My Social Life in London

IT was an epoch in my social life when at the dinner-table of Sir R. H. Inglis, a member for the University of Oxford, high Tory and Protestant, but genial friend and host of men of all parties, I first met Macaulay. Macaulay talked essays and engrossed the talking —conversation it could not be called. One could understand how he was a bore to other talkers. He evidently was to a great talker who sat next to me. He would seize upon a theme and dilate, with copious illustration, from a marvelous memory. Mention of the exclusive respect of the Ritualists for churches in the Gothic style led to an enumeration of the fathers of the early Church who had ministered in churches which were not Gothic. A question about the rules of equestrian statuary led to a copious dissertation proving that nature was the only rule. I have seen a whole evening party kept listening in a ring to an essay on final causes and the limits of their recognition, with numerous illustrations. But it seemed to me all exuberance, not assumption or ostentation.

Once, however, even I thought Macaulay a bore. It was at a breakfast at Lord Stanhope’s. Lord Russell was beginning to give us an account of the trial of Queen Caroline, which he had witnessed. Macaulay broke in with an essay, and Lord Russell was swept away by its tide. Of all English talkers that I ever heard, Macaulay seemed to me the first in brilliancy. He is the first in brilliancy of English writers, though not always the most sober or just. Of all his writings the least just, while it is perhaps the most brilliant, is the essay on Warren Hastings. Justice has been done upon it by Fitzjames Stephen.

Rogers especially might well dislike Macaulay, against whom, with his feeble voice, he could make no head. He was silent during dinner. After d inner, when the ladies were gone, he told anecdotes in language evidently prepared. It was treason then to talk. There was certainly a strain of malice in him. He was sensitive on the subject of his social position, and could not forgive Sydney Smith for saying in his presence that he would ‘bet a cheque on Rogers & Co.’ Theodore Hook was never tired of whipping him on that tender spot. He was sensitive also about his appearance, as, if he aspired to beauty, he had good reason for being. It was said that he had driven his foot through a portrait which told unflattering truth. I wish I had been present when the attention of the party was suddenly drawn to a caricature bust of him which the host had inadvertently left upon the mantel-piece. The struggles of the party to cope with the horror, some taking the line that it was a likeness, others that it was not, were described to me as very amusing. The immortality which Rogers expected for his poems has not been theirs. He is not deep, yet there are passages in him, such as the opening lines of ‘ Human Life,’ which are pleasant to my simple ear.

Of all the social talkers, I should say the pleasantest was Sir David Dundas, then Solicitor-General. He really conversed, and, while leading the conversation, drew out his company and made other people feel that they too had said good things.

When the Life of Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) appeared, people were disappointed because it did not sparkle with wit. Nobody who knew him could share the disappointment. It was not in any witty things that he said, but in his manner, which was wit in itself, that the charm resided. His good-natured simplicity of speech (if that will do for a translation of naïveté) had earned him the nickname of ‘the cool of the evening.’ He was an eager hunter of notorieties. It was said that he would have had the most noted felon of the day at his breakfast-table if he could.

Sitting there and looking round on the circle, you asked yourself how you came into that museum. Milnes was a great and a most successful collector of autographs. He showed me on the same page some love verses written by Robespierre when a youth, and a death-warrant signed by him under the Reign of Terror. General Grant, when he went to breakfast with Milnes, was presented with a round-robin which he had signed as a cadet at West Point. Milnes would not tell us how he had obtained it. To a collector of autographs everything is moral. The writer of Palm Leaves, in which by the way there are some very pretty lines, had at one time been a follower of Urquhart, the devotee and political champion of Turkey and the East. Urquhart can hardly have been sane. Milnes said that once when he went to Urquhart’s house, the door was opened by Urquhart’s son, stark naked, that being the father’s idea of physical education.

Eton friendship with Hallam’s son Henry opened to me the house of his illustrious father, which was no longer in the “long unlovely street,’ but in Wilton Crescent. The historian was then old and bowed down by the loss of the son whose epitaph is ‘In Memoriam,’ as well as by that of his wife and his favorite daughter. In earlier days he had been rather a social terror. People in his presence had spoken in fear of contradiction. It was said that he had got out of bed in the night to contradict the watchman about the hour and the weather. Sydney Smith said that the chief use of the electric telegraph would be to enable Hallam to contradict a man at Birmingham. But in his old age, and to a boy like me, Hallam was all mildness and kindness. I see the old man now, sitting in his library, with gout in his hands, in mournful dignity waiting for the end. But he would know that his work was done.

