doll?

Who would not be seized with surprise at the sight of this man? Behold the man of the most extraordinary good fortune of the age! Behold the man who conquered Napoleon, and who has lived twenty years on his laurels! It is not only in war that he has succeeded; peace has not been less profitable to him; he has ruled in the council as in the camp; his caprice has, for a long time, governed an intelligent and free people. He is the king of the last aristocracy in the world. Happy man! what honors has he failed to obtain that he ever desired to possess? He finds himself suddenly a learned man, without having ever studied any thing. Law and theology have decreed him their honors—the universities have made him their chancellor. Even more, the exclusive circles of the West End themselves, have recognized his supremacy. He has seen generations of dandies decay and fall every autumn, while he, their patriarch, remains as firm as ever. The inconstant winds of fashion have not torn a single leaf from his crown; he has continued in fashion for the quarter of a century. If you follow him this evening to some _rout_ in Grosvenor Square, you will see him throned on a couch. Around him a swarm of belles and grandams flutter, each one endeavoring to catch a word, or a smile, or a look from the hero. You will see, (for the hero is deaf, and there is no familiarity which is not permitted to him,) you will see the most favored among them in his arms, his black wrinkled hands resting on their white shoulders. Happy man! It is true that you may read on the buckle of the garter that surrounds the leg of the Septuagenarian, in letters of diamond—“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the motto of his order. Happy man! and by what mysterious power have you been thus enabled to succeed every where and with all persons? Oh! I know not! Perhaps to the small share of patient prudence and of inert common sense, that a narrow ball-proof forehead may contain, your success may be due. Perhaps to the beneficent rays and the partiality of that capricious star which so mysteriously lights the way of the predestined!

But look—who speaks—it is the Duke of Wellington! What labor! he tosses about his head! he grasps with his withered fingers the back of the bench that is before him! he seems as if he would drag from every place around him ideas which he cannot otherwise possess himself of. At last he draws from his brain some fragments of incoherent phrases and unconnected reasoning. All this, good and bad, ends in a sort of speech not very unreasonable; he enables you to guess for yourself what he wished to say, though he has not himself said it. He is an orator and a statesman, as he is a great coxcomb and a great general,—by destiny.

The tories of the House would be ungrateful if they forgot that it is the Duke of Wellington alone who has for a long time preserved them, by the vigorous and almost military discipline by which he has regulated their intemperate fury. He cannot be disobeyed with impunity. In the beginning of this very session Lord Londonderry was severely reprimanded for having engaged in a skirmish which the general had not authorized. At present, however, the evil spirits of the party seem to grow weary of the wise moderation of their chief. At least, if he does not quickly reduce them to obedience, they will, in spite of him, engage in a conflict with the people. But let his grace beware; should his soldiers induce him even to head his forces in this unequal combat, he will not find the same good luck that attended him at Waterloo.

An expression of silly and impotent ferocity characterizes the face on the left of the Duke of Wellington; not a hair upon his head, but on each side enormous whiskers perfectly white. One would say it was some {640} old Turk of the carnival or the theatre, who had lost his turban; but you should see this grotesque creature standing erect. It is so badly placed on its long legs, as to be unable to move without stumbling. You might upset it by your breath. Very constant in its attendance at the House, it is always busy when there. You are incessantly annoyed by the squeaking, scolding voice that proceeds from this great body: not that he often speaks, but excels all others in his applauses of tory speeches. He is the counterpart of Lord Holland, and it is his duty to counteract the ‘hears’ and ‘hurrahs’ of the latter. You would not have supposed that this was a very illustrious personage—illustrious at least by birth, as Lord Brougham once very irreverently remarked: nevertheless, it is a Royal Highness—it is the eldest brother of the king who plays the part of an impudent applauder of the incendiary speeches of an unpopular aristocracy. It is a prince of the blood who degrades his rank in this impotent farce. Truly, this Duke of Cumberland is badly advised; his military glory does not entitle him to play the tricks of a bully! and as his conscience must often recall to his memory certain private and public peccadilloes, he would be wise not to remind the world of them quite so often by his bravadoes. The public have not forgotten that strong suspicions of violent murder, of the basest seduction, and of incest, have stained an existence, which nothing but its adventitious rank has, perhaps, saved from the vengeance of the law. The Grand Master of the Orange Lodges is also sufficiently well known in Ireland. There is but little chance that he will ever have occasion to assert his rights to the throne. But would it not be wise to anticipate the possibility? In these times of popular sovereignty legitimacy does not always ensure a crown.

