e Church then were fat-livings,
and of the State, rotten-boroughs. To do nothing and get something,
formed a boy's ideal of a manly career. There was nothing in the lot,
little in the temperament, of Charles Egremont, to make him an exception
to the multitude. Gaily and securely he floated on the brilliant stream.
Popular at school, idolized at home, the present had no cares, and the
future secured him a family seat in Parliament the moment he entered
life, and the inheritance of a glittering post at court in due time,
as its legitimate consequence. Enjoyment, not ambition, seemed the
principle of his existence. The contingency of a mitre, the certainty of
rich preferment, would not reconcile him to the self-sacrifice which,
to a certain degree, was required from a priest, even in those days of
rampant Erastianism. He left the colonies as the spoil of his younger
brothers; his own ideas of a profession being limited to a barrack in a
London park, varied by visits to Windsor. But there was time enough to
think of these things. He had to enjoy Oxford as he had enjoyed Eton.
Here his allowance from his father was extravagant, though greatly
increased by tithes from his mother's pin-money. While he was pursuing
his studies, hunting and boating, driving tandems, riding matches,
tempering his energies in the crapulence of boyish banquets, and
anticipating life, at the risk of expulsion, in a miserable mimicry
of metropolitan dissipation, Dukism, that was supposed to be eternal,
suddenly crashed.

The Reform Act has not placed the administration of our affairs in abler
hands than conducted them previously to the passing of the measure, for
the most efficient members of the present cabinet with some very few
exceptions, and those attended by peculiar circumstances, were ministers
before the Reform Act was contemplated. Nor has that memorable statute
created a Parliament of a higher reputation for public qualities, such
as politic ability, and popular eloquence, and national consideration,
than was furnished by the old scheme. On the contrary; one house of
Parliament has been irremediably degraded into the decaying position of
a mere court of registry, possessing great privileges, on condition
that it never exercises them; while the other chamber that, at the first
blush, and to the superficial, exhibits symptoms of almost unnatural
vitality, engrossing in its orbit all the business of the country,
assumes on a more studious ins