servative
candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the
other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present
known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord
John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased
excessively about a certain couplet in _England's Trust_. I am not
going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century
the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary
indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves,
which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will
probably exclaim:

"Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_" for if frequency of
quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the
most popular of our living poets.

There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its
weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about
it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a
negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose,
equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of
Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less
brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country,
through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841,
thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a
return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith
over all its Paynim foes. "The worst evils," he writes, "from which we
are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect
of the rules of the Church." He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the
great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through
England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past
recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal
Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in
his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the
length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost
faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.

The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar
was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number
of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or
secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant
to read:

_Dear Friend! thou aske