others—the death of Mr. Windham gave a severe shock to his enjoyments. No adverse influences had shaken mutual esteem and intimacy during thirty years. From the turmoil of public business, the statesman often sought repose in the quiet study or the conversation of the man of letters. There, sincere affection and admiration at all times awaited him—such as were due to one of the most accomplished gentlemen and manly spirits of the age—from one of the most amiable and unassuming.
Mr. Windham formed the beau ideal of an English gentleman of the highest class. Well born, well educated, endowed with superior faculties, in addition to those goods of fortune which command consideration everywhere and often of themselves serve to open the portals to fame, he possessed judgment to turn these advantages to the best use. As a boy, he sought distinction, and as a boy obtained it, in being leader of all those sports which make the ambition of school-boy life. At college he became a student of no ordinary attainments. While resident for a season in Scotland he took to mathematics. At Oxford, and through life, he pursued with success the study of its higher branches. At twenty-three, he started with the future Lord Mulgrave on a voyage to the North Pole. He ascended, in 1785, in a balloon. At the siege of Valenciennes, he perilled himself freely in surveying the enemy’s works; and at an earlier period, ran personal risks in subduing mutiny in a militia regiment of which he was major. Even his death arose from the same
