Chapter XXXIV: An Old Photograph-Book (6)

The ranks of our good talkers--none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter--have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell. For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine--in short, since he entered Parliament--that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before that time his delightful _Obiter Dicta_ had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect. To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.

An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him "The Harmonious Blacksmith," and the collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified. He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means, and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too "cultured" to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] May 7, 1897.

XVII.

CLERGYMEN.

_ Clerus Anglicanus stupor mundi_. I believe that this complimentary proverb originally referred to the learning of the English clergy, but it would apply with equal truth to their social agreeableness. When I was writing about the Art of Conversation and the men who excelled in it, I was surprised to find how many of the best sayings that recurred spontaneously to my memory had a clerical origin; and it struck me that a not uninteresting chapter might be written about the social agreeableness of clergymen. A mere layman may well feel a natural and becoming diffidence in venturing to handle so high a theme.

In a former chapter I said something of the secular magnificence which surrounded great prelates in the good old days, when the Archbishop of Canterbury could only be approached on gilt-edged paper, and even the Bishop of impecunious Oxford never appeared in his Cathedral city without four horses and two powdered footmen. In a certain sense, no doubt, these splendid products of established religion conduced to social agreeableness. Like the excellent prelate described in _Friendship's Garland_, they "had thoroughly learnt the divine lesson that charity begins at home." They maintained an abundant hospitality; they celebrated domestic events by balls at the episcopal palace; they did not disdain (as we gather from the Life of the Hon. and Rev. George Spencer) the relaxation of a rubber of whist, even on the night before an Ordination, with a candidate for a partner. They dined out, like that well-drawn bishop in _Little Dorrit_, who "was crisp, fresh, cheerful, affable, bland, but so surprisingly innocent;" or like the prelate on whom Thackeray moralized: "My Lord, I was pleased to see good thing after good thing disappear before you; and think that no man ever better became that rounded episcopal apron. How amiable he was! how kind! He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Establishment."

But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal agreeableness. We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends entirely on the topic of the merriment. A clergyman who made light of the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common consent be intolerable. Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the "merriment of parsons" when it plays round subjects outside the scope of their professional duties.

Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that "he never, except once, knew him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;" and I regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment--rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was--subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson.

_Peter Plymley's Letters_, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton, the Essays on _America_ and _Persecuting Bishops_, will probably be read as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of Montgomery's Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb--an incredible number of those which are current in daily converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon.

When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I think, have struck every reader of the Bishop's Life, whether in the three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and good stories collected from other people are all that the books disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time. We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in _Lothair_, and on the principle of _Ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse_, it may be worth while to recall it: "The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his angelic jokes were well launched."

Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, "If I was paid what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;" and, waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do with Bishop Wilberforce's exuberant and infectious jollity. "A truly emotional spirit," wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country house, "he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other."

A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley. A clergyman to whom the Queen signed herself "Ever yours affectionately" must certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every circumstance of Stanley's nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for the part. He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys. He was born of famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of well-deserved promotion to the most delightful of all offices in the Church of England. His inward nature accorded well with this happy environment. It was in a singular degree pure, simple, refined, ingenuous. All the grosser and harsher elements of human character seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his "picturesque sensibility," and the phrase was happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified by something of the poet's imagination. His conversation was incessant, teeming with information, and illustrated by familiar acquaintance with all the best that has been thought and said in the world.

Never was a brighter intellect or a more gallant heart housed in a more fragile form. His figure, features, bearing, and accent were the very type of refinement; and as the spare figure, so short yet so full of dignity, marked out by the decanal dress and the red ribbon of the Order of the Bath, threaded its way through the crowded saloons of London society, one felt that the Church, as a civilizing institution, could not be more appropriately represented.

