But my thoughts went wanderting back at my
breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which
was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was
an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a
peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion.
So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner
of my library where the _peches de jeunesse_ stand--the little books
of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would
destroy if they could--and I took down _England's Trust_.
Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford
and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good
families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic
democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle
of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's
_Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the
leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also
the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_,
were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was
doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he
said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.
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