At the siege of Gibraltar, where he took up arms against his own king and country, he is said to have gone alone one night to the very walls of the town, and challenged the outpost.  They asked him who he was, and when he replied, openly enough, ‘The Duke of Wharton,’ they actually allowed him to return without either firing on or capturing him.  The story seems somewhat apocryphal, but it is quite possible that the English soldiers may have refrained from violence to a well-known mad-cap nobleman of their own nation.

Philip, son of the Marquis of Wharton, at that time only a baron, was born in the last year but one of the seventeenth century, and came into the world endowed with every quality which might have made a great man, if he had only added wisdom to them.  His father wished to make him a brilliant statesman, and, to have a better chance of doing so, kept him at home, and had him educated under his own eye.  He seems to have easily and rapidly acquired a knowledge of classical languages; and his memory was so good that when a boy of thirteen he could repeat the greater part of the ‘AEneid’ and of Horace by heart.  His father’s keen perception did not allow him to stop at classics; and he wisely prepared him for the career to which he was destined by the study of history, ancient and modern, and of English literature, and by teaching him, even at that early age, the art of thinking and writing on any given subject, by proposing themes for essays.  There is certainly no surer mode of developing the reflective and reasoning powers of the mind; and the boy progressed with a rapidity which was almost alarming.  Oratory, too, was of course cultivated, and to this end the young nobleman was made to recite before a small audience passages from Shakspeare, and even speeches which had been delivered in the House of Lords, and we may be certain he showed no bashfulness in this display.

He was precocious beyond measure, and at sixteen was a man.  His first act of folly—­or, perhaps, he thought, of manhood—­came off at this early age.  He fell in love with the daughter of a Major-General Holmes; and though there is nothing extraordinary in that, for nine-tenths of us have been love-mad at as early an age, he did what fortunately very few do in a first love affair, he married the adored one.  Early marriages are often extolled, and justly enough, as safeguards against profligate habits, but this one seems to have had the contrary effect on young Philip.  His wife was in every sense too good for him:  he was madly in love with her at first, but soon shamefully and openly faithless.  Pope’s line—­

    ‘A tyrant to the wife his heart approved,’