before it was completed, is given in the volume before us, but it is too long for extract. The story of Lady Russell is well known; it is not, however, so generally known that the great Bloomsbury estate, with Southampton House, was brought by her into the Russell family. The history of the later dukes is closely connected with the history of our land, and in the present day a Russell holds a foremost place. The following is an estimate of this family, although on the whole perhaps rather too favorable:

"Taken for all in all, no one of the great houses, except perhaps the Percies, who have better of England than that of Russell. The founder was a great and successful plunderer of the abbeys; but it is better to plunder monks than to plunder the Saxon people, and the properties of the great peers came almost all from one of these two sources. Since his time, one Russell has staked his head for the Protestant faith; a second the estates, in successful resistance to a despot; a third has died on the scaffold for the liberties of Englishmen; a fourth has materially aided in the Revolution which substituted law for the will of the sovereign; a fifth spent his life in resisting the attempt of the House of Bruns wick to rebuild the power of the throne, and gave one of the first examples of just religious government in Ireland; and a sixth organized and carried through a bloodless, but complete, transfer of power from his own order to the middle classes. The value of a nobility to a State has been questioned; but if a nobility is valuable, it is in families like the Russells

so often saved her from invasion, has deserved

that its worth consists. They overshade meaner men a little too much; but then, if the trees spoil the corn, it is also they which col

lect the rain,"

The next family claims notice chiefly on account of its founder, William Cecil, the great statesman who, for forty years, aided Elizabeth so heartily and so wisely in building up the prosperity and power of England. It has been the fashion of late years to speak very disparagingly of this "great man" (a phrase which we will employ, notwithstanding Macaulay's most onesided, though clever, estimate of his character), but, thanks to the invaluable store of State papers which have lately become available to the historian, justice is already begining to be done to him, and to a period which, especially in modern times, has been strangely mis

represented, because so greatly misunderstood.

"The Cecils have a great ancestor, but no pedigree;" and it was this that was often flung in the teeth of the Minister who sat chief at Elizabeth's councilboard, by the nobles with sixteen quarterings in their arms, who grudged him his high office. That his grandfather "kept the best inn in Stamford," was the chief taunt during the bitter contest between Leicester and Cecil; and we can not but smile at it when we remember that Leicester himself had scarcely a longer pedigree; while as to fame, the Dudleys were far less faultless than the Cecils, even innkeepers if they had been. We find, however, from the work before us, that the grandfather had certainly landed property in Lincolnshire, and was able to found a chantry in St. George's Church, Stamford. He was also one of Henry VIII.'s serjeants-at-arms, and obtained for his son the office of page of the crown. This son purchased the manors of Burghley, and seems to have been in frequent attendance on the king; while that he was valued by him seems proved by the one hundred marks left him in the royal will. He died in 1553, and was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Thus it will be seen that Cecil was not wholly brought up in Lincolnshire, and a stranger to London, sent thither to seek his fortune, but that his father dwelt within the precincts of the Court, and thus he was known, probably in his boyhood, to Anne Boleyn,-perhaps was even a boy-attendant at the gorgeous christening of that daughter, whom, through long after years he was to serve so faithfully.

William Cecil was an only son; he was born in Lincolnshire in 1520, and is said to have received his early education at Grantham. He studied at Cambridge, and then entered Gray's Inn. Before he was quite of age, he married his first wife, the sister of Sir John Cheke, and ere twenty-four he was a widower with an infant son, who succeeded to Burghley, and became Earl of Exeter. His second wife was Mildred Cook, sister of Lady Bacon, and, like her, distinguished for classical learning, especially as a Greek scholar. Cecil's first steps at Court are not easily traced; but we find him first

holding the office of "Master of Requests," under the Duke of Somerset. He has been charged with ingratitude in accepting office under Northumberland, subsequent to Somerset's fall; but the writers before us clearly prove that Cecil shared in his patron's disgrace, and was sent to the Tower. After his release, he indeed accepted the post of Secretary of State to the new Government; but this was eleven months after Somerset's fall. Cecil, however, although he accepted office, seems never to have acted cordially with Northumberland, and this, we think, supplies an additional reason, not hitherto recognized, for the hostility his son, Leicester, always expressed toward the Lord Treasurer. During the reign of Mary, Cecil certainly did not temporize so much as many of his contemporaries. He outwardly conformed, as did all the courtiers, but he kept up correspondence with the Protestants who had fled the kingdom, and all along kept a watchful eye over the interests of Elizabeth. "He steered his course with marvelous craft and courage. He placed himself at the head of the Opposition in the Commons, yet retained Mary's favor, and the queen even forgave the attention he paid to the Protestant heiress." These were anxious and difficult years, but probably it was to their teachings he owed that remarkable wariness, that deep insight into character, which so emphatically distinguished Elizabeth's great Minister.

