ine, who had early succeeded to the family estate, lived
in Grosvenor Street, and in becoming style. His house was furnished with
luxury and some taste. The host received his guests in a library, well
stored with political history and political science, and adorned with
the busts of celebrated statesmen and of profound political sages.
Bentham was the philosopher then affected by young gentleman of
ambition, and who wished to have credit for profundity and hard heads.
Mr. Bertie Tremaine had been the proprietor of a close borough, which
for several generations had returned his family to parliament, the
faithful supporters of Pitt, and Perceval, and Liverpool, and he had
contemplated following the same line, though with larger and higher
objects than his ancestors. Being a man of considerable and versatile
ability, and of ample fortune, with the hereditary opportunity which
he possessed, he had a right to aspire, and, as his vanity more than
equalled his talents, his estimate of his own career was not mean.
Unfortunately, before he left Harrow, he was deprived of his borough,
and this catastrophe eventually occasioned a considerable change in the
views and conduct of Mr. Bertie Tremaine. In the confusion of parties
and political thought which followed the Reform Act of Lord Grey, an
attempt to govern the country by the assertion of abstract principles,
and which it was now beginning to be the fashion to call Liberalism,
seemed the only opening to public life; and Mr. Bertie Tremaine, who
piqued himself on recognising the spirit of the age, adopted Liberal
opinions with that youthful fervour which is sometimes called
enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered
to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life. At Cambridge
Mr. Bertie Tremaine was at first the solitary pupil of Bentham, whose
principles he was prepared to carry to their extreme consequences, but
being a man of energy and in possession of a good estate, he soon found
followers, for the sympathies of youth are quick, and, even with an
original bias, it is essentially mimetic. When Mr. Bertie Tremaine left
the university he found in the miscellaneous elements of the London
Union many of his former companions of school and college, and from
them, and the new world to which he was introduced, it delighted him to
form parties and construct imaginary cabinets. His brother Augustus, who
was his junior only by a year, and was destined t