LORD HARTINGTON.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume IX, Issue 1574, 14 March 1887, Page 4

LORD HARTINGTON.

Of lidrd Hartington, the leader of the Unionist party afc~Home, the London, correspondent of a Melbourne paper writes : ,—lthink, — Ithink I wrote once that Lord Hartington is constitutionally the laziest of living men. He would lie in bed every day until three if it were not that his secretary and bis valet have orders to worry him out of bed by any and every means, not excepting the plan which children call the application of " cold pig." Lord Hartington is generally supposed lo be blase. Thirty years ago he and a certain duchess formed a Unionist party of two, and he has been too lazy and too good-natured ever since to repeal that union. The Devonshire Cavendishes do not appear to have been by any means averse to the above arrangement. The marquis is not likely to marry ; consequently, the Bon of bis younger brother, Lord Edward, is being trained and held out to the great world, and to the lesser world of Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Eastbourne (over which the Cavendishes hold sway), as the future Duke of Devonshire. Strangely enough, the present duke fucceeded his cousin under a sort of tamily compact. It is everybody's secret shat the cousin in question, the late Duke of Devonshire, was a changeling, or borrowed child ; but it was agreed that he should retain the title for life on condition of not marrying. He was a man of exquisite taste, who spent his life —a sufficiently loose one — amidab arhisis and musicians. His habits and tastes indicated that, whoever he was, he must have been of Italian parentage. It was the duke who collected tbe greater part of that statuary wbicb, next to the gardens, is the glory of Chatsworth. He was also the employer and patron of Sir Joseph Paxton, the father of tbe modern science of gardening in England. The present duke is a " character " in his way, He lives surrounded by the children of his son, Lord Edward Cavendish, and ol bis daughter, Lady Louisa Egerton, but never opens his lips, except to give ' monosyllabic answers or orders ; the rest of his time being spent either in perusing accounts from bis agents or reading works on theology of a decidedlj unorthodox type. He allows Lord Hartington £20,000 a year, and gives him Hardwicke-hall and aflat in Devonshirehouse. Nothing really amuses Lord Hartington. What seems to interest him most is playing whist or piquet, which latter he plays every autumn and winter evening with tbe duchess above referred to, should they happen to be staying in the same country house, and that, as a Yankee would say, is " generally nearly always " tbe case. Lord Hartington's £20,000 a year is really a very short allowance, for he is the weakest of men in dealing with money appeals. Recently, through a financial collapse in high quarters, he has found himself burdened with the whole charge of somebody else's very costly family. Beauty, in its hour of financial trial, has never appealed to him in vain, and tbe most casual and numerously superintended flirtation in " the Birdcabe" at Newmarket has often been made the excuse for a successful demand for a cool hundred. The devotions of such a man to the House of Commons, and to the drudgery of such an office as War Minister, can only be accounted for by high sense of public duty overmastering his constitutional indolence.

f v BtJCHTT-PArBA." — Quick, complete cure, all annoying Kidney, Bladder, and Urinary Diseases. At chemists and dvn<j;<r;sts, Kemgbhorne, Grosser & Co., Agents, \V<?)lington. '