Milman’s name is now seldom heard, yet he has left his mark in his histories of the Jews and of the Latin Church; nor is the ‘ Martyr of Antioch’ without merits as a poem. The author of the prize poem on the Apollo Belvedere had set out in life with an immense Oxford reputation. In his History of the Jews he had, as a student of German theology, faintly anticipated the higher criticism, and incurred orthodox suspicion accordingly. That he had talent, a richly stored mind, and conversational power, is certain. Whether he had anything more is doubtful. If he had, it was stifled in him, as it was in other rationalist theologians, by the fatal white tie.

Thackeray I used to meet at the dinners of the Saturday Review, but had not much intercourse with him. If he was cynical, his cynicism did not appear in his face or manner, which betokened perfect simplicity and good nature. From good nature, and not from that alone, I cannot help thinking that he lapsed when he gibbeted Croker in Vanity Fair, under the name of Wenham, as the parasite and pandar of the Marquis of Hertford, easily discernible under the pseudonym of the Marquis of Steyne. Croker was a rancorous politician, and both by his tongue and pen provoked bitter enmity; but there was nothing in his relation with Lord Hertford to brand him as a parasite, much less could he be supposed capable of playing the pandar. As a leading anti-reform member of the House of Commons he had been an associate of Hertford and other magnates of the Tory party. The connection continued after Croker’s retirement in disgust from public life. Slander, under cover of a fictitious name, as I have said before, when the person really meant can be easily recognized, is at once the most deadly and the most cowardly of all ways of assailing character. The person assailed cannot defend himself without seeming to countenance the libel.

In the house of Sir Roderick Murchison I used to meet the men of science; but it was not till later that I became intimate with Huxley and Tyndall. With Tyndall I became very intimate, and greatly loved him, though on some points we widely differed. He called himself a Materialist, and never allowed you to call him anything else, ever faithful to his formula that matter contained the potentiality of all life. But never was a man less materialist in the gross sense of the term. I used to think that he would have found it very difficult to account, on any materialistic theory, for his own sentiments and aspirations. Between Huxley and Owen there was at that time war about the Hippocampus Minor That Huxley was in the right seemed to be the verdict of the scientific world; had he found himself in the wrong he would have frankly owned it, for no man could be more loyal to truth. Murchison was a man of large property; he had been in the army; had taken to geology and become the Amphitryon of the scientific world. He had been engaged in exploring the mineral wealth of the Ural, and became very intimate with the Czar, whose feeling towards England, as he assured me, I have no doubt truly, was as good as possible, she being in the Czar’s eyes the great conservative power. The day before the Crimean War, nobody expected or desired it; while it was going, everybody was mad about it; when it was over, everybody condemned and deplored it.

If I remember rightly, I was an early subscriber to Herbert Spencer’s works. But it was not till much later, I think in 1876, that I became well acquainted with the man. We were staying at Buxton together. If a new moral world is built upon materialism, Herbert Spencer will have been one of the chief builders. In any case he was a shining light and a power. Of his personal eccentricities plenty of stories have been told. His nervous sensibility was extreme. A game of billiards was enough to deprive him of his night’s rest. He had been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with Huxley; but he gave it up because there was a difference on some scientific question between them, and this might have given rise to an argument, which Spencer’s nerves could not bear. A literary flippancy of mine once caused an estrangement between us, but I am happy to say we became the best of friends again.

The most interesting of my social experiences, however, were my visits to The Grange, a name familiar to all who have read the Life of Carlyle. Lord Ashburton, of the then immensely wealthy house of Baring, was a man of intellect and culture, and by no means a social cipher, though a less important figure than his wife. Lady Ashburton was a great lady, perhaps the nearest counterpart that England could produce to the queen of a French salon before the Revolution. In person, though not beautiful, she was majestic. Her wit was of the very brightest, and dearly she loved to give it play. She had at the same time depth of character and tenderness of feeling. It was a mistake to think that she was a Mrs. Leo Hunter on a grand scale. She cared as little for reputation in itself as she did for rank or wealth. To form a circle of brilliant talkers with herself as its centre, was her aim; and in this she fully succeeded. One or two appreciative listeners were also desirable, and were there. Beauty may have been a passport; at least I do not know what but the wonderful beauty of Mrs. Bigelow Lawrence, Sally Ward that had been, could have brought her and her not intellectually brilliant husband to The Grange. Everything was arranged for conversation. Breakfast was a function, and was served on round tables, each of a conversational size. The last comer always took Lady Ashburton out to dinner, that he might be thoroughly introduced into the circle.

