and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
less.

He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
sufficient divine, it ob