SIR EGERTON BRYDGES.
Time volumes are not so much an autobiography, as reminis- cences and opinions. An idea of the life of Sir EGERTON Beynnes may be gleaned from them ; but the materials are scant and scattered, and buried in a mass of foreign substances, colisis!ing of disquisitions on genius and poetry, antiquarian or genealogical discussions, curious sketches of characters if ail kirgl.sg from " Billy Pitt the Tory " down to some unknown squire in the Weald of Kent, and pleasant gossip on many matters. The work has been called melancholy, and the impression it leaves has been represented as lugubriously tristeful. We have had few if any feelings of this kind excited. The subject-matter is not indeed of a cheerful or a happy east : we see the ad- vantages of fortune thrown away, and witness the continual efforts of a vain ambition to acquire a disetinction which na- ture, we think, had gainsaid, and which at all events was pursued without vigour, consideration, or effort. But the strange and exaggerated manner in which these things are treated of, sometimes excite smiles, sometimes provoke laughter. The pedigrees are more wearisome than melancholy ; the public charac- ters, though somewhat coloured, it is to be suspected, by the medium through which they have passed, are interesting; and the sketches of private individuals who figure in these volumes are somewhat too sharp to be sad in the eyes of strangers. The au- thor rather defies than deprecates judgment—"mea virtute me involro:" and truly, a person who passes so free a censure upon other individuals, whom he merely met in private life, will have no right to complain of the censure which others may pass upon him. The hero of these memoirs was born in 1762 : his mother was an EGERTON, his father a BRYDGES of course. The combination produced a family amongst the most illustrious in the world, if that of' CONFUCIUS be excepted. The author traces his descent to CHARLEMAGNE ; and, coming down to the next epocha or the heralds, the Conquest, he proves himself connected on the female side with no fewer than one hundred Anglo-Norman non-enume- rated Barons, besides fifty-four whose titles are told. Nor is this all : the elder branch of the STUARTS is extinct ; the family of Sardinia, to whom the High Church looked in the days of GEORGE the Fourth and the Duke of WELLINGTON, may pass away ; even the house of Beuetswicx may cease to reign : but there will still be balm in Britain—the hydra of Republicanism must succumb whilst a BRYDGES is in being; for who so fit to mount the throne as a man connected with houses—
ROYAL.
All the chief branches of the Royal Houses of the Conqueror, Plantagenet, and Tudor.
FOREIGN ROYAL AND PRINCELY HOUSES.
1. Merovingian Kings of France ; 2. Carlovingian Kings ; 3. Capitian Kings ; 4. 'loyal !louses of Spain ; 5. Emperors of Germany, of all the Houses; 6. Portugal ; 7. Ancient Dynasty of Russia ; R. Many of the unialler Principalities of France; 9. Several of the princely Italian Houses, as Visconti, &e.