To pursue Cecil's life from the accession of Elizabeth, would require a volume -indeed, much more. In passing, we however, can not but express our wish for a new life of Lord Burghley. Seen in the light of undeniable historical documents, we should be better able to estimate the many difficulties by which he was surrounded; not the least of which was the hostility of the Leicester faction, which, pledged to his overthrow, was utterly unscrupulous as to the charges they brought against him. He is now represented by the Marquess of Exeter and the Marquess of Salisbury, the latter the descendant of his younger son, Robert Cecil. Neither branch has been such as to win much public regard; still, for the sake of their great founder, we can not grudge them their honors.

The remaining names, with the exception of the Howards, offer but little to interest the reader. The Villiers family, which now gives an Earl of Jersey and an Earl of Clarendon to the peerage, is chiefly deserving of notice for the singular and fortunate career of George Villiers, the favorite alike of James and Charles; that young Court adventurer who, through the deep management of his bold, unscrupulous mother, rose so high in power by the aid of an attractive person alone, that men looked wonderingly on, and believed it was through witchcraft. And that his family all believed in charms and spells, we have proof; and that his mother was ceaselessly employed with the wretched creatures she kept in her pay in warding off by strange and costly amulets the doom which she felt would fall upon her darling son, is also an historical fact. So no wonder when the "white handled knife" of Felton avenged the whole nation, the tale became a matter of firm belief that the bold, bad mother had bargained with the powers of darkness for a brief, but most brilliant career for George Villiers, and that thus, when the time had come, the victim was slain. His son, who was only eight months old at his father's death, was the notorious Duke of Buckingham of the "Cabal," the most profligate, except perhaps Chesterfield, of the profligate nobles of that "court of Belial," Charles II. Happily, the family ceased with him, and it is from George Villier's elder brothers the two present earls are descended.

The Petty-Fitzmaurices are connected closely with the political history of George III.'s reign; while the Herberts, though a very ancient house, had, until as yesterday, been little known as a governing family. The Barings are scarcely an English family, and their claim as a governing one can only rest on their money influence. The Somersets and the Berkeleys, the latter especially, have a very long pedigree, but require little notice, save that the Berkeleys, from the time when they made the riot in Bristol streets, and flung "Adam the cheeseman" into the well, five hundred years ago, to the present day, have been chiefly distinguished by their pugnacious qualities. That "there is no rule without an

the present imperfect condition of mental science, is much complicated by the difficulty of any attempt at defining the limits which separate sanity from insanity; for, as the learned Gregory truly remarks,

"Nulla datur linea accurata inter sanam mentem et vesaniam."

And it has frequently happened, perhaps to every one of us, that, called on to estimate the value of the ideas or actions of men, we have hesitated before pronouncing a judgment, even though our opinion may have amounted to an absolute conviction, uncertain as to the impressions of others; for it will always fare with the originators of any ideas inconsistent with the common forms of belief, as it fared with the precocious boy alluded to by Beattie :

"Some will think them wondrous wise,

And some believe them mad."

To the unthinking and unobservant, the compilation of such a work as we have indicated would seem to require only a little patient research. This was also the opinion of M. Delapierre when he entered on his task; but as his investigations proceeded, and materials were accumulated, the work assumed gigantic proprotions; and it appeared, he observes, as though a biographical account of literary madmen would involve, in the end, nothing less than the history of the world. "For madness enters in some measure into the constitution of most of the great minds with which history makes us acquainted; and it often becomes very difficult to establish the difference which predispositions to madness present from certain conditions known, or received, as those of reason."

Aristotle observes that it is of the essence of a good poet to be mad; an assertion the correctness of which Shakspeare has stamped with the weight of his great authority. But the affliction is shared, according to the latter, by all those who are victims to the tender passion; for

strength of the same sentiment, gives it a much wider scope, when he says that "Great wits to madness, sure, are near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide." The question as to who was the first subject of the mental phenomenon distinguished by the title of eccentricity is one at present rather difficult of solution; but if it be considered as a phase of insanity-as it must-there can be no doubt of its existence at a very early age. Indeed, assuming that excess of passion or derangement affects the moral constitution of our species no less than the intellectual, the eldest son of Adam was the first maniac, or eccentric character, as the advocates of the theory of moral insanity would term him; and the malady may be said to have prevailed when the Almighty declared that "every imagination of the thought of man's heart was only evil continually." In the restored world again Noah soon gave a temporary example of it, after an indulg ence which millions have since practiced with a similar result. Passing over numerous other indications of the existence of mental maladies in the Jewish nation, we find among the threatenings against disobedience of the Divine Laws, "Madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart;" while the "Spirit of Belial," whose influence is described as "dangerous, malignant, and inconsistent with truth," has been interpreted by modern German philosophers as nothing else than lunacy.

Early in Jewish narrative mention is made of the disorders incident to the human mind, which sometimes sheltered its infirmity under the garb of divination; and to the critical student of Biblical history, the fate of Nebuchadonozor,

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.'