his dazzling fortune, and the touch of extravagance which he caught from the spirit of his time, he was neither a Don Quixote nor a Prince Fortunate of mere adventures. For him there was nothing that could not be dared, but it must be dared with method and for an end in view; for him wisdom could never be “wisdom in the scorn of consequence.” Setting aside their natural bravery and the fashion of the day, there was little in common between this heroic prototype of the modern Englishman, and Sir Richard Grenville, the inheritor of a temperament which has long been practically extinct among us, and was even then the characteristic of a dwindling
class. The men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science—a type of arrested development surviving from the days beyond the Renaissance—fell with the Stuart Kings and were finally buried with the rebels of the ’45. It is easy to say that they were of no use, these turbulent, insensate, self-willed children of aristocracy; at the least they added colour and vivacity to life, and these are something; now and again they had their great moments, when folly touched the height of tragedy, and left a true inspiration for those who are not too sober or too senile to receive it.
Men have always liked to think of definite characteristics as the hereditary possession of certain families—often, no doubt, without much justification, but surely not altogether so in the
case of the Grenvilles. Reading their records without any preconceived belief, we cannot but hear one note ringing out again & again through at least three centuries and a half. We hear Sir Richard’s grandson, Sir Bevil—it goes without saying that he was a Cavalier—swearing “to fetch those traitors out of their nest at Launceston, or fire them in it.” We see him, “after solemn prayers,” charging furiously “both down the one hill and up the other” at Bradock Down; or again dying on the brow of Lansdowne Hill, after he had stormed it in the face of cannon, “small shot from the breastworks” and “two full charges from the enemy’s horse.”