Untitled

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 31, 8 February 1869, Page 2

THE LATE MARQUIS OF HASTINGS. The following remarks on the miserable life and end of the Marquis of Hastings, are taken from the Saturday Review: — r The life history of the late Lord Hastings is more touching than any sensational ! novel. At nine years of age this illstarred young man succeeded to the splendid estates and even more splendid titles of his house. ' Lord of himself, that heritage of woe,' he has managed to exhaust the superb misery of his lot. Eton and Oxford did nothing for him, or at any rate he had not the gifts or graces to profit by his opportunities. Born in 1842, he attained his majority scarcely more than five years ago, and into those five years he managed to compress all the weaknesses and too many of the vices of a long career of folly aud dissipation. We believe that he planted his first steps on Newmarket Heath at the mature age of 20j so that it has taken six years to dissipate his fortune, to shatter his health, to ruin hisreputation, and to bring the old proud name to destruction in the midst of a perfect chaos of disgrace and evil fame. How far the man, or how far his associates, are in fault, we none of us know. We suppose that the poor young lord never had a friend, or that 'confederates/ trainers, and managers, so early occupied the ground, and so rapidly mastered a mind which must always have been weak, that there was no place for a Mentor for this unpromising Telemachus. He either had the sad aud tragic fate of attracting all the elements of evil life to himseif, or of being destined to bring disgrace on ali with which he connected himself. If he was the victim of plots contrived to ruin

iim, the late Lord Hastings, consciously •or not, contrived to visit the ruin which he suffered on plenty of other people. Whether it was simple fatuity which consigned him as a prey to the devices of the Ring, or whether gambling had become afanaticism to him, it is not for us to know. We have not the materials on which to pronounce. Enough that conscience, judgment, and feeling must all have beeu obliterated before such a career was lived through. Aud now the end has •come. A constitution, feeble from the first, has been actually long-lived when, it has taken a lustrum of such a constant strain on body aud miud, culminating in such a crash of ruin and disgrace, to destroy it.