r by some paltry taunt about the
election of Colonel Luttrell, the imprisonment of the lord mayor, and
other measures in which the great Whig leader had borne a part at the
age of one or two and twenty. On Lord Holland no such slur could be
thrown. Those who most dissent from his opinions must acknowledge that a
public life more consistent is not to be found in our annals. Every part
of it is in perfect harmony with every other part; and the whole is in
perfect harmony with the great principles of toleration and civil
freedom. This rare felicity is in a great measure to be attributed to
the influence of Mr. Fox. Lord Holland, as was natural in a person of
his talents and expectations, began at a very early age to take the
keenest interest in politics, and Mr. Fox found the greatest pleasure in
forming the mind of so hopeful a pupil. They corresponded largely on
political subjects when the young lord was only sixteen; and their
friendship and mutual confidence continued to the day of that mournful
separation at Chiswick. Under such training such a man as Lord Holland
was in no danger of falling into those faults which threw a dark shade
over the whole career of his grandfather, and from which the youth of
his uncle was not wholly free.

On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as compared with his
grandfather and his uncle, labored under one great disadvantage. They
were members of the House of Commons. He became a Peer while still an
infant. When he entered public life, the House of Lords was a very small
and a very decorous assembly. The minority to which he belonged was
scarcely able to muster five or six votes on the most important nights,
when eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had accordingly become
a mere form, as it was in the Irish House of Peers before the Union.
This was a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It was not by
occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty solemn and unfriendly
auditors, that his grandfather and his uncle attained their unrivalled
parliamentary skill. The former had learned his art in "the great
Walpolean battles," on nights when Onslow was in the chair seventeen
hours without intermission, when the thick ranks on both sides kept
unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen upon them, when
the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the paralytic laid
down in their bedclothes on the benches. The powers of Charles Fox were,
from the first, exercise