as impossible for the prosecution to pick holes in his cisions, the only case they attempted proving a mplete justification of the Deputy's verdict. But Eve-inspiring as Strafford was, it is evident that he metimes found it difficult to keep order in Court tween the leading officials. Lord Cork gives a funny count of a wrangle of his own.

The Lord Chancellor made a long and impertinent speech. replied, "I was not of that opinion." His Lordship replied, care not for your opinion." "Nor I for yours," quoth I. is Lordship then said, "I care not a rush for you." The eputy told us we were both great officers, and prayed us to quiet, but we multiplying our unquiet conceits, one upon other, he then required, and commanded us to be quiet' p. 38).

Dr O'Grady's work concerns Strafford the adminisator rather than the man, of whom we catch glimpses Radcliffe's touching little memoir, the Strafford who veals himself in his letters as few personages of that on age have done. All who know anything about him ill remember the charming account of his little girls, Nan, who danceth prettily,' and 'Arabella, a small pracitioner that way,' in a letter written to Lady Clare, their randmother, and the mother of the Saint in heaven,' t whose mention he broke down in his last speech. In he matter of friendship, Strafford would have justified r Johnson's contention that a good hater makes a good iend, for few men have been more faithful to their iends than Strafford. Next to the Saint in heaven,' e children whom in His Mercy God lends to me,' ere evidently the nearest to his heart. Of his third ife, Elizabeth Rhodes, we know little. She may have een colourless, and certainly she must have been of the eek order of spouses, judging from the following letter ritten to her immediately after marriage by her Lord ad Master:

'DEAR BESSE, your first lines were welcome unto me, and will keep them in regard I take them to be full as of ndnesse, soe of truth. It is not presumption for you to rite unto me, the fellowship of marriage ought to carry ith it more of love and equality than any other apprehension, e I desire it may be ever betwixt us, nor shall it breake of y part.. You succeed in this family two of the rarest

ladies of their time; equal them in their excellent disposition of your minde, and you becume every ways equally worthy of any thing that they had or that the best of the world car give, and be you ever assured to be by me cherished and assisted the best I can thro' the whole course of my lif wherein I shall be noe other to you than I was to them, wit your lovinge husband, WENTWORTH.'

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Though this letter would hardly find favour with modern bride, Besse seems to have been a happy wif as well as an excellent stepmother. 'Implacable' thoug Wentworth was when crossed in his designs, he woul not have exercised the influence he did socially, or eve politically, had he been the sour-visaged tyrant depicte in the Puritan legend. Sir Philip Warwick, who di not love him, says: 'In his person he was of a ta babl stature, but stooped much in the neck. His countenanc was cloudy whilst he moved or sat thinking, but whe he spoke either seriously or facetiously he had a ligh some and a very pleasant ayre, and whatever he the did he performed very gracefully.' Being well aware the effects of pomp and shows on an imaginative peopl his Court, according to Howells, for sheer splendou could only be compared to that of the Spanish viceroy Naples. Nor was it less carefully regulated than it wa sumptuous. Drunkards were particularly abhorrent Strafford. When he arrived in Dublin he found drinkinsle grown to a 'disease epidemical,' and forthwith set him. self to reform it. As he is very severe in the punist. ment of offences so,' says a contemporary, 'he is caref that his family (i.e. his household) should be exemple in practice and ambitious of good and honourabl employment.' †

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Since it was part of his scheme that the setting the Viceroy's establishment should be worthy of me Great master's' representative, Strafford did not merel. plan, and begin to build a fine country seat in Irelan but also set himself to beautify the castle in Dubli Unluckily, however, though he could regulate the toas Er at his table, and quell Very Reverend Deans with frown, apparently, even he could not instil carefulnes

'Howells' Letters,' vol. I, p. 342: Howells-Sir E. Savage.

+ Fairfax Correspondence,' vol. 1, pp. 250-2: J. Bladen to Lor Fairfax, July 2, 1634.

to Irish housemaids. It merely needed one of these msels to leave a dust basket of charcoal embers' der a staircase, utterly to destroy the stately Chapel, 'Chapel Chamber and my lady's lodgings' which he d built. Indeed, if the alarm of fire had not been ven just in time, my Lady and the children would ve perished in the housemaid's bonfire. They were fely carried out wrapped in blankets, but the new oms, including the Chapel Chamber, a thing of beauty eing most richly furnished with black velvett, imoidered with flowers of silk works in tent stitch; all ait trees and flowers and ships imbroidered with gold Trist, went up in flames to the sky.

