THE LATE DUKE OF BEDFORD.
TT is not yet two months—" two little months "—since the
late Duke of Bedford was laid with his fathers. The -circumstances of his death were singular and painful, and were made the subject of an inquiry by the Home Secretary at the time, in answer to questions asked in the House of Commons. The matter is now forgotten, and may therefore be passed over in silence. With this exception, his death can hardly be said to have attracted any attention. Nothing would have pleased him better than to have dropped off -quietly, and not to have been disturbed in his rest by the praise or censure of the world, to which he always turned rather a deaf ear. But those who knew and valued him do not like to allow so eminent a man, and so remarkable a 'character, to pass away almost unknown to the general public. And now that a few weeks have gone by, and they can think of him again as he was in life, without the associations of sad and disturbing accidents, it may seem not inappropriate to bring him for a few moments once more before the eyes of his -contemporaries.
He was one of the richest men in England, but he had also been one of the poorest. He would sometimes say that he had lived upon all incomes from £200 to £200,000 a year, -and that he could do so again. He always retained in his personal habits the simplicity of a poor man; wealth was rather an inconvenience to him. He would lament that his -days were passed in fulfilling• the duties of a land-agent. From a table made a few years ago, it appeared that since he -came into the possession of his landed estates, he had spent at sum of more than £2,000,000 in the improvement of them without materially increasing the rents. His acts of munifi- cence were princely. He built a great many churches and schools, certainly not from the motive which is said to have impelled great men of old to the performance of such works. He liked to do for others what they were unable to do for themselves ; to try, for example, experi- ments in agriculture which were beyond the means of ordinary persons. Yet he never valued himself on his good deeds, but would rather apologise for them. For he had a fixed opinion that it is far easier to do harm than to do good, and that doing good is usually more than counter- balanced by the attendant evil. It was a favourite expression with him,--" He did as little harm as he could help." Some- times, when he gave hundreds and thousands, he would assume -the character of the receiver rather than of the conferrer of a favour. He would write that he had " scraped together " the money, or would apologise for the neglect of a post in answering a request. He was often believed, and sometimes believed himself, to be a pessimist ; but his pessimism or cynicism was not inconsistent with the most careful fulfilment of his duties to others. In him these qualities never obscured the fine dis- crimination, the just allowance, the kindly sympathy, the intense compassion for lea arbiagrables, which in his best moments, when he was quite sure of being understood, he gave proof of in word and deed. The truth was that, having a strong perception of the ludicrous, and having seen a great deal of the world, he would indulge in cynical conversation. It was chiefly a mannerism with him, though there was also a certain mischievous element contained in it. There was no writer who pleased and interested him so much as
Swift. But he was one of the kindest of men. There was a vein of tenderness in him which he strove to hide. No one could hear him speak of his mother, a most accomplished lady, of whom he said, " She was never for an hour out of his mind," or about a friend of his whose marriage had been a ship- wreck, or about the children of one of his neighbours who had recently lost their mother, without being aware that he was deeply moved by human sorrow, and that treasures of affec- tion and human feeling were locked up in his bosom.
He was a delightful companion, one of the wittiest of men, and an excellent letter-writer. His conversation was full of light touches of satire which did nobody any harm. He was very much of the Grand Seigneur, having an old-fashioned politeness of his own not at all of the Lord Chesterfield sort ; for it was wholly natural and unstudied. It is not too much to say of him that he was one of the finest gentlemen in Europe. In his own house he took extraordinary care of his guests, and they went away delighted with him. He would make arrangements for them, fetch them from a distance, and send them away, and look up " Bradshaw" to find the train which would best take them to their destina- tion. He had a quick perception of character, and a great insight into things and persons. Though he never pursued any subject far, his opinion, when he gave it, was worth having. He was light in hand, and his facetious criticisms on the statesmen of the day, English and foreign, not at all sparing some of his own relatives, were highly entertaining. He was a constant reader, and an excellent French and German scholar ; he would often bring from his stores curious passages, Greek, Latin, and English, which he had picked up from out-of-the- way books. Also he had a curious habit of seasoning his letters and conversation with quotations from the Vulgate, which he would employ in a manner the most remote from the original meaning. At times there was no limit to the extravagance of his fun, though in his laughter there was a certain element akin to tears, as of one who always carried in his mind the sadness and mutability of human affairs. He had been brought up abroad, under a tutor whose name is well known to Oxford students, Trendelenbnrg, of whom he entertained a grateful recollection. Afterwards he went into the Guards ; and, having never been at the University, he would sometimes point the shafts of his ridicule at such places. The charm of his manner and conversation was due in a measure to his foreign education, but more to natural gifts and the influence of his mother.
He was very sensitive, and therefore reserved,—and there- fore almost necessarily misunderstood, for sensitiveness takes various disguises, and may sometimes say the very opposite of what the sensitive person means or feels. He seemed to live a little way outside the world rather than in it. He was greatly in need of sympathy, yet hardly capable of receiving it, This sensitiveness was probably the source of occasional inequalities in his behaviour. He was quite uninfluenced by public opinion or by conventionalities of any sort. He had not much interest in present politics ; as far as he had any, he was a Unionist and Conservative, but in religion and education a Liberal. In foreign affairs he was German, and not French. After the Battle of Sedan, he remarked that the " Welt-Geist" had gone right this time.
He never gained distinction because he never sought it. He would have been the first to ridicule the notion that he would be remembered a century hence. He was disinterested and unambitious, altogether free from the prejudices of rank or wealth, not without a considerable touch of genius in his nature. But he was a spectator, not an actor, on the theatre of the world. He would not have cared to be numbered among famous men. To be ignored was what he would have preferred. Yet there are a few persons for whom he did care, who will always remember him, as long as they live, to have been a highly accomplished man of a singular goodness and kindness of heart, and unlike anybody else whom they ever
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