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70
Hereditary Genius
those who had bishops and archbishops for kinsmen. No less than ten
judges—of whom one, Sir Robert Hyde, appeared in the previous list—
have a bishop or an archbishop for a brother. Of these, Sir William Dolben
was brother to one Archbishop of York and son of the sister of another,
namely of John Williams, who was also the Lord Keeper to James I. There
are cases of Poet-relations, as Cowper, Coleridge, Milton, Sir Thomas
Overbury, and Waller. There are numerous relatives who are novelists,
physicians, admirals, and generals. My lists of kinsmen at the end of this
chapter are very briefly treated, but they include the names of many great
men, whose deeds have filled large volumes. It is one of my most serious
drawbacks in writing this book, to feel that names, which never now
present themselves to my eye without associations of respect and
reverence, for the great qualities of those who bore them, are likely to be
insignificant and meaningless to the eyes of most of my readers—indeed to
all of those who have never had occasion to busy themselves with their
history. I know how great was my own ignorance of the character of the
great men of previous generations, before I occupied myself with
biographies, and I therefore reasonably suspect that many of my readers
will be no better informed about them than I was myself. A collection of
men that I have learned to look upon as an august Valhalla, is likely to be
regarded, by those who are strangers to the facts of biographical history, as
an assemblage of mere respectabilities.
The names of North and Montagu, among the Judges, introduce us to a
remarkable breed of eminent men, set forth at length in the genealogical
tree of the Montagus, and again in that of the Sydneys (see the chapter on
“LITERARY MEN”), to whose natural history—if the expression be
permitted—a few pages may be profitably assigned. There is hardly a
name in those pedigrees
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