had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon.
As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal
sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and King, Jacobin and Carbonaro,
alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish balls, and the
vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave
dinners to Louis Blanc."

Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in
delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than
in the foregoing passage. Divested of its intentional and humorous
exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait. It exhibits with
singular fidelity the qualities which made Lord Houghton, to the end of
his long life, at once unique and lovable. We recognize the overflowing
sympathy, the keen interest in life, the vivid faculty of enjoyment, the
absolute freedom from national prejudice, the love of seeing and of
being seen.

During the Chartist riots of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother:
"Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be
sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post
of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." And those who knew
Lord Houghton best suspect that he himself originated the joke at his
own expense. The assured ease of young Milnes's social manner, even
among complete strangers, so unlike the morbid self-repression and proud
humility of the typical Englishman, won for him the nickname of "The
Cool of the Evening." His wholly un-English tolerance and constant
effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned,
procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of
"President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company." Bishop
Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847: "Carlyle was very
great. Monckton Milnes drew him out. Milnes began the young man's cant
of the present day--the barbarity and wickedness of capital punishment;
that, after all, we could not be sure others were wicked, etc. Carlyle
broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation
Companies for me. We _do_ know what is wickedness, _I_ know wicked men,
men whom I _would not live with_--men whom under some conceivable
circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes, there's
no truth or greatness in all that. It's just poor, miserable
littleness.'"

Lord Houghton's faculty of enjoyment was peculiarly k