A lady of Presbyterian antecedents who had conformed to Anglicanism once said to the present writer, "I dislike the _Episcopal_ Church as much as ever, but I love the _Decanal_ Church." Her warmest admiration was reserved for that particular Dean, supreme alike in station and in charm, whom I have just now been describing; but there were, at the time of speaking, several other members of the same order who were conspicuous ornaments of the society in which they moved. There was Dr. Elliot, Dean of Bristol, a yearly visitor to London; dignified, clever, agreeable, highly connected; an administrator, a politician, an admirable talker; and so little trammelled by any ecclesiastical prejudices or habitudes that he might have been the original of Dr. Stanhope in _Barchester Towers_. There was Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, whose periodical appearances at Court and in society displayed to the admiring gaze of the world the very handsomest and stateliest specimen of the old English gentleman that our time has produced. There was Dr. Church, Dean of St. Paul's, by many competent judges pronounced to be our most accomplished man of letters, yet so modest and so retiring that the world was never suffered to come in contact with him except through his books. And there was Dr. Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff, who concealed under the blandest of manners a remorseless sarcasm and a mordant wit, and who, returning from the comparative publicity of the Athenaeum to the domestic shades of the Temple, would often leave behind him some pungent sentence which travelled from mouth to mouth, and spared neither age nor sex nor friendship nor affinity.

The very highest dignitaries of the Church in London have never, in my experience, contributed very largely to its social life. The garden-parties of Fulham and Lambeth are indeed recognized incidents of the London season; but they present to the critical eye less the aspect of a social gathering than that of a Church Congress combined with a Mothers' Meeting. The overwhelming disparity between the position of host and guests is painfully apparent, and that "drop-down-dead-ativeness" of manner which Sydney Smith quizzed still characterizes the demeanour of the unbeneficed clergy. Archbishop Tait, whose natural stateliness of aspect and manner was one of the most conspicuous qualifications for his great office, was a dignified and hospitable host; and Archbishop Thomson, reinforced by a beautiful and charming wife, was sometimes spoken of as the Archbishop of Society. Archbishop Benson looked the part to perfection, but did not take much share in general conversation, though I remember one terse saying of his in which the _odium theologicum_ supplied the place of wit. A portrait of Cardinal Manning was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and I remarked to the Archbishop on the extraordinary picturesqueness of the Cardinal's appearance "The dress is very effective," replied the Archbishop dryly, "but I don't think there is much besides." "Oh, surely it is a fine head?" "No, not a fine head; only _no face_."

Passing down through the ranks of the hierarchy, I shall presently have something to say about two or three metropolitan Canons who are notable figures in society; but before I come to them I must offer a word of affectionate tribute to the memory of Dr. Liddon. Probably there never was a man whose social habit and manner were less like what a mere outsider would have inferred from his physical aspect and public demeanour. Nature had given him the outward semblance of a foreigner and an ascetic; a life-long study of ecclesiastical rhetoric had stamped him with a mannerism which belongs peculiarly to the pulpit. But the true inwardness of the man was that of the typical John Bull--hearty, natural, full of humour, utterly free from self-consciousness. He had a healthy appetite, and was not ashamed to gratify it; liked a good glass of wine; was peculiarly fond of sociable company, whether as host or guest; and told an amusing story with incomparable zest and point. His verbal felicity was a marked feature of his conversation. His description of Archbishop Benson (revived, with strange taste, by the _Saturday Review_ on the occasion of the Archbishop's death) was a masterpiece of sarcastic character-drawing. The judicious Bishop Davidson and the accomplished Canon Mason were the subjects of similar pleasantries; and there was substantial truth as well as genuine fun in his letter to a friend written one dark Christmas from Amen Court: "London is just now buried under a dense fog. This is commonly attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at Westminster."

XVIII.

CLERGYMEN--_continued_.

Of the "Merriment of Parsons" one of the most conspicuous instances was to be found in the Rev. W.H. Brookfield, the "little Frank Whitestock" of Thackeray's _Curate's Walk_, and the subject of Lord Tennyson's characteristic elegy:--

"Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best--
Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,
How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes!
How oft the Cantab supper host, and guest,
Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!

* * * * *

You man of humorous-melancholy mark
Dead of some inward agony--is it so?
Our kindlier, trustier Jaques, past away!
I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark:
[Greek: Skias onar]--dream of a shadow, go,--
God bless you. I shall join you in a day."

