showed that Disraeli threatened to meet the redoubtable Daniel at Philippi, where he would avenge the insult upon the first opportunity; and accordingly his first speech in Parliament contained a violent denunciation of O'Connell. But it was such a notable failure as to be greeted with continual jeers and laughter. He ended it, however, amid all sorts of loud noises, with these words: "I am not surprised at the reception I have experienced. I have succeeded at last. Ay, sir; and though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me." And it did come, only two years afterwards.

When John Bright was told that he must give Mr. Disraeli credit for being a self-made man, he added, "And he adores his maker."

B. 1809.

LORD HOUGHTON.

D. 1885.

(Richard Monckton Milnes.)

LORD HOUGHTON, though in one House of Parliament or the other all his life after he was twenty-seven years of age, was not naturally a good public speaker; but by infinite pains he acquired so much of the art as to satisfy his friends that he did not much over-estimate himself when he said to the Prince of Wales, after listening to the Prince one evening, "The two best after-dinner speakers, sir, are your Royal Highness and myself."

B. 1810.

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER.

THIS poet, almost of a former generation, shows his solid satisfaction with his own work by relating to most of his visitors that his best-known work, "Proverbial Philosophy," "has circulated to the extent of a million and a quarter of copies, chiefly in America," and that it has probably been read more widely than any other book save the Bible. This enables him to bear up under many stinging criticisms. He visited America in 1851 and in 1877, and says: "I went everywhere as a welcome visitor, saw everything worth seeing, dined with everybody of note, from the millionnaire on gold plate, to the Quaker Friend on pure white china, was made free of clubs and societies, was interviewed and photographed, was ridiculed, censured, and praised, and was made a thesis for article-writers and a butt for many humorists." He appears to have been delighted with it all, and does not hesitate to show a volume published in Philadelphia in 1852, entitled "Proverbs illustrated by Parallel or Relative Passages from the Poets." "It consists," the author says," of sands of gold sifted from the flood of literature, or the wise sayings of Solomon, Shakspeare, and Tupper, exemplified by the poets," and its object is "to furnish the means of employing the otherwise idle moments that occur in every one's life, by holding converse with the three great proverbialists." This is nice for Tupper, but what would Solomon say?

The Autobiography he has just published is very full of his ever-prominent and harmless egotism. Some of it is interesting. He can hardly be blamed for remembering that when he was at Christ Church, Oxford, he "had the honor of being prize-taker of Dr. Burton's theological essay, 'The Reconciliation of Matthew and John,' when Gladstone, who had also contested it, stood second;"" and when Dr. Burton," he says, “had me before him to give me the £25 worth of books, he requested me to allow Mr. Gladstone to have £5 worth of them, as he was so good a second."

FRANCES ANN KEMBLE BUTLER.

B. 1811.

FANNY KEMBLE unquestionably possessed hereditary talent as an actress, and in her girlhood was a conspicuous theatrical attraction. She married Pierce Butler in 1834,— a rich Philadelphian owning slaves in South Carolina,- from whom she was divorced in 1849; and although she spent some share of her life in America, she was intensely English, and had that affection for America she may be supposed once to have had for her husband, that is to say, a lively appreciation of the possible addition to her pecuniary resources. Her self-appreciation, in her letters, is carefully veiled by constant self-depreciation which she knows her correspondents will swiftly dispute. She writes:

"I sometimes fancied, too, that but for the amount of letter-writing I perform, I might (perhaps) write carefully and satisfactorily something that might (perhaps) be worth reading, something that might (perhaps) in some degree approach my standard of a tolerably good literary production,- some novel or play, some work of imagination, and that my much letter-writing is against this: but I dare say this is a mistaken notion, and that I should never under any circumstances write anything worth anything."

In one of her letters, after she had agreed, in 1848, upon the terms for a theatrical engagement, she writes as follows:

"I am most thankful that the depression and discouragement under which I succumbed for a while have been thus speedily relieved. It is a curious sensation to have a certain consciousness of power (which I have, though perhaps it is quite a mistaken notion), and at the same time of absolute helplessness. Is it not well that people of great genius are always proud as well as humble, and that the consciousness of their own nobility spreads, as it were, the wings of an angel between them and all the baseness and barrenness through which they are often compelled to wade up to the lips?”

B. 1812.

66

FROM a letter of Dickens to Macready, dated at Baltimore, March 22, 1842, I give the following extract: Macready, if I had been born here and had written my book in this country, producing no stamps of approval from any other land, it is my solemn belief that I should have lived and died poor, unnoticed, and a black sheep to boot. I never was more convinced of anything than of that.”

At twelve years of age he was placed with a relative engaged in making Warren's Blacking. It is clear he thought his father might have done better by him, for he writes about it thus:

"It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I have been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me— a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.

"My whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that time of my life."

When writing the fifteenth number of the "Pickwick Papers," he wrote to a friend: "I am getting