Carlyle was always there. He was a great favorite of Lady Ashburton. His talk was like his books, but wilder; in truth, his pessimism was monotonous and sometimes wearisome, though he could not fail to say striking things, still less to use striking words. One summer evening we came out after dinner on the terrace. There was a bright moon, and for a few minutes we all looked at it in silence, each probably having his own thoughts. At last a voice was heard: ‘Puir auld creature!’ Whether the moon was an object of pity in herself, or because she was doomed to look down on human affairs, I failed to divine.

Tennyson was there. I adored the poet, and should have liked to be able to worship the man. His self-consciousness and sensitiveness to criticism were extreme. One of the party whose name I forget, but who acted as a sort of aidede-camp to Lady Ashburton, asked me what I thought of Tennyson. I said that it was most interesting to meet him. ' But is he not very sensitive? ’ — ‘Sensitive! I should think he was. If my little girl were to tell him that his whiskers were ugly he would n’t forget it for a month.'

They asked Tennyson to read some of his own poetry aloud. This he was understood to be fond of doing. But to the general disappointment he refused. At his side was sitting Carlyle, who had been publishing his contempt of poetry. Immolating myself to the public cause,

I went over to Carlyle and asked him to come for a walk in the grounds. While we were gone the reading came off. I was reminded of this incident, which I had long forgotten, by a reference to it the other day in the Illustrated London News.

Mrs. Carlyle was at The Grange. She was a modest personage, rather in the background. Nobody knew that she was so clever as her letters prove her to have been. But that Lady Ashburton ever gave her serious cause for unhappiness I do not in the least believe. Lady Ashburton was a queen, and may, like other royalties, have been sometimes a little high; but she was incapable of doing anything unfeeling. I had a great respect for her character as well as admiration for her wit, and have always cherished the memory of the message which she sent me from her death-bed.

In the circle of The Grange was to be seen Bishop Wilberforce. He had good right to be there, for he was a very brilliant talker, especially happy in repartee. Of his eminent ability there could be no doubt. He would certainly have made his mark as an advocate or a politician. He set out as an Evangelical, like his father; he became, as was natural for a bishop, a High Churchman. He tried to combine both systems, and to ride two horses with their heads turned different ways. This in itself gave him, perhaps undeservedly, an air of duplicity and a nickname. He was, however, morbidly desirous of influence, which he seemed ever to cultivate without definite object. It was said that he would have liked to be on the committee of every club in London. He had the general reputation of not being strictly veracious; nor, as I had once occasion to see, was he, when Church party was in question, inflexibly just. He turned upon the Hampden question when he found that his course was giving offense at Court, and was upbraided with tergiversation by his party. He turned upon the Irish Church question just in time to be promoted from Oxford to Winchester, and to what he probably coveted more than the income, the Chancellorship of the Garter; and when he put forth a pathetic valedictory assuring the clergy of Oxford that he was agonized at leaving them but could not disobey the call of the Spirit, he provoked a smile. There could be no question as to his meritorious activity in his diocese. He was at first a fine preacher, but at last his incessant activity, leaving no time for reading or thought, impaired the matter of his sermons and compelled him to make up for lack of substance by delivery, of which, having an admirable voice and manner, he remained a perfect master. Too much allowance can hardly be made for the difficulties of the Mitre in those times.

A very different realm from The Grange was Strawberry Hill, where reigned Frances, Lady Waldegrave, whose husband, Lord Carlingford, and I were college friends. To the sham Gothic mansion built by the virtuoso Horace Walpole on the bank of the Thames had been added an enchanted castle of pleasure, with gorgeous salons, and magnificent grounds for out-ofdoor fetes stretching along the river. Frances, Lady Waldegrave, had been four times wedded. Thrice, it was said, she had married for title or wealth; the fourth time for love. She was a rat her florid beauty, taking perhaps to an elderly man. In her fourth wedlock she had chosen well, for Carlingford was a man of whom she might be proud, since he became a Cabinet Minister, and at the same time a domestic pillow. He was an Irishman, and when in the theatre at Dublin the jocular crowd asked his spouse which of her four husbands she liked best, she could turn their impertinence to plaudits by saying, ‘The Irishman, of course.’

She was the daughter of Braham the singer, and one of the best of daughters, for in her grandeur she never failed in devoted attachment to her father, whose portrait hung conspicuous upon her wall. Her ambition was to gather the whole of the great world, royalty included, in her salon at Strawberry Hill. In this she thoroughly succeeded. Curiously enough, the great fortune which she had accumulated by her successive marriages she had just run through when she died. After her death, I was staying with her husband at the place in the country where she was buried. There she lay, with a list of her husbands on her monument. Her fourth husband could not bear himself to take me to the grave; he had to put me in the hands of the curate. Utterly unlike to Harriet, Lady Ashburton, was Frances, Lady Waldegrave; yet Frances, Lady Waldegrave, to use Carlyle’s phrase, was not without an eye, and she could interest herself in other subjects than balls and garden-parties when she had a quiet hour.

It was a mark of the difference between the two social monarchies that, while at The Grange, breakfast, as I have said, was a conversational function for which arrangements were made, at Strawberry Hill you came down to breakfast at your own hour, and were served separately from a carte. The host and hostess did not appear till luncheon.

Now the splendor has departed from Strawberry Hill, from the gilded salons and the magnificent grounds. The place has become a tea-garden or something less elysian still. Sic transit gloria mundi.

In a mansion close to Strawberry Hill lived in luxurious exile the Duc d’Aumale and the Comte de Paris. D’Aumale, it seemed to me, would have made a strong Pretender; he was a soldier and a man of action, highly cultivated withal. But he was not the heir, and it seems that when he got back to France he gave himself up to pleasure. The Comte de Paris was a gentle creature who never could have made a Pretender without a Morny to play his game.

Among the intellectual magnates who were kind to me I must not forget Lord Stanhope. I spent some very pleasant days at Chevening with a literary company, two members of which were Mr. and Mrs. Grote. Grote was quiet and retiring. Mrs. Grote was unretiring, a rather formidable woman with a very sharp wit. Stanhope’s history is not a masterpiece; but it is interesting and fair, the work of a man of sense and a gentleman. The last qualification is valuable to a historian of the politics of aristocratic days.

Hard by lived also my great friend Grant Duff, a most accomplished politician and man of the world, whose name calls up to memory pleasant hours. When he was leaving for his government in India we gave him a farewell banquet at a great hotel. I, having come some distance, took a bed there. In the morning I was awakened by a knock at my door and a female voice offering me brandy and soda. The more I declined the cup of health, the more pressingly it was offered. Was it intended for some other revelers, or was it taken for granted that those who had dined there overnight must want brandy and soda in the morning?

From Chevening we visited Knole, the country-seat of Lord Sackville near Sevenoaks. I there found a portrait of Walsingham, which confirmed me in the belief that a portrait which on leaving Oxford I made over to the Bodleian, it having passed for a portrait of Sir Thomas Bodley, was really a portrait of Elizabeth’s great Secretary of State. Each portrait has the dispatch symbolical of the Secretaryship, as the white wand is of the Treasurership, in its hand. The date of the subject’s age on the picture does not exactly agree with Bodley’s age. The date of Walsingham’s birth is uncertain. His monument in St. Paul’s was destroyed by fire.

A party at a country-house was seldom complete without Hayward, the prince of anecdotists and the great authority on social history and gossip. His anecdotes certainly gained embellishment by repetition, and were therefore perhaps more amusing than authentic. He was fond of dissolving the false pearls of history and destroying heroic illusions. It was with much gusto that he assured us that Pitt’s last words were, not. “Oh! my country! how I love my country!’ but, “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat-pies.’ Disraeli, whom he must in some way have offended, has alluded to him in Lothair as a ‘little parasite.' Little he was in stature, but he was no parasite; on the contrary, he bore himself very much as t he master of the circle. He was a bachelor; his pen must have brought him an income; and as he had many friends among the political leaders, he could have got an appointment if he had needed it. But he, no doubt, prized his freedom.

