He has the Corpus Poetarum and Shakespeare and Pope at his finger-ends, and his intimate acquaintance with the political history of England elicited a characteristic compliment from Lord Beaconsfield.  It is his favourite boast that in all his tastes, sentiments, and mental habits he belongs to the eighteenth century, which he glorifies as the golden age of reason, patriotism, and liberal learning.  This self-estimate strikes me as perfectly sound, and it requires a very slight effort of the imagination to conceive this well-born young Templar wielding his doughty pen in the Bangorian Controversy, or declaiming on the hustings for Wilkes and Liberty; bandying witticisms with Sheridan, and capping Latin verses with Charles Fox; or helping to rule England as a member of that “Venetian Oligarchy” on which Lord Beaconsfield lavished all the vials of his sarcasm.  In truth, it is not fanciful to say that whatever was best in the eighteenth century—­its robust common sense, its racy humour, its thorough and unaffected learning, its ceremonious courtesy for great occasions, its jolly self-abandonment in social intercourse—­is exhibited in the demeanour and conversation of Sir William Harcourt.  He is an admirable host, and, to borrow a phrase from Sydney Smith, “receives his friends with that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine.”  As a guest, he is a splendid acquisition, always ready to amuse and to be amused, delighting in the rapid cut-and-thrust of personal banter, and bringing out of his treasure things new and old for the amusement and the benefit of a later and less instructed generation.

Extracts from the private conversation of living people, as a rule, I forbear; but some of Sir William’s quotations are so extraordinarily apt that they deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk.  That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens’s Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree.  The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, “This reminds me of Addison’s evening hymn—­

    ’And Knightley to the listening earth
     Repeats the story of his birth.’”

Surely the force of apt citation can no further go.  When Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt’s hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day, Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line—­

    “The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.”

Some historians say that he substituted “bards” for “birds,” and the reception accorded by the poet to the parody was not as cordial as its excellence deserved.