HOLLAND HOUSE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22319, 5 February 1938, Page 18

HOLLAND HOUSE

❖ LORD ILCHESTER’S SECOND VOLUME Chronicles of Holland House 1820-1900 By the Earl of Ilchesler John Murray. 550 pp. (18/- net.) Lord Ilchester's second volume of the history of his house is as valuable as the first but not so pleasantly interesting. The family and the House are in decline: less money, fewer great men within and without the family, more sprrows to record, and days crowded that a society like that ot Holland House in its heyday was less necessary and less important. In this volume is no character to rank with Charles James Fox, no friendship like Napoleon’s, no scandal like the marriage of the third Lord Holland, no picturesque neerdowells like the Regency bucks, less scholarship, less wine, less talk, more travel, more trifling variety. Hut here, in small or great part, are Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Sidney Smith, replete with good food, good talk, and youthful Here are Lord John Russell, Melbourne, Palmerston, George IV, and William IV. The strongest character is Lady Holland, according _ to Macaulay “a large bold-looking woman, with the remains of a fine person and the air of Queen Elizabeth,” ambitious and active, but her husband’s hindrance. Lord John Russell told her: ‘‘No man will act in a Cabinet with a person whose wife opens all his letters. ’ Another strong character is represented m Holland House records rather more favourably than usual. “Brougham, said Lord Holland, “looks and talks like a giant released among pigmies.- ’ , Lord Holland survives in the earlj part of this latter history to act largely behind the stage for the Whig leaders. He pursues his literary way and continues to gather about him from his own and foreign countries men famous in letters and diplomacy. His death was the beginning of family decline. His son Henry, a weaker man prone to amatory enthusiasm, could not, like his brothers and sisters, bear Lady Holland’s crude and selfish domination, and so the breach of Holland House traditions was opened. Lord Ilchester’s story, which began with such fire and such fair prospects, ends with an inventory of furnishings and pictures and with the description of a garden. Tne works of men, their lesser works, remain; the men are gone.