the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of
seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward
earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis
of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, of my
life" (he tells us) "in the remotest part of the south of Ireland, under
the government of an old grandfather [Thomas Fitzmaurice, earl of
Kerry], who reigned, or rather tyrannized, equally over his own family,
and the neighboring country as if it was his family, in the same manner
as I suppose his ancestors, lords of Kerry, had done for generations
since the time of Henry II., who granted to our family one hundred
thousand acres in those remote parts in consideration of their services
against the Irish, with the title of barons of Kerry.... My grandfather
did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to
make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character
which can be imagined--obstinate and inflexible: he had not much
understanding, but strong nerves and great perseverance, and no
education except what he had in the army, where he served in his youth,
with a good degree of reputation for personal bravery and activity. He
was a handsome man, and, luckily for me and mine, married a very ugly
woman, who brought into his family whatever degree of sense may have
appeared in it, and whatever wealth is likely to remain in it." In 1741
the stern grandfather died, and in the course of the next ten years the
grandson picked up such bits of education as an Irish public school of
the period, supplemented by a clerical private tutor, might afford. At
sixteen he went to Christ Church, Oxford (in those days boys were
commonly taking their degrees at the universities at an age when they
would now be well content to have won their way into a school sixth
form), and there read law, history, Demosthenes, and "by myself a great
deal of religion."

And here our autobiographer abruptly turns aside from the incidents of
his own story to sketch the antecedents, existing condition and
character of the politics and politicians of the time of his first entry
into public life. No one, we take it, will be disposed to quarrel with
the interruption, for it gives us, in the space of a few pages, a
picture of men and manners which, painted as it is by the mature hand of
a shrewd contemporary observer, cannot but form a most important
add