Colonel-afterwards Sir Charles Phipps. Of this corps the only survivors are Lady Clanricarde, Mr. James Stuart Wortley, and myself.

The pieces performed were French vaudevilles adapted to the Hatfield stage by Theodore Hook, and they suffered no deterioration by passing through the hands of the author of "Killing no Murder."" Charles Phipps was to act the part of a King of Sweden, but having no star, a despatch was sent to the Duke of Wellington to borrow his. The messenger returned with His Grace's Insignia of a Knight, Grand Cross of the Order of the Sword. It is worthy of remark that the box which contained the order had evidently never been opened before."

He was equally fortunate in the sister isle, whose two leading celebrities about the time when he visited it were indicated by a popular song:

'Oh, Dublin is a famous city,

The finest city upon the sea,

For here's O'Connell making speeches,

And Lady Morgan making tea.'

Irish life and character were shown off to perfection in Lady Morgan's snug little nutshell of a house' (as she used to call it) in Kildare Street. When she transferred her household gods to William Street, Lowndes Square, she was still the centre of a brilliant circle; and she retained her wit, her warmth of feeling, her high spirits, her frolic sense of fun, and her genuine love of country, to the last; but she was too old to bear transplanting, and her efforts to acclimatise herself in the fashionable atmosphere of London explain, without justifying, the overfrank avowal of Lady Cork: I like you better as an Irish blackguard than as an English fine lady.' She was certainly at her best when she let loose her inexhaustible flow of native Irish humour, disdaining conventionalities and not disdaining the brogue.

When Lord Albemarle first made her acquaintance, he found her occupied in preparing her O'Briens and O'Flahertys' for the press; in which, she told him, he was to figure as a certain Count, a great traveller, who made a trip to Jerusalem for the sole object of eating artichokes in their native country.

The chief attraction in the Kildare Street "at homes" was Lady Morgan's sister, Olivia, wife of Sir - Clerk. Her conversational powers were so greatly superior to those of her novel-writing sister, that I cannot help suspecting that the work which went in the name of one was a joint production.'

Both were highly gifted women, but Lady Morgan's conversational powers fully came up to the standard of her authorship :

The authoress of the "Wild Irish Girl," justly proud of her

gifted sister Olivia, was in the habit of addressing every new comer with "I must make you acquainted with my Livy." She once used this form of words to a gentleman who had just been worsted in a fierce encounter of wits with the lady in question. "Yes, ma'am," was the reply; "I happen to know your Livy, and I only wish your Livy was Tacitus.'

At Bowood he made the acquaintance, which speedily ripened into intimacy, of Moore, and heard him sing most of his melodies::

'Amongst others, "The Slave," a song expressive of the sympathy of the writer in the abortive insurrection for which his friend and college-chum, Robert Emmett, paid the forfeit of his life. I wish I could convey to my reader an idea of the spirit which the poet threw into the words

"the green flag flying o'er us,

And the foe we hate before us."'

Only the words happen to be:

'We tread the land that bore us,

Her green flag glitters o'er us,

The friends we've tried are by our side
And the foe we hate before us.'

Another reminiscence, of a somewhat later period, is introduced by the remark, that 'Wit and beauty have seldom been crowded into so small a space as occasionally found admittance into Mrs. Norton's tiny drawing-room at Storey's Gate, Westminster.'

It is difficult to glance over this recapitulation, far from complete, of the numerous and varied scenes of social and intellectual enjoyment open to the rising celebrity of fifty years since, and escape the melancholy reflection of how many have passed away, with hardly a chance or hope of their being adequately replaced.

6

In June, 1829, tired of an idle life, after several unsuccessful applications to be placed on half-pay, he started for Turkey with the view of ascertaining whether the Turks were able to hold their own against the Russians, aided by the Balcan range of mountains, supposed to present a sort of Alpine barrier which it required the genius of a Napoleon to surmount.' The problem had been solved before he arrived upon the ground by the march of Diebitsch's army (July 26, 1829) through the pass, or rather passes, for there are several, and so free from obstruction, that (he states) almost every field-officer had his caleche, the general officers three or four, and every company a cart, for their campkettles.' This was not his only illusion touching Turkey which this expedition helped to dissipate. He returned, and remains, convinced

convinced that the barbarism of the Osmanlies is, from the very nature of their institutions, utterly ineradicable, and that they have no claim to the character of civilisation with which the British public were then disposed to credit them.'

On Tuesday, the 5th of February, 1833, he took his seat in the first Reformed Parliament as one of the Members for East Norfolk. In 1838 he was appointed a Groom in Waiting, and one of his first duties was to attend Her Majesty to Westminster on the morning of her coronation. In March, 1851, he succeeded, on the death of his brother, to the family title and estates, and took his seat in the House of Lords. Some of his personal experiences of both Houses are well worth telling and graphically told. In 1852 he published Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries,' a useful contribution to the party annals of the period. The fifty years' close in 1854 with a dinner at Rogers's, St. James's Place, at which Sir Robert Adair, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford and himself were the guests.

