As a child I had an immense admiration for these gorgeous beings, though, between ourselves, they must have been abominably loud dressers.  They affected rather vulgar sealskin waistcoats, with the festoons of a long watch-chain meandering over them, above which they exhibited a huge expanse of black or blue satin, secured by two scarf-pins of the same design, linked together, like Siamese twins, by a little chain.

A reference to Leech’s drawings will show the flamboyant checked “pegtop” trousers in which they delighted.  Their principal adornment lay in their immense “Dundreary” whiskers, usually at least eight inches long.  In a high wind these immensely long whiskers blew back over their owners’ shoulders in the most comical fashion, and they must have been horribly inconvenient.  I determined early in life to affect, when grown-up, longer whiskers than any one else—­if possible down to my waist; but alas for human aspirations!  By the time that I had emerged from my chrysalis stage, Dundreary whiskers had ceased to be the fashion; added to which unkind Nature had given me a hairless face.

My uncle, old Lord Claud Hamilton, known in our family as “The Dowager,” adhered, to the day of his death, to the William IV. style of dress.  He wore an old-fashioned black-satin stock right up to his chin, with white “gills” above, and was invariably seen in a blue coat with brass buttons, and a buff waistcoat.  My uncle was one of the handsomest men in England, and had sat for nearly forty years in Parliament.  He had one curious faculty.  He could talk fluently and well on almost any topic at indefinite length, a very useful gift in the House of Commons of those days.  On one occasion when it was necessary “to talk a Bill out,” he got up without any preparation whatever, and addressed the House in flowing periods for four hours and twenty minutes.  His speech held the record for length for many years, but it was completely eclipsed in the early “eighties” by the late Mr. Biggar, who spoke (if my memory serves me right) for nearly six hours on one occasion.  Biggar, however, merely read interminable extracts from Blue Books, whereas my uncle indulged in four hours of genuine rhetorical declamation.  My uncle derived his nickname from the fact that in our family the second son is invariably christened Claud, so I had already a brother of that name.  There happen to be three Lord Claud Hamiltons living now, of three successive generations.

I shall never forget my bitter disappointment the first time I was taken, at a very early age, to see Queen Victoria.  I had pictured to myself a dazzling apparition arrayed in sumptuous robes, seated on a golden throne; a glittering crown on her head, a sceptre in one hand, an orb grasped in the other.  I had fancied Her Majesty seated thus, motionless during the greater part of the twenty-four hours, simply “reigning.”  I could have cried with disappointment when a middle-aged lady, simply dressed in widow’s “weeds” and wearing a widow’s cap, rose from an ordinary arm-chair to receive us.  I duly made my bow, but having a sort of idea that it had to be indefinitely repeated, went on nodding like a porcelain Chinese mandarin, until ordered to stop.