Mr

Reid adds that he studied conversation as an art, and, like Johnson, he is said to have carefully prepared himself for the company he expected to meet. He quotes Lord Houghton himself in confirmation of that, but we may say that his talk seemed spontaneous enough; and in fact he was far too impulsive or volatile to tie himself down strictly to a line or a subject. It was a proof at once of his superabundant vitality and his powers that he made the breakfasts, in which he claimed the inheritance of Rogers, a success and a feature in London literary society. Surely in a climate and with social conditions like our own, no entertainments can generally be more depressing! But his table was always surrounded by celebrated guests, and when a young aspirant was known to have breakfasted more than once with Milnes, it was regarded as a brevet of promise and capability.

It

meant money and when a book, or rather a second notices press book, was to be brought forth. And the host at these unseasonable banquets was always seen relatively at his best. Had it been a French noonday déjeûner, with generous wines in abundance, the guests might have held their own with him. But Milnes had the early morning courage on which Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington prided themselves, and he would get exhilarated, if not intoxicated, over the tea and the coffee.

His education and early circumstances were greatly against him. A somewhat weakly child, he was never sent to a public school. Nor, although his father appreciated his abilities and cherished high hopes as to his future as a politician, did father and son ever pull satisfactorily together. Nor did it help to smooth matters when the elder Milnes refused a peerage offered by Lord Palmerston, for the son set a sufficient value on social distinctions, and had no desire to struggle unnecessarily against the tide, when he could float with the stream in a cork jacket. Moreover, although Mr Reid does not go much into financial details, in early life he had no superfluity of money. The debts of an extravagant uncle weighed heavily upon the family estates, though it is characteristic of Milnes's generous unselfishness, that far from owing the spendthrift a grudge, he lived with him on terms of warm friendship. But when he went up to Cambridge, to Trinity College, he was singularly fortunate in his friendships and associates. It would be long to enumerate the men destined to various distinction who were more or less his intimates. Among others were

Charles Buller and John Sterling, Trench, Julius Hare, Praed, Hallam, Thackeray, Alford, Kinglake, and the brothers Tennyson. He was welcomed at once in the most intellectual set, and Arthur Hallam wrote of him very shrewdly in 1829 to Mr Gladstone: "Milnes is one of our aristocracy of intellect here. A kind-hearted fellow as well as a very clever one, but vain and paradoxical." He fig ured as one of the most conspicuous debaters at the Union, evidently bestowing much thought on his speeches, as is shown by the letters to members of his family. Yet his spirits were as easily dashed as they were elevated, and he found the examinations a formidable ordeal, although he might have passed them more successfully with greater resolution. Deferring his intention of standing for the borough of Pontefract, which is within a short drive of the family seat, he travelled in Germany, and afterwards visited Ireland. We allude to the Irish tour, because it was then he made the acquaintance of Eliot Warburton, with whom he kept up a close friendship till Warburton's tragical death. He has told us that the author of The Crescent and the Cross' set so little value on the delightful book, that he offered it to Kinglake to cut up into footnotes for 'Eothen.' When he visited Greece and the East, the poet who celebrated Mahomet was characteristically divided between his sympathies with the constitutional aspirations of the emancipated Greeks, and his admiration of the picturesque manners and customs of the Turks of the old school. His sympathies in the one direction found vent in verse; those in the other were expressed in prosaic letters to England.

He was a man of twenty-seven when, in 1836, he made his start in London with definite if not very exalted ambitions, and with many social advantages. "He was young; he was gifted; he had already gained a certain measure of repute as a poet and a critic." The young man indulged freely in gaiety, though scarcely in dissipation, and Mr Reid gives a fair idea of his character, tastes, and pursuits :—

"He was no anchorite; on the contrary, even before this period of his life had been reached, his friends spoke of him as an epicurean; fond of the good things of this life in the common sense of the term, but happily also fond of the best things of this life in the highest sense of the words. From the first, therefore, after he had pitched his tent in the great have made it his mission to combine, wilderness of London, he seems to as far as might be, the two worlds with which, by temperament, he sympathised-the world of pleasure and the world of intellect."

Milnes

When a man of genuine ability makes up his mind as to the course he is to pursue, and follows it out with steadfast determination, he is pretty sure to succeed. had some reason to be assured of his own powers of fascination. As Mr Reid points out, he shrank from the eloquent monologues in which Macaulay and his friend Carlyle were wont to indulge. Having a nervous horror of being deemed a bore, he became sprightly professional talker. Afterwards when he figured as host, he had learned to put a constraint upon himself, and to endeavour to draw out his guests in place of trying to dazzle them. With regard to the vice of engrossing the conversation, Mr Reid tells an excellent story of the first meeting of the two great historians :

а

"Shortly after Macaulay's return to London" (from India) "Milnes met him at a breakfast at Rogers', at which Carlyle was also present. The fame of Carlyle's utterances-for, as I have shown, I can scarcely speak

of his talk as conversation-was then at its zenith, and Rogers' guests had gone expecting to enjoy a rich treat. But Macaulay, his mind overflowing with the stores of knowledge which had been accumulating during his sojourn in India, seized the first opening that presented itself, and having once obtained the ear of the company, never allowed it to escape even for a moment till the party was at an end. Greatly dissatisfied at the issue of a morning from which he had expected so much, Milnes followed Carlyle into the street. I am so sorry,' he said to the philosopher, that Macaulay would talk so much and prevent our having a single word from you.' Carlyle turned round, and held up his hands in astonishment. 'What!' he said,

with his accent of Annandale, 'was

that the Right Honourable Tom? I had no idea that it was the Right Honourable Tom. Ah well, I understand the Right Honourable Tom now."

