Richard Monckton Milnes was born in London, June 19, 1809. His father, Robert Pemberton Milnes, then a young man of twenty-five, and M.P. for the family borough of Pontefract, had just flashed into sudden celebrity in the House of Commons by a brilliant speech in favour of Mr Canning, which saved the Portland Administration, and would have made Mr Milnes’s political fortune, had he been so minded. But when Mr Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or as Secretary of War, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, no: I will not accept either; with my temperament, I should be dead in a year.’ That he had entered Parliament with high hopes, and confidence in his own powers to win distinction there, is plain from the well-known story (which his son evidently believed) that he laid a bet of 100_l._ that he would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in five years. But, when the time came, he declined to ‘take occasion by the hand,’ and sat down under the oaks of Fryston to spend the rest of his life, just half a century, in the placid uniformity of a country gentleman’s existence. His abandonment of public life, and his refusal to return to it in any form, even when, late in life, Lord Palmerston offered him a peerage, were unsolved riddles to his contemporaries. Those who read these volumes will have but little difficulty in finding the answer to it. He was endowed with a proud independence of judgment which could never bind itself to any political party, and a critical fastidiousness which made him hesitate over every question presented to him. These two qualities of mind were conspicuous in his son, and barred to some extent his advancement, as they had barred his father’s. It must not, however, be imagined that the elder Milnes was an indolent man. Far from it. He was a daring rider to hounds, a scientific agriculturist, an active magistrate, a stimulator of the waning Toryism of Yorkshire by speeches which showed what the House of Commons had lost when he left it, and ardently curious about men of note and events of interest—another characteristic which descended to his son. Occasionally, too, he yielded to a love of excitement which Yorkshire could not gratify, and revisited London, to tempt the fickle goddess who presides over high play—a taste which cost him dear, for it compelled him to pass several years of his life in comparative obscurity abroad, while the rents in his fortune, due to his own and his brother’s extravagance, were being slowly repaired. We have been told, by one who knew him late in life, that he was a singularly loveable person—the delight of children and young people—full of jokes, and fun, and _persiflage_. ‘You could never be sure whether he spoke in jest or in earnest,’ said our informant. Here again one of the most obvious characteristics of his son makes its appearance.