al ever can be--namely, a challenge to faculties or
acquirements which are coextensive with life. I will, therefore, turn
from Miss X, and the lines in which I suggested an elopement with her as
a project desirable for both of us, to some of the male celebrities
whose names I have just mentioned, and describe how they impressed me
when I first made their acquaintance.

Of the well-known visitors who wintered at Torquay none was more
punctual in his appearance than Lord Houghton, who found an annual home
there in the house of two maiden aunts. Through these long-established
residents he had for years been familiar with my family, and from the
first occasion on which I met him he exhibited a friendship almost
paternal for myself. Lord Houghton was a man who, as Dryden said of
Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books
had been equal to his conversation. Certainly nothing which he wrote, or
which a biographer has written about him, gives any idea of the gifts--a
very peculiar mixture--which made him a marked figure in any company
which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the
fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither,
such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and
his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed
with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching
at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had
ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my
life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always
wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting
at dinner by the celebrated Lady E---- of T----, who was indulging in a
long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation.
"When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my
feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of
your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me
of a perplexing situation in which he had once found himself, and of how
he sought counsel about it from Lord Houghton, his kinsman. Gaskell's
difficulty was this. A friend for whom he was acting as trustee had,
without imposing on him any legal obligations in the matter, begged him
with his dying breath to carry out certain instructions. These seemed to
Gaskell extremely unwise, and objectionable