That fat Lord, with his chin graciously reposing on his well gloved hand, and a _bouquet_ of red pinks in his button hole, is the father of Viscount Castlereagh, and was in his day a distinguished dandy. He retains all the elegance that is compatible with a large belly and sixty years. You can still admire his form in spite of his fatness, which threatens to burst at every point through his riding coat. The good taste which distinguishes his toilette, and contends even against the advances of old age, does not unfortunately characterize the legislative conduct of Lord Londonderry. He is the most indiscreet speaker in this House, in which all extravagance or violence is rare. The habit of interrogating ministers, and especially on all matters connected with Spain, in which country he formerly served as a colonel of huzzars, is almost a disease with him. Good a tory as he is, he has too much zeal; and I am entirely of the opinion of M. de Talleyrand, that nothing can be more unfortunate than too much of that quality. This rashness of the old huzzar brings down upon him, now and then, severe rebuffs from the generalissimo. O'Connell has perfectly described the old marquis, when he called him half-maniac—half-idiot. He is not a bad man; but nature has rather liberally endowed him with that sort of broken eloquence which supplies the want both of language and thought, by the profusion and vehemence of gesture. He is always too much pleased to display his cambric handkerchief in public. In my opinion, the whigs would have gained as much as the tories, by suffering him to have departed on his embassy to St. Petersburg.

We must pass by Lord Aberdeen, Lord Wharncliffe and Lord Ellenborough, whom you see seated around the Duke of Wellington; they are his principal aids-de-camp, and were formerly ministers with him. They are prudent and cunning tories, if not moderate ones, and express themselves well; but we have not room to give full length portraits of them. An epic catalogue does not describe every soldier of the two armies, not even every officer; and our article is more modest than an Iliad. For the best reasons then, we must content ourselves with pointing out with the finger the chief heads of our assembly.

To complete the review, we must finish our tour of the Chamber, with the ranges of benches to our left. Do you observe up there on the third row of benches, with its back against the wall, that figure of a monkey dressed in a light colored wig, with its mouth awry, and looking as if it was employed in cracking nuts? Far as this noble Lord is seated from the head quarters of the tories, he is nevertheless one of their most important and redoubtable captains. He has been twice Lord High Chancellor, and held that office in the late cabinet of Sir Robert Peel; this person is Lord Lyndhurst. Like Lord Brougham, he passed from the bar, through the House of Commons, to the woolsack. His extreme ugliness has nothing about it that can be considered vulgar; on the contrary, he is the only lawyer I have ever seen who had the air of a man of the world, and the polished manner of one who had been a courtier. He is more than a lawyer; he is a most finished orator, always clear, pithy, skilful, well-disciplined, and never tedious, but concise and agreeable. His voice is full, grave, and generally calm, but always capable of raising itself to the occasion; he only grows warm when some personal but secret vexation disturbs him. He is not troubled with a conscience; the privilege of dispensing with which, he retains as a lawyer, though he has in other respects managed to throw off the peculiarities of his profession. Formerly he was an ultra whig. At heart he is still only an advocate, though interested with the aristocracy, and affecting their polished good breeding. He is a tory just now, because toryism has paid him liberally for his pleadings. To-day, if the reformers could offer him higher distinctions, he would discover, I am afraid, in his bag, an abundance of arguments for reform.

Before turning the corner of the extreme left, let us pause a moment to observe three personages, who centre in themselves all the ultra toryism of the House. They are seated by the side of each other, at the end of the last bench on this side.

