What would have surprised me would have been if the guest (whatever his difference of age or station) had not felt immediately and completely at home, or if Lord Houghton had not seemed and spoken as if they had known one another from the days of short frocks and skipping-ropes.  There never lived so perfect a host.  His sympathy was genius, and his hospitality a fine art.  He was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of “Auld Lang Syne,” and when a young man came up from Oxford or Cambridge to begin life in London, he was certain to find that Lord Houghton had travelled on the Continent with his father, or had danced with his mother, or had made love to his aunt, and was eagerly on the look-out for an opportunity of showing gracious and valuable kindness to the son of his ancient friends.

When I first lived in London Lord Houghton was occupying a house in Arlington Street made famous by the fact that Hogarth drew its interior and decorations in his pictures of “Marriage a la Mode.”  And nowhere did the social neophyte receive a warmer welcome, or find himself amid a more eclectic and representative society.  Queens of fashion, professional beauties, authors and authoresses, ambassadors, philosophers, discoverers, actors—­every one who was famous or even notorious; who had been anywhere or had done anything, from a successful speech in Parliament to a hazardous leap at the Aquarium—­jostled one another on the wide staircase and in the gravely ornate drawing-rooms.  And amid the motley crowd the genial host was omnipresent, with a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each successive guest—­a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics or of politics.

Lord Houghton’s humour had a quality which was quite its own.  Nothing was sacred to it—­neither age, nor sex, nor subject was spared; but it was essentially good-natured.  It was the property of a famous spear to heal the wounds which itself had made; the shafts of Lord Houghton’s fun needed no healing virtue, for they made no wound.  When that saintly friend of temperance and all good causes, Mr. Cowper-Temple, was raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, Lord Houghton went about saying, “You know that the precedent for Billy Cowper’s title is in Don Juan?—­

    ’And Lord Mount Coffee-house, the Irish peer,
     Who killed himself for love, with drink, last year.’”

When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he pocketed the coin, “Ah, my dear boy, the great Lord Hertford, whom foolish people called the wicked Lord Hertford—­Thackeray’s Steyne and Dizzy’s Monmouth—­used to say, ’There is no pleasure in winning money from a man who does not feel it.’  How true that was!—­” And when he saw a young friend at a club supping on pate de foie gras and champagne, he said encouragingly, “That’s