6

We do not go quite so far as Gray in his remark to Walpole, that if any man were to form a book of what he had seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever hands, prove a useful and entertaining one.' But when a man, with Lord Albemarle's advantages and opportunities, sets down what he has seen and heard whenever it has happened to be worth seeing or hearing, a book so formed could hardly fail to be, what this is, both amusing and instructive-to satisfy, in fact, the highest expectations that could have been formed of the best sort of diary by Gray.

ART. VII.-The Methods of Ethics. By Henry Sidgwick, M.A., Lecturer and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London, 1874.

THI

HE serious and comprehensive work of which we have prefixed the title to this article is one that deserves some notice at our hands. It is a work professedly critical, and the bent of the author's mind is evidently inclined towards criticism. Nevertheless, amidst all his critical bias, the wish to be constructive preponderates; and towards the end of his work he purely and simply advances the theory which is his sole and final conclusion.

That conclusion is the very popular theory of ethics commonly

*Narrative of a Journey across the Balcan, with a Visit to Azani in 1829-30.' Two volumes. 1831.

known

known as Utilitarianism. In saying this, we speak of Utilitarianism as a known and definite view. And so we think it is; it is a view having certain strong and characteristic features, partly, in our opinion, right, partly wrong; and our object in this article will in great measure be to discriminate its sound from its erroneous parts. Nevertheless, though we speak of Utilitarianism as a single theory, there are great differences between its different expositors. The Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill is not the Utilitarianism of Bentham; the Utilitarianism of Mr. Sidgwick again differs from that of either of his predecessors.

But, with whatever differences, it is impossible, in noticing a book of the Utilitarian school, to avoid recognising the common stamp impressed upon it, which marks it as one of a series of writings imbued with a common tendency, and inculcating that tendency upon the world at large. Moreover, though this common tendency, this adherence to a particular school of thought, is seldom the most important thing in an original book, it must for the most part be the primary topic in any criticism on the book; and for this reason that all adherence to a school, except where such adherence is absolutely and completely justified by reason, is a kind of knot in the tangled skein of philosophy, a knot which, till it is untied, perpetually collects about it jarring and discordant forces, which ought to be pursuing their way in the serene course of enlarging knowledge. We do not hold Utilitarianism to be perfect truth; but we think it has in it that element of truth which needs disentangling from the erroneous implications with which it is surrounded.

Let us, without troubling ourselves with the object and scope of moral philosophy, about which so much could be written, proceed at once to state that which we conceive to be the strong point of the Utilitarian thinkers. That is, their recognition of happiness as the final fruit of all good action; their assertion, that we cannot conceive an action to be good, without conceiving that it will be productive of happiness in the total outcome, and that the better it is, the more happiness it will produce. To think that one action is better than another, and to think that in its whole result it will make the sentient world, the world of living beings, less happy than the other action would have done (the two being alternatives), is impossible. Goodness and happiness are correlatives, as the seed and the fruit.

Wherein, then, do we differ from the Utilitarians? In this, that besides saying that happiness is the final fruit of good action, they say that it is the sole pre-determinant of action beforehand;

beforehand; that, if we are in doubt which of divers courses to pursue, the only method of decision consists in imagining the results of each course, weighing each result against each, and considering in which the preponderance of happiness lies. This is quite a different assertion from the former.

us.

The consequence of actions, the degree of happiness which we or others shall derive from them, is often quite unknown to It may be said that this ignorance is an unavoidable calamity; that we must judge of consequences as well as we can, that error is to be expected here as elsewhere, and that we must hope to eliminate it by time. This, in its measure, is true, but it is not adequate. For it often happens that actions, whose consequences we are quite incapable of estimating, are yet such as we feel ourselves strongly impelled to perform from some quarter or other of our nature. Here then quite a new question arises, and one not included in the morality which guides men by the simple estimate of resulting happiness. The question is no longer: What course of action shall I institute? But it is this: Shall I, or shall I not, be deterred from this action, to which my vital impulses so strongly bear me, by any prevision of consequences that I can command? In the man who thinks thus, there is no longer the mere scientific spirit seeking to survey; there is the vital spirit bearing him on of itself whither he knows not.

Utilitarian philosophers do not indeed always ignore the consideration here advanced. For instance, Mr. Sidgwick, in the book before us, says (p. 41):

'To sum up, in contravention of the doctrine that our conscious active impulses are always directed towards the production of agreeable sensations in ourselves, I would maintain that we find everywhere in consciousness extra-regarding impulse, directed towards something that is not pleasure; that in many cases this impulse is so far incompatible with the self-regarding, that the two do not easily co-exist in the same moment of consciousness, and that more occasionally (but by no means rarely) the two come into irreconcilable conflict, and prompt to opposite courses of action.'

This is very nearly, if not quite, a complete statement of the actual case. But Mr. Sidgwick is in part of his book an original thinker, and in part the disciple of a school, and when he speaks in his former capacity, he sometimes says things which in his latter capacity he presently ignores. Thus in his fourth book, where he adopts and defends the specifically Utilitarian position, he thus lays down the fundamental rule of action (p. 440):

'Still, as this actual moral order is admittedly i perfect, it will be

the