The Sun.
London, England, 1863-02-02 00:00:00

The Death of the Marquis of Lansdowne.

Lord Lansdowne, in a good old age, died on Saturday
Saturday evening at 6 o'clock. On Wednesday, the 21st,
he fell as he was walking on the terrace at Bowood, and
cut his head. On the following Tuesday he began to sink,
and ho never rallied after. His life is the history of the
Whigs during the past century. In youth he was the hope
of the party, and in declining years he was the sage on
whose counsel they relied. His views, like theirs, were
formed in the two great schools of politics—the historical
school of Edinburgh and the utilitarian school of London,
which so moulded public opinion as ultimately to secure
the ascendancy of Liberal principles. Of refined manners,
of cultivated tastes, with an intellect not indeed command-
ing, but yet extremely acute; with a nature by no means
impassioned, yet in its calm current most genial ; and with
oratory that, if seldom brilliant, was always effective, he
was, in his glossy buff and blue attire, the best repre-
sentative of the deeding Whigs, as we have known them
in these latter days—a pleasant family party, who,
with abundance of sound sense and social tact, have
combined aristocratic likings with literary fellow..
ship, oligarchical ideas with popular favour, and a
cautious policy with inflammatory speeches. The most 1
influential, the rncst sensible, the most amiable, the most ,
elegant of Whigs, Lord Lansdowne retired in the hey-day
of youth into the House of Lords. For 20 years the party
was disorganised ; it had no leader of mark among the
Commons, and it may be said to have existed only in the
saloons of Lansdowne-house and Holland-house. There,
perhaps, were congregated more of wit and wisdom, more
of brain and beauty than could be assembled anywhere else
in the three kingdoms—more, in a word, of that fine essence
which ultimately moulds opinion, creates a party, and rules
the State. The Whigs have always been worshippers of
talent, and few men had a more keen appreciation of all
that is brilliant in letters, powerful in debate, or useful in
administration than the late Lord Lansdowne. Who ever
gave the budding genius a warmer welcome ? Who was a
more certain friend to the rising man ? By an instinct
that, if not genius, was the next thing to it—a noble taste
—he surrounded himself with men of mark, and gave splen-
dour to a party which had to endure all the ignominy of
defeat. At length, through the disorganisation of the
Tories, the party began once more to make a figure; and,
in fact, with the exception of a short interval during which,
to use the metaphor of Mr. Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, who
found the Whigs bathing, had run away with their clothes,
the great Whig lords, with the deceased Marquis at their
head, ever since the formation of Lord Grey's Cabinet, the
first meeting of which WAS held at Lansdowne-house, kept
the Government of the country entirely in their hands,
Lord Lansdowne, more than the leader of a party, became
the patriarch of the Upper House; he became the personal
friend and adviser of the Queen, as the Duke of Wellington
had been, and he has now died in a good old age, after a
most useful and most prosperous career, in as high honour
as can be enjoyed by a subject.
The fortunes of the Lansdowne family were formed by a
man chiefly known as the founder of a new science—the
science of Political Arithmetic, but whose life involved so
many of the modes of activity which a very remarkable
period afforded that one is surprised to find that it has been
almost entirely overlooked by the biographers. Sir William
Petty, the son of a clothier at Romsey, fought his way
desperately to fame and fortune in the times of the Com-
monwealth and the Restoration. He entered the navy, and
soon left it ; he tried merchandise for a time, and left that
also ; he then invented a copying machine, but received no
profit from it ; he turned to medicine, and dissected in Paris
under the guidance of Hobbes ; he became Professor of
Anatomy at Oxford ; to anatomy he added music, and be-
came professor of this art at Gresham College ; subse-
quently he became physician to the Irish army dining the
Protectorate ; not content with these occupations, he con-
tracted for the admeasurement of lands in Ireland forfeited
by the rebellion, his survey being still of great value in the
law courts as a work of reference; he became a member of
Parliament under Oliver ; he was knighted by Charles II.;
he was one of the founders of that Royal Society which has
had so much influence on the development of science ; he at
length became a shipbuilder, inventing a double-bottomed
vessel to sail against wind and tide; and, finally, by vari-
ous important works on taxation and national wealth, he
established, as we have said, the new science of Political
Arithmetic. He died, leaving what in these times would
be considered very large possessions—personal estate to the
amount of £45,000, and landed property to the value of
£6,500 a year. Such are the self-made men who supply
our English aristocracy with new blood, and preserve it in
vital connection with the hearts of the people. He married
a lady who was Baroness Shelburne in her own right, and
by her daughter, his only surviving child, who had inter-
married with the Kerry family, he became the great grand-
father of the celebrated Earl of Shelburne, the first Mar-
quis of Lansdowne, and the father of the deceased Marquis.
