that Nottingham had been sacrificed to Russell, and that Montague had been preferred to Fox.  It was by his dexterous management that the Princess Anne had been detached from the opposition, and that Godolphin had been removed from the head of the hoard of Treasury.  The party which Sunderland had done so much to serve now held a new pledge for his fidelity.  His only son, Charles Lord Spencer, was just entering on public life.  The precocious maturity of the young man’s intellectual and moral character had excited hopes which were not destined to be realized.  His knowledge of ancient literature, and his skill in imitating the styles of the masters of Roman eloquence, were applauded by veteran scholars.  The sedateness of his deportment and the apparent regularity of his life delighted austere moralists.  He was known indeed to have one expensive taste; but it was a taste of the most respectable kind.  He loved books, and was bent or forming the most magnificent private library in England.  While other heirs of noble houses were inspecting patterns of steinkirks and sword knots, dangling after actresses, or betting on fighting cocks, he was in pursuit of the Mentz editions of Tully’s Offices, of the Parmesan Statius, and of the inestimable Virgin of Zarottus.1 It was natural that high expectations should be formed of the virtue and wisdom of a youth whose very luxury and prodigality had a grave and erudite air, and that even discerning men should be unable to detect the vices which were hidden under that show of premature sobriety.

Spencer was a Whig, unhappily for the Whig party, which, before the unhonoured and unlamented close of his life, was more than once brought to the verge of ruin by his violent temper and his crooked politics.  His Whiggism differed widely from that of his father.  It was not a languid, speculative, preference of one theory of government to another, but a fierce and dominant passion.  Unfortunately, though an ardent, it was at the same time a corrupt and degenerate, Whiggism; a Whiggism so narrow and oligarchical as to be little, if at all, preferable to the worst forms of Toryism.  The young lord’s imagination had been fascinated by those swelling sentiments of liberty which abound in the Latin poets and orators; and he, like those poets and orators, meant by liberty something very different from the only liberty which is of importance to the happiness of mankind.  Like them, he could see no danger to liberty except from kings.  A commonwealth, oppressed and pillaged by such men as Opimius and Verres, was free, because it had no king.  A member of the Grand Council of Venice, who passed his whole life under tutelage and in fear, who could not travel where he chose, or visit whom he chose, or invest his property as he chose, whose path was beset with spies, who saw at the corners of the streets the mouth of bronze gaping for anonymous accusations against him, and whom the Inquisitors of State could, at any moment, and for any or no reason, arrest, torture,