Charles I., after whose death the Antiope was bought by the banker Jabach, and the Cupid went to Spain and was ultimately brought back to England by Lord Londonderry, who purchased it in 1834 from Caroline Bonaparte, the ex-Queen of Naples. Three other pictures-the Danaë of the Borghese, the Io at Vienna, and the ruined Leda at Berlin-were presented by the Duke of Mantua to Charles V., who visited Correggio in 1532. The strange fate which befell them, and the tale of their almost miraculous preservation through untold dangers and adventures, are fully related by Dr. Ricci. All three must once have ranked among the painter's finest works, and, in spite of the cruel injuries which they have suffered, they still contain passages of rare beauty. Besides these great pictures, Correggio also painted two allegories of Vice and Virtue for the Camerino which Isabella d'Este adorned with masterpieces by the foremost artists of her day, and was engaged on a set of cartoons for her son Federigo, when a short illness brought his life to a sudden close. He died on the 5th of March, 1534, in the same little house belonging to his father where he had first seen the light, forty years before.

The last chapter, which Dr. Ricci devotes to a study of the painter's characteristics, strikes us, we must confess, as somewhat disappointing. The biographer spends so much time in refuting the unreasonable complaints of pedants who blame Correggio because he did not possess the qualities of Raphael or Michelangelo, that he has little space left to consider the artistic personality of his hero. He insists once more upon his Ferrarese origin, and points out rightly that the development of his original genius was, in a great measure, fostered by his isolated life. He dwells also on the high excellence of Allegri's craftsmanship, that mastery which made Mr. Ruskin once speak of him as Captain of the painter's art.' But Dr. Ricci omits to mention the marvellous flesh-painting, in which he rivalled the Venetians themselves, and he hardly does justice to the unstudied and spontaneous gladness that was so marked a feature of his genius. It is this intensely joyous feeling, finding expression, as it does, not only in the swift flight of his angels or the merry gambols of his putti, but in the magic of his colour, in the space and sunlight of his landscapes, in the rapt smiles of his women faces, that forms the real charm of his art, and which makes him, more than any other painter of his age, the unconscious prophet of the latest and most brilliant phase of the Italian Renaissance.

ART. VII.-The Onslow Papers. Historical MSS. Commission.

1896.

HE very interesting fragment which is all that remains of the Papers and Correspondence relating to the Onslow family, for some time preserved at Clandon Park, the seat of the present Earl of Onslow, has now been published by the Historical MSS. Commission; and though it has been seen before and been used by previous writers, the light which it throws on our political and party history in the reign of George II. has been scarcely if at all noticed. More than this, the last words of the greatest of English Speakers,' as Onslow has usually been called, may well be thought, in view of certain recent events, to possess a special significance for ourselves who have witnessed so many attempts to lower that authority of which Onslow was the great champion. It may be as well, perhaps, to remind all readers of the introductory notice prepared by the Commissioners, that although Onslow's direct narrative terminates with his appointment to the Speakership in 1728, it was drawn up for the benefit of his son many years later; that it alludes to numerous events long subsequent to his acceptance of the Chair, and that the opinions expressed in it are the result of his matured experience. The Papers consist of two parts: a memoir of his family, written partly in 1735, and partly much later, and two Notes, occupying about twenty pages, on Opposition.' Both contain references to events which occurred after Walpole's downfall, and as late as Pelham's Administration; the whole term of his Speakership just covering the reign of George II., a period rich in political memoirs, which enable us to give a tolerably good guess at what was passing through the Speaker's mind when he committed these reflections to paper.

The Onslows are descended from an ancient family of gentry long seated at Onslow, in Shropshire, and trace their pedigree direct to Roger de Onneslowe in the reign of Henry III. They remained in Shropshire till the beginning of the seventeenth century; and the immediate ancestor of the present family, Richard Onslow, who was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1566, was buried at Shrewsbury. Through his wife, however, a Miss Hardinge, of Knowle, in Surrey, he acquired an estate at Cranley in that county, to which the family removed about 1653. The grandson of this Richard, Sir Richard Onslow, seems to have been regarded by the Speaker as a kind of second founder of the family. He represented the county of Surrey in Parliament from 1627 to his death in 1663; and in the Civil War took the side of the Parliament,

though

though always opposed to going to extremities with the King. He stood high in the favour of Cromwell, whom he would have liked to see King, because he thought the people would never settle down under any other form of government, and for the same reason assisted in promoting the Restoration, though no friend to Stuart principles. In narrating this part of the family history, the Speaker calls attention to the fact 'as a most extraordinary thing,' that notwithstanding the frequent and sometimes very wild changes of government that happened, especially from the dissolution of the Long Parliament by Cromwell to the time of the King's being restored, yet the laws had their free course as to all private matters, and in which justice was as strictly administered under them as in any age either before or since.' In illustration of Cromwell's anxiety on this point, he tells the following story of Sir Matthew Hale,-which he had, he says, from undoubted authority,—namely,

'that Cromwell, having a desire to make him one of his Judges, went himself to Mr. Hale's chambers to make him an offer of it, which he, being much inclined to the King's cause, at first refused, and was free enough, upon the encouragement Cromwell gave him so to do, to own that his reason for refusing it was his scruples as to the authority he was to take a commission from and to act under. Cromwell told him that he did not come to dispute with him about his authority; he had got the power, and he was resolved to keep it; but he was resolved also to exercise it well if he could, and to distribute justice to the people. "And if you, Sir," says he, " and such men as you, will not suffer me to govern by Red Gowns, I must and will govern by Red Cloaks." Upon which Hale accepted the office and continued one of the Judges to the time of Cromwell's death, with some restrictions, however, as to his sitting upon criminal cases, which Cromwell gavo into.'