But though thus ennobled by his ancestors, EGERTON in early life was a younger brother. He felt, perhaps, that even the ho- nours Of the. race of CH ARLEMAGNE were chiefly reflected on the eldest born : he might desire to render the illustrious by birth yet mere illustrious by genius: he could not but remember that his e 1, so rieli in kings and heroes, was unable te b (e' being ie ic eil by the sacred v' inns of a pout. Loa„ peel ri g over t! ^ie things, and the nightly visitations of sometliirer lilse a in ::'t', ia- dueed him to touch the lyre. At two-and-twenty, he published a volume of poems, which fell still-born from the pie_.;; and ab tit the same period he married. The ill success of his first court bip (of the Muses) crushed his powers of composition fur a time : but after seven years they revived ; and since 1792, his life has been a long disease of the cacoethes scribendi. He hag contributed to many periodieals, and edited some himself; he has composed no- vels, poems, pamphlets, travels, essays, and genealogical trees ; he has written treatises on law, poetry, political economy, and high descent ; and lastly, he has written his life. Besides this, he sat for a short time in Parliament, and served for a still shorter as a captain of the train-bands. He dabbled in agriculture, as an ama- teur; became involved by his own neglect, and, as he says, by the rascality of his agents; and at last was compelled, by iecreasing difficulties, to reside abroad. In addition to all this, he had another employment, which has given a colour to his mind. His childless elder brother laid claim to the dormant title of Lord Cieterms of Sudeley ; but all the difficulties and troubles of the case were de- volved upon our author; who had to hunt up the evidence, prove the pedigrees, and rectify the evils which sprung from his bee her's occasional intermeddling. This claim was finally rejseted ; contrary, as our author says, to the " legem terms." But lie had many enemies to contend with. The parvenus of the Peers were opposed to him; two of the ancient nobility disgraced themselves by voting against him. The Law Lords were his enemies ; E L LE NBOROUGH 1BL-sere- sented the law ; REDESDALE made it for the nonce. Yet all this would have availed nothing, had not his brother sent round a cir- cular requesting an attendance on the great, the important day, big with the fate of the Carlovingian race. This was interpreted into a canvass. Some friends were shocked, and went away ; others voted against the claim, to show their purity ; parvenus aed medio- erdists (Peers neither old nor new, but more mischievous than either) howled with triumph; those who had never attended the progress of the case came down to pass judgment ; the ranks of the conspirators were swelled by a new creation of two days old; and the claim was held " not sufficiently proved.' This decision eventually killed his elder brother. It has soured the mind of his successor. Hear him on the hardships he underwent, on the miseries he experienced. The order of things is not very con- secutive, but it is not cur fault. The hostile resolution of the Lord's on the Peerage claim was received by our enemies with grills of extreme delight, as we were all made to feel it in various ways by the countenances and adtitessns. of those into xylem compaay we ea.
Wed. One noble for I, at whose house I paid a morning visit, and with whom
had been On something like confidential terns, never came into the room when 1: L.ard I was there. He was a teal of the world, and took up things warmly wh. n they went tech : he had made a long and able speech for the claim, and then declined to vote. lie has been dead many years : 1 never saw hint after- wards, nor wished to see him. He had been a most successful, yet was not a happy man : Pitt and a rich marrh:ge Iti.d lifted hint front a mean birth to a high station and large estates. Ile was, with some other successful children of capricious fortune, of a Northern, though not Scotch race. Of the little reliance to be put on modern at istoeracy, we had innumerable proofs. One of Mr. Pitt's Peers introduced himself to the claimant, for the purpose of hearing from him every thing confidential which he could learn, and then went and reported hack the whole to the agents of the fiercest opponents. The wife of a mitred dignitary, who had long known the Gamily, paid visits to get out all the gossip, which no doubt she related to her brother, who, though he never once attended a Committee, came down to vote against the claimant,— probably sent by a powerful house of intriguants, who in less than a century had raised themselves from mean and poor gentry into the highest offices, rank, and wealth of the state. Another Peer, unfortunately of an out title and house, teas met in the street the day after the Lords' resolution, anron mention of the event, etied, " Ala ! I ant very sorry I was not there, for I had promised to come down and vote against it !" though he had actually never been present for a mo- ment at a single hearing, ! This honourable Peer's sister had been particularly intimate with one of the claimant's family. Another Peer was brought by a soh.disant friend to meet the present writer at dinner several times, and pre- tended great cordiality and good intention towards the claim ; but this noble Inn! was also among the voters in oppositiom to the utter astonishment of us all. He had been himself made a Peer, but not by Pitt. There were, however, a noble few who, in spite of all intrigues, wet e
" faithful among the faithless thend."
