sts, of his county. In all the vicissitudes of his career,
Liverpool, I believe, never wavered in its attachment to him. He
contributed to the many charitable and philanthropic works with which
he was concerned not only much money, but also--what in so rich a man
was far more meritorious--an extraordinary amount of time and patient
supervision. Among the many offices he accepted, was president of the
Literary Fund for dispensing charity to needy authors, and on the
committee of that charity I had, during many years, ample opportunity
of observing how far he was from treating a presidential position as a
sinecure. The regularity of his attendance, the constant attention he
paid to every detail of the charity; the infinite pains which he would
bestow upon obscure cases of distress, marked him out as a model
president, and many of those whom our rules did not allow us to help
were assisted by his bounty. He contributed with a large but
discriminating generosity to many causes that were conspicuous in the
eyes of the world, but his special bias was towards unostentatious
and unobserved benevolence, and crowds of obscure men in obscure
positions were assisted by him.

Those who did not know him, and those who had come in merely casual
contact with him, sometimes formed a false impression of his
character. He had a great deal of natural shyness. He had very little
of the gift of small talk. On occasions of mere show and in
uncongenial atmospheres he was apt to be awkward and embarrassed, and
when walking by himself he was extremely absent and quite capable of
brushing against his oldest friend with a complete unconsciousness of
his presence. These traits sometimes gave rise to natural
misinterpretations, which a fuller knowledge always dispelled. No one
who knew Lord Derby could fail to feel that his nature was one of the
most genuine and transparent simplicity, singularly free from all
tinge of arrogance, superciliousness, and acrimony. His personal
tastes were exceedingly simple, and there was not a particle of
ostentation in his character. He delighted in a quiet country life and
had a strong sense of natural beauty. In his youth he had been an
ardent mountaineer, and in later life he had few greater pleasures
than to watch the growth of his plantations. He calculated that he had
planted in his lifetime about two million of trees.

He was among the best-read men I have ever known. His private library
was one of the fines