Lord Emsworth

“ The Earl of Emsworth stood in the doorway of the Senior Conservative Club's vast diningroom, and beamed with a vague sweetness on the two hundred or so Senior Conservatives who, with much clattering of knives and forks, were keeping body and soul together by means of the coffee-room luncheon. He might have been posing for a statue of Amiability. His pale blue eyes shone with a friendly light through their protecting glasses; the smile of a man at peace with all men curved his weak mouth ”

“ It was thought that the limit of permissible license had been transcended, and the following day Peto and Elstowe, the other speaker, were summoned before the council to receive a reprimand. Lord Essex told them they deserved to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Thames. 'Threaten such things to rich and dainty folk, which have their hope in this world,' answered Elstowe, gallantly, 'we fear them not; with thanks to God we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land.' [9] Men of such metal might be broken, but they could not be bent. ”

“ Emmet’s [96] assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.
Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” ”

“ For this, and other sacrifices and merits, his Majesty, by patent under the Privy Seal, dated Oxford, Jan., 1643, was pleased to advance Sir Francis Esmond to the dignity of Viscount Castlewood, of Shandon, in Ireland: and the viscount's estate being much impoverished by loans to the king, which in those troublesome times his Majesty could not repay, a grant of land in the plantations of Virginia was given to the lord viscount; part of which land is in possession of descendants of his family to the present day. ”

“ You do me honour overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of the superior.” He [91] turned half-smiling to the presiding judge. “There are men concerned in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conception of yourself, my lord.” At the final moment of his life Emmet stood motionless with a handkerchief in his hand, the fall of which was to be the signal for the cart to be drawn away. ”

“ The title we bear is his, if he would claim it. 'Tis we who have no right to our name: not he that's too great for it. He sacrificed his name at my dying lord's bedside—sacrificed it to my orphan children; gave up rank and honor because he loved us so nobly. His father was Viscount of Castlewood and Marquis of Esmond before him; and he is his father's lawful son and true heir, and we are the recipients of his bounty, and he the chief of a house that's as old as your own. ”

“ When he is sober he is delightful; and when tipsy, perfectly irresistible.” And referring to his favorite, Shakspeare (who was quite out of fashion until Steele brought him back into the mode) , Dick compared Lord Castlewood to Prince Hal, and was pleased to dub Esmond as ancient Pistol.
The Mistress of the Robes, the greatest lady in England after the Queen, or even before her Majesty, as the world said, though she never could be got to say a civil word to Beatrix, whom she had promoted to her place as maid of honor, took her brother into instant favor. ”

“ In May, Essex and Waller invested Oxford, while Fairfax, Manchester, and the Scots met under the walls of York. Thus these two great royalist cities were attacked at once by all the forces of parliament. Charles, invested by a stronger force, and being deprived of the assistance of the princes, Rupert and Maurice, his nephews, who were absent on their marauding expeditions, escaped from Oxford, and proceeded towards Exeter. In the mean time, he ordered Prince Rupert to advance to the relief of York, which was defended by the marquis of Newcastle. ”

“ He was called to the bar in Ireland in 1781, and in that year he married Anne Western Temple, daughter of Robert Temple, an American loyalist who had settled in Ireland. Emmet attained eminence as an advocate; he possessed a highly poetical imagination, remarkably retentive memory, and a vast amount of acquired knowledge of law, divinity, and literature. Under the chancellorship of Lord Lifford, Emmet was advanced to the rank of king's counsel in 1787. His death occurred in February 1788, while he was on circuit in the south of Ireland, and his widow died in the following November. ”

“ Then, when his day's work was done, at whatever hour that might be, it was as if the word 'business' was unknown to him, and there sat at table, dressed in loose and somewhat ill-fitting clothes, a man of very simple and kindly nature, a connoisseur in cookery, art, and millinery, a gentleman at heart, and to the backbone an American—one who, in spite of his gentleness, was without breeding; one who, in spite of his deep and varied knowledge, was without culture.
He and Amelie were seated at lunch alone together on the day following Mrs. Emsworth's triumphant debut. ”

“ The reign of Sensibility was not over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only [58] to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing capital sentence. ”

“ Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure from the common, in one direction, by their conformity in every other. ”

“ The untoward fate of one, the unfortunate enthusiast Lord Edward Fitzgerald, commences the history of the insurrection; the last, Robert Emmett, comes to complete the story, his episode almost as an anticlimax. Both were lives of promise, miserably thrown away, and it is recognised that both these victims rebels destroying a house furniture of misapplied talents were worthy of a better fate, and capable of higher things. ”

“ Emsworth was something of a personality; her friends, who were many, said she could act; her enemies, who were legion, allowed she was beautiful, and New York, which sets the time in so many things, takes its time very obediently in matters of artistic import from unbusiness-like England and France. In this conviction, it was flocking there to-night. Besides the great impresario, Bilton, had let her the Dominion Theatre, and was known to have given her carte blanche in the matter of mounting and dresses. ”