I cannot think of thase lays without indignation and disgust ; observers won. tiered how I bore it as I did: The truth is, that I hail been so tormented about it tar a number of years, ;old kept in such painful and provoking suspense, that any termination to the contest, however unfavourable, appeared to me at the moment to he preferable to a eontinuanee of the aline sufferings. My brother was always in such a fever and irritation that he would not give me a moment's rest ; he was at Illy door front four in the morning till past midnight ; he even often called me out of me bed : and when he did nut call me, he complained that lie had been sitting for hours in my room below waiting for me. Ile had no firmness of mind, ;IA mild rely in nothing, on himself: he was driven about like a feather by every breath and calumny and whisper; and I had such absurd misrepresentations to :u sorer, that I often lost all patience. This has been a most painful situation, and aggravated in this way,—that the unsuccessful are always supposed by the malevolence of the world to be in the wrong. " What !" they said, "the high tribunal of the Lords! can you sup- pose they would do an act of injustice? What interest could they have in coming to a wrong decision?" Lord Betlesdale has himself answered this ; he has told them what interest the Lords had in such a ease. He begins his speech on the Banbury case in these memorable words—" This is a question not simply between the Crown and the claimant ; it of every Peer whose patent is of a subsequent date to the patent of With on Earl of Banbury." Is any thing further wanted than the asset tion of their own favourite judge? Then Lord Ellenborough complained how hard it was that persons should be put among the Peers who had not worked for it, as he had done !—an odd argument against a seat in the Ilttse, of which the essence was hereditability. This, it will be sad, was temper, not ignorance or ineareity of argument : but want of temper is a greater disqualification in a judge, than want of capacity or want of knowledge.
One great point insisted on throughout the volumes, is that success is no proof of merit. If time and space allewod it, many passages—some sharp, some ludicrous—mi,rlit be (voted and the subject itself is not unworthy of a calm discussion. But, in the sweeping deciAons of Sir EGERTON, it is easy to see that the judge has an eye to his own case; for haw men who have laboured so long and so earnestly, were ever, perhaps, more completely un- successful on all points. One great object of his life was the elysium of which poets sing—a rural retreat, and a state of literary leisure, free from internal care and external annoyances. Ile had a seat in a beautiful country : in early life he possessed a com- petent, in later years an ample income : yet his solitude was con- stantly haunted by the cares and anxieties ofan embarrassed man. He had set his heart upon the Chandos Peerage ; his peculiar studies ought to have told him either of the truth or falsehood of the claim. After years of litigation and expense, it was condi- tionally- rejected. From that time to this, he persists in asserting his right ; and has assumed the title, but has taken no steps to bring the claim before the Lords, or another tribunal which he says is open to him. The desire of present rem:wit and future fame was his earliest, his most enduring, and his strongest passion.
" What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own ?"
was his constant question, which he has never yet been able to re- solve. In a favourable and perhaps a friendly notice of the man, in the last Quarterly, this is attributed to want of steady industry; for it is said, " he possesses the temperament of genius in as high a perfection as any author of our titres:' The phrase is not spe- cific. If by temperament lie meant a sensibility of mind, we be- lieve few of the higher intellectual qualities are more common, and, unless balanced by other powers, few more mischievous; for, like nervous irritability in the bodily system, it is a proof of weakness rather than of strength. Of steady industry, indeed, we believe Sir EGERTON BRYDGES incapable by nature; for be wants the thewes and sinews necessary for continuous labour. He has no ruminating 'power, which would enable him to make the know- ledge he acquires from hooks and observation his own. Nor has he the 711018 sana, or, as the Quarterly acknowledges, the logical power which is requisite to form a first-rate intellect. Lastly, he wants the unknown principle of mental life, the power of genius. These observations must be applied to the high literary rank to which Sir EGERTON BRYDGES has aspired, and which he some- what covertly claims for his powers, it not for his productions. In a lower sphere he has considerable merit; and will obtain a place in history among the literary actors of the present day, though his station on the role may be lower than he would tutee. For tins re- putation he will b.! indebted to porl1umianees which he now despises—to his heraldic and bibliographical works : and why ? Because they are at the head of their class, if they be not in spirit altogether unique. As an English bibliographer, he perhaps equals DIHDIN in a knowledge of books, and very far surpasses hint in his useful acquaintance with their contents : he has, which the other has not, a tolerable taste, and a delicate perception; he has, too, all the enthusiasm of the Doctor without his twaddle and his cant. As ft./and/id genealogist he is without a rival ; as an elegant herald lie stands alone.
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