No. 7.
THE HONOURABLE WILLIAM LAMB, AFTERWARDS SECOND VISCOUNT MELBOURNE.
As a youth. Black coat trimmed with fur.
BORN 1779, DIED 1848.
By Sir Thomas Lawrence.
WILLIAM, second Lord Melbourne, was born March 15, 1779. His father and mother were friends of the Prince of Wales, and lived in that brilliant Whig circle of which Fox and Sheridan were the political ornaments, and the Duchess of Devonshire the Queen of Beauty. It is difficult now to realise the spirit of that society, in which dissipation and intellectual refinement were so singularly combined. Drunkenness among the men was too frequent to be considered disgraceful, and even those who passed for being sober took their two or three bottles a day. Conversation was habitually interlarded with oaths; gambling, to such an extent as to cripple the largest fortunes, was the common amusement of both sexes; and morality in other respects was in a low state. But joined with this there was that high sense of personal honour, which in England, and still oftener in France, has, at other times, been united with similar manners. There was more than this. There was a spirit of justice and generosity—even of tenderness—and in some cases a delicacy of feeling which we are accustomed now to associate only with temperance and purity. There was also a very cultivated taste, derived from a far more extensive knowledge of the Classics than is to be found in these days; a love of poetry and history; and, above all, an enthusiastic worship of liberty.
How came this strange worship of liberty among this exclusive and luxurious aristocracy? Originally, perhaps, as the result of faction. Excluded from power and deprived of popularity by misfortunes and mistakes, which it would take too long to mention, the Whigs had been driven in their adversity to fall back upon their original principles. The debating instinct of their great Parliamentary leader seized upon the cry of liberty as a weapon of warfare in the House of Commons, and the cause which he advocated was so congenial to his frank and generous nature that he embraced it enthusiastically and imparted his enthusiasm to his friends. I must not pursue these thoughts further, but the circumstances of a man’s early life have such influence in moulding his character that, even in such a slight sketch as this, it may not have been out of place to call attention to the state of that society, with its vices and its redeeming qualities, in the midst of which William Lamb grew up.
He went to Eton in 1790, and to Cambridge in 1796. In 1797 he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, but without leaving Cambridge. In 1798 he won a prize by the oration on ‘The Progressive Improvement of Mankind,’ which was alluded to by Fox in the House of Commons.
In 1799 he went to Glasgow to Professor Millar’s, from whose house he wrote during this and the following year several letters to his mother, which still exist. They show the keenest interest in politics, and an enthusiastic admiration for the French; and they are not entirely free from a slight taint of that apparent want of patriotism which infected the Liberal party at that time, and which did it such irreparable damage. It is only fair to say that there is an entry written in a notebook a few years later showing how keenly he appreciated and lamented this political error, and throughout the whole course of the Peninsular War he expresses the warmest wishes for the success of the British arms, and for those of our allies in Germany.