Upon some occasion, soon after Mr. Temple came to
be his lordship’s secretary, Mr. Temple acknowledged
to a gentleman, in Lord Oldborough’s presence,
some trifling official mistake he had made: Lord
Oldborough, as soon as the gentleman was gone, said
to his secretary, “Sir, if you make a mistake,
repair it—that is sufficient. Sir,
you are young in political life—you don’t
know, I see, that candour hurts a political character
in the opinion of fools—that is, of the
greater part of mankind. Candour may be advantageous
to a moral writer, or to a private gentleman, but not
to a minister of state. A statesman, if he would
govern public opinion, must establish a belief in
his infallibility.”
Upon this principle Lord Oldborough abided, not only
by his own measures, but by his own instruments—right
or wrong, he was known to support those whom he had
once employed or patronised. Lucky this for the
Falconer family!
“MY DEAR DOCTOR,
“How I pity you who have no vacations!
Please, when next you sum up the advantages and disadvantages
of the professions I of law and medicine, to set down
vacations to the credit side of the law.
You who work for life and death can have no pause,
no respite; whilst I from time to time may, happily,
leave all the property, real and personal, of my fellow-creatures,
to its lawful or unlawful owners. Now, for six
good weeks to come, I may hang sorrow and cast away
care, and forget the sound and smell of parchments,
and the din of the courts.
“Here I am, a happy prisoner at large, in this
nutshell of a house at the Hills, which you have never
seen since it has become the family mansion.
I am now in the actual tenure and occupation of the
little room, commonly called Rosamond’s room,
bounded on the N. E. W. and S. by blank—[N.B.
a very dangerous practice of leaving blanks for your
boundaries in your leases, as an eminent attorney
told me last week.] Said room containing in the whole
14 square feet 4-1/2 square inches, superficial measure,
be the same more or less. I don’t know
how my father and mother, and sisters, who all their
lives were used to range in spacious apartments, can
live so happily, cooped up as they now are; but their
bodies, as well as minds, seem to have a contractile
power, which adapts them to their present confined
circumstances. Procrustes, though he was a mighty
tyrant, could fit only the body to the bed. I
found all at home as cheerful and contented as in
the days when we lived magnificently at Percy-hall.
I have not seen the Hungerfords yet; Colonel H. is,
I hear, attached to Lady Elizabeth Pembroke.
I know very little of her, but Caroline assures me
she is an amiable, sensible woman, well suited to
him, and to all his family. I need not, however,
expatiate on this subject, for Caroline says that she
wrote you a long letter, the day after she returned
from Hungerford Castle.
