Palladian Treasure
The Portrait of a Whig Peer. By Brian Connell.
(Deutsch, 30s.) . IN attics, stables and the cellars of aristocralle houses, the huge, hairy travelling trunks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are yielding up their treasures. The volume of material i5 vast. No class that has ever lived is so well docu- mented as the European aristocracy of the Iasi few centuries. It is doubtful, however, whelhet any cache—even Boswell's—is more voluminous than the papers of the second Viscount Painter; ston at Broadlands which Mr. Connell has sill and selected for the great joy and benefit scholar and general reader alike. This Palmerston—the Prime Minister's lath.° —was a collector by temperament. He loved 1n,e,i tures and made the fine collection which 01 graces Broadlands. But he loved factual dets,i as much as he loved his art. Everything that spent, everything that he saw, went down in accounts and journals. This passion for recordo, detail started in his earliest boyhood and endeu only with his death. He corresponded with thc assiduity, if not the wit, of a Horace WalPnle.; He left millions of words behind him, and III' life, both .spiritual and material, can be CO' structed in accurate detail. • Palmerston, unlike the other great self-Pre: servers of his time—Boswell and Walpole—Ws' a plain man, direct and straight in his make-nili confident, happy, well balanced, capable (,). steady concentration and possessing an insatiabw. appetite for fact. He saw life without distortion and 'his tranquil record is, in consequence' historically invaluable. Such a temperament can easily make for dullness, Mr. Connell has been wise to select; even though professional sch0lars,. will long for a, more detailed knowledge of Ills accounts and of those parts of his journals Wilic describe industrial processes and social change"; Palmerston's curiosity led him everYWh.er: —up the Alps, down the Rhine, over Vesuvint'' round Capri; he braved the highlands of Se° -4 land and the bogs of Ireland; he penetote. English country houses and French salonst, factories, here, there and everywhere, 3 tracted his sensible, level-headed attentins' Naturally he found the French Revolution Wei sistible, although he hated it, and he sr! months listening to the National Assembirs He collected men as avidly as he collected PIO:, —Voltaire, Rumford, Herschel, Banks, ReYNI'll Garrick, de Saussure, all pass through his P*7, And as if this were not enough, he married charming, intelligent women whose letters a. h tenderness and human warmth to a volume W„hica might, without them, have read too much 104 book by Mr. Gunther. The letters of the thu„ Viscount, the future Prime Minister, as a would alone have made this volume mernorablis Scholars will want more, no one else will. 11.1 a brilliant performance both by the Palmerstovo
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