BOOK III, THE FOUNDER LIBRARY. news reached him of Lord ROCKINGHAM'S death, and of the break-up in the Cabinet which followed, his decision was, if possible, more decided. He still clave to Fox, while GRENVILLE his brother, Lord TEMPLE, accepted from SHELBURNE the Lieutenancy of Ireland. A Lordship of the Treasury or the Irish Secretaryship was by turns pressed upon Mr. GRENVILLE by Lord TEMPLE with an earnestness which Lord Temple may be called passionate. Let me hope,' said he, 'that you will feel that satisfaction that every [other] member of my family most earnestly feels at my acceptance of the Lieutenancy of Ireland. . . . I conjure you, by everything that you prize nearest and dearest to your heart; by the joy I have ever felt in your welfare; by the interest I have ever taken in your uneasiness; weigh well your determination ; it decides the complexion of my future hours.. to T. Gren ville, 12th July. I have staked my happiness upon this cast.' The resolve of Thomas GRENVILLE to adhere to the position he had taken was the cause of a family estrangement which endured for many years. But the more a reader, familiar with the annals of the time (and especially if he be also familiar with the personal history of Lord TEMPLE before and after), may study Lord TEMPLE'S letters of 1782, the less he is likely to wonder that the peculiar line of argument they develope failed to attain the aim they had in view. The vein that runs through them is plainly that of personal ambition; not of an adherence-at any cost-to a sincere conviction, whether right or wrong, of public duty. Such a line of argument was, at no time, the line likely to commend itself to Thomas GRENVILLE. Both his virtues, and what by many politicians will be regarded as his weaknesses, alike armed him against obvious appeals to mere self-interest or self-aggrandisement. Book III, Chap. V. T FOUNDER OF THE GRENVILLE LIBRARY. THE WITH FROM PAR One result-and the not unanticipated result of the family estrangement of 1782 was that, two years later, Mr. GRENVILLE found himself to have no longer the command. of a seat in Parliament. For four years to come he gave most of his leisure to a pursuit which he loved much better -as far as personal taste was concerned-namely, to the DRAWAL resumption of his systematic studies in classical literature. But in 1790 he was elected a burgess for the town of Aldborough. Thenceforward, and for a good many years, politics again shared his time with literature, and with those social claims and duties to which no man of his day was more keenly alive. In 1795 a second diplomatic mission was offered to him, and it was accepted. In the interval, another and more lasting change had come across his career in Parliament. He was one of the many Foxites' who utterly disapproved the course which their old leader adopted in regard to the French Revolution and to the rising passion to glorify and to imitate it at home. To the Man of the People' (as he was very fancifully called), the English countershock to the French overturn was, in one sense, specially fatal. It ripened peculiar, though hitherto in some degree latent, weaknesses. And with these, when they became salient, Thomas GRENVILLE had really as little fellow-feeling as had Edmund BURKE. Alike both men now supported PITT, with whom, as experience increased and judgment matured, they both had always had intrinsically far more in common. And among the results of the new political relationships came a restoration of family harmony. George GRENVILLE became PITT'S Foreign Secretary; Thomas GRENVILLE became PITT's Minister to the Court of Berlin. One year later, he again sat in Parliament for Buckingham. LIAMENT, 1784-90. Book III, THE FOUNDER OF THE LIBRARY. THE MIS- BERLIN, 1795. The mission to Berlin was first impeded by a threatened shipwreck among icebergs at sea, and, when that impediment had been with difficulty overcome, the journey was GRENVILLE again and more seriously obstructed by an actual shipwreck the coast of Flanders. Mr. GRENVILLE's life was exupon posed to imminent danger. After a desperate effort, he succeeded in saving his despatches and in scrambling to land. But he saved nothing else; and the inevitable delay enabled the French Directory to send SIEYES to Berlin, in advance of the ambassador of Britain. The able and versatile Frenchman made the best of his priority. Mr. GRENVILLE was not found wanting in exertion, any more than in ability. But in the then posture of affairs the advantage in point of time, proved to be an advantage which no skill of fence could afterwards recover. Hence it was that the mission of 1795 became practically an abortive mission. With it ended the ambassador's diplomatic THE career. Almost equally brief was his subsequent actively official career in England. On