This tribute is as true in substance as it is striking in phrase. I have noticed the same peculiarity about Mr. Brookfield's humour as about Jenny Lind's singing. Those who had once heard it were always eager to talk about it. Ask some elderly man about the early triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale, and notice how he kindles. "Ah! Jenny Lind! Yes; there was never anything like that!" And he begins about the _Figlia_, and how she came along the bridge in the _Sonnambula_; and you feel the tenderness in his tone, as of a positive love for her whose voice seems still ringing through him as he talks. I have noticed exactly the same phenomenon when people who knew Mr. Brookfield hear his name mentioned in casual conversation. "Ah! Brookfield! Yes; there never was any one quite like him!" And off they go, with visible pleasure and genuine emotion, to describe the inimitable charm, the touch of genius which brought humorous delight out of the commonest incidents, the tinge of brooding melancholy which threw the flashing fun into such high relief.

Not soon will fade from the memory of any who ever heard it the history of the examination at the ladies' school, where Brookfield, who had thought that he was only expected to examine in languages and literature, found himself required to set a paper in physical science. "What was I to do? I know nothing about hydrogen or oxygen or any other 'gen.' So I set them a paper in common sense, or what I called 'Applied Science.' One of my questions was, 'What would you do to cure a cold in the head?' One young lady answered, 'I should put _my_ feet in hot mustard and water till _you_ were in a profuse perspiration.' Another said, 'I should put him to bed, give him a soothing drink, and sit by him till he was better.' But, on reconsideration, she ran her pen through all the 'him's' and 'he's,' and substituted 'her' and 'she.'"

Mr. Brookfield was during the greater part of his life a hard-working servant of the public, and his friends could only obtain his delightful company in the rare and scanty intervals of school-inspecting--a profession of which not even the leisure is leisurely. The type of the French abbé, whose sacerdotal avocations lay completely in the background and who could give the best hours of the day and night to the pleasures or duties of society, was best represented in our day by the Rev. William Harness and the Rev. Henry White. Mr. Harness was a diner-out of the first water; an author and a critic; perhaps the best Shakespearean scholar of his time; and a recognized and even dreaded authority on all matters connected with the art and literature of the drama. Mr. White, burdened only with the sinecure chaplaincies of the Savoy and the House of Commons, took the Theatre as his parish, mediated with the happiest tact between the Church and the Stage, and pronounced a genial benediction over the famous suppers in Stratton Street at which an enthusiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.

Canon Malcolm MacColl is an abbé with a difference. No one eats his dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make society a profession. He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England. The Franco-German War, the Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule, and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and _ex animo_ an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well. His inflexible integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the Priest in Politics. He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and has been behind the scenes of some historic performances. Yet he has never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of his sacred calling.

Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of _The Star Sapphire_, has drawn under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity, one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first conversation with William Wilberforce, she said: "I have always heard that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did not know that he was also the wittiest." The agreeableness of the great philanthropist's son--Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester--I discussed in my last chapter. We may put aside the fulsome dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be content to rest the Bishop's reputation for agreeableness on testimony so little interested as that of Matthew Arnold and Archbishop Tait. The Archbishop wrote, after the Bishop's death, of his "social and irresistibly fascinating side, as displayed in his dealings with society;" and in 1864 Mr. Arnold, after listening with only very moderate admiration to one of the Bishop's celebrated sermons, wrote: "Where he was excellent was in his speeches at luncheon afterwards--gay, easy, cordial, and wonderfully happy."

I think that one gathers from all dispassionate observers of the Bishop that what struck them most in him was the blending of boisterous fun and animal spirits with a deep and abiding sense of the seriousness of religion. In the philanthropist-father the religious seriousness rather preponderated over the fun; in the bishop-son (by a curious inversion of parts) the fun sometimes concealed the religiousness. To those who speculate in matters of race and pedigree it is interesting to watch the two elements contending in the character of Canon Basil Wilberforce, the Bishop's youngest and best-beloved son. When you see his graceful figure and clean-shaven ecclesiastical face in the pulpit of his strangely old-fashioned church, or catch the vibrating notes of his beautifully modulated voice in

"The hush of our dread high altar,
Where The Abbey makes us _We_,"

you feel yourself in the presence of a born ecclesiastic, called from his cradle by an irresistible vocation to a separate and sanctified career. When you see him on the platform of some great public meeting, pouring forth argument, appeal, sarcasm, anecdote, fun, and pathos in a never-ceasing flood of vivid English, you feel that you are under the spell of a born orator. And yet again, when you see the priest of Sunday, the orator of Monday, presiding on Tuesday with easy yet finished courtesy at the hospitable table of the most beautiful dining-room in London, or welcomed with equal warmth for his racy humour and his unfailing sympathy in the homes of his countless friends, you feel that here is a man naturally framed for society, in whom his father and grandfather live again. Truly a combination of hereditary gifts is displayed in Canon Wilberforce; and the social agreeableness of London received a notable addition when Mr. Gladstone transferred him from Southampton to Dean's Yard.

Of agreeable Canons there is no end, and the Chapter of Westminster is peculiarly rich in them. Mr. Gore's ascetic saintliness of life conceals from the general world, but not from the privileged circle of his intimate friends, the high breeding of a great Whig family and the philosophy of Balliol. Archdeacon Furse has the refined scholarship and delicate literary sense which characterized Eton in its days of glory. Dr. Duckworth's handsome presence has long been welcomed in the very highest of all social circles. Mr. Eyton's massive bulk and warm heart, and rugged humour and sturdy common sense, produce the effect of a clerical Dr. Johnson. But perhaps we must turn our back on the Abbey and pursue our walk along the Thames Embankment as far as St. Paul's if we want to discover the very finest flower of canonical culture and charm, for it blushes unseen in the shady recesses of Amen Court. Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul's, is beyond all question one of the most agreeable men of his time. In fun and geniality and warm-hearted hospitality he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official house he inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds certain others which his admirable predecessor could scarcely have claimed. He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature, literature and life. His temperament is essentially musical, and, indeed, it was from him that I borrowed, in a former paragraph, my description of Jenny Lind and her effect on her hearers. No man in London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every class and stratum; and those friends acknowledge in him not only the most vivacious and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the moral forces which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift their lives.

Before I have done with the agreeableness of clergymen I must say a word about two academical personages, of whom it was not always easy to remember that they were clergymen, and whose agreeableness struck one in different lights, according as one happened to be the victim or the witness of their jocosity. If any one wishes to know what the late Master of Balliol was really like in his social aspect, I should refer him, not to the two volumes of his Biography, nor even to the amusing chit-chat of Mr. Lionel Tollemache's Recollections, but to the cleverest work of a very clever Balliol man--Mr. W.H. Mallock's _New Republic_. The description of Mr. Jowett's appearance, conversation, and social bearing is photographic, and the sermon which Mr. Mallock puts into his mouth is not a parody, but an absolutely faultless reproduction both of substance and of style. That it excessively irritated the subject of the sketch is the best proof of its accuracy. For my own part, I must freely admit that I do not write as an admirer of Mr. Jowett; but one saying of his, which I had the advantage of hearing, does much to atone, in my judgment, for the snappish impertinences on which his reputation for wit has been generally based. The scene was the Master's own dining-room, and the moment that the ladies had left the room one of the guests began a most outrageous conversation. Every one sat flabbergasted. The Master winced with annoyance; and then, bending down the table towards the offender, said in his shrillest tone--"Shall we continue this conversation in the drawing-room?" and rose from his chair. It was really a stroke of genius thus both to terminate and to rebuke the impropriety without violating the decorum due from host to guest.

Of the late Master of Trinity--Dr. Thompson--it was said: "He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who is able to abide his frost?" The stories of his mordant wit are endless, but an Oxford man can scarcely hope to narrate them with proper accuracy. He was nothing if not critical. At Seeley's Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History his only remark was--"Well, well. I did not think we could so soon have had occasion to regret poor Kingsley." To a gushing admirer who said that a popular preacher had so much taste--"Oh yes; so very much, and all so very bad." Of a certain Dr. Woods, who wrote elementary mathematical books for schoolboys, and whose statue occupies the most conspicuous position in the ante-chapel of St. John's College--"The Johnian Newton." His hit at the present Chief Secretary for Ireland,[22] when he was a junior Fellow of Trinity, is classical--"We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us." But it requires an eye-witness of the scene to do justice to the exordium of the Master's sermon on the Parable of the Talents, addressed in Trinity Chapel to what considers itself, and not without justice, the cleverest congregation in the world. "It would be obviously superfluous in a congregation such as that which I now address to expatiate on the responsibilities of those who have five, or even two, talents. I shall therefore confine my observations to the more ordinary case of those of us who have _one talent_."

FOOTNOTES:

[22] The Right Hon. G.W. Balfour.

XIX.

REPARTEE.

Lord Beaconsfield, describing Monsignore Berwick in _Lothair_, says that he "could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee." The former performance is considerably easier than the latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory, and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage" is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means inclined to admit the general inferiority of contemporary conversation to that of the last generation, I am disposed to think that in the art of repartee our predecessors excelled us.

If this is true, it may be partly due to the greater freedom of an age when well-bred men and refined women spoke their minds with an uncompromising plainness which would now be voted intolerable. I have said that the old Royal Dukes were distinguished by the racy vigour of their conversation; and the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King Ernest of Hanover, was held to excel all his brothers in this respect. I was told by the late Sir Charles Wyke that he was once walking with the Duke of Cumberland along Piccadilly when the Duke of Gloucester (first cousin to Cumberland, and familiarly known as "Silly Billy") came out of Gloucester House. "Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Gloucester, stop a minute. I want to speak to you," roared the Duke of Cumberland. Poor Silly Billy, whom nobody ever noticed, was delighted to find himself thus accosted, and ambled up smiling. "Who's your tailor?" shouted Cumberland. "Stultz," replied Gloucester. "Thank you. I only wanted to know, because, whoever he is, he ought to be avoided like a pestilence." Exit Silly Billy.

Of this inoffensive but not brilliant prince (who, by the way, was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) it is related that once at a levée he noticed a naval friend with a much-tanned face. "How do, Admiral? Glad to see you again. It's a long time since you have been at a levée." "Yes, sir. Since I last saw your Royal Highness I have been nearly to the North Pole." "By G---, you look more as if you had been to the South Pole." It is but bare justice to this depreciated memory to observe that the Duke of Gloucester scored a point against his kingly cousin when, on hearing that William IV. had consented to the Reform Bill, he ejaculated, "Who's Silly Billy now?" But this is a digression.

Early in the nineteenth century a famous lady, whose name, for obvious reasons, I forbear to indicate even by an initial, had inherited great wealth under a will which, to put it mildly, occasioned much surprise. She shared an opera-box with a certain Lady D---, who loved the flowing wine-cup not wisely, but too well. One night Lady D--- was visibly intoxicated at the opera, and her friend told her that the partnership in the box must cease, as she could not appear again in company so disgraceful. "As you please," said Lady D---. "I may have had a glass of wine too much; but at any rate I never forged my father's signature, and then murdered the butler to prevent his telling."

Beau Brummell, the Prince of Dandies and the most insolent of men, was once asked by a lady if be would "take a cup of tea." "Thank you, ma'am," he replied, "I never _take_ anything but physic." "I beg your pardon," replied the hostess, "you also take liberties."

The Duchess of Somerset, born Sheridan, and famous as the Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, was pre-eminent in this agreeable art of swift response. One day she called at a shop for some article which she had purchased the day before, and which had not been sent home. The order could not be traced. The proprietor of the establishment inquired, with great concern, "May I ask who took your Grace's order? Was it a young gentleman with fair hair?" "No; it was an elderly nobleman with a bald head."

