to exclude a respectable, wealthy, and ancient country-gentleman from the honours of an English barony to which he was really entitled? The crown officers were bound to fulfil a certain course of duty; so were the judges of the high tribunal before which the case was tried. And Sir Egerton ought, at least, to have the matter tried over again, before he dares to hazard one whisper of the injurious tenour thus shortly alluded to by us-once for all, and not, we must own, without some mixture of indignation in our pity. He now, we see, announces himself on his title-p -pages, and, we are told, signs his letters, as per legem terræ Lord Chandos of Sudeley.' Can this childish vaunt afford even a momentary satisfaction to a high mind?

With

The other great grievance is Sir Egerton's literary one. respect to it, we cannot do better than re-quote an emphatic sentence from Mr. Sharp's Letters:' namely, A want of harmony between the talents and the temperament is, wherever it is found, the fruitful source of faults and of sufferings. Perhaps few are less happy than those who are ambitious without industry --who pant for the prize, but will not run the race.' Sir Egerton has all his days been busy without industry-perpetually panting for the prize, but never sufficiently persevering to make out one real heat.

In vain would he console himself with such fond flattery as the following

⚫ Genuine poetry lies in the thought and sentiment, not in the dress; and these spring from the native powers of the head and heart, which no study or artifice can give. Memory, artifice, and industry may assist an author in making imitations, but they will want raciness and life. Lord Byron has made a great outcry against pretensions to sensibility; but no one had more intense sensibility than he had; and this outcry was itself an affectation. It is fear to go alone, and frankly to lay open one's own internal movements, which diverts genius from its course, and makes it produce spurious fruit. But I cannot think that any one can so deceive himself as to believe, when he is writing from the memory, that he is writing from the heart. My sensitiveness from childhood was the source of the most morbid sufferings, as well as of the most intense pleasures, &c. &c.'—vol. i.

p. 5.

Does Sir Egerton seriously believe that Lord Byron ever dreamt of disparaging sensibility? He attacks the professors of ultrasensibility, because he had observed mankind sharply, and seen that these were often in fact cold-hearted scoundrels; but the glorious gift of Heaven itself he partook as largely and reverenced as profoundly as any of his contemporaries. He, no doubt, despised those who set up for poets with no stock in trade. but sensibility; but this was simply because he himself happened

to

to be a great artist, as well as a man of delicate nervous organization; and he therefore very well knew that he owed to intense study of himself and of the world-to most indefatigable industry the means of stamping immortality on the delineations of mental emotion.

-

Sir Egerton would fain deceive himself—but he does not succeed even in that: by us, and by all who have observed his career attentively, it is considered as highly probable that, had he done justice to his own powers, had he been able to command his thirst for fame, and brave enough to make one really great effort, and await the result with manly calmness, instead of frittering away his strength in puny lucubrations, each forgotten next morning only to be followed by another equally ephemeral, he might have long ere now taken his place among the best of his age; but if a man, a man of leisure and fortune too, far removed from the necessity of writing for bread, will indulge himself in a fretful career of pettynesses, he must take the consequences. The men whose lot he would fain have partaken were cast in a far other mould than his : they did not confound real literary industry, the noble toil of energetic intellect, with the habit of covering every day a certain surface of paper-they never expected the rewards of first-rate authorship from broadsides and pamphlets, a few hasty novels, and a swarm of black-letter reprints.

But of all this, as we have already hinted, Sir Egerton himself, in his saner moods, appears to be completely conscious. He then feels, as we all see, that the temperament of genius has been his in an exquisite degree, but that his strength of mind and fixity of purpose have never been on the same scale either with that or with his ambition. It is on this point that we wish principally to arrest the attention of young literary enthusiasts. The delicate sensibilities of genius are precious gifts: nothing great can be done without them; but by their means alone nothing either great or good ever has been or ever will be effected in the world of letters. They are but the materials for laborious and patient art to work with; and he who cannot command them within his own bosom, will never command the thoughts and feelings of mankind. to such an extent as is required for the erection of an intellectual authority over a cultivated age. Sir Egerton's ambition in this way has evidently been set upon something rather more important than the Barony of Chandos.

Having missed the prize, he is now not seldom in the mood to disparage it; but who does not understand such passages as the following?

The wise plan would seem to me, at this too late period of my life, to be, in cases of the most humble competence, to keep aloof

from

from all the paths of human contest or rivalry, and to pass one's days in retirement, despising show, and vanity, and notice, and seek. ing to while away the time by any innocent and self-dependent amusement. We seek distinction by an inherent propensity; but it is of no worth if obtained. I regret that I ever had any ambition." -pp. 102-4.

The true subject of regret ought to be that he did not either bring up his mental habits to the pitch of his ambition, or lower his ambition to some point of easier attainment. He says elsewhere, however,―nay, it is but at the distance of a couple of

pages,

In the sphere of higher society-among those whose intellect must guide human affairs, there is a demand for the genius and talents which see far and wide,-into which individual interests, and the petty management which give selfish advantages at the expense of others, do not enter. There great mental gifts are properly appreciated, and make their way. Thus no man of genius, or superiority of mind, should ever place himself in a narrow neighbourhood.'-p. 94. And this comes from the same pen which can still pour out such eternal diatribes as the following:

I now sit at the window of my humble campagne at Geneva, catching a glimpse of the noble lake, and defy or forget a world which once troubled me, and whose spite and other evil passions I once was not strong enough to overcome. Now they pass by me unheeded; they rattle along the road, but do not disturb my calm; and I live in the company of departed poets, and sublime and tender moralists. Many of my feelings have been anticipated by Cowley in his admirable prose-essays, which are models of thought, sentiment, and language. Everything is at the mercy of mind: if we think rightly we are capable of enjoyment under almost any adversity or deprivation. Calumny and detraction may rage; but in retirement we hear it not. There is a noble stanza in Thomson's "Castle of Indolence,"

beginning

"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny !"'-pp. 105. We believe we have now quoted enough to let our readers into the secret of Sir Egerton's unfortunate state of mind. His burden is very like that of our old friend Timon of Athens

The learned pate

Ducks to the golden fool; all is oblique.'

