Explore "The Duke of Rutland's Poems" by Edmund Gosse on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ENGLAND'S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London: printed for J. G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.
My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion.