Lord Beaconsfield’s penetration in reading character and skill in delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than in the foregoing passage.  Divested of its intentional and humorous exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait.  It exhibits with singular fidelity the qualities which made Lord Houghton, to the end of his long life, at once unique and lovable.  We recognize the overflowing sympathy, the keen interest in life, the vivid faculty of enjoyment, the absolute freedom from national prejudice, the love of seeing and of being seen.

During the Chartist riots of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother:  “Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment’s notice.”  And those who knew Lord Houghton best suspect that he himself originated the joke at his own expense.  The assured ease of young Milnes’s social manner, even among complete strangers, so unlike the morbid self-repression and proud humility of the typical Englishman, won for him the nickname of “The Cool of the Evening.”  His wholly un-English tolerance and constant effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned, procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of “President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company.”  Bishop Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847:  “Carlyle was very great.  Monckton Milnes drew him out.  Milnes began the young man’s cant of the present day—­the barbarity and wickedness of capital punishment; that, after all, we could not be sure others were wicked, etc.  Carlyle broke out on him with, ’None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Companies for me.  We do know what is wickedness, I know wicked men, men whom I would not live with—­men whom under some conceivable circumstances I would kill or they should kill me.  No, Milnes, there’s no truth or greatness in all that.  It’s just poor, miserable littleness.’”

Lord Houghton’s faculty of enjoyment was peculiarly keen.  He warmed not only both hands but indeed all his nature before the fire of life.  “All impulses of soul and sense” affected him with agreeable emotions; no pleasure of body or spirit came amiss to him.  And in nothing was he more characteristically un-English than in the frank manifestation of his enjoyment, bubbling over with an infectious jollity, and never, even when touched by years and illness, taking his pleasures after that melancholy manner of our nation to which it is a point of literary honour not more directly to allude.  Equally un-English was his frank openness of speech and bearing.  His address was pre-eminently what old-fashioned people called “forthcoming.”  It was strikingly—­even amusingly—­free from that frigid dignity and arrogant reserve for which as a nation we are so justly famed.  I never saw him kiss a guest on both cheeks, but if I had I should not have felt the least surprised.