Earl Spencer

“ Rosebery, saying little, but now and then launching a pleasant mot; Harcourt, cheery, expansive, witty. Like a scene from one of Dizzy’s novels, and all the actors men with parts to play.”
The scene is now almost as distant as one from a Sheridan comedy. The Earl is dead; the library is in exile; the whole scheme of things to which both belonged has passed away. The very type of aristocracy which Earl Spencer so worthily represented seems tending to extinction; it has at any rate become of less and less account in politics. ”

“ In the old days the ordinary course of a young man was first to take up politics as a game, and then to adopt it as a vocation. The game lost interest when the sides became grotesquely unequal, and the vocation is no longer felt.
A man like Earl Spencer is, therefore, not merely rare in present-day politics; he is almost unknown. The Peers who still take an interest in the affairs of the nation are not territorial, but rather urban and even suburban Peers. ”

“ Silence followed the address of Mr Evans. On his right hand, leaning against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquess of Bland-ford. Lord Althorp stood a little backward, to the right of his father, Earl Spencer."
The first movement of the forces gives the historian an opportunity of dropping a withering sneer at an unfortunate man, so provincial in his notions as to suppose that a hundred pounds or two would be of any avail in such a contest. ”

“ Charles Spencer, a youth of extraordinary hopes, very learned for his age, and ingenious, and under a governor of great worth. Happy were it, could as much be said of the elder brother, the Lord Spencer, who, rambling about the world, dishonors both his name and his family, adding sorrow to sorrow to a mother, who has taken all imaginable care of his education. There is a daughter very young married to the Earl of Clancarty, who has a great and fair estate in Ireland, but who yet gives no great presage of worth,—so universally contaminated is the youth of this corrupt and abandoned age! ”

“ Spencer, I here create thee Earl of Wiltshire, And daily will enrich thee with our favour,50 That, as the sunshine, shall reflect o'er thee. Beside, the more to manifest our love, Because we hear Lord Bruce doth sell his land, And that the Mortimers are in hand withal, Thou shalt have crowns of us t'outbid the barons And, Spencer, spare them not, lay it on. ”

“ They often took a selfish view of public questions. They often lacked imagination and sympathy. [229] They were many of them most complacent pagans. Most were quite horribly calm over things like the Irish famine and the industrial shames of Great Britain. But it is not easy to point to any age or country which afforded better examples than the best of them of the cultivated mind in the sound body, of powers mental and physical carried to their highest pitch of development, of refined virility and calm strength. And of the type Earl Spencer was not the least worthy representative. ”

“ Second Lord Northington, formerly M.P. for Hampshire.
[103] Lord Spencer, who succeeded his father as second Earl Spencer in 1783, married Lady Lavinia Bingham, eldest daughter of the first Earl of Lucan.
[104] The Right Hon. John Foster, Lord Oriel (1740-1828) , Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland (1784) , Speaker of the Irish House of Commons (1785-1800) , was the author of the Irish Corn Law of 1784, the founder of the National Bank, and closely connected with Lord Sheffield by their common interests in commercial and financial questions. He was elected Speaker August 15, 1785. ”

“ In his constant letters to his ‘dearest harte,’ he gives a melancholy picture of the perplexed and unsatisfactory state of affairs in the royal army. He says: ‘The discontent that I and other honest men receive dayly is beyond expression,’ and he declares ‘that were it not for the punctilio of honour’ he would not ‘remaine an howre.’
Lord Spencer was with the King at Edgehill, and with Prince Rupert at Bristol, etc. etc., and in 1643 he was raised to the dignity of Earl of Sunderland. ”

“ Before the close of his mayoralty Spencer received the honour of knighthood.
By his wife, Alice Bromfield, Spencer had an only child, Elizabeth, who in 1598 was sought in marriage by William, second lord Compton (afterwards first Earl of Northampton) . Spencer strongly disapproved of the match, but Compton's influence at court enabled him to procure Spencer's imprisonment in the Fleet in March 1599 for ill-treating his daughter (State Papers, Dom. 1598–1601, p. 169) . The young lady was ultimately carried off by her lover from Canonbury House in a baker's basket. ”

