he house, Sir Thomas Wharton, had won his
peerage from Henry VIII. for routing some 15,000 Scots with 500 men, and
other gallant deeds. From his father the marquis he inherited much of
his talents; but for the heroism of the former, he seems to have
received it only in the extravagant form of foolhardiness. Walpole
remembered, but could not tell where, a ballad he wrote on being
arrested by the guard in St. James's Park, for singing the Jacobite
song, 'The King shall have his own again,' and quotes two lines to show
that he was not ashamed of his own cowardice on the occasion:--

'The duke he drew out half his sword,
---- the guard drew out the rest.'

At the siege of Gibraltar, where he took up arms against his own king
and country, he is said to have gone alone one night to the very walls
of the town, and challenged the outpost. They asked him who he was, and
when he replied, openly enough, 'The Duke of Wharton,' they actually
allowed him to return without either firing on or capturing him. The
story seems somewhat apocryphal, but it is quite possible that the
English soldiers may have refrained from violence to a well-known
mad-cap nobleman of their own nation.

Philip, son of the Marquis of Wharton, at that time only a baron, was
born in the last year but one of the seventeenth century, and came into
the world endowed with every quality which might have made a great man,
if he had only added wisdom to them. His father wished to make him a
brilliant statesman, and, to have a better chance of doing so, kept him
at home, and had him educated under his own eye. He seems to have easily
and rapidly acquired a knowledge of classical languages; and his memory
was so good that when a boy of thirteen he could repeat the greater part
of the 'AEneid' and of Horace by heart. His father's keen perception did
not allow him to stop at classics; and he wisely prepared him for the
career to which he was destined by the study of history, ancient and
modern, and of English literature, and by teaching him, even at that
early age, the art of thinking and writing on any given subject, by
proposing themes for essays. There is certainly no surer mode of
developing the reflective and reasoning powers of the mind; and the boy
progressed with a rapidity which was almost alarming. Oratory, too, was
of course cultivated, and to this end the young nobleman was made to
recite before a small audience passages from Shakspeare, and even
s