ng men, all of them fresh from Oxford
and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good
families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic
democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle
of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's
_Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the
leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also
the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_,
were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was
doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he
said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It was the
theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in
the lower classes; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of
society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities
and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for
politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it
came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any
improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks
back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but
nothing to blush for.

One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous
saying of Fletcher of Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of
a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little
collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike
at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack,
countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh
Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers,
only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic
Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and
afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The
Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet
volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.

When _England's Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge.
Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought
to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was
believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John
Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Con