On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or banale, his face at once betrayed conversational prostration; a lady who often watched him used to say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first course; and that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some other partner.  “He had great charm,” writes to me another old friend, “in a quiet winning way, but was ‘dark’ with rough and noisy people.”  So it came to pass that his manner was threefold; icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge; good-humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, the lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, affectionate, the sourire des yeux often inexpressibly winning and tender.  “Kinglake,” says Eliot Warburton in his unpublished diary, “talked to us to-day about his travels; pessimistic and cynical to the rest of the world, he is always gentle and kind to us.”  To this dear friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day of his death an octagonal gold ring engraved “Eliot.  Jan:  1852.”  He would never play the raconteur in general company, for he had a great horror of repeating himself, and, latterly, of being looked upon as a bore by younger men; but he loved to pour out reminiscences of the past to an audience of one or two at most:  “Let an old man gather his recollections and glance at them under the right angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes.”  The chief characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid, sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk’s in Dr. Johnson’s day, like Talleyrand’s in our own, poignant without effort.  His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee:  terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the slightest change of muscle: 

“All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word.” {25}

Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel:  to an unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, “my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life during the reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry.”  Madame Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon.  “Le pauvre Kinglake, decontenance, repondit tout bas intimide comme un enfant qu’on met dates le coin:  Oui—­non—­pas precisement.”