English History of the Irish Rebellion, and at one time sat in the English House of Commons as burgess for Chichester. Of his family, the eldest son was Sir William Temple, the well-known diplomatist, statesman, man of letters, and patron of Swift; the second, Sir John, who rose to be Attorney-General and Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was Lord Palmerston's great-great-grandfather. The title dates from Sir John's son Henry, who was created a peer of Ireland by the titles of Viscount Palmerston, of Palmerston, co. Dublin, and Baron Temple, both in the peerage of Ireland.

In spite of their long connection with Ireland, the Temples remained for the most part English in interests, and almost entirely English in blood, notwithstanding Mr. Kinglake and other writers who talk about the Foreign Secretary's Celtic temperament. Lord Palmerston's father, the second Viscount, succeeded his grandfather in the year 1757, and sat for several years in the English Parliament as member for East Looe, Hastings, and Winchester. By his first wife, the daughter of a Cheshire baronet, he had no issue; he married secondly, Mary, the daughter of Mr. Benjamin Mee, of Bath, and the sister of a director of the Bank of England; and their eldest son Henry John was born at Broadlands, Hants, his father's English seat, on the 20th of October 1784. The second son, William, who was born in 1788, and died in 1856, became of some note as Minister to the Court of Naples; and of the two daughters, the eldest, Frances, married Admiral Sir William Banks, and the second, Elizabeth, the Right Hon. Lawrence Sulivan. The story that Lord Palmerston's father and mother became acquainted through

Chester's Registers of Westminster Abbey, p. 517, note.

the peer being thrown from his horse in Dublin, and carried into a neighbouring house where he was tenderly nursed by his future wife, appears entirely baseless, as there is no reason for connecting the Mees with the Irish capital. The family belonged to the west country. The marriage was solemnized at Bath, where some of Lady Palmerston's relations lived until comparatively recent times, and Miss Mee is described in the papers of the day as of Fenchurch Street," which was in all probability the home of her brother. The anecdote appears to have been derived by Lord Palmerston's biographer, Lord Dalling, from a not particularly accurate life of the statesman by MacGilchrist, although the latter declines to vouch for its accuracy, and adds, by way of detail, the evident figment that Mr. Mee was a respectable hatter, in middling circumstances. Mr. Ashley is possibly better informed. when he describes him, in the revised edition of the biography, as a man of good family; but nothing seems to be certainly known about him.

Of Harry Temple's parents, the father seems to have been a good-humoured gentleman, with literary and artistic tastes, and a great fondness for society. "Lord Palmerston," writes Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, to his wife in 1786, "has not got to his second childhood, but only as far as his second boyhood, for no school-boy is so fond of a breaking-up as he is of a junket and pleasuring."* From the same authority we gather that shortly before his death he was constantly repeating Wilkes's mot, that the Peace of 1763 was the peace of God which passeth all understanding. Broadlands, a house which had for nearly two cen

* Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, edited by his great-niece the Countess of Minto, vol. i. p. 107.

turies belonged to the family of St. Barbe was rebuilt by him from designs by "Capability" Brown, which were supplemented by plans furnished by Holland, the architect of Carlton House. It is a favourable specimen of the later Georgian period, with the inevitable Ionic portico, and is pleasantly situated on the east bank. of the Test, close to Romsey, with its grand old abbey church. Here he made a collection of pictures of some importance, including the "Infant Academy,' which was bequeathed to him by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Of the pair, Lady Palmerston seems to have been decidedly the more popular, and her strong commonsense, even spirits, and unselfish disposition endeared her to a large circle of friends, particularly to the Mintos. They lived chiefly at their houses in Park Lane and at East Sheen, paying, however, several vists to Italy, where their eldest boy strengthened that knowledge of the language which he had already acquired through an Italian tutor, and which stood him good service in after life. Believers in the doctrine of heredity will notice that the dispositions of both his parents were reproduced by Lord Palmerston in a very remarkable degree.

In due course Harry Temple went to Harrow, where he was a contemporary of Peel and Lord Althorp, though not, as is sometimes stated, of Lord Byron. There tradition represents him as acquitting himself with credit in a fight with a big boy named Salisbury; and in an amusing letter written in March 1798, to a young friend Francis Hare, a brother of Augustus and Julius Hare, he describes himself as having begun Homer's Iliad at the "beautifull" episode of Hector's parting from Andromache, as keeping up his Italian, regarding drinking and swearing as ungentlemanlike, and viewing

matrimony with qualified approval, "though he would be by no means precipitate in his choice." At the age

of sixteen he repaired, according to the educational fashion of the time, to Edinburgh, where for three years he boarded with Dugald Stewart, and attended his lectures at the University, the parents paying £400 a year for those privileges.* "In these three years," wrote Palmerston in after life, "I laid the foundation for whatever useful knowledge and habits of mind I possess." He seems, indeed, to have been a model pupil. Dugald Stewart described his character in the most. enthusiastic terms; aud Lord Minto, who was very fond of him, wrote to Lady Paimerston: "Harry is as charming and perfect as he ought to be; I do declare I never saw anything more delightful. On this subject I do not speak on my own judgment alone. I have sought opportunities of conversing with Mr. and also with Mrs. Stewart on the subject, and they have made to me the report which you have already heard from others, that he is the only young man they ever knew in whom it is impossible to find any fault. Diligence, capacity, total freedom from vice of every sort, gentle and kind disposition, cheerfulness, pleasantness and perfect sweetness, are in the catalogue of properties by which we may advertise him if he should be lost." To which Lord- Minto might have added that he was an extremely handsome and wellgrown lad; for such is distinctly the impression pro

* Lord Dalling, in his Life of Palmerston, reproduces a story, apparently from MacGilchrist, to the effect that Sir William Hamilton, when he edited Dugald Stewart's lectures on political economy, based his text on some notes taken in shorthand, and subsequently copied out by Henry Temple. A glance at Sir William Hamilton's preface to the lectures would have convinced him that the anecdote was entirely groundless, as the lectures are based on the notes of pupils called Bridges, Bonar, and Dow.

duced by the interesting water-colour portrait, painted in 1802 by Heaphy, which has recently been presented to the National Portrait Gallery. Harry Temple is there represented as looking dreamily at the spectator. The features have a family likeness to those of later life, but the whole expression of the face is completely unlike that of the very wide-awake individual whom Leech has handed down to posterity with a sprig in one corner of his mouth. At the age of eighteen, Harry Temple seemed to be about to develop into a statesman of the Burleigh rather than of the Carteret type, if indeed he took any part in public life at all; and the change in his disposition between boyhood and manhood seems to have been even more abrupt and complete than is usually the case.

In 1803 he went to St. John's College, Cambridge, and proceeded in the ordinary course to his M.A. degree, without examination. Though he acquitted himself with credit at the College examinations, he made no permanent additions at Cambridge to his stock of knowledge.

Before he left Edinburgh, Palmerston lost his father, and in 1805 his mother died. Both of these blows were a great shock to him, and after the former, Lord Minto, finding him "entirely silent," wrote to his wife that "Harry had too little spring for his age." He probably modified his opinion when, in 1806, his young friend, though he was only just twenty-one, and had not taken his degree, stood for the University of Cambridge, where a vacancy had been created by the death of Mr. Pitt. Palmerston's competitors were Lord Henry Petty, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, and his old schoolfellow Lord Althorp, both of whom were to be his colleagues in the Grey and Melbourne ministries; and