gravely remonstrated with the President for inviting Sir Charles Dilke to his table.  Then followed articles defending the course taken by the President, and so for some time the ball was kept up.  The remonstrance of the Ambassador was a myth, Lord Lyons was a friend of Sir Charles; but the latter was suspect at the time both in England and France; in England for his speeches and motion on the Civil List; in France, because, with Frederic Harrison, he had helped to get some of the French Communists away from France; and the French Government was watching him with spies.  In Sir Charles’s motion Kinglake took much interest, refusing to join in the cry against it as disloyal.  Sir Charles, he said, spoke no word against the Queen; and only brought the matter before the House because challenged to repeat in Parliament the statements he had made in the country.  As a matter of policy he thought it mistaken:  “Move in such a matter openly, and party discipline compels your defeat; bring pressure to bear on a Cabinet, some of its members are on your side, and you may gain your point.”  Sir Charles’s speech was calmly argumentative, and to many minds convincing; it provoked a passionate reply from Gladstone; and when Mr. Auberon Herbert following declared himself a Republican, a tumult arose such as in those pre-Milesian days had rarely been witnessed in the House.  But the wisdom of Kinglake’s counsel is sustained by the fact that many years afterwards, as a result of more private discussion, Mr. Gladstone pronounced his conversion to the two bases of the motion, publicity, and the giving of the State allowance to the head of the family rather than, person by person, to the children and grandchildren of the Sovereign.  Action pointing in this direction was taken in 1889 and 1901 on the advice of Tory ministers.

Amongst Frenchmen of the highest class, intellectually and socially, he had many valued friends, keeping his name on the “Cosmopolitan” long after he had ceased to visit it, since “one never knows when the distinguished foreigner may come upon one, and of such the Cosmo is the London Paradise.”  But he used to say that in the other world a good Frenchman becomes an Englishman, a bad Englishman becomes a Frenchman.  He saw in the typical Gaul a compound of the tiger and the monkey; noted their want of individuality, their tendency to go in flocks, their susceptibility to panic and to ferocity, to the terror that makes a man kill people, and “the terror that makes him lie down and beg.”  We remember, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as before all things a type of his nation; “he impersonated with singular exactness the idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of what they called ‘a Frenchman;’ for although (by cowing the rich and by filling the poor with envy), the great French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one man untouched.  He was bold, gay, reckless, vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take away human life.”