prepared to accept it, and he might be said to have left the University
only to enter the House of Commons.

There, if his career had not yet realised the dreams of his youthful
admirers, it had at least been one of progress and unbroken prosperity.
His first speech was successful, though florid, but it was on foreign
affairs, which permit rhetoric, and in those days demanded at least
one Virgilian quotation. In this latter branch of oratorical adornment
Ferrars was never deficient. No young man of that time, and scarcely any
old one, ventured to address Mr. Speaker without being equipped with a
Latin passage. Ferrars, in this respect, was triply armed. Indeed, when
he entered public life, full of hope and promise, though disciplined to
a certain extent by his mathematical training, he had read very little
more than some Latin writers, some Greek plays, and some treatises of
Aristotle. These with a due course of Bampton Lectures and some dipping
into the "Quarterly Review," then in its prime, qualified a man in
those days, not only for being a member of Parliament, but becoming a
candidate for the responsibility of statesmanship. Ferrars made his way;
for two years he was occasionally asked by the minister to speak, and
then Lord Castlereagh, who liked young men, made him a Lord of the
Treasury. He was Under-Secretary of State, and "very rising," when the
death of Lord Liverpool brought about the severance of the Tory party,
and Mr. Ferrars, mainly under the advice of zealots, resigned his office
when Mr. Canning was appointed Minister, and cast in his lot with the
great destiny of the Duke of Wellington.

The elder Ferrars had the reputation of being wealthy. It was supposed
that he had enjoyed opportunities of making money, and had availed
himself of them, but this was not true. Though a cynic, and with little
respect for his fellow-creatures, Ferrars had a pride in official