John Manners, Statesmen No. 36

Carlo Pellegrini's chromolithograph presents Lord John James Robert Manners, Tory grandee and MP, as a silver-haired man of middle age in a well-cut frock coat and bow tie, one finger extended in rhetorical emphasis, a top hat resting on the bench beside him — the House of Commons setting unmistakable. The caption quotes his own youthful verse: *'Let arts and commerce, laws and learning die, / But leave us still our old nobility.'* Pellegrini makes the politics the joke: Manners was a Young England romantic who genuinely believed hereditary aristocracy outranked every modern institution. The exaggerated head and slightly hunched posture convey amiable pomposity rather than menace — a man whose convictions are sincere and, to liberal London, gloriously absurd.