A genial journalist recently said that Mr. Goschen was now chiefly remembered by the fact that he had once had Sir Alfred Milner for his Private Secretary.  But whatever may be thought of the First Lord of the Admiralty as a politician and an administrator, I claim for him a high place among agreeable talkers.  There are some men who habitually use the same style of speech in public and in private life.  Happily for his friends, this is not the case with Mr. Goschen.  Nothing can be less agreeable than his public style, whether on the platform or in the House of Commons.  Its tawdry staginess, its “Sadler’s Wells sarcasm,” its constant striving after strong effects, are distressing to good taste.  But in private life he is another and a much more agreeable man.  He is courteous, genial, perfectly free from affectation, and enters into the discussion of social banalities as eagerly and as brightly as if he had never converted the Three per Cents, or established the ratio between dead millionaires and new ironclads.  His easiness in conversation is perhaps a little marred by a Teutonic tendency to excessive analysis which will not suffer him to rest until he has resolved every subject and almost every phrase into its primary elements.  But this philosophic temperament has its counterbalancing advantages in a genuine openness of mind, willingness to weigh and measure opposing views, and inaccessibility to intellectual passion.  It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle.  Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group of intimate friends who drank ’34 port and conversed accordingly.  Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpassed; and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, whose “sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos,” were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius.  But this belongs to ancient history, and my business is with the conversation of to-day.

Very distinctly of to-day is the conversation of Mr. Labouchere.  Even our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle.  The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there, poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory, and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light