multiplication of the fit, with equal justice he demands that some control should be exercised over the unreasonable multiplication of the unfit, whether such unfitness be due to drink, feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, or disease.

III

From what has been said, the following propositions may, it is submitted, be fairly deduced:

(1) That Eugenics is a progressive, social science on the banner of which might well be inscribed: 'Sound health is wealth-Good birth is worth.'

(2) That our increased and increasing knowledge of the laws that regulate the ascent and descent of man imposes on jus the duty of encouraging the spread of this new science as a wholesome, moral, and (with a view to race improvement) necessary department of thought and learning.

(3) That, as Mr. Francis Galton suggested in 1904, we ought (a) to remember that, ignorant though we are of the ultimate destinies of humanity, much is left within our own power, and that what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly Man may do presciently, quickly, and benignly; (b) to have faith that, once the principles of Eugenics have penetrated into the national conscience, an enlightened public opinion will give effect to them in ways we cannot at present foresee.

To the foregoing the present writer would add, almost in the words of J. S. Mill uttered half a century ago, that the cultivation of a high conception of what may be made of the world we live in, is capable of supplying a poetry, and (in a sense) a religion, much more fitted to exalt our feelings and ennoble our conduct than any philosophic, or mystic, speculation regarding worlds unseen and unknown.

MONTAGUE CRACKANTHORPE

A GREAT NORFOLK HOUSE 1

EDWARD COKE, the most profound jurist whom England has ever produced, was born at Mileham, in the county of Norfolk, on the 1st of February 1552. He was the only son of his father, who died when he was in his tenth year, and he boasted of an ancestry which he believed could be traced back to the twelfth century. He succeeded to an estate large enough to provide him with something more than a sufficient maintenance. His father was a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. The son entered at the Inner Temple in 1571 and was called to the Bar on the 20th of April 1578. He speedily acquired an extraordinary reputation as a consummate lawyer and advocate, and in his fortyfirst year he entered Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for the county of Norfolk, and was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons, an office in those days always filled by a lawyer. He became successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and of the King's Bench, but he never attained to the highest post under the Crown; his great rival, Bacon, may be said to have hindered him from becoming Keeper of the Great Seal. He died on the 3rd of September 1634, labouring to the last at the three concluding volumes of the Institutes, dealing respectively with Magna Charta, the Criminal Law, and the Jurisdiction of the Courts.

Against his private character no whisper was ever raised. 'Never,' says his contemporary, Judge Whitelocke, 'so just, so upright, so free from corrupt solicitations of great men and friends as he was. In all cases before him the counsel might assure his client from the danger of bribery.' Of his furious language when he gave way to his passion of his coarseness of vituperation when he raved against the object of his indignation or scorn-there can be no palliation, much less any defence; but England owes him a debt of gratitude which posterity has hardly yet paid him; for he was the first discoverer, apostle (and, I had almost written, the first inspired teacher) who revealed to our forefathers the great truth that this realm of

1 Coke of Norfolk and His Friends. The Life of Thomas William Coke, First Earl of Leicester of Holkham. By A. M. W. Stirling. In two volumes, 8vo. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1908.

England was not and never could be the mere appanage of a despot, who could do no wrong and who could impose his will or his whim upon a subject and an abject people. He it was who first taught his countrymen that the sovereignty of a great nation implies the existence of reciprocal duties and responsibilities, king and subjects being co-ordinate, each supporting and controlling the other in the sphere of rights and privileges; till, in the realisation of that grand idea, the sovereign should stand as the supreme representative of a happy and a loyal people, a king whose conscious aim it should be to live by law, ' and because right is right to follow right in scorn of consequence.'

This was the grand theory of the Lord Chief Justice Coke. He was the first exponent of Whig principles and the first great teacher of the Whig philosophy.

So highly and so early did Coke rise into general estimation as an advocate that his practice at the Bar became in a few years enormous. His industry and power of work were phenomenal; his gains were perhaps larger than any other professional man in this country has ever approached. Without being extortionately covetous, he was apparently from the first possessed by two yearnings: the one was an ever-present hankering to add to his landed property; the other was an intense desire to found a family '--in other words, a desire to maintain the entirety of his territorial acquisitions in the ownership of his posterity.

after

The realty of which Sir Edward Coke died possessed included wide tracts of land in ten English counties, upwards of sixty manors— for the most part with manor-houses-and smaller estates in a hundred parishes. So skilfully was the devolution of this great aggregate protected by all the devices of strict settlement and entail from being subdivided and alienated that a hundred and thirty years Sir Edward's death almost the whole of it passed into the ownership of his last male heir. This was Thomas Coke, who was some years under age when he succeeded to the Norfolk estates—as his father and grandfather had been before him. This explains why there was no capital mansion for all that great territory which the Cokes possessed in the county, and which made up an aggregate of forty thousand acres, very widely distributed, and the rents of which during three minorities must have brought in immense accumulations ready money to these wealthy landlords.

of

The Holkham estate strictly so called was by no means so attractive or so valuable as some others which the Chief Justice had possessed himself of in Norfolk. There was a tradition, often repeated a genera tion or two ago, that when first the building of a great mansion was talked about in the seventeenth century, it was for some time doubtful whether or not to set it down at Castle Acre, which would have afforded a splendid site for the contemplated palace, and that the decision of the question was for some time doubtful. Perhaps a sentiment in

favour of the old Hall at Holkham had something to do with the decision that finally was come to.