The celebrated Lady Clanricarde, daughter of George Canning, was talking during the Franco-German War of 1870 to the French Ambassador, who complained bitterly that England had not intervened on behalf of France. "But, after all," he said, "it was only what we might have expected. We always believed that you were a nation of shopkeepers, and now we know you are." "And we," replied Lady Clanricarde, "always believed that you were a nation of soldiers, and now we know you are not"--a repartee worthy to rank with Queen Mary's reply to Lady Lochleven about the sacramental character of marriage, in the third volume of _The Abbot_.

A young lady, who had just been appointed a Maid of Honour, was telling some friends with whom she was dining that one of the conditions of the office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A cynical man of the world who was present said, "What a tiresome rule! I think I should keep my diary all the same." "Then," replied the young lady, "I am afraid you would not be a maid of _Honour_."

In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank--"Now, Luttrell, we're all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me." Eyeing his questioner gravely, Luttrell made answer, "It is an odd question; but as you, Lady Holland, ask it, I don't mind telling you. If I live till next year, I shall be--devilish old."

For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen, for Lord Holland's genial humour, and for Lady Holland's indiscriminate insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay's Life and Charles Greville's Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs. Most of these verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.

Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh, who, as the writer of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, had been the foremost apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O'Coighley, the priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and France, was the basest of mankind. "No, Mackintosh," replied that sound though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; "he might have been much worse. He was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a renegade."

These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age. Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the Greville Memoirs--that mine of social information in which I have so often quarried--came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, if he had read them. He replied, "No. I do not feel attracted to them. I remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton." This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled. In a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady Morley's comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady Jersey--the Zenobia of _Endymion_--of whom some gushing admirer had said that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of black and diamonds--"it was like night." "Yes, my dear; _minuit passé_." A masculine analogue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the table-talk of Lord Granville--certainly not an unkindly man--to whom the late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild. "It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift. I should like to find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is rare." "Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair."

When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership of Rossall, a disappointed competitor said that it was a case of [Greek: eneka tou kuriou]; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.

When the _New Review_ was started, its accomplished Editor designed it to be an inexpensive copy of the _Nineteenth Century_. It was to cost only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names--those of the British aristocracy for choice. He was complaining in society of the difficulty of finding a suitable title, when a vivacious lady said, "We have got _Cornhill_, and _Ludgate_, and _Strand_--why not call yours _Cheapside_?"

Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists. Of a small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was said by a friend that he was like Euclid's definition of a point: he had no parts and no magnitude, but had position. In previous chapters I have quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke. Professor Thorold Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein. Lord Bowen is immortalized by his emendation to the Judge's address to the Queen, which had contained the Heep-like sentence--"Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the great office to which we have been called." "Wouldn't it be better to say, 'Conscious as we are of one another's unworthiness'?" Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science--"His only fault is that he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature." A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General Election of 1880. His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, "Now, that's really too bad, for ---- is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a _Superior Being_."

At dinner at Balliol the Master's guests were discussing the careers of two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the other a bishop. "Oh," said Henry Smith, "I think the bishop is the greater man. A judge, at the most, can only say, 'You be hanged,' but a bishop can say, 'You be d---d.'" "Yes," twittered the Master; "but if the judge says, 'You be hanged,' you _are_ hanged."

Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory politician--nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and exceptions. When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.

Of Dr. Haig-Brown it is reported that, when Head Master of Charterhouse, he was toasted by the Mayor of Godalming as a man who knew how to combine the _fortiter in re_ with the _suav[=i]ter in modo_. In replying to the toast he said, "I am really overwhelmed not only by the quality, but by the _quantity_ of his Worship's eulogium."

