peeches which had been delivered in the House of Lords, and we may be
certain he showed no bashfulness in this display.

He was precocious beyond measure, and at sixteen was a man. His first
act of folly--or, perhaps, _he_ thought, of manhood--came off at this
early age. He fell in love with the daughter of a Major-General Holmes;
and though there is nothing extraordinary in that, for nine-tenths of us
have been love-mad at as early an age, he did what fortunately very few
do in a first love affair, he married the adored one. Early marriages
are often extolled, and justly enough, as safeguards against profligate
habits, but this one seems to have had the contrary effect on young
Philip. His wife was in every sense too good for him: he was madly in
love with her at first, but soon shamefully and openly faithless. Pope's
line--

'A tyrant to the wife his heart approved,'

requires explanation here. It is said that she did not present her
boy-husband with a son for three years after their marriage, and on this
child he set great value and great hopes. About that time he left his
wife in the country, intending to amuse himself in town, and ordered her
to remain behind with the child. The poor deserted woman well knew what
was the real object of this journey, and could not endure the
separation. In the hope of keeping her young husband out of harm, and
none the less because she loved him very tenderly, she followed him soon
after, taking the little Marquis of Malmsbury, as the young live branch
was called, with her. The duke was, of course, disgusted, but his anger
was turned into hatred, when the child, which he had hoped to make his
heir and successor, caught in town the small-pox, and died in infancy.
He was furious with his wife, refused to see her for a long time, and
treated her with unrelenting coldness.

The early marriage was much to the distaste of Philip's father, who had
been lately made a marquis, and who hoped to arrange a very grand
'alliance' for his petted son. He was, in fact, so much grieved by it,
that he was fool enough to die of it in 1715, and the marchioness
survived him only about a year, being no less disgusted with the
licentiousness which she already discovered in her Young Hopeful.

She did what she could to set him right, and the young married man was
shipped off with a tutor, a French Huguenot, who was to take him to
Geneva to be educated as a Protestant and a Whig. The young scamp
dec