Canada, where Arcadia was to revive again, at a distance from all the
depraved and degraded social systems of Europe, under the auspices of
these two enthusiastic young reformers. Mr. Brand had completed his
studies in Germany, and acquired, by assiduous reading and intimate
personal acquaintance with the most enlightened and profound thinkers of
the philosophical school of which Kant was the apostle, a mental
cultivation very unlike, in its depth and direction, the usual
intellectual culture of young Englishmen of his class.

He was an enthusiast of the most generous description, in love with
liberty and ardent for progress; the political as well as the social and
intellectual systems of Europe appeared to him, in his youthful zeal for
the improvement of his fellow-beings, belated if not benighted on the
road to it, and he had embraced with the most ardent hopes and purposes
the scheme of emigration of Colonel Talbot, for forming in the New World
a colony where all the errors of the Old were to be avoided. But his
mother died, and the young emigrant withdrew his foot from the deck of
the Canadian ship to take his place in the British peerage, to bear an
ancient English title and become master of an old English estate, to
marry a brilliant woman of English fashionable society, and be
thenceforth the ideal of an English country gentleman, that most
enviable of mortals, as far as outward circumstance and position can
make a man so.

His serious early German studies had elevated and enlarged his mind far
beyond the usual level and scope of the English country gentleman's
brain, and freed him from the peculiarly narrow class prejudices which
it harbors. He was an enlightened liberal, not only in politics but in
every domain of human thought; he was a great reader, with a wide range
of foreign as well as English literary knowledge. He had exquisite
taste, was a fine connoisseur and critic in matters of art, and was the
kindliest natured and mannered man alive.

At his house in Hertfordshire, the Hoo, I used to meet Earl Grey; his
son, the present earl (then Lord Howick); Lord Melbourne; the Duke of
Bedford; Earl Russell (then Lord John), and Sidney and Bobus Smith--all
of them distinguished men, but few of them, I think, Lord Dacre's
superiors in mental power. Altogether the society that he and Lady Dacre
gathered round them was as delightful as it was intellectually
remarkable; it was composed of persons eminent for abil