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sation.” She used to rehearse “by heart prolix romances, with the substance
of speeches and letters, as well as passages; and this with little or no
hesitation, but in a continual series of discourse—the very memory of which
is to me at this day very wonderful.”
She died not long after the birth of her first child, and the child died not
long after her.
Roger North, the biographer of his brothers, from whom I have quoted so
much, was the author of other works, and among them is a memoir on
Music, showing that he shared the musical faculty that was strongly
developed in the Lord Keeper. Little is known of his private life. He was
Attorney-General to the consort of James II. There can be no doubt as to
his abilities. The “Lives of the Norths” is a work of no ordinary writer. It is
full of touches of genius and shrewd perception of character. Roger North
seems to have been a most loving and loveable man.
Charles, the fifth Lord North, was the eldest of the family, and succeeded
to the title; but he did not, so far as I am aware, show signs of genius.
However, he had a daughter whose literary tastes were curiously similar to
those of her uncle, Dr. John. She was Dudleya North, who, in the words of
Roger, “emaciated herself with study, whereby she had made familiar to
her not only the Greek and Latin, but the Oriental languages.” She died
early, having collected a choice library of Oriental works.
I will conclude this description of the family with a characteristically
quaint piece of their biographer's preface:
“Really, the case is memorable for the happy circumstance of a flock so
numerous and diffused as this of the last Dudley Lord North's was, and no
one scabby sheep in it.”
The nearest collateral relation of the North family by the Montagu side is
Charles Hatton, their first cousin. He is alluded to three times in Roger
North's “Lives,” and each time with the same epithet—” the incomparable
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