2, and was for
seventy years one of the best talkers in London. Born of a family which
combined high rank with intellectual distinction, his parentage was a
passport to all that was best in social and political life. It argues no
political bias to maintain that in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century Toryism afforded its neophytes no educational opportunities
equal to those which a young Whig enjoyed at Bowood and Panshanger and
Holland House. There the best traditions of the previous century were
constantly reinforced by accessions of fresh intellect. The charmed
circle was indeed essentially, but it was not exclusively, aristocratic;
genius held the key, and there was a _carriere ouverte aux talents_.

Thus it came to pass that the society of Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland
and Lord Melbourne was also the society of Brougham and Mackintosh, and
Macaulay and Sydney Smith. It presented every variety of accomplishment
and experience and social charm, and offered to a man beginning life the
best conceivable education in the art of making oneself agreeable. For
that art Mr. Villiers had a natural genius, and his lifelong association
with the Whigs superadded a technical training in it. But this, though
much, was by no means all. I hold it to be an axiom that a man who is
only a member of society can never be so agreeable as one who is
something else as well. And Mr. Villiers, though "a man about town," a
story-teller, and a diner-out of high renown, has had seventy years'
experience of practical business and Parliamentary life. Thus the
resources of his knowledge have been perpetually enlarged, and, learning
much, he has forgotten nothing. The stores of his memory are full of
treasures new and old. He has taken part in the making of history, and
can estimate the great men of the present day by a comparison with the
political immortals.

That this comparison is not always favourable to some exalted
reputations of the present hour is indeed sufficiently notorious to all
who have the pleasure of Mr. Villiers's acquaintance; and nowhere is his
mastery of the art of conversation more conspicuous than in his knack of
implying dislike and insinuating contempt without crude abuse or noisy
denunciation. He has a delicate sense of fun, a keen eye for
incongruities and absurdities, and that genuine cynicism which springs,
not from the poor desire to be thought worldly-wise, but from a lifelong
acquaintance with the foibles of