During a New Year week I was invited by Lord and Lady Lyonesse to a very diverting house-party.  This peer, it will be remembered, is the well-known radical philanthropist who owed his title to a lifelong interest in the submerged tenth.  Their house, Ivanhoe, is an exquisite gothic structure not unjustly regarded as the masterpiece of the late Sir Gilbert Scott:  it overlooks the Ouse.  Including our hosts we numbered forty persons, and the personnel, including valets, chauffeurs, and ladies’-maids brought by the guests, numbered sixty.  In all, we were a hundred souls, assuming immortality for the chauffeurs and the five Scotch gardeners.  On January 2nd somebody produced after dinner a copy of the Petit Parisien relating the plebiscite for the greatest Frenchman of the nineteenth century; another guest capped him with the Evening News list.  The famous Pall Mall Gazette Academy of Forty was recalled with indifferent accuracy.  Conversation was flagging; our hostess looked relieved; very soon we were all playing a variation of that most charming game, suck-pencil.

At first we decided to ignore the nineteenth century.  The ten greatest living Englishmen were to be named by our votes.  Bridge and billiard players were dragged to the polling-station in the green drawing-room.  Lord Lyonesse and myself were the tellers.  I shivered with excitement.  One of the Ultimatelies of Churton Collins seemed to have arrived:  it was Gotterdammerung—­the Twilight of the Idols.  And here is the result of the ballot, which I think every one will admit possesses extraordinary interest: 

Hall Caine.

Marie Corelli.

Rudyard Kipling.

Lord Northcliffe.

Sir Thomas Lipton.

Hichens.

Chamberlain.

Barrie.

George Alexander.

Beerbohm Tree.

I ought to add, of course, that the guests were unusually intellectual.  There were our host and hostess, their three sons—­one is a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, another is at Balliol, and a third is a stockbroker; there were five M.P.’s with their wives (two Liberal Imperialists, two Liberal Unionists, and one real Radical), a Scotch peer with his wife and an Irish peer without one; a publisher and his wife; three Academicians; four journalists; an Irish poet, a horse-dealer, a picture-dealer, another stockbroker, an artist, two lady novelists, a baronet and his wife, three musicians; and Myself.  I think the only point on which the sincerity of the voting might be doubted, is the ominous absence of any soldier’s name on the list.  Lord Lyonesse, however, is a firm upholder of the Hague Conference:  like myself, he is a pro-Boer, but he will not allow any reference to military affairs, and I suspect that it was out of deference to his wishes that the guests all abstained from writing down some names of our gallant generals.  Lord Kitchener, however, obtained nine votes, and I myself included Christian De Wet; but on discovery of documents he was ruled out, in spite of my pleading for him on imperialistic grounds.  I thought it rather insular, too, I must confess, that Mr. Henry James and Mr. Sargent were denied to me because they are American subjects.  My own final list, as pasted in the Album at Ivanhoe, along with others, was as follows: