78 Recollections of the Vine Hunt. 



he was a very poor speaker in public, and could not 

 even express with fluency the common-places which 

 many men, very inferior to him in intelligence, acquire 

 the habit of uttering with ease. But he served his 

 generation ; he was a steady supporter of Government 

 under Pitt, Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool : ministers 

 could always reckon on his vote, and his constituents 

 were satisfied with him. 



But his most remarkable and most important 

 failure was in the management of his own estate. He 

 was always in want of money ; for he kept foxhounds, 

 represented the county, and maintained a very large 

 old house, and a prominent position in the neigh- 

 bourhood, on an income which many would have 

 thought scarcely sufficient for any one of these de- 

 mands on it ; and no doubt all these services might 

 have been better performed, if his means had been 

 more ample. On the other hand, his estate was sin- 

 gularly capable of improvement. Its clay soil and 

 small enclosures were overrun with oak timber ; it re- 

 quired clearing like an American forest, and draining 

 like an Irish bog. In those days oak timber was of 

 great value ; and he might have cut many thousand 

 pounds' worth of it, and have increased the annual 

 rents of his estate by doing so. But he never could 

 bring himself to make any change. Conservative 

 as he was in his politics (though the word was not 

 then invented), he was still more conservative in 

 his tastes and feelings. By him no hedgerow was 

 grubbed, no sunshine let in upon his woodland fields, 

 no land drained, no roads improved. His delight 

 was to keep everything exactly as he had found it, 

 and he loved to take his visitors to a stately grove 



