STATESMEN. No 358.

GENERAL THE EARL OF LUCAN, G.C.B.

THE Bingham are a family of Saxon origin. But three hundred years ago Sir Richard Bingham suppressed an insurrection of the wild Irish, and was made Marshal of Ireland. Since then they have been established in Castlebar as members of the English garrison, and have furnished the greater number of the Members of Parliament for County Mayo. A hundred years ago one of them was made Baron Lucan, and a little later he was improved into an Earl.

The present Lord Lucan is the third Earl. He was born on the 16th April, 1800, married a sister of the late Lord Cardigan at nine-and-twenty, and succeeded to the title when nine-and-thirty. He was marked out by nature as a soldier, and he had become one by profession. He served in the Crimea with distinction, and commanded the cavalry on the day of Balaklava, when, having defeated and broken the Russian cavalry in the morning by charging through and through them with one-tenth of their number, he in the afternoon launched the famous Light Cavalry charge, in accordance with what seemed to be the reasonable meaning of Lord Raglan's ambiguous order to advance. All efforts to prove that he was wrong in thus construing that order have failed; and the way in which it was carried out proved that he had brought the cavalry to a high state of efficiency and himself to a soldierly readiness to do any mortal thing commanded by his superior officer.

Lord Lucan is a marvellous specimen of the British animal. His father learnt abstinence at the age of fifty from Lewis Cornaro's curious work, and ate his twelve daily ounces of food thenceforth with a pair of scales on the table, to such good purpose that he lived to the age of seventy-five. But the son has been abstemious all his life. He holds that every horse that dies under the age of twenty-five has been killed, and that every man who fails to live to eighty has committed suicide. He eats and drinks so sparingly that he has always been an object of alarm to his friends and servants. The only drink, besides milk and water, that he thoroughly believes in is brandy, which he holds to be sovereign in emergencies, and of which when campaigning he has been known to drink half a bottle without feeling it. But in ordinary times he scarce can finish two glasses of wine a day. The result is that he furnishes in himself the greatest testimony to temperance ever known. He is now over one-and-eighty years of age, yet he is sound and unblemished, and has no sign of age about him. Up to a couple of years ago he had never known a doctor by name or by sight, and even now he rarely troubles one. His figure—upright as a dart—is that of a young man of thirty; his eye is bright, his movements alert and active; he sits a horse as well as ever he did; his memory is ready and marvellous; and he is never known to falter at a date or to trip over any one of the details of the many good stories he tells.

He is extremely precise in all social duties. His manners are of that exquisitely good kind which, while they never pass the bounds of correctness, are nevertheless not entrenched within the limits of haughtiness. Yet he can be haughty upon occasion, as even Royal Personages have found. His judgment is excellent, and he makes any conclusion he comes to so thoroughly his own that he is hardly to be moved from it. He is convinced among other things that the new-fangled system of short service is a fatal one for a volunteer army like that of England; and as he never scruples to say what he believes, he has dealt some hard knocks at the time-servers who have adopted or even apologised for this system for quite other reasons than that they believe in it.

STATESMEN. No 358.

THE Binghams are a family of Saxon origin. But three hundred years ago Sir Richard Bingham suppressed an insurrection of the wild Irish, and was made Marshal of Ireland. Since then they have been established in Castlebar as members of the English garrison, and have furnished the greater number of the Members of Parliament for County Mayo. A hundred years ago one of them was made Baron Lucan, and a little later he was improved into an Earl.

Lord Lucan is a marvellous specimen of the British animal. His father learnt abstinence at the age of fifty from Lewis Cornaro's curious work, and ate his twelve daily ounces of food thenceforth with a pair of scales on the table, to such good purpose that he lived to the age of seventy-five. But the son has been abstemious all his life. He holds that every horse that dies under the age of twenty-five has been killed, and that every man who fails to live to eighty has committed suicide. He eats and drinks so sparingly that he has always been an object of alarm to his friends and servants. The only drink, besides milk and water, that he thoroughly believes in is brandy, which he holds to be sovereign in emergencies, and of which when campaigning he has been known to drink half a bottle without feeling it. But in ordinary times he scarce can finish two glasses of wine a day. The result is that he furnishes in himself the greatest testimony to temperance ever known. He is now over one-and-eighty years of age, yet he is sound and unblemished, and has no sign of age about him. Up to a couple of years ago he had never known a doctor by name or by sight, and even now he rarely troubles one. His figure—upright as a dart—is that of a young man of thirty; his eye is bright, his movements alert and active: he sits a horse as well as ever he did; his memory is ready and marvellous; and he is never known to falter at a date or to trip over any one of the details of the many good stories he tells.

97L

50L

20L

(These charts are for monitor calibration only)

Yale Center for British Art, 2013