case require,
    Coax the faint baron, curb the bold esquire,
    Deride restraint, but deprecate desire,
    Unbridled yet unloving, loose but limp,
    Voluptuary, virgin, prude and pimp.

Lines to A young viscount, who died at Oxford, on the morrow of A
Bump supper (by the President of his College)

    Dear Viscount, in whose ancient blood
      The blueness of the bird of March,
      The vermeil of the tufted larch,
    Are fused in one magenta flood.

    Dear Viscount—­ah! to me how dear,
      Who even in thy frolic mood
      Discerned (or sometimes thought I could)
    The pure proud purpose of a peer!

    So on the last sad night of all
      Erect among the reeling rout
      You beat your tangled music out
    Lofty, aloof, viscontial.

    You struck a bootbath with a can,
      And with the can you struck the bath,
      There on the yellow gravel path,
    As gentleman to gentleman.

    We met, we stood, we faced, we talked
      While those of baser birth withdrew;
      I told you of an Earl I knew;
    You said you thought the wine was corked;

    And so we parted—­on my lips
      A light farewell, but in my soul
      The image of a perfect whole,
    A Viscount to the finger tips—­

    An image—­Yes; but thou art gone;
      For nature red in tooth and claw
      Subsumes under an equal law
    Viscount and Iguanodon.

    Yet we who know the Larger Love,
      Which separates the sheep and goats
      And segregates Scolecobrots, [1]
    Believing where we cannot prove,

    Deem that in His mysterious Day
      God puts the Peers upon His right,
      And hides the poor in endless night,
    For thou, my Lord, art more than they.

[Footnote 1:  A word from the Greek Testament meaning people who are eaten by worms.]

It is a commonplace to say after a man is dead that he could have done anything he liked in life:  it is nearly always exaggerated; but of Raymond Asquith the phrase would have been true.

His oldest friend was Harold Baker,[Footnote:  The Rt.  Hon. Harold Baker.] a man whose academic career was as fine as his own and whose changeless affection and intimacy we have long valued; but Raymond had many friends as well as admirers.  His death was the first great sorrow in my stepchildren’s lives and an anguish to his father and me.  The news of it came as a terrible shock to every one.  My husband’s natural pride and interest in him had always been intense and we were never tired of discussing him when we were alone:  his personal charm and wit, his little faults and above all the success which so certainly awaited him.  Henry’s grief darkened the waters in Downing Street at a time when, had they been clear, certain events could never have taken place.