The first, with a long, rough body, with a white cravat, dressed in tawdry clothes, coarsely built, and looking like a clown, is the Duke of Newcastle. Observe that dull, sottish eye—those long, erect ears. See with what interest he listens! what attentive stupidity! Nevertheless, you may rest assured that he does not understand a word of what he hears. The words of a speaker have to knock a long while at the door of his dull brain; he never fully comprehends an idea but after a week's mature deliberation. Generally, at the end of a session, he begins to understand the speech of the king, pronounced at its opening. A sort of brutal and furious hatred against every thing that he conceives to savor of reform, serves him in lieu of any other {641} understanding. The rough lessons which the indignation of the people have beaten into him, have not been able to teach any prudence to his blind instincts. All his recriminations are impressed with the dullness of his slow mind. The peerage might be killed and buried this winter—it would not be sooner than the next spring that his Lordship would order his horses, and drive to the House of Lords to argue against Catholic emancipation.

The other two persons, are those of two noblemen in great credit with the church, even more of fanatics than tories. Neither of them is deficient in a certain oratorical fury, which, however, savors much more of the pulpit than the Parliament.

In the first place, that fanatical looking figure which is watching you with a fiery black eye, playing with the ruffles of his shirt, with the knobs of his umbrella, is Lord Winchelsea; an honest man, probably, and a furious, but sincere protestant. There is an appearance of conviction in the intemperate homilies that he improvises for the House of Lords, or the columns of the Standard, which in some measure palliates their haughty intolerance. This noble zealot, even while he is preaching up the persecution of popery, persuades himself, I am confident, that his own apostleship will secure him martyrdom.

As to that other personage—that huge and deformed colossus, whom you would take for a chosen _cuirassier_ discharged from service in consequence of excessive fatness—though his protestant mysticism may be of rather larger calibre, I should be inclined to put less faith in his relics. This Lord Roden—for it is Lord Roden—was in his youth a miscreant, who acknowledged neither God nor Devil, and worshipped only his dinners and his debaucheries. But in the middle of one of those nights of excess, he had a vision somewhat like that which cried out to Swedenbourg—_You eat too much._ From that moment, submissive to supreme advice, the Earl of Roden reformed his diet and his irregular habits, and he has become by degrees, the evangelical and political preacher that he is at the present time. In other respects this conversion has in no degree diminished his _embonpoint_; and his new piety does not prevent his being a most furious Orangist, ever ready, if permitted, to sacrifice to his monarch a magnificent hetacomb of Irish Catholics.

Let us, for the present, cross the chamber, in giving a _coup d'œil_ to the benches ranged before the bar, and facing the throne. These are called the _independent_ benches. The majority of the peers whom you observe seated there have been ministers. The greatest, both in personal appearance and public fame, is Lord Grey. Observe his tall person, how thin, frail, and bent it seems! After his seventieth year he was unable to give himself up any longer to public affairs; he wanted physical strength to continue the arduous labor of reform. He himself placed the load on shoulders which he had accustomed to bear it; and finally resigned both power and the active part he formerly took in parliamentary discussion. Let justice be rendered to him while still living; he has been a bold and loyal statesman; as soon as he found the helm entrusted to his hands, he steered the ship of state on principles that he had for thirty years recommended. He has not proved a miserable traitor to his promises and his past history, as the perjured ministers of revolutionary origin in France, the worthless product of that gloriously useless revolution of July. He is the first whig who ever dared to carry into practice his own principles. Assuredly, it required something more than ordinary determination to open to reform that wide gate, which he knew could never again be closed.

In addition to this, he was no common speaker. The impression of his dignified, convincing and penetrating oratory, is still deeply impressed on the recollection of those who were accustomed to hear him; the air and manner of a great nobleman, which always distinguished him, gave additional force to his authority. The noble affability of his manners would remind you of the old Duke of Montmorency-Laval. There is this difference between them, that Lord Grey did not succeed in forming and supporting his ministry alone by the influence of his fine manners, as the _ci-devant_ plenipotentiary of Charles X at Vienna, did in respect to his embassies.

