that virtue which seeketh not her own reward.

His ruling passion was the love of ease.

The beginnings of all this were more or less discernible at school,
where Lord Mansfield gave him the nick-name of Jack Meggot.

His other little particularities were the best running and walking in
the school, and the commencement of his fame for riding, which, in the
well-known trials in the Swiss Academy, outdid all competition. Worsley,
of the Board of Works, alone divided the palm; he rode more gracefully.
Elwes was by far the boldest rider.

The Duke of Portland (who died in 1809) was among the _delicciae_ of each
form at Westminster, in all that appertained to temper, the tenderness
and warmth of feeling, suavity of approach, and the whole passive power
of pleasing. Thus much internal worth, tempered with but little of those
showy powers which dazzle and seduce, gave early promise that he
would escape all intriguing politics, and never degrade himself by the
projects of party; for a party-man must always be comparatively mean,
even on a scale of vicious dignity; in violence, subordinate to the
ruffian; in chicane, below a common town-sharper.

He had, happily, no talents for party; he was better used by nature.
He seemed formed for the kindliest offices of life; to appreciate the
worth, and establish the dignity of domestic duties; to exemplify the
hardest tasks of friendship and affinity; to display each hospitable
charm.

All that he afterwards did for Chace Price, and Lord Eduard, appeared
as a flower in its bud, in Dean's-yard and Tothill-fields, with the
fruit-woman under the Gateway, and the coffee-house then opposite.

In his school-exercises, fame is not remembered to have followed any but
his Wednesday evening themes: some of them were incomparably the best of
the standing. In the rest of the school business, said the master to him
one day, "you just keep on this side whipping."

His smaller habits were none remarkable, except that his diet was rather
more blameable in the article of wine. A little too early; a little too
much.

This, probably, more than any hereditary taint, made him, in immediate
manhood, a martyr to the gout.

Against this, his ancestor's nostrum was tried in vain; the disease
would not yield, till it was overborne by abstinence, which, to the
praise of the duke's temper, he began and continued, with a splendour of
resolution not any where exceeded.

~79~~The duke had been long estra