We proceed to extract a few specimens of this strange narrative, not with any view of further criticising the author's mistakes about himself, but simply as illustrative of the unhappy consequences which attend an exquisite temperament unaccompanied by strength of mind and firmness of purpose. The mingled tone of self-satisfaction and self-reproach which runs through the whole book is painfully but most interestingly characteristic; but

in truth a great many of our extracts have been selected merely for the artless beauty of the language. Sir Egerton very seldom pursues one strain of thought or sentiment long enough to bring out the full impression at which he aims; but it is impossible not to be delighted with the felicitous gleams that every now and then escape him. Thus, nothing can be more exquisitely true and touching than the sketches he gives of himself in early boyhoodwhat would we not give for such a series of confessions from a Collins or a Chatterton, or any one whom all the world do agree in considering as an ill-used genius? At nine years of age he was sent to school at Maidstone :

'I was so timid on entering into school, and my spirits were so broken by separation from home, and the rudeness of my companions, that in my first schoolboy years I never enjoyed a moment of ease or cheerfulness. Many of those feelings, which I should now consider as necessarily associated to a poetical temperament, I then painfully concealed, lest they should subject me to ridicule; but I always entertained the resolution and the hope some day to break into notice.' -pp. 3-5.

In his Memoir of 1826, we find a passage on the same subject, which we wonder Sir Egerton has not preserved.

6

My unhappiness at this first severance from my home was extreme. I entirely lost my spirits, and became a prey to timidity, shyness, and reserve. Hitherto, for some years, existence had been delight. I had lived almost in the open air, coursing through grass, and flowers, and leaves, unruffled by rivals, unsubdued by petty tyrants: the day was now irksome to me; and I looked forward to the next with dread. All that belonged to my family, and the spot of my nativity and childhood, were constantly before my fancy, in shapes and colours which made them seem like the appendages of Paradise. When Christmas came, and I reached home, my delight was so convulsive, that for two days I was agitated by continued fits of laughter, frightful enough to alarm all my family. About the third day my spirits became calmer. As the holidays came to a close, and at each succeeding return, my suffering was extreme. I remained at Maidstone school four years; and scarcely think that I ever enjoyed an hour there. My only intervening pleasure was to be found in the days spent at Linton,'-(a friend's seat on the borders of Coxheath,)—of which every picture and every incident remains fresh upon my memory.'-Autobiographical Memoir. 1826.

We have said that Sir Egerton is quite incapable of narrating anything in a proper or logical order; but we are thankful that, about the middle of his first octavo, a casual mention of the Biographia Britannica' extracts from him another of these early reminiscences

The

The form is like Bayle's, but not the spirit. Scarce any article rises above mere compilation. It seems ungrateful to speak thus; for from this work I began at eight or nine years old to contract my passion for biography. I had the work constantly in my hands during the holidays, which I almost invariably spent at home. The volumes always lay in one of the windows of the common parlour at Wootton; and how often have 1 rejoiced when the rain and snow came, to keep me by the winter fireside, instead of mounting my pony, to follow all the morning my uncle's harriers! and when I was out, how I counted the hours till I could return to my beloved books! The moment dinner was over I drew my chair round to the fire, and one of these large volumes was opened upon my knees. I grew peevish if any one interrupted me; and was so totally absorbed in myself, that I was lost to all that was passing around me. At that time I was much more delighted with this work than with all the books of poetry that offered themselves to me.'-pp. 98, 99.

In another of these rambling chapters, he says,

* At an early age, Buchanan's Latin poetry was a great and intimate favourite with me, and I got Milton's juvenile poems almost by heart. I generally carried these little volumes (the Elzevir of Buchanan) in my pocket. I read them on stiles, on banks, and under hedges, when the season allowed, as well as by the winter fire, when the weather kept me in-doors. Collins also was one of the earliest objects of my enthusiastic admiration. From fourteen or fifteen I dreamed of authorship, and never afterwards gave up the ambition.' -p. 114.

Again, after some of his philosophical old man's preachments against worldly ambition, far down in the book, we read:

But I used to hear from my earliest infancy of the rise and grandeur of my ancestor, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and of my royal blood.* Then, again, I heard of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, who was my father's relation, and of whose education I have heard that my grandfather had the care. The portrait of Chancellor Egerton, in his official robes, hung by the bedside in which I was born, and seemed with his grave countenance to look solemnly upon me. The engraved portrait of the other chancellor always hung over the fireside of my uncle's justice-room. The Gibbon arms were there quartered with the Yorke saltier, and reminded me of the relationship, for I was always observant of heraldic symbols. I have no doubt that these things made an impression on my mind, which operated strongly on my future fate.'

No doubt of it: hence the excellent edition of Collins's Peerage -not forgetting the parenthetical section which it devotes to the

* Whether our author be or be not a legitimate descendant of the house whose titles he has assumed, there can be no question as to his truly illustrious maternal pedigree. The blood of almost every royal family in Europe mingled in the veins of the Bridgewater Egertons, of whom there is now no male survivor.

VOL. LI. NO. CII.

2 B

Chandos