HIS REMINISCENCES. 379 



homilies was full of interest. He had known 

 everybody, both male and female, who was any- 

 body for the last fifty-five or sixty years ; for even 

 as a Harrow boy he was intimate with illustrious 

 Harrovians like Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, 

 Lord Aberdeen, and Sir James Graham. In the 

 belief that a few extracts from his letters, and 

 from notes of his conversations made at the time 

 of their occurrence, will place him before his 

 contemporaries in a truer position than, from his 

 tendency to shrink modestly into private life, he 

 now occupies, I am tempted, with Sir William's 

 own concurrence, to add these two chapters to a 

 work of which Lord George Bentinck is the hero 

 — a work of which Sir William was cognisant, 

 and upon which, so far as he was acquainted 

 with it, he was so good as to bestow his approval. 

 Let me begin by quoting the following descrip- 

 tion from his pen of the universally popular Earl 

 of Eglinton (the owner of Van Tromj) and the 

 Flying Dutchman), whom Sir William and his 

 still living friend and contemporary, Chief-Justice 

 Morris, regarded as the best Irish Viceroy that 

 they had ever known. 



THE THIRTEENTH EARL OF EGLINTON. 



" When first I visited Eglinton Castle, not long- 

 after the celebrated tournament, which was com- 

 pletely marred by incessant torrents of rain, the 