The Holkham estate properly so called extends over an area of about ten thousand acres, having the shallow sea with its long stretches of sandbanks as its boundary on the north, and on the west what appears to have been, perhaps, a Roman limes, or low rampart, marking the extent of the jurisdiction of the commanding officer of the mighty camp at Brancaster, thrown up in the days when the hordes of invading barbarians were swarming from across the sea-Saxons or Angles peradventure to begin with, to be followed, some three or four hundred years later, by the Scandinavian pirate fleets, vestiges of whose fierce onslaught are still to be seen in the traces of the Danish camps still remaining, telling of conflicts not a few.

This tract of country, including the parishes of Holkham, Quarles, Egmere, the Warhams, and Wighton, came into the possession of the Cokes by the marriage of John Coke, fourth son of the Chief Justice, with Muriel, daughter and heir of Anthony Wheatley, Esq., of Holkham, in 1612. John Coke died at Holkham in 1661, and was succeeded by his second son, another John, who died ten years later, and was succeeded by his cousin, Robert Coke of Thorington, who was apparently under age when he came into the estate, and enjoyed it little more than seven years. He died, aged twenty-nine, in January 1679, and was succeeded by his son Edward, father of Thomas Coke, the builder of the great palace of Holkham, who was at the death of his father in 1707 a boy of twelve years of age. When the estates changed hands so frequently in a period of thirty years, and were under the management and supervision of officials responsible to the Court of Chancery, it was not to be looked for that anything like sentiment or special interest in the old house should be shown in the management of the property, though as early as 1660 we learn that John Coke, the year before his death, had already begun to reclaim 360 acres of salt marshes from the sea, and his example was followed apparently by others. But it is pretty clear that the old manor-house at Holkham was not any very important mansion, and hardly a vestige of it remains, nor is it clear where it actually stood in the seventeenth century. It looks as if young Edward Coke, whose long minority came to an end in 1696, was the first who seriously meditated the building of a new mansion worthy of the great territory which he now owned, and before death smote him in his thirty-first year he had often talked of his intentions to the son who succeeded him.

This was Thomas Coke, the builder of the great house which rose to be one of the most magnificent palaces in England. His father had been a ward in Chancery for nine years before he succeeded to his inheritance; the son had been himself under the guardianship of his maternal grandfather, Sir John Newton, of Barr's Court, Gloucestershire, under whose care and vigilance he appears to have been educated

by private tutors. They inspired him with an enthusiastic taste for the art and literature of Greece and Rome.

The state of our English universities about this time was deplorable. Lads of fifteen or sixteen were left almost absolutely to themselves; there was hardly any discipline; and though there was no lack of learning among the Fellows of colleges and such younger students as looked forward to a career sooner or later in Church or State, yet the undergraduates were left to take their own way, and were as little subject to discipline of any kind as medical students at the London hospitals were half a century ago; with this serious difference, that the former were mere boys, often supplied too liberally with money, and left to pursue a career of dissipation, and very little else; the latter had, at any rate professedly, an object to work for and a professional career for which it was necessary that they should prepare themselves. It was decided that young Thomas Coke should not be entered at either of our universities. At fifteen he was sent to the University of Turin, which at that time enjoyed a high reputation, and where other young Englishmen resorted to learn Italian and to fit themselves for the grand tour on the Continent which might enlarge their minds, familiarise them with foreign life and manners, and give them a larger experience of men than it was thought could be acquired within the limits of our 'four

seas.'

Young Thomas Coke started on his Continental travels apparently, in 1712, with a cortège and retinue hardly less imposing than might have satisfied a young prince, heir to a grand duchy or a crown. In Italy he fell in with Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, a young man a year or two his senior, of great wealth and of similar tastes for literature and art. It is deplorable that no correspondence between these two young men has come down to us; but it is certain that both indulged in lavish expenditure of money upon pictures and sculpture, ancient manuscripts, and other works of art, and it is more than probable that the two accomplished young men consulted one another on their plans for the future; Lord Burlington having, doubtless, already in view the building of the magnificent Burlington House in London, Thomas Coke getting from his friend many a hint and suggestion regarding the vast mansion which he had in view, which was to rise up in its grandeur twenty years later among the sandhills of Norfolk.

and

Be that as it may, during those six years of his wanderings in Italy Thomas Coke appears to have gone on spending huge sums of money in acquiring glorious pictures of the Italian schools, priceless examples of ancient sculpture for galleries which had as yet no existence, books and MSS. for a library which was to be provided in the future, and showing in all this lavish expenditure a highly cultivated taste, stimulated by the suggestions and advice of accomplished experts