“Tu pias laetis animas reponis
Sedibus, virgaque levem coerces
Aurea turbam.”

Here he worked through the morning; the afternoon took him to the “Travellers,” where his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. Chenery, usually expected him; then at eight o’clock, if not, as Shylock says, bid forth, he went to dine at the Athenaeum.  His dinner seat was in the left-hand corner of the coffee-room, where, in the thirties, Theodore Hook had been wont to sit, gathering near him so many listeners to his talk, that at Hook’s death in 1841 the receipts for the club dinners fell off to a large amount.  Here, in the “Corner,” as they called it, round Kinglake would be Hayward, Drummond Wolff, Massey, Oliphant, Edward Twisleton, Strzelecki, Storks, Venables, Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American Ticknor, and a few more; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, when in Scotland, sending hampers of pheasants to the company.  “Hurried to the Athenaeum for dinner,” says Ticknor in 1857, “and there found Kinglake and Sir Henry Rawlinson, to whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling.  We pushed our tables together and had a jolly dinner. . . .  To the Athenaeum; and having dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and Stirling, I hurried off to the House.”  In later years, when his voice grew low and his hearing difficult, he preferred that the diners should resolve themselves into little groups, assigning to himself a tete-a-tete, with whom at his ease he could unfold himself.

No man ever fought more gallantly the encroachments of old age—­on sut etre jeune jusque dans ses vieux jours.  At seventy-four years old, staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on riding over to Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick Pollock was staying.  “I mastered,” he said, in answer to remonstrances, “I mastered the peculiarities of the Brighton screw before you were born, and have never forgotten them.”  Vaulting into his saddle he rode off, returning with a schoolboy’s delight at the brisk trot he had found practicable when once clear of the King’s Road.  Long after his hearing had failed, his sight become grievously weakened, and his limbs not always trustworthy, he would never allow a cab to be summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his lodgings.  But he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten Row, and more reluctantly still his continental travel.  Foreign railways were closed to him by the Salle d’Attente; he could not stand incarceration in the waiting-rooms.

The last time he crossed the Channel was at the close of the Franco-Prussian war, on a visit to his old friend M. Thiers, then President.  It was a dinner to deputies of the Extreme Left, and Kinglake was the only Englishman; “so,” he said, “among the servants there was a sort of reasoning process as to my identity, ending in the conclusion, ‘il doit etre Sir Dilke.’” Soon the inference was treated as a fact; and in due sequence came newspaper paragraphs declaring that the British Ambassador had