It was probably, however, in a simpler apartment an this gorgeous room that Wentworth's happiest urs were spent in Dublin. Conversation and a pipe tobacco with his friends was more to his taste than rds or banquets. Ormonde, whose wit was so appreted in later days by Charles II, was one of the tle circle admitted to his intimacy. It was to Wentorth's advantage to be on terms of personal friendship ith an Irish nobleman carrying the weight Ormonde in Ireland, but the Deputy would give himself equal puble to set a shy curate at his ease, as William andesforde's letter testifies.

After supper,' writes the latter, a cousin of the Wandesde who was Master of the Rolls, and Strafford's right hand administrative matters, he (the Deputy) pulled me by cloak privately and caused me to follow him into a private m when he takes tobacco and was likewise pleased three houres to discourse pleasantly and to draw from me en my poor opinion with much liberty by the noble and atle openesse of his countenance and fashion towards me.' †

Dr O'Grady has given a full account of Strafford's al, and has wisely included his great speech in the pendix. Even now it can scarcely be read without otion; nor certainly without admiration for the man, prived of his chief witnesses and tortured with pain, ending himself with a wealth of resource, controlled

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Autobiography of Mrs A. Thornton,' 11-12.

'Eng. Hist. Review,' Ix, Jan.-Oct. 1894, p. 550: Wm. Wandesforde to R. Wandesforde, Oct. 8, 1638.

temper, and high courage which have seldom been sur passed. In truth 'never man looked death more stately in the face.' It was, however, these very qualities tha sealed his doom. His enemies realised that his acquitte meant their destruction. 'Stone dead hath no fellow and so Strafford was done to death, his works in Irelan good and bad alike, followed him into the pit, and tidal wave of anarchy swept over the country.

One-man rule has that drawback. The successor hard to find; and never so hard as when 'constructi treason' can, in Strafford's phrase, easily prove structive treason' to any ruler having the courage enforce order in a land seething with disorder. Straffor successors took good care not to court these dange and Ireland has paid the penalty of their pruden throughout the centuries. Richelieu's verdict we alrea know. A natural affinity between these two great me the sworn enemies of anarchy, perhaps inspired Cardinal's judgment. Archbishop Ussher, saint a scholar, who shrived Strafford in his last hours, has l another and a more surprising verdict. A white so said the Archbishop-an epithet at first sight singula inappropriate for a man all energy in his many-sid nature, loving and hating with an intensity given few. Yet in the heart of the furnace the flame but white; and it was in the hour of Strafford's supre sacrifice that Ussher was enabled to see, further perha than others, into the soul of the Great Deputy.

WINIFRED BURGHCLERE.

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.7.-LANDOWNERS AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE.

the past few years the Conservative Party would pear to have surrendered without a struggle its first onghold in Great Britain, the country-side. This is more surprising, for the position had neither been n without effort nor maintained without sacrifice. t for the presence of a powerful and wealthy landning body, English agriculture might well have cumbed at several crises in its chequered career, leed it may be that the impoverishment or disappearce of so many of the old landlords has something to with the dilemma that confronts our greatest tional industry to-day, for they alone in the season of ir greatness were shrewd enough to recognise more es than that of least resistance. Such a view is unpular, clashes with democratic conceptions, affronts W creeds, and, indeed, has little save truth to comnd it, for the evil that men do lives after them.' rhaps the best way of arriving at the relations ween landowning families and the people who work them is to consider the conditions that brought those tions about. The urban worker looks with contempt on the countryman, and yet, but for the landlord and husbandman, industrial England had never been. by strengthened the arm now raised against them; lay the city wage-earner refuses to support any posal that would tax him, even lightly, for the mainance of the class that brought him into being. The has been the support of all our great experiments Empire building and industry.

In Angevin England the manor fed the worker, the lowner lived from farm to farm; the hiring of land not practised until money grew plentiful. It may doubted whether the custom of rent-paying was blished before the end of the 15th century. Down hat time relations were more intimate and perl, and it may be permissible to claim that the important export trade of this country proceeded, ador times, from the farm in response to the demand English wool. Continental needs brought arable to s in the 'spacious days' of Elizabeth and the more racted era of James I, producing conditions similar