mind were, as far as I know, quite unlike anything that obtained among his predecessors and contemporaries; nor do I see them reproduced among the men who have come after him.  His peculiarities were not external.  His appearance accorded with his position.  He looked very much what one would have expected in a country gentleman of large means and prosperous circumstances.  His early portraits show that he was very like all the other young gentlemen of fashion whom D’Orsay drew, with their long hair, high collars, and stupendous neckcloths.  The admirably faithful work of Mr. Lehmann will enable all posterity to know exactly how he looked in his later years with his loose-fitting clothes, comfortable figure, and air of genial gravity.  Externally all was normal.  His peculiarities were those of mental habit, temperament, and taste.  As far as I know, he had not a drop of foreign blood in his veins, yet his nature was essentially un-English.

A country gentleman who frankly preferred living in London, and a Yorkshireman who detested sport, made a sufficiently strange phenomenon; but in Lord Houghton the astonished world beheld as well a politician who wrote poetry, a railway-director who lived in literature, a libre-penseur who championed the Tractarians, a sentimentalist who talked like a cynic, and a philosopher who had elevated conviviality to the dignity of an exact science.  Here, indeed, was a “living oxymoron”—­a combination of inconsistent and incongruous qualities which to the typical John Bull—­Lord Palmerston’s “Fat man with a white hat in the twopenny omnibus”—­was a sealed and hopeless mystery.

Something of this unlikeness to his fellow-Englishmen was due, no doubt, to the fact that Lord Houghton, the only son of a gifted, eccentric, and indulgent father, was brought up at home.  The glorification of the Public School has been ridiculously overdone.  But it argues no blind faith in that strange system of unnatural restraints and scarcely more reasonable indulgences to share Gibbon’s opinion that the training of a Public School is the best adapted to the common run of Englishmen.  “It made us what we were, sir,” said Major Bagstock to Mr. Dombey; “we were iron, sir, and it forged us.”  The average English boy being what he is by nature—­“a soaring human boy,” as Mr. Chadband called him—­a Public School simply makes him more so.  It confirms alike his characteristic faults and his peculiar virtues, and turns him out after five or six years that altogether lovely and gracious product—­the Average Englishman.  This may be readily conceded; but, after all, the pleasantness of the world as a place of residence, and the growing good of the human race, do not depend exclusively on the Average Englishman; and something may be said for the system of training which has produced, not only all famous foreigners (for they, of course, are a negligible quantity), but such exceptional Englishmen as William Pitt and Thomas Macaulay, and John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, and Richard Monckton Milnes.