marine villa, to which the disappointed statesman frequently retired. It was this mansion and these circumstances which elicited from Gray, the poet, those memorably severe and clever verses, of which, inasmuch as they are omitted in more than one standard edition of his works, we venture to transcribe the opening stanzas:

"Old, and abandoned by each venal friend,

Here Holland formed the pious resolution
To smuggle a few years, and strive to mend
A ruined character and constitution.

"On this congenial spot he fixed his choice;

Earl Goodwin trembled for his neighbouring sand; Here sea-gulls scream and cormorants rejoice,

And mariners, though shipwrecked, dread to land.

"Here reign the blustering north and blighting east;
No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing;

Yet Nature could not furnish out the feast;
And he invokes new horrors still to bring.

"Here mouldering fanes and battlements arise;
Turrets and arches nodding to their fall;
Unpeopled monast❜ries delude our eyes,
And mimic desolation covers all," etc.

Another contemporary poet, Churchill, in his "Epistle to William Hogarth," has dealt no less. severely with Lord Holland's character:

"Lift against Virtue Power's oppressive rod;
Betray thy country, and deny thy God;
And, in one general comprehensive line

To group, which volumes scarcely could define,
Whate'er of sin and dullness can be said,

Join to a Fox's heart a Dashwood's head."

In the "Selwyn Correspondence," which, by the bye, contains many pleasing and characteristic letters written by Lord Holland, the last notice which occurs of him is in a melancholy letter, without date, addressed by Lord Macartney from Bath to George Selwyn. "His (Lord Holland's) mind,” writes the former, "is weak and languid, like his pulse, but at times appears to recover itself, and to be quiet and strong. His speech and memory are impaired, but I think his apprehension is perfect. Poor Lady Holland is a good deal changed; she is grown thin, and looks ill. Her whole nervous system seems strongly affected; the least trifle alarms her, and in the midst of the most cheerful discourse she often bursts out into an involuntary effusion of tears."

For Selwyn, Lord Holland appears to have ever entertained the sincerest affection. "I have looked upon you," he writes to him in 1767, "to be like no other man in the world." When Lord Holland was attacked by his last illness, Selwyn, whose

' Afterward created Baron Le Despencer, a dissolute man of pleasure and an incompetent minister. Not only was it said of him, when chancellor of the exchequer in 1762, that he was " a man to whom a sum of five figures was an impenetrable secret," but he himself observed, when offered the appointment, that people would point at him in the streets and cry, "There goes the worst chancellor of the exchequer that ever appeared."