Another anecdote will perhaps suggest to some enterprising writer the possibility of whitewashing even Jeffreys :

'And now I have mentioned Jeffreys, let me tell you an anecdote relating to him which I had from Sir Joseph Jekyll, the present Master of the Rolls.

'Whilst Jeffreys was in the Tower, he sent for the famous Dr. Scott to come to him in order to assist him in his devotions, being then near his death. The doctor, in his exhortations to him to recollect the past actions of his life that required repentance, took notice particularly of the cruelty he had been charged with against those people in the West who had been prosecuted before him for their being concerned in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion. Upon this Jeffreys raised himself with more than ordinary emotion, and said: "Doctor, I have been very unjustly charged with this as if it

had

had proceeded from my own disposition, but what I did I had express orders for, and was so far from exceeding my orders that I was not half bloody enough for the man who sent me thither"; and soon after died. The doctor told this to my Lord Somers, from whom Sir Joseph told me he had it.'

The above-mentioned Sir R. Onslow had two sons, of whom the elder was the first Lord Onslow. He was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1709 to 1710, but lost his seat for Surrey at the General Election when the Tories swept the board.' At the accession of George I. he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in the following year was raised to the peerage as Baron Onslow, of Onslow in Shropshire and Clandon in Surrey. He died in 1717; and we must now turn to the nephew, the real subject of our article.

'I was born,' he says, 'on the 3rd of September, 1691, at Kensington, in the county of Middlesex, in the first house of the left hand as you come into the town from London.'

He was sent to school at Guildford before he was seven years old, and boarded with Mr. Vernon, a clergyman, who was, he says, one of the last of the race who used to be called 'Church Puritans, an expression we do not remember ever to have met with before. He was Rector of Merrow, near Guildford, and 'during all his time the Communion table stood in the middle of the chancel, and he administered the Sacrament always in that particular place, and not at the east end,-a circumstance your reading the history of your country will make you understand, and the reason of my taking notice of it; a matter of some curiosity, and the only instance of it, I believe, then remaining in England.'

This little record has its interest in connexion with the Lincoln Judgment, where one of the articles against Dr. King turned on this very point, the removal of the altar table,—that is, from the position here described to the end of the chancel, so that the ends, instead of the sides, stood north and south.

From Guildford School, Onslow at the age of fourteen was transferred to Winchester, and three years afterwards went up as a gentleman commoner to Wadham. In 1710, however, his father, who had been in business as a Turkey merchant, died in embarrassed circumstances, and his son was recalled from Oxford before he was twenty years of age. By the kindness of his uncle, Lord Onslow, he was enabled to study for the Bar, and at his house at Clandon he always spent the Long Vacation. There he was introduced to the best society; but, owing to his natural shyness-so he tells us he did not profit by

it as he might have done. He adds that this infirmity had always 'hung upon him'; and it may possibly account for some of the sarcasms which Horace Walpole points at his expense. Shyness in private is not incompatible with pomposity in public: indeed, is often the cause of it.

Onslow, however, did not succeed at the Bar. He went the Home Circuit, and had business where he was known. But he never could speak with any confidence, and his legal knowledge, though of a kind to be eminently useful to him in his future position, stood him in little stead as a common-law advocate. His uncle, however, got him a berth in the Post Office worth 4007. a year, as good as 8007. now, on which he lived pretty comfortably till he entered Parliament. In 1717, as we have seen, his uncle died; but he continued very good friends with his cousin, the second Lord, took a little place in the country near Clandon-became Chairman of Quarter Sessions-and, in spite of his shyness, a leading man in the county. When a vacancy occurred in the parliamentary representation of Guildford by the death of General Wroth, he was returned for that borough on the 16th of February, 1719, in the twenty-eighth year of his

age.

He entered Parliament at a time when the South Sea craze was at its height, and caught the infection like other people. He threw himself into the crowd of speculators; and, more fortunate than the majority, emerged with plunder. At one time he held stock worth 9,000l., which his cousin Lord Onslow bought of him at that price, giving a bond for the money. When the crash came Onslow did not like to press his relation for the whole amount, and compounded with him for rather less than a third of it; and deducting from this the original price of the stock, the remainder, he says, was 'very inconsiderable.'

He has left us a very graphic account of the public madness, and also of the general fury when the bubble burst. That was the time, if ever, he thinks, for King James the Third' to have struck in.

'If some bold men had taken advantage of the general disorder men's minds were in, to provoke them to insurrection, the rage against the Government was such for having as they thought drawn them into this ruin, that I am almost persuaded, the King being at that time abroad, that could the Pretender then have landed at the Tower, he might have rode to St. James's with very few hands held up against him.'

Onslow was now in want of money, having resigned his place in the Post Office when he took his seat. But his maiden speech,