I had a good friend in the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr. Denison, afterwards Lord Ossington, through whose interest I enjoyed debates. He would always get me under the gallery or in some place on the floor of the House. It is on the floor of the House only that a debate can be enjoyed. I shall have occasion further on to mention one or two of the great speakers. Of those I heard, the general level did not seem to me to be high. There was great waste of time in droning through speeches which were mere dilutions of the morning’s editorials. Why cannot each speaker, except the leaders, instead of wandering over the whole subject, take a point and press it home? The whole discussion, however, is little more than a great party demonstration. The name ‘deliberative assembly’ is a mockery. On any party question there is no more deliberation than there is in the interchange of volleys between two lines of battle. Besides, every one is talking less to the House than to the reporters.

While I am in a fault-finding mood I may say that the House —and still more the House of Lords — is too highly decorated for a hall of debate, where nothing should divert the eye from the speaker. Ventilation and acoustics at that time were bad. It seems that architectural science has not yet learned to produce with certainty a room in which you can be heard, a place in which you can breathe, or a chimney which will not smoke. The acoustics of the House of Lords were worse than those of the House of Commons. It was said that the leader of the Opposition went out and bought an evening paper to learn what the head of the government was talking about. During the passage of the Oxford University Bill I was placed on the steps of the throne to watch the bill and communicate with the minister in charge. On that spot, where nobody sits, you could hear the speakers on both sides well.

1 enjoyed the theatre, and had in Patrick Comyn and Smyth Pigott pleasant companions to add to my enjoyment. Of all the acting that I saw, the grandest was that of Ristori in Camma; above all in the famous scene in which Camma elicits the secret of her husband’s murder by affecting love of the murderer, then entices him to drinking the poisoned cup, drinks of it herself, and dies. The plot, which is from Plutarch, Tennyson has taken for his Cup. Of Rachel, Matthew Arnold has said that she began where Sara Bernhardt ended. She was passion, especially of the satanic kind, incarnate. Adrienne Lecouvreur was her topping part, and the death-scene, for which she was supposed to have studied in a hospital, was her topping scene. Her direct opposite was the female star of the English stage, Helen Faucit, who was all tenderness. About Wigan, our male star, there seems to have been a difference of opinion. His friends asserted that he alone could act a gentleman; his critics said the reverse.

Some of the opera people acted as well as sang well. Jenny Lind did, in pieces that suited her, such as Gazza Ladra and Figlia del Regimento. Something was missed when, having renounced opera, she sang at concerts. Tietjens also acted well in such a part as Lucrezia Borgia ; while her companion Alboni, supreme and rapturously applauded as a singer, stalked the stage in her tabard with the grace of a female elephant. Jenny Lind’s character enhanced her popularity. She was no harpy, like other prima donnas, but left something for the lesser folk. I have spoken of the friendship between Jenny and Arthur Stanley, who was, like Johnson, dead to the charms of music, and said that the only thing that pleased him was a drum solo. Where he could have heard a drum solo we never could ascertain. Mario and Grisi, having spent the fortunes which they had made, were forced to return to the stage. But superannuated as they were, I fancy their audience, though it received them well, took more pleasure in seeing than in hearing them.

Charles Kean acted Hamlet with applause, yet, I thought, not well. Shakespeare is a philosophic poet as well as a dramatist, and sometimes transcends the dramatic sphere. Perhaps one who had the sensibility to feel the part of Hamlet would scarcely have the nerve to act it. The best Hamlet I ever saw was that of the German Devrient, who did at all events soliloquize the soliloquy, not declaim it.

I enjoyed a visit to Sadler’s Wells, the people’s theatre, long since improved out of existence. It was pleasant to see the loyalty of the people to Shakespeare. The taste of the people, being simple, is sound. Phelps, at Sadler’s Wells, was a fine declaimer. He gave well Prospero’s speech in The Tempest.

But all the theatres, and especially Sadler’s Wells, suffered from Charles Kean’s fancy for spectacles. He imagined that Shakespeare was an antiquarian, and put on his plays in the garb of the historic period. So we had the Duke of Athens, who to Shakespeare was like a Duke of Milan, talking of nunneries; fairies in Athenian groves; and two Athenian gentlemen going out to fight a duel with Grecian swords. In Macbeth we had the rude simplicity of primitive Scotland; and the throne, to which Macbeth’s ambition climbed through treason and murder, was a wooden stool. Shakespeare paid no more respect to historical character than to geography, and he had no scenery at all.

