CHAPTER V. EARLY FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES.-HYDE VILLIERS AND HIS FAMILY.-JOHN MILL.-CHARLES AUSTIN.-JOHN ROMILLY. -EDWARD STRUTT. ANNO DOм. 1824-27. ANNO ET. 24-27. Ir was not, however, to all persons nor in every species of intercourse that my manners were equally unprepossessing, or that I found myself unacceptable. My employment in the colonial office introduced me to a companion of my own age, Thomas Hyde Villiers, then a clerk in the office; and from companions we became very shortly each the most intimate friend of the other. We were associated in our work, I officially the subordinate, for something less than a year, when he quitted the office to enter upon political life in the House of Commons, and I took his place. He was perhaps the ablest, and had he lived long enough would probably have been the most distinguished, of a very able and distinguished brotherhood. George Villiers, now Earl of Clarendon, and lately secretary of state for foreign affairs, was the eldest of the brothers; my friend, Hyde, the second; Charles, a member of the present cabinet (1865), the third; Edward, whose dear friendship was the treasure and the charm of my middle age, the fourth; Montague, the late Bishop of Durham, the fifth; Algernon, who died young, the sixth. And there was one sister, Theresa, then about two-and-twenty years of age.* They lived with their father and mother in Kent House, * Born March 8, 1803. Knightsbridge, occupying one half of it, while the other was occupied by their mother's brother, Lord Morley, and his wife—a woman whose wit, vivacity, and good-humor, natural, easy, and unambitious, will probably be remembered in London society till the last of her contemporaries shall have dropped out of it. She was a woman of the world, and, with the exception, perhaps, of Lady Charlotte Lindsay, the wittiest woman of her time; but with all that she was simple, kindly, brave, and strong. George Villiers, then about twenty-six years of age, was gay, graceful, brilliant, and pre-eminently popular; Charles, with still more wit than George (who, however, had not a little), was sarcastic and unpopular, but among friends very agreeable; of Hyde and Edward, as those with whom my relations were close, I will speak more largely of the one here, of the other hereafter; for it was not immediately that my intimacy with Edward began. Hyde's face was that of a fair and distinguished-looking child grown to the stature of manhood (he was very tall), with as little alteration as might be of its delicate features. He had a large forehead, large eyes, and a sensitive mouth beautifully chiselled. He was slenderly made, with a feminine roundness of the muscular fabric. His manners could be what he pleased. They were invariably high-bred, and, under all ordinary circumstances, expressively courteous. He was calm, self-governed, ambitious, but with a far-sighted ambition, caring little for present, unless in so far as they might conduce to ultimate, results; cool and not vain, patient and resolute, enduring bodily pain with unshaken fortitude, and encountering danger* and difficulty with an undisturbed mind. In boy * Duelling had not yet come to an end, and I was once the bearer of a hostile message (in the nature of demand for an apology) from Hyde Vil hood he had been educated at home, in the midst of social pleasures and with the worst of tutors; and, with his personal attractiveness and talents for society, he was in the way to an epicene course of life; but, having gone to Cambridge, he there fell in with some young men of striking abilities, great attainments, and democratic opinions; learned to look with little favor upon the ways of life in the classes of society to which he had been accustomed; and, deploring his miseducation and the ignorance of which he now became conscious, applied himself to retrieve the time so far as might be still possible. Before he and I made each other's acquaintance he had made up his mind to renounce London society and its pleasures; and soon after that he took a house in Suffolk Street, which I shared with him; and, as I had hardly any other acquaintances, and he desired to avoid the swarm of his who were idle and uncultivated, we lived a great deal together. When I quoted, in a previous page, the greater part of a poem in which I had taken (about the year 1829) a retrospect of the formation of my own mind by intercourse with others, I reserved, as more apposite in this place, the two following stanzas: liers to an electioneering opponent, who, in one of his speeches, had exceeded the bounds of electioneering privilege. The negotiations took some time. Hyde was suffering severe pain from an abscess in the head, behind the ear, of which he died soon after. Throughout the affair he continued laboring almost without intermission at a report of a committee of which he had been chairman. His brother, George, showed as little anxiety about the result of the proceedings. On my return from my first interview he asked me what sort of fellow Mr. S. was. "A mild prig," was "A very dangerous person indeed!" said George Villiers, The gentleman made an apology, however, and there was my answer. with a smile. no duel. "The other was in age my own compeer: A searching pupil-from his natural sphere At Fashion's shrine a favored devotee: "I gathered from his converse-shall I say A reverence too exclusive and supreme And most recluse abstraction: not a theme A questioning spirit; with our double team Scouting those easy words, the good old yea and nay." If the description in the latter stanza was applicable to Hyde Villiers and myself, it was not less so to the small set of able and highly instructed young men who had been, with one exception, his associates at Cambridge, and who, in London, continuing to be his, became mine also; Charles Austin, John Mill, Edward Strutt, John Romilly, Charles Villiers. They were radical, Benthamite doctrinaires, and were regarded by prudent people as very clever young men who were thwarting the gifts of Providence and throwing away their prospects of worldly advancement by audaciously avowing extreme and extravagant opinions. As time went on, however, the world met them half-way; and, whether they have retained or renounced their democratic views, every one of them has obtained what he sought and pursued. Charles Austin was, in conversation, the most brilliant of them all; and there was a singular charm in his man ner, which expressed the power to command along with the desire to please. It was socially genial as well as buoyant (though, perhaps, indicating some hardness and coldness at bottom), good-humored, frank, and wholly unaffected; and there was a sort of light and almost careless strength in his conversational diction, contrasting strangely and strikingly with the logical precision of thought which he, in common with the rest of them, cultivated as the one thing needful. His precision seemed inevitable and easy; that of the others more or less painstaking and circumspect. He betook himself to the parliamentary bar, then the most lucrative career for a lawyer, but one which, not being compatible with a seat in the House of Commons, excluded him from all the honors and dignities of the profession. He made an enormous fortune (nearly £40,000 in one year, I believe), with an amount of exertion which ruined his health for a time; and all his labors, energies, abilities, knowledge, and fascination of manner and discourse ended by placing him, in the latter stages of his life, in the position which a thousand ordinary persons occupy by mere inheritance in the earlier stages of theirs-that of a rich country gentleman and chairman of quarter sessions. Had his ambition been political instead of pecuniary, he might have been a second Lord Lyndhurst; but he got what he desired. John Mill was the most severely single-minded of the set. He was of an impassioned nature, but I should conjecture, though I do not know,* that in his earliest youth the passion of his nature had not found a free and unobstructed course through the affections, and had got a good deal pent up in his intellect; in which, however large (and among the scientific intellects of his time I hardly know *Written before the publication of John Mill's Autobiography. |