THE LETTERS OF THE FIRST LORD DUDLEY.* Mn. ROMILLY is

entitled to the gratitude of all lovers of good reading for having rescued from an old cupboard this collection of the first Lord Dudley's letters to Mrs. Dugald. Stewart, which were always believed to have been destroyed. For not only are they excellent in themselves, but they reveal a strange and curiously attractive figure, somewhat of a mystery to his generation, and almost forgotten nowadays save by diligent students of memoirs. In the interval between his schooldays and his going to Oxford he was sent to Edinburgh to the care of Dugald Stewart, then at the height of his fame as writer and Professor. The By S. H. Boartily. tars to " Ivy" from the Arai Earl of Dudley.

insanity settled down upon it, he kept up with her a constant and intimate correspondence. The lectures of Dugald Stewart were at the time a kind of training ground for statesmen,—Brougham, Palmerston, Lansdowne, Henry Erskine, and Lord John Russell being among his pupils ; for, whatever his limitations as a philosopher, he seems to have been a teacher with a singular power of inspiring his hearers.

After Oxford Dudley settled in London as a rich bachelor of cultivated tastes, knowing every one, going everywhere, the only man in England, according to Madame de Stael, who

understood the art of conversation. He sat in the House of Commons, at first as a strong Whig, ultimately as a.

eanningite, till his father died. In 1827 he became Foreign Secretary, but his official career was undistinguished, being remembered only for the reputation for finesse, which rose from his accidentally putting letters to the French and Russian Ambassadors into the wrong envelopes. With the coming of the Reform agitation he went out of office, and soon his health broke down, his mind weakened, and he dis- appeared from society. The letters in this volume deal only With the brighter part of his life, when be was still a brilliant and much observed figure, about whose future men speculated, but on whose ability all were agreed.

From the verdicts of his contemporaries, we know him to have been extremely accomplished, equally at his ease when capping Latin verses with Louis XVIII., or making epigrams at Metternich's table, which were repeated in every salon in Europe. We know him, too, to have been admired by a large and most varied circle of friends, and to have borne an unblemished character in an age when few escaped the breath of scandal. But these letters to Mrs. Stewart show him as something more,—a correspondent with a genius for enter- taining gossip and spirited sketches of men and matters, and with it all a delicate sentimentality which softens the glitter of his wit. The man who in a busy life could find time to write thus for the amusement of an old Scots lady must have had a true genius for friendship. He is perfectly candid to her, however reserved he may have been to the world, and we have a full record of his political and social prejudices. He can never have been a very enthusiastic Whig. He con- sistently opposed any extension of the franchise, and be shared with the Duke of Wellington the odium of an unpopular position. "A long continued and strongly expressed wish of the people," he wrote, "ought, no doubt, to be gratified ; but it is the part of a wise and strong Govern- ment to resist popular clamour, to choose the proper season for granting requests, and to wait till it has had time to distinguish between the real permanent will of the country and a mere transitory cry." He was furious with the Whig exultation at Pitt's death, though he hated Melville and others of Pitt's friends, and being thoroughly uncomfortable under the banner of Grey and Grenville, lost no time in changing it for that of Canning. His dislike of Americans has the true Tory ring, and he misses no chance of sneering at them,—" he is what the American savages would call an influential character." He shared, it is true, the current Whig admiration for Napoleon. When that great man was interned in Elba he travelled to Italy through France, and was struck with amazement at the energy and good sense of the Napoleonic government. It was he, too, who, when asked by Metternich his opinion of the French Emperor, answered finely : "Mon Prince, je ne anis pas militaire, seals il me actable gull a rendu la gloire passe° dontense, et la renommee future impossible." But that other mark of the good Whig, devotion to Holland House, he was sadly lacking in. He thought Lord Holland a comic figure, and he detested his wife "for the extreme badness of her heart." She "hates a Court where she is not presentable, and a town where she is only partially visited." The Hollands have had so much of their own way in literature that it is refreshing to have the other side of the picture.

