yet the irreverence is rather in
seeming than in reality, for a nickname, a pet-name, an abbreviation,
is often the truest token of popular esteem. It was so with the
subject of this section, whose perennial youthfulness of heart
and mind would have made formal appellation seem stiff and out of
place.

Edward Frederick Leveson-Gower was the third son of Granville
Leveson-Gower, first Earl Granville, by his marriage with Henrietta
Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the third Duke of Devonshire.
The very names breathe Whiggery, and in their combination they
suggest a considerable and an important portion of our social and
political history.

I have always maintained that Whiggery, rightly understood, is not
a political creed, but a social caste. The Whig, like the poet, is
born, not made. It is as difficult to become a Whig as to become a
Jew. Macaulay was probably the only man who, being born outside the
privileged enclosure, ever penetrated to its heart and assimilated
its spirit. It is true that the Whigs, as a body, have held certain
opinions and pursued certain tactics, which were analysed in chapters
xix. and xxi. of the unexpurgated _Book of Snobs_. But those opinions
and those tactics have been accidents of Whiggery. Its substance
has been relationship. When Lord John Russell formed his first
Administration, his opponents alleged that it was mainly composed
of his cousins, and the lively oracles of Sir Bernard Burke confirmed
the allegation. A. J. Beresford-Hope, in one of his novels, made
excellent fun of what he called the "Sacred Circle of the
Great-Grandmotherhood." He showed--what, indeed, the Whigs themselves
knew uncommonly well--that from John, Earl Gower, who died in 1754,
descend all the Gowers, Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors,
Harcourts, and Russells, who walk on the face of the earth. Truly
a noble and a highly favoured progeny. "They _are_ our superiors,"
said Thackeray; "and that's the fact. I am not a Whig myself (perhaps
it is as unnecessary to say so as to say that I'm not King Pippin
in a golden coach, or King Hudson, or Miss Burdett-Coutts)--I'm
not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"

It argues no political bias to maintain that, in the earlier part
of the nineteenth century, Toryism offered to its neophytes no
educational opportunities equal to those which a young Whig enjoyed
at Chatsworth and Bowood and Woburn and Holland House. Here the
best traditions of the previou