plit a hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into
filaments still finer. In a mind less happily constituted, there might
have been a risk that this turn for subtilty would have produced serious
evil. But in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland there was ample
security against all such danger. He was not a man to be the dupe of his
own ingenuity. He put his logic to its proper use; and in him the
dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.

His political life is written in the chronicles of his country. Perhaps,
as we have already intimated, his opinions on two or three great
questions of foreign policy were open to just objection. Yet even his
errors, if he erred, were amiable and respectable. We are not sure that
we do not love and admire him the more because he was now and then
seduced from what we regard as a wise policy by sympathy with the
oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy so
enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace,--a love which in
him was second only to the love of freedom,--and by the magnanimous
credulity of a mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of devising
mischief.

To his views on questions of domestic policy the voice of his countrymen
does ample justice. They revere the memory of the man who was, during
forty years, the constant protector of all oppressed races and
persecuted sects; of the man whom neither the prejudices nor the
interests belonging to his station could seduce from the path of right;
of the noble, who in every great crisis cast in his lot with the
commons; of the planter, who made manful war on the slave trade; of the
landowner, whose whole heart was in the struggle against the corn-laws.

We have hitherto touched almost exclusively on those parts of Lord
Holland's character which were open to the observation of millions. How
shall we express the feelings with which his memory is cherished by
those who were honored with his friendship? Or in what language shall we
speak of that house, once celebrated for its rare attractions to the
furthest ends of the civilized world, and now silent and desolate as the
grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty years ago, a poet addressed
those tender and graceful lines, which have now acquired a new meaning
not less sad than that which they originally bore.

"Thou hill, whose brow the antique structures grace,
Reared by bold chiefs of Warwick's noble race,