Lord Dudley wrote at an epoch when English style was suffering from a flood of neologisms and semi-philosophic phrases. "Opposition is very strong," he writes, "but I am not sure (to use the modern dialect) that it contains in itself the principle of success." He did not greatly like the fashion, and his own style has something of the simplicity and vigour of the great letter-writers of the eighteenth century. He

mischief in them,—about Lord Grenville's manners, and Brougham's prowess in field sports, and the banalities of

Rogers. Here is an example. "Among the papers of Doctor Davies, the late Provost of Eton, have been found several of the best exercises of his favourite pupils—Lord Grenville, Lord Wellesley, and Canning. Lord Wellesley's verses are chiefly upon religion; Lord Grenville's upon love; and

Canning's favourite topic is the charms of retirement and the renunciation of ambitious pursuits." His comments are rarely

without vigour and point. "It is vastly unlucky that the axiom of political economists—viz. That demand is the mother of supply '—does not hold good with respect to a Parliamentary leader. A Select Committee should be appointed to inquire

into the reasons which prevent this valuable article from appearing on the market."—" The county gentlemen don't think much about the 'Edinburgh Review,' or if they do they believe it to be the production of some individual Scotch atheist, or Scotch clergyman, or both under one."—" I shall be glad of peace, and yet I own I have a pleasure in seeing this confounded people [the French] that have tormented all mankind ever since I can remember anything, and made us pay ten per cent, upon our incomes, to say nothing of other taxes, plundered and insulted by a parcel of square-faced barbarians from the Wolga." But he is at his best in his descriptions of his contemporaries ; for outside art, where he professed himself "descended in the female line from the Consul Mummius," there was scarcely a type of intel- lectual distinction with which he was not familiar. Of George III. he writes with some malice that he is "so old, has had such a large family, and has been such a regular attendant upon divine service that the greatest part of his subjects think there could be no evil so dreadful as that of shocking any one of his prejudices." He is not above scandal, for he has much to say of Lady Caroline Lamb and Mrs. Clarke, and a new piece of gossip about Brougham and Lady Rosslyn. Of Miss Berry, that talented lady, we are sorry to say he reports that "she has a laud, harsh voice, and is unacquainted with grammar." How far he was in spirit from the Whigs is shown by his judgment of Fox as "a very bad man," and his ever-recurring sneers at Whitbread. "The Brewer" is never out of his letters ; he calls him an " uncourtly tradesman," and admits reluctantly that he " stands firm upon a butt of his own Entire." Towards Madame de Stak.1, who was a devoted admirer of his, he is a little unfriendly. He wished to pair her off with Sir James Mackintosh to talk abstractions ; but perhaps to the finical Dudley the root of her offence was, as Miss Stewart reports, that she appeared" so detestably dirty." As to Mackintosh, he writes :—" If I were a king I should make an office for him in which it should be his duty to talk to me two or three hours

a day He should fill my head with all sorts of know-

ledge, but, out of the great love I should bear towards my subjects, I would resolve never to take his advice about

anything." Of Bentham he tells a good story, which contains an admirable parody of that sage in his more foolish moments. Macaulay, who appears at the end of the letters, did not please him,—"a very clever, very educated, and very

disagreeable man." Curiously enough, he is friendly to Perceval, whom few of the wits could endure, and he does justice to his almost forgotten talents and his singular urbanity of disposition. "If he had not been bred a lawyer he would probably have risen to the character of a great man." But on the whole Wellington is the figure who stands out most clearly in these pages. When Dudley first met him after Vimiera he was immensely attracted by him, and when he served in his Cabinet be came to admire still more the unique qualities of the man. There is a pleasing story of the Duke's methodical ways with which we may end this review :—

" The other morning I went to him early. He was employed in the drudgery of transcribing a monstrous long letter. . . . . It must have cost him near three hours. While he was finishing a sentence my eye was caught by a scrap of paper that lay open on the table before me, so that I had read it before there was time to think whether it was right to read it or no. It was from his house steward, with whom he communicates in writing, and was in these words : 'Will your grace be pleased to have some fresh tea ordered in, as we are now making use of the best canister?' Is not this characteristic ? Poor Canning ! They might have consumed all the Hyaon. Bouchong, and Pekoe in the house without his having the smallest suspicion of what was going on."