less of a politician than an ardent agriculturist and a most amiable and respected country gentleman, residing the greater part of the year at Woburn. He engaged the services of Telford and others in re-draining and extending the Bedford Level, rebuilt Covent Garden Market at a cost of £40,000, and spent a like sum on the church at Woburn. To his house there he added a gallery of statuary brought by him from Italy. He was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in the short Grenville Administration of 1806; but never again accepted office, though a stanch Whig to the last. He not only improved his estates materially, but devoted great pains to ameliorating the condition of the farm-labourers, rebuilding their cottages both in Bedfordshire and Devonshire, and re-letting them at a low rental-a process the family are now, we believe, engaged in repeating. He died in October 1839, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Francis, the seventh and late Duke of Bedford, who followed much the same course of life with his father, like him preferring agriculture and country life to an active part in politics. The Duke, however, was understood to be a man of sound judgment in politics as well as country pursuits, and he always participated in the counsels of his younger and more distinguished brother, Lord John Russell, whose debts incurred through his acceptance of office he repeatedly paid— as Lord John stated to a Committee of the Commons appointed to inquire into salaries-and to whom he at last bequeathed an estate sufficient to support a new peerage. For many years the Duke, though without office, was in truth a leading member of the Cabinet a position very rarely held by any one out

side its pale. Under his careful management, the income of the head of the house of Russell attained to the enormous sum of £300,000 per annum. The Duke died May 14, 1861, and was succeeded by his only son, William, eighth Duke, who has always led a very secluded and peculiar life, and is unmarried. The fame of the Russells has, it need hardly be said, rested for many years on the reputation and position of the uncle of the present Duke, Lord John Russell, the mover of the Reform Bill, and for so long a time the leader of the Whig and Liberal parties. He was created, on the 30th of July 1861, Earl Russell, of Kingston-Russell, Dorset, and Viscount Amberley, of Gloucestershire. His eldest son shows some promise of maintaining the family character for ability, though as yet unknown as a politician.

Taken for all in all, no one of the great houses, except perhaps the Percies, who have so often saved her from invasion, has deserved better of England than that of Russell. The founder was a great and successful plunderer of the abbeys, but it is better to plunder monks than to plunder the Saxon people, and the properties of the great peers came almost all from one of those two sources. Since his time one Russell has staked his head for the Protestant faith, a second the estates in successful resistance to a despot, a third has died on the scaffold for the liberties of Englishmen, a fourth has aided materially in the Revolution which substituted law for the will of the Sovereign, a fifth spent his life in resisting the attempt of the house of Brunswick to rebuild the power of the throne, and gave one of the first examples of just religious government in Ireland, and a sixth organ

ised and carried through a bloodless but complete transfer of power from his own order to the middle class. The value of a nobility to a State has been questioned, but if a nobility is valuable, it is in families like the Russells that its worth consists. They overshadow meaner men a little too much; but then, if the trees spoil the corn, it is also they which collect the rain.

The Cecils.

HE Cecils have a great ancestor, but no pedigree. A parasite of the founder, the crafty resolute patriot who built Elizabeth's throne, tried to persuade him that he was the lineal representative of the Roman Cæcilii,* a pedigree which would have placed him above every Norman baron; but the able old man had more modest ideas, and was greatly distressed because, believing himself to be gentleman in the English sense, he could not quite prove it. His enemies would have it that his grandfather "kept the best inn in Stamford," and the first Earl of Salisbury was taunted by peers as grandson of a sievemaker; but the Cecils themselves were doubtful, as witness this letter from the founder's son, first Earl of Exeter, to a relative:-"I have thought

* It is a curious and not quite explicable fact that there is no pedigree in the modern world which can be proved to connect us with the ancient civilisation, and only one, that of the Savelli, which claims to do 80. The patriciat cannot have perished utterly, and the only explanation is, that its heiresses intermarried with the invaders, and are lost in their barbarous designations. We question whether in Europe any pedigree equals that of the Queen as lineal representative of Wulf the Teuton. The Hindoo pedigrees are longer, but they include adoptions, and there is a doubtful element in all the Jew descents. Otherwise clear connection with the tribe of Levi would be a matchless descent.-(M. T.)

good to require you to make search in my study at Burghley amongst my boxes of my evidences; and I think you shall find that very writ itself by the which my grandfather, or great-grandfather, or both, were made Sheriffs of Lincolnshire or Northamptonshire; and likewise a warrant from the Duke of Suffolk in King Henry the Eighth's time to my grandfather, and old Mr Wyngfyld that dead is, for the certifying touching the fall of woods in Clyffe parke or Rockyngham forest, by the name of Davy Cecyll, Esquire ; which title at those days was used but to such as were gentlemen of note, where commonly they were entitled but as the name of gentlemen, though now the name of esquire is used on the naming of any gentleman. If you have any records of your own to show the descent of my great-grandfather, I pray you send a note thereof; likewise my Lord my father's altering the writing of his name inclineth many that are not well affected to our house to doubt whether we are rightly descended of the house of Wales,* because they write their name Sitsell, and our name is written Cecill; my grandfather wrote it Syssell, and so in orthography all the names differ. Whereof I marvel what moved my Lord my father to alter it. I have my Lord's pedigree very well set out which he left unto myself, which my brother of Selby Priory desired me for to give in charge unto you." The letter is dated London, November 14, 1605.

"The house of Wales" are the family of Sitsylt or Cecil, of Alterynnis, in Herefordshire, who claimed a descent from the Princes of Wales. The Lincolnshire Cecils claimed as their ancestor a younger son of this family, whom they identify with the David Cyssell referred to in the text, and the Welsh Cecils wisely allowed the relationship, which could only bring them good. But the connection is entirely hypothetical.