Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/104

 of the habits and character of Sir Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and of his own means of obtaining an intimate knowledge of them; of his having, when a young man in the Temple, spent much time "in the eating hours with the Earl of Dorset, the Lord Conway, and the Lord Lumley, men who excelled in gratifying their appetites;" of Dorset's "person, beautiful and graceful and vigorous;" of his wit and learning such "that he could not miscarry in the world." Lord Clarendon then glances at the unrestrained scope Dorset gave to his sensual appetites at that season of life—in the latter years of James I.—when the court of England presented a scene, such as could only be paralleled by the court of Henry III. of France. Clarendon then alludes to the duel in which the Earl of Dorset killed the Lord Bruce under the walls of Antwerp, "upon a subject very unwarrantable." It could not have been under such a King as Hume has described James in the words above quoted, that the men lived to whom Clarendon referred when he said that when he looked back to those days of his own early life, when he herded with such associates, that he had much more cause to be terrified upon the reflection than the man had who viewed in the morning Rochester Bridge, which he