His friends had no difficulty in answering the question, and answering it affirmatively; but the practical test was never applied, for on succeeding to his inheritance he glided—­“plunged” would be an unsuitable word—­into a way of living which was, more like the [Greek:  scholae] of the Athenian citizen than the sordid strife of professional activity.  He was singularly happy in private life, for the “Sacred Circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood” contained some delightful women as well as some distinguished men.  Such was his sister-in-law Marie, Lady Granville; such was his cousin Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland; such was his mother, the Dowager Lady Granville; and such, pre-eminently, was his sister, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, of whom a competent critic said that, in the female characters of her novel Ellen Middleton, she had drawn “the line which is so apt to be overstepped, and which Walter Scott never clearly saw, between naivete and vulgarity.”  Myself a devoted adherent of Sir Walter, I can yet recall some would-be pleasantries of Julia Mannering, of Isabella Wardour, and even of Die Vernon, which would have caused a shudder in the “Sacred Circle.”  Happiest of all was Freddy Leveson in his marriage with Lady Margaret Compton; but their married life lasted only five years, and left behind it a memory too tender to bear translation to the printed page.

Devonshire House was the centre of Freddy Leveson’s social life—­at least until the death of his uncle, the sixth Duke, in 1858.  That unsightly but comfortable mansion was then in its days of glory, and those who frequented it had no reason to regret the past.  “Poodle Byng,” who carried down to 1871 the social conditions of the eighteenth century, declared that nothing could be duller than Devonshire House in his youth.  “It was a great honour to go there, but I was bored to death.  The Duchess was usually stitching in one corner of the room, and Charles Fox snoring in another.”  Under the splendid but arbitrary rule of the sixth Duke no one stitched or snored.  Everyone who entered his saloons was well-born or beautiful or clever or famous, and many of the guests combined all four characteristics.  When Prince Louis Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III., first came to live in London, his uncle Jerome asked the Duke of Devonshire to invite his mauvais sujet of a nephew to Devonshire House, “so that he might for once be seen in decent society”; and the Prince, repaid the Duke by trying to borrow five thousand pounds to finance his descent on Boulogne.  But the Duke, though magnificent, was business-like, and the Prince was sent empty away.

The society in which Freddy Leveson moved during his long career was curiously varied.  There was his own family in all its ramifications of cousinship; and beyond its radius there was a circle of acquaintances and associates which contained Charles Greville the diarist and his more amiable brother Henry, Carlyle and Macaulay, Brougham and Lyndhurst, J. A. Roebuck and Samuel Wilberforce, George Grote and Henry Reeve, “that good-for-nothing fellow Count D’Orsay,” and Disraeli, “always courteous, but his courtesy sometimes overdone.”