r-Lytton, the novelist--was dead
before I came to London; but his brilliant son, "Owen Meredith," in the
intervals of official employment abroad, was an interesting figure in
Society; curled and oiled and decorated, with a countenance of Semitic
type.

Lord Houghton--to me the kindest and most welcoming of hereditary
friends--had a personality and a position altogether his own. His
appearance was typically English; his manner as free and forthcoming as
a Frenchman's. Thirty years before he had been drawn by a master-hand as
Mr. Vavasour in _Tancred_, but no lapse of time could stale his infinite
variety. He was poet, essayist, politician, public orator, country
gentleman, railway-director, host, guest, ball-giver, and ball-goer, and
acted each part with equal zest and assiduity. When I first knew him he
was living in a house at the top of Arlington Street, from which Hogarth
had copied the decoration for his "Marriage a la mode." The site is now
occupied by the Ritz Hotel, and his friendly ghost still seems to haunt
the Piccadilly which he loved.

"There on warm, mid-season Sundays, Fryston's bard is wont to wend,
Whom the Ridings trust and honour, Freedom's staunch and genial
friend;
Known where shrewd hard-handed craftsmen cluster round the
northern kilns,
He whom men style Baron Houghton, but the gods call Dicky
Milnes."[27]

When first I entered Society, I caught sight of a face which instantly
arrested my attention. A very small man, both short and slim, with a
rosy complexion, protruding chin, and trenchant nose, the remains of
reddish hair, and an extremely alert and vivacious expression. The
broad Red Ribbon of a G.C.B. marked him out as in some way a
distinguished person; and I discovered that he was the Lord Chief
Justice of England,--Sir Alexander Cockburn, one of the most conspicuous
figures in the social annals of the 'thirties and 'forties, the
"Hortensius" of _Endymion_, whose "sunny face and voice of music" had
carried him out of the ruck of London dandies to the chief seat of the
British judicature, and had made him the hero of the Tichborne Trial and
the Alabama Arbitration. Yet another personage of intellectual fame who
was to be met in Society was Robert Browning, the least poetical-looking
of poets. Trim, spruce, alert, with a cheerful manner and a flow of
conversation, he might have been a Cabinet Minister, a diplomatist, or a
successful finan