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Francis North, the Lord Keeper, was one of a family of five brothers and
one sister. The lives of three of the brothers are familiarly known to us
through the charming biographies written by another brother, Roger North.
Their position in the Montagu family is easily discovered by means of the
genealogical tree. They fall in the third of those generations I have just
described—the one in which the family gained one dukedom, two earldoms,
and two baronies. Their father was of a literary stock, continued backwards
in one line during no less than five generations. The first Lord North was an
eminent lawyer in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and his son—an able man
and an ambassador—married the daughter of Lord Chancellor Rich. His
son again—who did not live to enjoy the peerage—married the daughter of
a Master of the Court of Requests, and his great-great-grandsons—the
intermediate links' being more or less distinguished, but of whose marriages
I know little—were the brothers North, of whom I am about to speak.
The father of these brothers was the fourth Baron North. He was a
literary man, and, among other matters, wrote the life of the founder of his
family. He was an “economical” man, and “exquisitely virtuous and sober in
his person.” The style of his writings was not so bright as that of his father,
the second baron, who was described as full of spirit and flame, and who
was an author both in prose and verse; his poems were praised by Walpole.
The mother of the brothers, namely, Anne Montagu, is described by her son
as a compendium of charity and wisdom. I suspect it was from the fourth
Baron North that the disagreeable qualities in three of the brothers North
were derived—such as the priggishness of the Lord Keeper, and that
curious saving, mercantile spirit that appeared under different forms in the
Lord Keeper, the Financier, and the Master of Trinity College. I cannot
avoid
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