any
aristocrat in his. He had a habit, we are told, of slowly getting up
and walking out of the House in the middle of Mr. Disraeli's speeches,
and just when that ingenious orator was leading up to a carefully
prepared point, and then immediately returning behind the Speaker's
chair. If this is true, it was perhaps rude, but nobody can deny that
it is a Tory dodge of indicating disdain. What was really irritating
about Mr. Bright was that his disdain was genuine. He did think very
little of the Tory party, and he did not care one straw for the
opinion of society. He positively would not have cared to have been
made a baronet. Sir William Fraser seems to have been really fond of
Disraeli, and the very last time he met his great man in the Carlton
Club he told him a story too broad to be printed. The great man
pronounced it admirable, and passed on his weary way.

A CONNOISSEUR

It must always be rash to speak positively about human nature, whose
various types of character are singularly tough, and endure, if not
for ever, for a very long time; yet some types do seem to show signs
of wearing out. The connoisseur, for example, here in England is
hardly what he was. He has specialized, and behind him there is now
the bottomless purse of the multi-millionaire, who buys as he is
bidden, and has no sense of prices. If the multi-millionaire wants a
thing, why should he not have it? The gaping mob, penniless but
appreciative, looks on and cheers his pluck.

Mr. Frederick Locker, about whom I wish to write a few lines, was an
old-world connoisseur, the shy recesses of whose soul Addison might
have penetrated in the page of a _Spectator_--and a delicate operation
it would have been.

My father-in-law was only once in the witness-box. I had the felicity
to see him there. It was a dispute about the price of a picture, and
in the course of his very short evidence he hazarded the opinion that
the grouping of the figures (they were portraits) was in bad taste.
The Judge, the late Mr. Justice Cave, an excellent lawyer of the old
school, snarled out, 'Do you think you could explain to _me_ what is
taste?' Mr. Locker surveyed the Judge through the eye-glass which
seemed almost part of his being, with a glance modest, deferential,
deprecatory, as if suggesting 'Who am _I_ to explain anything to
_you_?' but at the same time critical, ironical, and humorous. It was
but for one brief moment; the eyeglass dropped, and there came