“ Spencer Compton, 2nd earl of Northampton in the Compton line (1601—1643) , was the son of William, 1st earl, lord president of the marches, whose father had been created Baron Compton by Elizabeth, and of Elizabeth, daughter and heir of Sir John Spencer, lord mayor of London. On the 3rd of November 1616 he was created a Knight of the Bath, and was elected for Ludlow in the parliament of 1621, the same year being appointed master of the robes to the prince of Wales and attending the latter in the adventure to Spain in 1623. ”

“ I gave your Lordship's letter to the King. He cannot yet be persuaded that the new guards will hurt his affairs so much as I believe they will. Sir William T. is now here, and will speak to him of them ”

“ To curtail, for the benefit of a small privileged class, prerogatives which the Sovereign possesses and ought to possess for the benefit of the whole nation, was the object on which Spencer's heart was set. During many years he was restrained by older and wiser men; and it was not till those whom he had early been accustomed to respect had passed away, and till he was himself at the head of affairs, that he openly attempted to obtain for the hereditary nobility a precarious and invidious ascendency in the State, at the expense both of the Commons and of the Throne. ”

“ A wealthy nobleman of manly character, commanding presence, and engaging manners, Spencer was soon a prominent and popular figure in society. At Spencer House in London and at Althorp Park, his Northamptonshire seat, he soon exercised magnificent hospitality. Devoted to sport, he was an admirable horseman. Through life he rode about London on business or social errands, and he was thrice master of the Pytchley hounds. In shooting, too, he always took a lively interest, largely with an eye to national needs. ”

“ Lord Spencer was always favourable to Catholics, but it was in the spirit of generosity to a fallen, or justice to an injured people. He never dreamt his own son would be one of the first to reap the benefit of the measures he advocated in Parliament. The letter he received from Leicester in January, 1830, must have been a shock indeed. Besides, a member of this aristocratic house descending to such a level {201} must be considered a family disgrace—an event to be wept over as long as there was one to glory in the name of Spencer, or feel for its prestige. ”

“ But he was no abstract idea; he was a man vigorously devoted to truth and justice as he saw them, who had deep insights, and who finished, under terrible frustrations from bad health, a piece of work that taken for all in all, is extraordinary. A human life is greater than all its possible appraisers, assessors, and critics. In comparison with the fact of Spencer's actual living, such critical characterization of it as I have been at all these pains to produce seems a rather unimportant as well as a decidedly graceless thing. ”

“ I have already said that Spencer is much more widely known in this country than in England. During the first few weeks of my sojourn in the United States I heard more inquiries and more talk about Spencer than about almost any other Englishman living. Spencer's whole life, his pure, rigorous, anchorite-like devotion to knowledge, is indeed a wonderful phenomenon in an age like the present. He has labored for the love of labor and for the good it does to the world, almost absolutely without reward. I presume that as paying speculations Herbert Spencer's works would be hopeless failures ”

“ These were the friends—few but faithful—amid all the hundreds, who alone had a word of cheer for Lord Spencer in a long and trying speech he had to address to his irreconcilable foes. But if there was any tremor in him as he stood up in surroundings so trying, I was unable to detect it. Indeed, at the moment he rose, there was something very fine and very impressive in his figure. He is, as most people know, a man of unusual height; hard exercise and the ride across country have kept him from having any of that tendency to embonpoint which destroys in middle age so many a fine figure. ”

