a Whig Ministry. He
was thrice married, and each time advantageously. His first wife, as
we have seen, was a sister-in-law of Lord Mulgrave; the second, whom
he wedded at the age of sixty-three, was the widow of Mr. Plumer
of Gilston Park, which became his through the marriage; his third
alliance, when he was nearly seventy, gave him the advantage of a
jointure of 1,000l. per annum allowance as guardian, and a couple of
mansions. His writings would lead to the notion that Robert Ward was
everything tender and amiable; and so he might be as long as he was
pleased; but he would seem to have had a quiet implacability, that was
offended on slight grounds, and obdurate in displeasure. He quarreled
with his son on account of his politics: he received some slight from
an official friend and repulsed all attempts at explanation, till a
letter written when Ward was seventy-two and his correspondent turned
of seventy produced a reconciliation rather dry on his part. It would
have been satisfactory to know that some relenting, some interest
beyond a "suspicion" of the writer, had been shown on the receipt
of the following manly letter, written after the publication of
_De Vere_. After alluding to the internal traits by which he had
identified the author, the anonymous correspondent continues:

"It surprises me, I confess, that the feeling, judgment, and
sagacity, which sufficed to produce the work that I have been
commending, should have suffered the golden opinions of me,
which you entertained, to be filched and adulterated by mere
traducers, whose reports the hearer's own experience could
have almost refuted, and whose testimony was so obviously
liable to be warped by prejudice.

"We live in a strange world. Before my feelings and
dispositions had changed from wavering and transient to
permanent and fixed,--before the desultory ramblings, which
almost became our age, had terminated in a path, and that,
I trust, a right and honorable one, and from which, with
moderate allowance for human inferiority, I have not deviated
since,--before my principles had attained their vigor, and
generated those correct habits which it was their province
to produce,--in short, while, like most young men, I might
be said to have as yet 'no character at all,' I obtained your
friendship. How I lost it, I have already told you. When,
remains to tell you. I lost it when any