The other nobleman of coarse appearance, still fresh and blonde, is the Earl of Ripon, politically better known by his second title of Viscount Goderich. He also was raised for a moment to the top of the ministerial ladder; but it does not appear that he has made up his mind to remain in private life, into which situation his incapacity made him so soon fall back. However, if he aspires to reascend, he has not taken the right road to accomplish his designs; it is no longer the period when one may balance between two opinions, or feed on two political parties. It would be a double mistake in him to persist in his attempts to reseize the reins of supreme authority. The confusion of his reasoning as well as of his ideas, when he attempts to speak, proves very clearly that he does not possess the clear and firm head necessary to manage the furious horses of the chariot of state.

The Duke of Richmond has never raised himself to the same sublime elevation; he is one of those poor nobles whose liberalism must be maintained by high and lucrative employments. He is one of those aristocratic worthies, always ready for any sort of military or civil work, and all sort of salaries. Lieutenant General and _aid-de-camp_ of the king, his grace has not hesitated to stoop to manage the mails, and to become a member of a whig cabinet. At the present moment, he has the bearing of one who flatters himself with the chimerical hope of a _juste-milieu_ administration, of which he would be a member. Louis XVIII would have placed him in his upper house. The noble duke, remarkable for a false air of Parisian elegance, which distinguishes his carriage from that of our great men, usually so full of stiffness and formality; yet I do not think that any of the modern great men of France have ever, as the Duke of Richmond often does, crossed their legs and raised their feet higher than the level of their heads, in full session, for the purpose of better viewing themselves in their polished boots.

Excepting the Duke of Wellington, we have not yet met a single nobleman who can call himself truly fashionable. Ah! but see here is Lord Alvanley. Yes, this little man, erect, bloated, swollen, breathless, careless, ill-dressed, with nothing _recherché_ about him but his yellow gloves, and looking as if he had just come from a debauch to which he was anxious to return, is {642} one of the chief representatives of modern fashion in the House of Lords. Formerly he was a whig; now he is a tory, or rather he is a _bon convive_, and belongs to the party which gives the best dinners and suppers. As the tories are distinguished for their sumptuous entertainments—therefore he is a tory. He ought not to have waited until he was ruined to have become a conservative. No matter! having eaten up his own property, he now helps others to do the same thing; he pays with his company and his gaiety. He has, in fact, a rich vein of humor; one might make a large volume of his witticisms. He is always sober at the House. It was his evil genius which inspired him on one occasion to grapple with O'Connell; the contest was unequal; the agitator wields the most deadly _repartee_. Fashionable and witty as Lord Alvanley is, he will nevertheless retain, during his life, graved on his forehead, the title of _bloated buffoon_, inflicted on him by the rude adversary whom he so imprudently attacked.

This young man of a handsome form, gracious in his appearance, and of striking mien, going out of the House, is the Earl of Errol. He votes with the ministry, although he is almost a member of the royal family. He is, in fact, a son-in-law, _sous-officiel_, of William IV, having married one of the illegitimate daughters of his Majesty. I should be glad to show you his brother-in-law, the Earl of Munster, the illegitimate issue of the same illustrious parent; but he rarely attends the sittings of Parliament. High and profitable sinecures have been showered upon these noble Earls. You see that in this age of constitutional governments, calling themselves moral and economical, sovereigns still shower, after the manner of Louis XIV, wealth and honors on their bastards.

You would hardly ask the name of that old man, so withered by age, whose slender legs are pushed into those old fashioned boots, with his twisted queue leaping about on the shining and powdered collar of an old blue frock. You would say it was some old French emigrant, forgotten in 1814 by the Restoration, and left on this side of the water. Observe how he moves to and fro; it is his constant motion. The eighty years of the Earl of Westmoreland do not prevent his being the most stirring and active tory in the House. He has been a member of the cabinet; and occasionally, at distinct intervals, he will still raise his old voice in defence of his old cause. Immediately on the adjournment of the House, you may see him mount an old horse, as lank as himself, and gallop off. It is perhaps a mere fancy, but it seems to me that on the day the old Earl and his horse fail to return, toryism will be no more. In spite of myself I am accustomed to embody in this old man, all that remains of energy and strength in that dying party. He looks like the last living and moving form in the midst of the inanimate skeletons of this aristocracy, so fast crumbling into dust.