small, grubby Italian, leaning on his walking-stick, smoking a cheroot at the station,” was looked upon, not only by Alfred but by his biographer, as an “irresistible challenge to fling the juicy, but substantial, fragment full at the unsuspecting foreigner’s cheek.”  At this we are told that “Alfred collapsed into noble convulsions of laughter.”  I quote this incident, as it illustrates the difference between the Tennant and the Lyttelton sense of humour.  Their laughter was a tornado or convulsion to which they succumbed; and even the Hagley ragging, though, according to Edward Lyttelton’s book, it was only done with napkins, sounds formidable enough.  Laura and Alfred enjoyed many things together—­books, music and going to church—­but they did not laugh at the same things.  I remember her once saying to me in a dejected voice: 

“Wouldn’t you have thought that, laughing as loud as the Lytteltons do, they would have loved Lear?  Alfred says none of them think him a bit funny and was quite testy when I said his was the only family in the world that didn’t.”

It was his manliness, spirituality and freedom from pettiness that attracted Alfred to Laura; he also had infinite charm.  It might have been said of him what the Dowager Lady Grey wrote of her husband to Henry when thanking him for his sympathy: 

“He lit so many fires in cold rooms.”

After Alfred’s death, my husband said this of him in the House of Commons: 

It would not, I think, be doing justice to the feelings which are uppermost in many of our hearts, if we passed to the business of the day without taking notice of the fresh gap which has been made in our ranks by the untimely death of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton.  It is a loss of which I hardly trust myself to speak; for, apart from ties of relationship, there had subsisted between us for thirty-three years, a close friendship and affection which no political differences were ever allowed to loosen, or even to affect.  Nor could I better describe it than by saying that he, perhaps, of all men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood, which every English father would like to see his son aspire to, and, if possible, to attain.  The bounty of nature, enriched and developed not only by early training, but by constant self-discipline through life, blended in him gifts and graces which, taken alone, are rare, and in such attractive union are rarer still.  Body, mind and character, the schoolroom, the cricket field, the Bar, the House of Commons—­each made its separate contribution to the faculty and the experience of a many-sided and harmonious whole.  But what he was he gave—­gave with such ease and exuberance that I think it may be said without exaggeration that wherever he moved he seemed to radiate vitality and charm.  He was, as we here know, a strenuous fighter.  He has left behind him no resentments and no enmity; nothing but a gracious memory of a manly and winning personality, the memory of one who