THE STOWE COLLECTION.
The contents of Stowe, the house of the Buckingham and Chandos family, were brought to the hammer on Tuesday, the 15th of August, 1848. For full particulars of the genealogy of this old and noble family, we must, with pleasure, refer our readers to the annotated catalogue of the choicest objects of art and vertu contained in its princely mansion. The editor, Mr. Henry Rumsay Forster, evidently bestowed considerable pains on the work he took in hand; and in his “Historical Notice of Stowe,” after enumerating the visits to it of almost all the crowned heads of civilized Europe, gives some lines written by Mr. Disraeli, M.P., while a guest at Stowe in the year 1840. They are in allusion to a beautiful statuette by Cotterell, of the Duke of Wellington, which His Grace of Buckingham had purchased, and up to the time of the sale had preserved in the library.
“Not only that thy puissant arm could bind
The tyrant of a world, and, conquering Fate,
Enfranchise Europe, do I deem thee great;
But that in all thy actions I do find
Exact propriety: no gusts of mind,
Fitful but wild, but that continuous state
Of ordered impulse mariners await
In some benignant and enriching wind,—