her house delightful, can be as hard and rude as she pleases to the world in general.  Fortunately, in most cases native kindness of heart usually hurries to heal the wound that “wicked wit” may have made.  This would scarcely seem to have been so with Lady Ashburton, for Lord Houghton tells us that “many who would not have cared for a quiet defeat shrank from the merriment of her victory,” one of them saying, “I do not mind being knocked down, but I can’t stand being danced upon afterward.”  Lord Houghton, however, defines this “jumping” as “a joyous sincerity that no conventionalities, high or low, could restrain—­a festive nature flowing through the artificial soil of elevated life.”  And it must be owned that there was at least nothing petty or rancorous in a nature which showed so rare an appreciation of genius, and an equal capacity for warm and disinterested friendship.

In contrast with this chapter is the one on the Berrys, which is full of interesting details in regard to those remarkable women, and reveals a pathetic history hardly to have been expected in connection with the amusing gossip that has hitherto clustered around their names.

But by far the most interesting paper is that on Heinrich Heine.  A letter from an English lady whom Heine had known and petted in her childhood, and who visited the poet in his last days, when he himself, wasted by disease, “seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet that covered him,” gives what is perhaps the most lifelike picture we have ever had of a nature that seems equally to court and to baffle comprehension.  Lord Houghton has little to add, on this subject, from his personal recollections; but his comments upon it evince perhaps as close a study and sagacious criticism, if not as much subtlety of thought, as Matthew Arnold’s famous essay.  The following passage, for example, sums up very felicitously the social aspect of Germany, and its influence on Heine:  “The poem of ‘Deutschland’ is the one of his works where his humor runs over into the coarsest satire, and the malice can only be excused by the remembrance that he too had been exposed to some of the evil influences of a servile condition.  Among these may no doubt be reckoned the position of a man of commercial origin and literary occupation in his relation to the upper order of society in the northern parts of Germany. ...Here there remained, and after all the events of the last year there still remains, sufficient element of discontent to justify the recorded expression of a philosophic German statesman, that ’in Prussia the war of classes had still to be fought out.’”