I was in a box at the opera one evening with two friends. The party next night was to meet again. I arrived first. Presently one of the other two came in. I asked after the third, and was horrified by the reply that he had shot himself that afternoon. The evening before he had apparently been in the best of spirits. He was young and wealthy. I never learned the cause of his weariness of life. The weather was very sultry and bad for the liver.

Having spoken of E. S. Pigott, I may say that he was very intimate with Dickens, whom I only once saw, and whom I understood it was difficult to meet, as he lived very much in a choice circle of his intimate friends. Pigott told me his opinion of the unhappy relations between Dickens and his wife, which came too much before the world. It was a common case: Dickens had married at a low level, and his wife had not risen with him; otherwise, according to Pigott, an excellent judge, there was no fault on her side. The matrimonial history of writers of works of imagination has often been unhappy. Their imagination turns a woman into an angel, and then they find that she is a woman. About this time the scandalous world was being regaled with the war between Bulwer and his wife. When Bulwer was being elected at Hertford, his consort drove up in a post-chaise, mounted the hustings, and delivered a philippic against him. Their son was credited with some lines on the occasion: —

If Dickens’s own home was not happy, few writers have done more to make other homes happy and diffuse kindly feelings. His ‘Christmas Carol’ is an evangel.

I became intimate with some of the exiles driven to England by the political storms of Europe. Among them was Louis Blanc, of whom I saw a good deal. In his writings there is a strain, I am afraid, not only of the visionary but of the terrorist. This, however, he did not betray when we sat on the Terrace at Richmond one summer afternoon talking of his plans for the regeneration of mankind. He ascribed the failure of his National Workshops of course to the machinations of the enemy. What was undeniable was that they had failed.

I took more to the Italian exiles, Mazzini, Saffi, and Arrivabene, whose cause, that of Italian independence, was perfectly pure. To Mazzini, whose acquaintance I formed at the house of Sir James Stansfield, I took very much. He seemed to me a genuine servant of humanity, regarding Italian nationality, to the rescue of which he gave his life, as subservient to the general good of mankind. He denied that he had been concerned in any assassination plot. With Garibaldi I exchanged letters, but we never met. He was coming to Oxford and to my house when he was suddenly whisked out of the country, by what influence is a mystery to this hour. For myself,

I never doubted that it was by the influence of the Queen. Victoria was a Stuart upon a Hanoverian throne. A friend of mine at Court heard Disraeli feeding with slanderous stories her hatred of Garibaldi. She bitterly hated Bismarck also, for having put an end to the Kingdom of Hanover. Perhaps that may have been partly the cause of her sympathy with France against Germany. The French Emperor, to whose influence some suspected the spiriting-away of Garibaldi was due, had in him still something of the revolutionist and an eye to possible assistance from that side.

Two famous relics of a political generation gone by, Brougham and Lyndhurst, I just saw. Lyndhurst I heard make a speech on the House of Lords, too cursory for the display of his mighty reasoning powers. It was curious to see a man who had been at Boston a British subject before the American Revolution.

Nothing can adequately paint the galvanic motions of Brougham’s face and figure. His activity and productiveness, as is well known, were miraculous. He aspired to leadership not only in law, politics, and literature, but in science. Lord Stanhope used to tell a story of the editor of a new magazine who humbly petitioned Brougham for an article to grace his first number. The happy man received three articles by return of post! Brougham’s private secretary, Sir Denis le Marchant, told me that Brougham, when he was leading at once in the Bar and in Parliament, making one speech seven hours long, could do with two hours’ sleep each night. On Saturday afternoon he would turn in till Monday morning. When he was in full practice on the northern circuit, and at the same time candidate for the representation of Yorkshire in Parliament, he would, after a long day in court, get into a post-chaise, and go very long distances to election meetings. Summoned suddenly to attend his client Queen Caroline on a great emergency, he slept all the way in the carriage. For this preternatural activity, however, he paid by long fits of depression. His sister, who was with us at Mortimer, was grotesquely like him in all respects, and was subject to the same fits of depression, which, however, in her case were more lasting. Brougham was very emotional, and wept bitterly when he heard of the death of an old political associate. His attempt to revive his failing notoriety by circulating a report of his having been killed by an accident took in the whole press except The Times.

