Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/25

 THE ANCESTOR 7 inclination to break away from the sameness of existence which had become almost hereditary in his family. Like his father, twice he woo'd and twice he wed ; by his first wife, Catherine Cocks, niece of the Lord Chancellor Somers and sister to the first Countess of Hardwicke, one daughter only was born to him, who grew up and became the wife of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, Bart., but her birth was her mother's death ; his second wife, the Lady Elizabeth Ashley, daughter of Anthony, second Earl of Shaftesbury, to whom he was married in 1707, bore to him four children — one daughter, who died in babyhood, and three sons, all of whom have already been mentioned, viz., James, Thomas and William Harris. And here we come to that point when the family history becomes something more than a mere setting down and recording of births, deaths and marriages, all of which may be very engrossing to the real student of genealo- gical research or to members of the Harris family, but which are probably dry and unprofitable to the ordinary and casual reader. The Lady Elizabeth Harris was the mother of a dis- tinguished scholar and public servant, and the grandmother of one of the most distinguished diplomatists of the eighteenth century. Whether Lady Elizabeth was herself a woman of great ability it is impossible to judge, not only because the material is wanting from which any opinion could be formed, but because ladies of her generation had so little opportunity of doing aught else than to lead a dignified and dependent existence before their work-frames, never venturing much abroad unless attended by an escort of their nearest male relatives. That she came of a talented family however is beyond dispute, for her grandfather, the first Earl of Shaftes- bury, was one of England's most illustrious Lord Chancellors and two of her brothers, the third Earl (the noble author of Characteristics) and Mr. Maurice Ashley (the translator of Xenophon) were men of no mean parts. She appears to have possessed a rather delicate constitution, and after her husband's death, which occurred when her eldest son was only twenty-two, lived a life of great retirement, spending many of her days at Bath, that place where once the old and the young, the solemn and the gay, the infirm and those in all the full vigour of health loved to congregate. Nevertheless, be things what they may, it was Lady Elizabeth's eldest son James who brought about a radical change in the