yment: he had lords and ladies
to his table--foolish people--foolish men--and foolish women--and there
was an end of him and us. 'Lord Holland selected his lords and ladies,
not for their rank, but for their peculiar merits or acquirements.' Then
even Lady Holland's oddities were amusing. When she wanted to get rid of
a fop, she used to say: 'I beg your pardon, but I wish you would sit a
little farther off; there is something on your handkerchief which I
don't quite like.' Or when a poor man happened to stand, after the
fashion of the lords of creation, with his back close to the
chimney-piece, she would cry out, 'Have the goodness, sir, to stir the
fire.'

Lord Holland never asked any one to dinner, ('not even _me_,' says
Rogers, 'whom he had known so long,') without asking Lady Holland. One
day, shortly before his lordship's death, Rogers was coming out from
Holland House when he met him. 'Well, do you return to dinner?' I
answered. 'No, I have not been invited.' The precaution, in fact, was
necessary, for Lord Holland was so good-natured and hospitable that he
would have had a crowd daily at his table had he been left to himself.

The death of Lord Holland completely broke up the unrivalled dinners,
and the subsequent evenings in the 'gilded chamber.' Lady Holland, to
whom Holland House was left for her life-time, declined to live there.
With Holland House, the mingling of aristocracy with talent; the
blending ranks by force of intellect; the assembling not only of all the
celebrity that Europe could boast, but of all that could enhance private
enjoyment, had ceased. London, the most intelligent of capitals,
possesses not one single great house in which pomp and wealth are made
subsidiary to the true luxury of intellectual conversation.

On the morning of the day when Lord Holland's last illness began, these
lines were written by him, and found after his death on his
dressing-table:--

'Nephew of Fox, and Friend of Grey,
Sufficient for my fame,
If those who know me best shall say
I tarnished neither name.'

Of him his best friend, Sydney Smith, left a short but discriminative
character. 'There was never (amongst other things he says) a better
heart, or one more purified from all the bad passions--more abounding in
charity and compassion--or which seemed to be so created as a refuge to
the helpless and oppressed.'

Meantime Sydney Smith's circumstances were still limited; L50 a year as
evening pre