the formation of Lord GRENVILLE'S Cabinet (February, 1806), no office was taken by the Premier's next brother. But on the death of Fox, six months later, he became First Lord of the Admiralty. That office he held until the formation of the Tory Government, in the month of April, 1807. It was too brief a term to give him any adequate opportunity of really evincing his administrative powers. And during almost forty remaining years of life he never took office again, contenting himself with that now nominal function (conferred on him in the year THE CHIEF 1800), the Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, to the south of the river Trent,' of the profits of which, as will be seen presently, he made a noble use. That office in Eyre had once TRENT. been a function of real gravity and potency. It was still JUSTICE SHIP IN EYRE,' SOUTH OP 1800-1845. Chap. V. FOUNDER OF THE LIBRARY. JUSTICESHIP AND WHAT COME OF ITS PERPETUA a surviving link between the feudal England of the Henrys BOOK III, and the Edwards, on the one hand, and the industrial THE England of the Georges on the other. Under a king who could govern, as well as reign, the Chief-Justiceship in GRENVILLE Eyre' might have shown itself, in one particular, to possess a real and precious vitality still. By possibility, the sports of twelfth-century and chase-loving monarchs might have been made to alleviate the toils, to brighten the leisure, and to lengthen the lives, of nineteenth-century and hard-toiling artisans. For in exerting the still legal powers (long THE CHIEF dormant, but not abolished) of the forest justiceship, a IN EYRE, potent check might have been provided against the pro- MIGHT HAVE fligate, although now common, abuse of the powers entrusted by Parliament to the Board of Woods and Forests. No new TION. legislation was wanted to save many splendid tracts of forest land (over which the Crown then-and as well in 1845, as in 1800-possessed what might have been indestructible 'forestal rights'), for public enjoyment for ever. Existing laws would have sufficed. But no blame on this score lies at the charge of the then Chief Justice in Eyre. Had Mr. GRENVILLE, for example, ever conceived the idea of using the Forest Laws to preserve for the English people, we will say, Epping Forest, or any other like sylvan tract on this side of Trent, as a People's Park' for ever, he would have been laughed at as a Quixote. If Parliament in 1870 is fast becoming alive to the misconduct of those 'Commissioners' who have dealt with the Forestal rights of the Crown exactly in the spirit of the pettiest of village. shopkeepers, rather than in the spirit of Ministers of State, there was in Mr. GRENVILLE'S time scarcely the faintest whisper of any such conviction of public duty in regard to that matter. Not one Member of Parliament, I think, had ever (at that time) pointed out the gross hypocrisy, as well Book 111, THE OF THE GRENVILLE Will of the Rt. Hon. T. Grenville; MR.T. GRENVILLE'S INTER COURSE WITH, AND ESTEEM FOR, SIR A. as the folly, of selling by the hands of one public board and for a few pounds hundreds of acres of ancient and lovely woodlands, and then presently buying, by the hands of another public board, acres of dreary and almost unimproveable barrenness by the expenditure of several thousands of pounds, in order to provide new recreation grounds for public enjoyment!' Of that forestal Chief-Justiceship Mr. GRENVILLE was the last holder. The office had been established by WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. It was abolished by Queen VICTORIA. One of the chief pursuits of those forty years of retirement which ensued to the founder of the Grenville Library, upon the breaking up of the Grenville Administration of 1806, was book-buying and book-reading. A great part of my Library'-so wrote Mr. GRENVILLE, in 1845-'has been purchased by the profits of a sinecure office given me by the Public.' If that sinecure was not and, under the then circumstances, could not have been by its holder's action or foresight, made the means of preserving for public enjoyment such of the ancient forests as, early in this century, were still intact in beauty, and also lay near to crowded and more or less unhealthy towns, it was at least made the means of giving to the nation a garden for the mind. 'I feel it,' continued Mr. GRENVILLE, in his document of 1845, 'to be a debt and a duty that I should acknowledge my obligation by giving the Library so acquired to the BRITISH MUSEUM for the use of the Public.' I have had occasion, already, to mention that many years before his death Mr. GRENVILLE formed a very high estimate of the eminent attainments and still more eminent public services of Sir A. PANIZZI. No man had a better opportunity of knowing, intimately, the merits of the then |