ith a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each
successive guest--a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of
piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics or of politics.

Lord Houghton's humour had a quality which was quite its own. Nothing
was sacred to it--neither age, nor sex, nor subject was spared; but it
was essentially good-natured. It was the property of a famous spear to
heal the wounds which itself had made; the shafts of Lord Houghton's fun
needed no healing virtue, for they made no wound. When that saintly
friend of temperance and all good causes, Mr. Cowper-Temple, was raised
to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, Lord Houghton went about saying,
"You know that the precedent for Billy Cowper's title is in _Don
Juan?_--

'And Lord Mount Coffee-house, the Irish peer,
Who killed himself for love, with drink, last year.'"

When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his
cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he
pocketed the coin, "Ah, my dear boy, the _great_ Lord Hertford, whom
foolish people called the _wicked_ Lord Hertford--Thackeray's Steyne and
Dizzy's Monmouth--used to say, 'There is no pleasure in winning money
from a man who does not feel it.' How true that was!--" And when he saw
a young friend at a club supping on _pate de foie gras_ and champagne,
he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in
life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather
grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain
_obiter dicta_ which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a
really kind heart. "All men are improved by prosperity," he used to
say. Envy, hatred, and malice had no place in his nature. It was a
positive enjoyment to him to see other people happy, and a friend's
success was as gratifying as his own. His life, though in most respects
singularly happy, had not been without its disappointments. At one time
he had nursed political ambitions, and his peculiar knowledge of foreign
affairs had seemed to indicate a special line of activity and success.
But things went differently. He always professed to regard his peerage
as "a Second Class in the School of Life," and himself as a political
failure. Yet no tinge of sourness, or jealousy, or cynical disbelief in
his more successful contemporaries ever marred the geniality of his
political conversation.

As years advanced he became not (