Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/291

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE HON. AUBERON HERBERT.
277

Converse with Mr. Herbert on such matters, and you are made to feel as if you had been entertaining angels unawares. The ethical superiority of the Radical creed which you may have assumed, he will demonstrate to you with a freshness of logic and a fervor of conviction that I have never heard sin-passed; not that I agree with all or nearly all of the practical conclusions at which he has arrived. Of some of these I shall have a few words to say by and by. It is the frank, generous spirit, void of the faintest suspicion of arrière pensée, in which he approaches every political problem, that is the great matter.

Auberon Herbert was born in London in 1838, his father being Henry, third Earl of Carnarvon, and his mother Henrietta Anna Howard, niece of the twelfth Duke of Norfolk. The father of the first Earl of Carnarvon, the Hon. Major-Gen. William Herbert, was a son of the eighth Earl of Pembroke. Henry, the first earl, was raised to the baronage as Lord Porchester of High Clere, Southampton, in 1780, and in 1793 he was made Earl of Carnarvon. He was a gentleman of intrepid bearing, and is said to have earned his claim to a peerage by drawing his sword and threatening to run Lord George Gordon, of riotous memory, through the body unless he undertook on the spot to withdraw the mob from the precincts of St. Stephen's. The second earl affected Whiggery; the third, the author of "Portugal and Galicia,"—an authoritative book of travel of no inconsiderable literary merit,—was a Tory; while the fourth, the late colonial secretary (Mr. Herbert's brother), whose resignation was the first clear intimation to the country that Beaconsfield and the Jingoes in the cabinet meant serious mischief, it is