Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/427

Rh pleasure, seldom losing a thousand at a sitting, but thinking five hundred pounds a reasonable price for the waistcoats of the year. Mr. Wemyss Reid, who produces the father as a foil to the son, says, in allusion to this item of account, that Pemberton Milnes was " not altogether free from the spirit of dandyism." This felicity of understatement and sobriety of colour is one of his merits as a biographer. He used to be a guest at Fryston, and writes as a personal friend. His best act of friendship is the lucid good sense with which he assigns the just proportions to his hero, marking the limit and the drawback, and indulging in no word of praise that will not amply be confirmed by all who remember him.

The elder Milnes, who died in 1858, did not transmit his parliamentary talent to his son, and was disposed to look down on him for spoiling his political position with desultory literature. But there was a wayward instability and fastidiousness which seems to have run in the blood. The son never, threw away such a chance or deceived the expectation of others, as his father did. The family history, perhaps, influenced him at another point. They were Unitarians who, not long before his time, exchanged the meeting-house for at least an occasional conformity. In religion, as in other things, he showed not the zeal of a convert, but an impartial eclecticism, a vivid and inconstant curiosity, a semi-detached adhesiveness, which tended towards isolation.

His university life was active and useful to his mental development, if not positively studious ; but before Thirlwall and Niebuhr shaped him he began to display one quality which had much to do with the enmities and the friendships of later times. He treated his disreputable uncle like a schoolfellow, and his aunts as if they were his sisters ; and he told his respected father that he thought he must be insane. Before settling down to Pall Mall and Parliament he was so long abroad that he was a pretty good linguist, and could detect the English accent in our best French scholars. He always continued his connection with France, and many of his best friends