“ I do not attach much importance to the disparagement of Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads him well will know, that in following the strong bent of his genius, he was careless of the many, careless also of the few, self-assured that he should "create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to witness the revolution he had wrought, and "to see what he foresaw." ”

“ Returned to parliament for Tamworth on 28 June 1756, he was appointed a lord of the admiralty in 1761, and vice-chamberlain of the household in 1765, and, having thus vacated his seat at Tamworth, was elected for Aldborough in Yorkshire. ”

“ Emsworth rather embraced this opportunity of playing it before a private audience, with a view to seeing whether her public in New York, with their strange mixture of cynical indifference to anything but money, and the even stranger survival of the Puritan spirit, which crops up every now and then as some rare border plant will crop up among the weeds and grasses of a long overgrown garden, would be likely to swallow it. ”

“ V. And the following Year the Dukes of York, Norfolk, and Buckingham, with the Earls of Salisbury, Shrewsbury, and Pembrook, Viscount Bourchier, the Lord Rivers, and Sir John Falstaff; being all absent from St. George’s Feast, they declared the reason of their absence by their Messengers. There are many Precedents of this kind, and of Letters sent from the Sovereign, directed to his Lieutenant, to accept of Knights-Companions Excuses, whose absence he had beforehand dispenc’d with; we observe those Dispensations excus’d not the sending their own particular Excuses ”

“ But we may safely assume that no advocacy either of men or of angels could by any possibility have stirred the hearts of those in authority, and saved the life of the man who was presumptuous enough to rebel against the Union. The trial was hurried through. Every Irish schoolboy knows the impassioned and eloquent address which Emmet delivered—an address which even the tragic circumstances could not save from the brutal interruption of Lord Norbury. ”

“ Emerson had a great admiration for Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture. He warns against false leadership:—
"To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others.—He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world,—to be himself the counter-balance of all falsehood and all wrong.—The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish.—England maintains trade, not liberty." ”

“ No man admired King William more; a hero and a conqueror, the bravest, justest, wisest of men—but 'twas by the sword he conquered the country, and held and governed it by the very same right that the great Cromwell held it, who was truly and greatly a sovereign. But that a foreign despotic Prince, out of Germany, who happened to be descended from King James the First, should take possession of this empire, seemed to Mr. Esmond a monstrous injustice—at least, every Englishman had a right to protest, and the English Prince, the heir-at-law, the first of all. ”

“ Emsworth had not been gone more than ten minutes or so before Bilton was shown up. He appeared to be in a particularly well-satisfied humour this morning, and as he moved about the room, noting with his quick eye the stamp of femininity which Mrs. Emsworth had already impressed into the garnishing of the place, he whistled softly to himself. In his hand he carried a small jewel-case with her initials in gold upon the top. As always, in the relaxed mood the true man came to the surface ”

“ It was an unhappy day for everybody on Exmoor when Sir Ensor Doone was outlawed by good King Charles, and came with his tall sons and wild retainers to the Bagworthy water.
This befell in 1640. At first, the newcomers were fairly quiet, and what little sheep-stealing they did was overlooked. But in the troublous times of the Great Rebellion they grew bolder and fiercer; they attacked men and burnt farms and carried off women, and all Exmoor stood in fear and terror of them. None of the Doones was under six feet, and there were forty and more of them, and they were all true marksmen. ”

“ Owning large property in Wexford, Waterford, Kilkenny, and Tipperary, he was created Lord Esmonde, Baron of Limerick, co. Wexford, on 20 May 1622. In 1639 he was summoned before the Star-chamber for having conspired with Lord Mountnorris and Sir Piers Crosby to libel the lord deputy Wentworth in the matter of one Robert Esmonde, whose death they laid to his charge (Irish Cal. ii. 71; Rushworth, iii. 888–902; State Papers, Dom. ccccxx. 36) , After the outbreak of the great rebellion he seems to have tried to maintain a neutral position between the king and the parliament ”

“ Emmet lives in it, and outlives. It is the compensation of a lot cast in a planet where even our own honourable action has a trick of turning hostile and smearing us, that there is something in the best of us which cannot be smeared. Robert Emmet’s large soul has, like a magician, pieced together his broken body, the symbol of his broken, mistimed, and because mistimed, unhallowed effort. But only his own soul [89] has done it, and by a power within, shaking herself clear of censure. Mr. Henry Curran devotes to him a reticent paragraph obliquely affectionate. ”

“ This Englishman, whatever his eminence of courage and skill might be, had been the husband of Emmet’s sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon. The young soldier had probably weighed well what he was inheriting, before his marriage, and found all that endurable enough, until he died. In a world where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and men of like temper see each other as they are, Henry Sturgeon must have smiled from the blood-wet Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes. ”

“ New England Reformers.—Would any one venture to guess how Emerson would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism, his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous, too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears, in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin? ”