Se non e vero, e ben trovato. It is a good story, and it is characteristic of Milnes that he should vicariously and unconsciously have resented Macaulay's monopolising the talk. But it sounds incredible that the shrewd and sarcastic philosopher, who disliked being left out in the cold at least as much as Milnes, should have failed to identify the omniscient essayist, were it only from the overflow of the treasures he had brought home from the East.

From France in 1841 there are several interesting letters to Sir Robert Peel. Milnes is said to have seen much of the king and M. Guizot, and to have been accredited by both with unofficial messages. After all, the messages seem to have been couched in general

terms of civility, expressing the natural desire that nothing should be done to endanger the friendly relations of the countries. But

doubtless Milnes was encouraged to believe that they must induce Peel to offer him, sooner or later, the post he desired. The humorous account of an interview with the Premier two years afterwards, is quite sufficient to explain his disappointments. Peel regarded

The

Sheridan

all light littérateurs as triflers, and poets with their unprofitable pursuits as the butterflies of the human species. Carlyle had prompted Milnes to press Tennyson's claims for a pension. rival claimant was Knowles, the popular dramatist. As Carlyle had put it, "Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when the Lord asks you why you did not get the pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents; it is you that will be damned." Accordingly,

"Peel consulted Milnes as to the course which he ought to take, accompanying the appeal by the statesolutely nothing either of Mr Tenny

ment that for himself he knew ab

son or Mr Knowles.

"What!' said Milnes. 'Have you never seen the name of Sheridan Knowles on a playbill?'

'No,' replied Peel.

66 6 And have you never read a poem of Tennyson's?'

"No,' was again the answer, accompanied by a request that Milnes would let him see something which Tennyson had written. Accordingly Milnes sent to Sir Robert Peel the two poems of 'Locksley Hall' and 'Ulysses,' &c."

Among his literary friends there were few whom he valued more highly than Mrs Proctor, the wife of "Barry Cornwall." She was a frequent guest at Fryston, where she kept her favourite seat at a

particular corner of the breakfast-table, as he was a regular visitor in the house in Weymouth Street, where she lived before, as a very old lady, she changed it for a celestial tenement in Queen Anne's Mansions. There he used to meet Dickens, Thackeray, and many a minor celebrity; and for long, when Robert Browning was in London, he was always to be found with Mrs Proctor of a Sunday afternoon. Her letters

are worth reading for their own sake, and especially for the sprightliness of touch as to current literary gossip. Mrs Proctor, when drawing on her reminiscences, used to laugh good-humouredly at the story told by Mr Reid of Milnes's appearance at a State Fancy Ball in 1844. Of all characters in the world, Milnes had pitched upon Chaucer, and Macready had been called in to superintend "the grave and simple costume." Wordsworth, as we know from a memorable recollection of the Ettrick Shepherd's, had little charity or consideration for the smaller fry of Parnassus. He growled out sarcastically, when he heard of this, "If Monckton Milnes goes as Chaucer, the father of English poetry, all that is left for me is to go as Monckton Milnes." Naturally, as a somewhat prominent celebrity in society, Milnes appeared among the graphic sketches from life in one of Disraeli's social novels. As we have remarked, the two men never took to each other, but the portrait of the Mr Vavasour of 'Tancred' is truthful and not unkindly, if slightly caricatured. Mr Vavasour was to be unmistakably identified by his habits and tastes as well as by his idiosyncrasy :

"Mr Vavasour's breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class,

or merit, one might almost add, your character, you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. All this was very well in the Albany, and only funny; but when he collected his menageries at his ancestral hall, the sport sometimes became tragic. A real philosopher, alike from his genial disposition, and from the influence of his rich and various information, Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathising with every one. His life was a gyration of energetic curiosity, an insatiable whirl of social celebrity. He was everywhere and at everything; he had gone down in a divfor his acquaintances, he was weling-bell, gone up in a balloon. As comed in every land; his universal sympathies seemed omnipotent."

In the beginning of 1846 Milnes wrote a letter to his old friend Mr Gladstone, which indicates, according to Mr Reid, the turningpoint in his career. Lord Canning had resigned the UnderSecretaryship for Foreign Affairs. In this communication, which was marked "private," Milnes gave free expression to his wishes, and frankly urged his pretensions in something resembling an ultimatum. If what he considered his reasonable claims were ignored, he should take it as an intimation that the career of a politician was closed to him. As the letter had no result, he may have regretted stooping to make the appeal, though in such matters he was by no means morbidly sensitive. In any case, thenceforth he seems to have considered his fate was fixed: he renounced his dearer and graver ambitions; and consequently the rest of these volumes of biography is mainly the somewhat monotonous story of the social existence of a man who had to be content to go on as he had begun, and grow old in a