A great many other people are made to cross Sir William Fraser’s stage.  His comments upon them are lively, independent, and original.  He liked Cobden and hated Bright.  The reason for this he makes quite plain.  He thinks he detected in Cobden a deprecatory manner—­a recognition of the sublime truth that he, Richard Cobden, had not been half so well educated as the mob of Tories he was addressing.  Bright, on the other band, was fat and rude, and thought that most country gentlemen and town-bred wits were either fools or fribbles.  This was intolerable.  Here was a man who not only could not have belonged to the ‘world,’ but honestly did not wish to, and was persuaded—­the gross fellow—­that he and his world were better in every respect than the exclusive circles which listened to Sir William Fraser’s bon mots and tags from the poets.  Certainly there was nothing deprecatory about John Bright.  He could be quite as insolent in his way as any aristocrat in his.  He had a habit, we are told, of slowly getting up and walking out of the House in the middle of Mr. Disraeli’s speeches, and just when that ingenious orator was leading up to a carefully prepared point, and then immediately returning behind the Speaker’s chair.  If this is true, it was perhaps rude, but nobody can deny that it is a Tory dodge of indicating disdain.  What was really irritating about Mr. Bright was that his disdain was genuine.  He did think very little of the Tory party, and he did not care one straw for the opinion of society.  He positively would not have cared to have been made a baronet.  Sir William Fraser seems to have been really fond of Disraeli, and the very last time he met his great man in the Carlton Club he told him a story too broad to be printed.  The great man pronounced it admirable, and passed on his weary way.

A CONNOISSEUR

It must always be rash to speak positively about human nature, whose various types of character are singularly tough, and endure, if not for ever, for a very long time; yet some types do seem to show signs of wearing out.  The connoisseur, for example, here in England is hardly what he was.  He has specialized, and behind him there is now the bottomless purse of the multi-millionaire, who buys as he is bidden, and has no sense of prices.  If the multi-millionaire wants a thing, why should he not have it?  The gaping mob, penniless but appreciative, looks on and cheers his pluck.

Mr. Frederick Locker, about whom I wish to write a few lines, was an old-world connoisseur, the shy recesses of whose soul Addison might have penetrated in the page of a Spectator—­and a delicate operation it would have been.