ward VI. a Peter Temple was the owner of Stowe, married Millicent, daughter of William Jekyll, of Newington, Middlesex, and had by her two sons, from the elder of whom, John, descended the heiress who made the fortunes of the Grenvilles; and from the younger, Anthony, descended Sir John Temple (Master of the Rolls, Commissioner of the Great Seal, and Commissioner of Government in Ireland during the reign of Charles I., the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate), the celebrated Sir William Temple, and the Viscounts Palmerston, of whom the present Premier is the most distinguished representative. Sir Peter Temple, second baronet, the descendant of John, the elder son of Peter Temple, of Stowe, was the High Sheriff of Bucks, to whom the Ship-money Writ was addressed which John Hampden resisted, and Sir Peter himself got into trouble with the King for not enforcing arrears. He represented Buckingham in the two last Parliaments of Charles, was an ardent adherent of the Puritan party, and was nominated one of the judges to try the King, but never sat. By his second wife, Christian, sister of Sir Richard Leveson, of Trentham, he had a son, Richard, who succeeded him in the baronetcy, and was a distinguished member of the country party in the reign of Charles II. Voting for the exclusion of the Duke of York, he was put out of the commission of the peace by James II. on his accession, joined in the Revolution, and voted for declaring the throne vacant in the Convention Parliament. He had only one surviving son, the eldest, Richard, who succeeded him as fourth Baronet. One of the younger daughters, Christian, married Sir Thomas Lyttelton, and was the

mother of George, Lord Lyttelton. Lyttelton. The second daughter, Hester, married, as we have seen, Richard Grenville, of Wotton, and became eventually the heiress of her brother, Sir Richard Temple. The latter entered the army, and served with great distinction under Marlborough, was dismissed as a Whig by his successor Ormond, and, on the accession of George I., was created, October 19, 1714, Baron Cobham, in Kent, being descended through his grandmother, Christian Leveson, from Margaret, Lady Sondes, sister of Henry Brooke, sixth and last Baron Cobham of that family. He was raised to the further dignity of Viscount Cobham, May 23, 1718, with remainder, failing his male issue, of the dignity of Viscountess Cobham to his sister Hester Grenville and her issue male, and failing such, to his sister Christian Lyttelton and her issue male, with an extension of the dignity of Baron Cobham to his said sisters and their heirs-male, as in the case of the Viscountcy. Sir Richard Temple died without issue in 1749, when Hester Grenville became Viscountess and Baroness Cobham, and, on the 18th of October in the same year, was raised to the dignity of Countess Temple, with remainder of the Earldom of Temple to her issue male. She died in 1752, leaving four sons and one daughter. Richard, the eldest son, succeeded as Earl Temple; George, the second son, was the celebrated Minister of whom Burke has left one of his characters;" the third, James Grenville, was the father of James, Lord Glastonbury, who was raised to that title in 1797, and died in 1825 without issue; the fourth son, Henry, was Governor of Barbadoes (where he was very popular), Ambassador to the

Porte, and a Commissioner of the Customs, and died in 1784. His daughter Louisa was the grandmother of the present Earl Stanhope. The Countess Temple's daughter, Lady Hester Grenville, became in 1754 the wife of the first William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, and was created Baroness Chatham in her own right. We have, therefore, now before us the first generation of that remarkable array of talent which was connected with the name of Grenville during the reigns of George II. and George III.

It is scarcely possible to tell the lives of the two brothers, Richard, Earl Temple, and the Right Honourable George Grenville, separately, so intimately connected were their political vicissitudes. Richard Grenville, the elder brother, was born September 26, 1711, educated at Eton, and sent on his travels. On his return to England he was elected, through the influence of his uncle, Lord Cobham, in 1734, for the Temple family borough of Buckingham, and he afterwards exchanged this seat for one for the county. On the death of his mother, in October 1752, he became Earl Temple, and thus united the estates of Wotton and Stowe. He had obtained, in 1736, a very considerable accession of property by his marriage with Anna Chamber, one of the daughters and coheirs of Thomas Chamber, Esq., of Hamworth, and a ward of the celebrated Lady Betty Germaine. He had formed the strictest intimacy, personal and political, with his brother-in-law, Pitt, and in November 1755, when the latter was dismissed from his office of Paymaster-General, Temple generously stepped forward with pecuniary assistance, conveying his offer through his sister, Lady Hester Pitt, in the following

delicate manner :"I cannot defer till to-morrow morning making a request to you, upon the success of which I have so entirely set my heart that I flatter myself you will not refuse it to me. I must entreat you to make use of all your interest with Mr Pitt to give his brother Temple leave to become his debtor for a thousand pounds a-year till better times. Mr Pitt will never have it in his power to confer so great an obligation upon, dear Lady Hester, your most truly affectionate brother, TEMPLE." It was long before Pitt allowed the remembrance of this kindness to be outweighed by circumstances of an opposite character. Indeed, he may be said to have sacrificed to this remembrance not only himself, but in a great degree his country also. Earl Temple may have been in private life an amiable and excellent man, but there was in him an excessive self-appreciation, or rather, perhaps, we should say a most exaggerated estimate of his importance and claims as the head of the great Grenville family. There can be little doubt but his connection with Mr Pitt, the high position acquired by the latter, and the somewhat dependent social position in which that statesman had been placed relatively to Lord Temple, fostered this excessive family pride, and induced the Earl to attribute to himself much of the success and prestige of his distinguished brother-in-law. Lord Temple had, undoubtedly, considerable ability, but he can lay claim justly to nothing approaching the commanding genius of Pitt; and his idea that he must be appealed to by the latter for counsel and approbation on every occasion, and his attempt to dictate to him his political conduct, furnish singular instances of the power of

family and personal vanity. The same character and vanity are patent at least in his successor, the second Earl Temple and first Marquess of Buckingham; and for two generations, the Crown, the people, and politicians generally, were constantly encountered by these Grenville family pretensions in a manner which almost obliterated the public sense of their talents and services.

In November 1756, Lord Temple took office under Pitt, as First Lord of the Admiralty; but not being (through illness) consulted as to an alteration in the address in answer to the speech from the throne, he was so offended that he came down to the House of Lords, "at the hazard of his life," as he declared, and delivered an invective against the passage which had not received his sanction, and then strode out of the House, " with a thorough conviction," says Lord Waldegrave, "that such weighty reasons must be quite unanswerable;" but on his departure the address was voted unanimously. Pitt was also absent from his duties through gout, so this caused no breach between the brothers, and on the 5th of April in the following year Temple was dismissed by the King, as was immediately afterwards Pitt also. In the following June, however, Pitt forced his way into office again and carried with him Temple, who accepted the post of Lord Privy Seal. He thus became a prominent member of Pitt's great Administration, and his friends claim for him that during the frequent illnesses of Pitt, Temple really governed, and is entitled to much of the praise bestowed on the great Commoner. But though Temple might ably second and sustain Pitt's policy, there is no doubt that the inspiration of its