“ I said. "She is determined to be a burden to no one. That is very proper."
Miss Spencer looked down on the ground again. "I must go and get the coffee," she said.
"Has the lady many pupils?" I asked.
"She has only Mr. Mixter. She gives all her time to him."
At this I could not laugh, though I smelt provocation; Miss Spencer was too grave. "He pays very well," she presently added, with simplicity. "He is very rich. He is very kind. He takes the Countess to drive." And she was turning away.
"You are going for the Countess's coffee?" ”

“ Yet long before this hobnobbing with the later generation of poets, Spencer had ceased to admire German romanticism, for in 1802 he burlesqued the German ghost literature in a play called Urania, which was performed at Drury Lane theatre. He published volumes of poems in 1804 and 1811, while a collected edition appeared in 1835, a year after his death. [4]
Lady Diana Beauclerk, who had become interested in Mr. Stanley's translation because it furnished subjects for her pencil, was the eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, third Duke of Marlborough, [5] and was thus Mr. W. R. Spencer's aunt. ”

“ Spencer has no special place as a man of letters; and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance was that he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there is about him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations, is in a certain consistency and completeness from his own point of view. There is something mediæval, and therefore manful, about writing a book about everything in the world. Now this simplicity expressed itself in politics in carrying the Victorian worship of liberty to the most ridiculous lengths ”

“ Spencer has been successful in following the order of nature and pointing out how things came to be, is a matter about which speculators will differ, but there is one consolation for those who are not content to sit down and wait for the Spencerian evolution to correct social aberrations, he could not make man different from what he is whatever his ancestry or the genesis of his being. We know that man's volition and consequent action can, and does, influence and determine conditions favorable and unfavorable to his welfare. ”

“ The workingmen of Spencer fall on happy times. Here are books easy to come at as the water you drink and the air you breathe and stores of them which can never be exhausted. If it had come to pass thirty years ago that some man delving in your wild hills had struck gold, and all the eager manhood of New England had gone crazy to delve for gold where Spencer stands, and had found it in mighty stores, I wonder whether that would have been such a boon to Spencer and the world as this you have done—establishing great industries and wholesome and good ”

“ He became Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1780, and also served in America against his fellow-countrymen. On his return he entered the service of the Elector of Bavaria, and received the honour of knighthood from George III. He came back to England in 1795, and devoted the remainder of his life to scientific research. His experiments for the improvement of fireplaces and chimneys have proved of lasting benefit to mankind.
[20] Lord Henry Spencer (1770–1795) , second son of George, third Duke of Marlborough. He died at Berlin, to which court he had been accredited as Envoy-Extraordinary. ”

“ In October 1848 he made a visitation of the Bahamas and went to Havannah some years later. He remained in Jamaica till 1856, when failing health compelled him to appoint a coadjutor. Returning to England, he settled at Torquay, where he died on 24 Feb. 1872.
Spencer married, on 14 July 1822, Eliza, daughter of John Musson, and left three daughters.
Spencer was the author of ‘Sermons on Various Subjects’ (1827) , ‘The Mourner Comforted’ (1845) , and a number of fugitive poems, some of which appeared in ‘Blackwood's Magazine’ (e.g. October 1837, p. 555) . ”

“ Gathering about him in massed formation the heavy artillery of American conservatism—Mr Root, Dr Butler, Judge Gary, Mr Taft—Mr Beale has prefaced Spencer’s essays by a series of prose lyrics which, while they may gratify the few remaining adherents of the Spencerian philosophy, are otherwise valuable only as a somewhat inept expression of the ideals of the last age. ”

“ Mr. Spencer thought he would stop over in the town a few days and look over the situation. No, the clerk need n’t call the boy. He would carry up his suit-case, himself; it was rather heavy.
Mr. Ralph Spencer, the phœnix that arose from Jimmy Valentine’s ashes—ashes left by the flame of a sudden and alterative attack of love—remained in Elmore, and prospered. He opened a shoe-store and secured a good run of trade.
Socially he was also a success, and made many friends. And he accomplished the wish of his heart. He met Miss Annabel Adams, and became more and more captivated by her charms. ”