L ord A Ithorp. 1 2 7 



We bid our old friend good-bye, little thinking we 

 should never meet again, and sped on our way to New- 

 castle. The Tyne was running in a muddy, turbulent 

 torrent beneath the Stocksfield bridge. It once over- 



church in a pale-blue embroidered habit. She was worthy of the hus- 

 hand of her choice ; and so the years go on, till at last he learns 

 abruptly from the lips of his groom that she is dead ; and henceforward 

 the days when she was by his side, and a merry freight of children in 

 the carriage, during those happy woodland rides, seem to the old man 

 like part and parcel of a dream. 



Whatever he did he did with all his might, and he invariably did it 

 well. No man had a finer eye to hounds, or better hands and nerve, 

 whether on Rose of Raby or " the flyer which stands in the stall at the 

 top." In the heat of his Lambton canvass he worked on all day with 

 two fractured ribs. Sir John Sinclair entrusted him to revise the proof- 

 sheets of his ' ' Code of Agriculture ;" and even in his 82nd year he 

 delivered a lecture of nearly two hours' length on poetry, at Haydon 

 Bridge. Bone manure, draining, subsoil ploughing, and the application 

 of animal and vegetable chemistry to agricultural objects were his theme 

 in days when to talk of such things was almost enough to stamp a man 

 as a Jacobin and a visionary. He dared to denounce the corn laws as 

 "the parent of scarcity, clearness, and uncertainty," when 99 people 

 out of 100 thought him a man of profane lips for saying so, and Bright 

 and Cobden were mere boys. When he was ' ' up" for a speech, the 

 audience always knew that they would hear some sturdy truths ; but no 

 one was more uncompromising, and yet more full of tact. His oppo- 

 nents might dislike what he said, but they could not object to the lan- 

 guage in which it was clothed. Only a week before his death he 

 mediated in an excellent speech between landlord and tenant, when an 

 offensively couched resolution about game had been passed at the 

 Hexham Farmers' Club. "The Black Prince of the North," as he had 

 been called in his hot political youth, was never in better tune for 

 speaking than at the Newcastle Royal Dinner of '46, and an after- 

 dinner remark of the second Duke of Cleveland's, to the effect that 

 agricultural improvement had reached its utmost limit, drew from him 

 an indignant denial, and a stout argument on tenancies-at-will as against 

 leases. It was in '59 that he spoke what he called his " Peace and 

 Plenty" speech, in which Prince Albert delighted, and his last at a 

 public dinner was made at the Highland Society's meeting of 1867, 

 where he attended as judge. 



As an agent he practised what he preached. Strong as his political 

 predilections were, he never interfered, directly or indirectly, with a 

 voter. The Greenwich estates, when they came into his hand, pro- 

 duced 29,000/. clear, and gradually rose, under the draining and other 

 improvements which he planned and carried out, to 40,000/. With the 

 labourers he had peculiar sympathy, and, "let the oppressed go free 

 and break every yoke," was a saying that seemed ever present with him. 