Bentham remarked of Lord Shelburne that he was the only
Minister he ever heard of who did not fear the people. As
a Minister, however, his career cannot be regarded as very
successful. His countenance was said to resemble that of
Louis XVI., and his fate was in this also like that of the
monarch,—that when to all appearance he had reached the
summit of power he was politically beheaded. On the dis-
solution of the Fox and North Ministry, the whole nation
expected that his Majesty would have sent for Lord Shel-
burne, who had already been Premier ; but the King sent
for his subordinate, young Pitt, and Shelburne was con-
soled for the loss of his ambition by the coronet of a mar-
quis. Probably it was not difficult to console him, and
now—in order to prove what he once said to Johnson, that
a man ought to have every gratification and to be perfectly
happy in the enjoyment of £5,000 a year,—he retired to in-
dulge more congenial tastes in the adornment of Lansdowne
House, which he purchased when half finished from Lord
Bute, and where he collected a splendid gallery of ancient
and modern pictures, together with a library of 10,000
volumes, comprising the largest assortment of pamphlets
and memoirs on English history and politics possessed by
any man of his time, as well as a series of manuscripts
which were subsequently sold to the British Museum
for £5,000. The library itself was exquisitely de-
corated by Cipriani in imitation of the antiquities
found in Herculaneum, and it was while occupied in
this superb temple as the librarian, philosopher, and friend of
Lord Shelburne, that Priestly made the discovery of oxygen.
It was at Lansdowne-house, then known as Shelburne-
house, that Lord Henry Petty was born on the 2d of July,
1780, so that at the time of his decease he had attained the
great age of 82. His father was twice married. By his
first wife, a daughter of Earl Granville, he had two sons,
the younger of whom diet early, while the latter, who suc-
ceeded his father in the title, died without issue. By his
second wife, a daughter of the Earl of Upper Ossory,
Lord Shelburne had, besides a daughter who did not long
survive, one son, the subject of this memoir, who became
the third and most distinguished Marquis of Lansdowne.
Ire his childhood, however, Lord Henry Petty had only the
prospects of a younger son; and, seeming to be a precocious
boy, he was destined at an early age, like so many of the
youthful scions of the great houses, to the service of the
State. As Pitt and Fox were specially traine 1, so Henry
Petty and John Russell were cradled lawgivers; the Con-
stitution was their rockinghorse, and when other boys were
sucking barleysugar and playing at cricket, they were ad-
miring Magna Charta and studying the tactics of Ministers.
.Almost all our leading statesmen of these later times have
been trained in this way ; they have chosen politics for
their profession from the first, and they have practised la-
boriously in the Senate as other men practise at the bar.
It was with this view that Lord Henry Petty was sent to
`Westminster School, where he vies placed under the special
superintendence of one of the masters, the Rev. Mr.Debarry.
One rare privilege was then, as it still is, possessed by the
Westminster boys, of which Henry Petty fully availed him-
self—the privilege of attending the debates in Parliament;
and in those days, when oratory was studied more as an art
than it is now—when at times the manner seemed of more
importance than the matter—when the " action, action,
action," of Fox made the Ministers seem to be traitors in
their own eyes—when the showy rhetoric of Sheridan,
which now seems dull and unprofitable as the scenes
of a theatre in the daylight, told with such effect that on
one occasion Pitt had to ask the house to postpone its vote
—when Burke was rendering his argument dark by exces-
sive brightness of imagery, till his auditors, dazzled by the
glare, were at last blinded into sleep ; and when—not to
speak of Erskine and the other luminaries of the law—Pitt
himself was elaborating those stately periods in which he
said so little and seemed to say so much that some one ex-
claimed with admiration, "I do believe he could deliver a
King's Speech off hand," the sight must have been pecu-
liarly inspiring to a boy, especially since all this mastery of
language was used with the most deadly designs in the
most furious philippics, not so much for the establishment
of principles and the passing of laws as for the demolition
of parties and the impeachment of Ministers. Henry Petty
was sadly disappointed one night in attending these debates.
He had missed by a very few minutes that strange scene,
really ridiculous, althongh intended to be terrific, in which
during a debate on the Alien Act, Burke drew a dagger
from his breast, and, throwireg it on the floor, cried, " This
is what you will gain by an alliance
with France." Pro-
bably, no man of his time had such a complete political
education as this young lord, who, while
yet a boy, sedu•
lously attended the debates in Parliament, thence passed
to Edinburgh to study history and
philosophy, afterwards
graduated at Cambridge, now studied Beathamism under
the best possible guidance, and soon--for the Peace of
Amiens was of short duration--returned to England to
learn the arts and imbibe the traditions of Lansdowne-
house nb
member
ra fr,eir l ythe
house and Holland-house. Great were the
hhopes enter-
o
twined of him, and in the follcwiiagta,ara,s
n
age, he entered the House of Commons
family borough of Caine. lie immediately t urned his at ten-
flout° finance. Was not his great ancestor a financier ?
'Viere not the Whigs,his always bail arithmeticians, in want
of a financier ? Was not lie himself, as well as friend
Horner, fitted by his Edinburgh trebling to shin© in
finance ? Therefore, as a worthy' descendant of ‘l, ilpliaitnti
Petty, and as a worthy rival of William '
ho delivered his maiden speech on the Bank Restric' ion
Act. But his most important effort, and that which de-
cided his position in the House of Commons,
was a speech
delivered in support of the attack on Lord Melville as
Treasurer of the Navy. Melville was accused of applying
various public moneys to his own use, and of permitting
his paymaster Trotter to do the same, and even to use his
opportunities on the Stock-Exchange, Eventually, all that