Eton introduced me, among other houses, to that of Lord Chancellor Campbell, whose son, Lord Stratheden that afterwards was, and I had been in the same boarding-house. It was of Lord Campbell as the author of the Lives of the Chancellors that Lyndhurst said he had added a pang to death. He may not be strictly accurate or impartial, but his book is racy of the profession. It was to Campbell that was due the putting the plaintiff in a libel case into the witness-box. It seems doubtful whether he did well. The consequence is apt to be, instead of the trial of the defendant for his slander, the trial of the person libeled on his general character and life.

Through Campbell’s son, Stratheden, I remotely touched Canadian politics. Joseph Howe came over to protest against the inveigling of Nova Scotia into the Confederation, with an introduction to Stratheden, who sent him to me. Howe was at a dinner at which the Liberal leaders were present, and there made a speech, too warm for a rather cool-blooded audience, threatening dire consequences if Nova Scotia were not set free. The case was taken up in Parliament, but the next thing heard was that Howe was in a Confederation Government. On the question of Confederation, he might have yielded to destiny; but he should hardly have gone into the Government. The conduct of the Nova Scotian legislators, who, having been elected to oppose Confederation, carried it by their votes, remains a historical mystery.

I spent a day with Lushington, Lady Byron’s counsel, but nothing was said about the famous case. Lushington would never speak of it. His lips might be sealed by professional duty. Yet it seems strange that when the portentous version of the matter adopted by Mrs. Beecher Stowe was in circulation, he should not, if he could with truth, have denied that there was anything more than a matrimonial quarrel of the common kind. In my childhood I had seen Lushington chaired on his election for Reading.

Blessed are clubs, and above all clubs in my memory the Athenæum, with its splendid library and its social opportunities. Without clubs what would bachelor life in London be! We know pretty well from the record of days before them. Instead of being denounced as hostile to marriage, the clubs ought to be credited with keeping young men fit for it. Even with a club, the life of a young man in a city where he has no home is not free from danger. In trying many years afterwards to assist in the foundation of a good club for young men in Toronto, I was acting on observations made during my own stay in London.

Without a home in London I could myself hardly be said to be. I had something like a home in the house of my father’s brother-in-law, the Reverend Sir Henry Dukinfield, who had succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his brother, after being for some time pastor of St. Martins-in-the-Fields.

Sir Henry was an active and valued coadjutor of Bloomfield the Bishop of London, a statesman-prelate who strove to adapt the Church to the times and renew her hold upon the nation, not by reviving her claims to priestly authority, but by placing her in the van of social improvement. He was the apostle of public baths and wash-houses. His wife, Lady Dukinfield, was my ideal of a lovely and graceful English woman. Nor was her character less graceful than her form and manner. Her portrait bears me out. La belle An-glaise she had been called in France, and her beauty was of the kind that loses least by age. She was a niece of Craufurd, Wellington’s Peninsula general. Her father was a diplomatist. She was with him at Brussels at the time of Waterloo, and was the last survivor but one of those who had danced at the famous ball. Her memory was perfectly clear. They all knew that the French were advancing. But Wellington, to prevent a panic, had desired that the ball might take place. The lodgings of Lady Dukinfield’s father were opposite to the quarters of the Duke, whom she saw mount his horse and ride forth. She also saw the Guards, her brother’s regiment, march out. On the day of Waterloo she and her father were dining with the Prince de Condé, when news came that the British were totally defeated, and the French were marching on Brussels. The Prince called for his horses and went off to Ghent. Lady Dukinfield’s father hurried her home, but found that his horses had been stolen. They presently got horses and set out for Ghent, finding the road blocked with fugitives. Before they reached Ghent they were overtaken by news of the victory. I did not ask Lady Dukinfield where the ball had taken place. Prince Leopold afterwards heard her story, and I believe took a note of it. He may have asked the question.

Sir Henry, a clergyman and a devout one, one day let fall the remark that a man’s religious reputation must be very high to enable him to refuse a challenge to a duel. I note this to mark the change of sentiment.