It has been a matter of frequent remark that, considering what an immense proportion of parliamentary time has been engrossed during the last seventeen years by Irish speeches, we have heard so little Irish humour, whether conscious or unconscious--whether jokes or "bulls." An admirably vigorous simile was used by the late Mr. O'Sullivan, when he complained that the whisky supplied at the bar was like "a torchlight procession marching down your throat;" but of Irish bulls in Parliament I have only heard one--proceeding, if my memory serves me, from Mr. T. Healy: "As long as the voice of Irish suffering is dumb, the ear of English compassion is deaf to it." One I read in the columns of the _Irish Times_: "The key of the Irish difficulty is to be found in the _empty_ pocket of the landlord." An excellent confusion of metaphors was uttered by one of the members for the Principality in the debate on the Welsh Church Bill, in indignant protest against the allegation that the majority of Welshmen now belonged to the Established Church. He said, "It is a lie, sir; and it is high time that we nailed this lie to the mast." But a confusion of metaphors is not a bull.

Among tellers of Irish stories, Lord Morris is supreme; one of his best depicts two Irish officials of the good old times discussing, in all the confidence of their after-dinner claret, the principles on which they bestowed their patronage Said the first, "Well, I don't mind admitting that, _caeteris paribus_, I prefer my own relations." "My dear boy," replied his boon companion, "_caeteris paribus_ be d----d." The cleverest thing that I have lately heard was from a young lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman. Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them

"The storied Erne and animated bust."

Frances Countess Waldegrave, who had previously been married three times, took as her fourth husband an Irishman, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, who was shortly afterwards made Chief Secretary. The first night that Lady Waldegrave and Mr. Fortescue appeared at the theatre in Dublin, a wag in the gallery called out, "Which of the four do you like best, my lady?" Instantaneously from the Chief Secretary's box came the adroit reply: "Why, the Irishman, of course '"

The late Lord Coleridge was once speaking in the House of Commons in support of Women's Rights. One of his main arguments as that there was no essential difference between the masculine and the feminine intellect. For example, he said, some of the most valuable qualities of what is called the judicial genius--sensibility, quickness, delicacy--are peculiarly feminine. In reply, Serjeant Dowse said: "The argument of the hon. and learned Member, compendiously stated, amounts to this--because some judges are old women, therefore all old women are fit to be judges."

To my friend Mr. Julian Sturgis, himself one of the happiest of phrase-makers, I am indebted for the following gems from America.

Mr. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, showed an English friend the place where Washington was said to have thrown a dollar across the Potomac. The English friend expressed surprise; "but," said Mr. Evarts, "you must remember that a dollar went further in those days." A Senator met Mr. Evarts next day, and said that he had been amused by his jest. "But," said Mr. Evarts, "I met a mere journalist just afterwards who said, 'Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a sovereign across the Atlantic.'" Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes, would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent wines of which he was afraid.

It was Mr. Motley who said in Boston--"Give me the luxuries of life, and I care not who has the necessaries."

Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings (among them the well-known "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris"), heard some grave city fathers debating what could be done to mitigate the cruel east wind at an exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He suggested that they should tether a shorn lamb there.

A witty Bostonian going to dine with a lady was met by her with a face of apology. "I could not get another man," she said; "and we are four women, and you will have to take us all in to dinner." "Fore-warned is four-armed," said he with a bow.

This gentleman was in a hotel in Boston when the law forbidding the sale of liquor was in force. "What would you say," said an angry Bostonian, "if a man from St. Louis, where they have freedom, were to come in and ask you where he could get a drink?" Now it was known that spirits could be clandestinely bought in a room under the roof, and the wit pointing upwards replied, "I should say, 'Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel.'"

Madame Apponyi was in London during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867, and, like all foreigners and not a few Englishmen, was much perplexed by the "Compound Householder," who figured so largely in the discussion. Hayward explained that he was the Masculine of the Femme Incomprise.

One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the justest, was made by "the gorgeous Lady Blessington" to Napoleon III. When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington's hospitable and brilliant but Bohemian house. And she, when visiting Paris after the _coup d'état_ naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the unbounded hospitalities of Gore House. Weeks passed, no invitation arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington's presence. At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception. As he passed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught sight of his former hostess. "Ah, Miladi Blessington! Restez-vous longtemps à Paris?" "Et vous, Sire?" History does not record the usurper's reply.

Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him there burst into dithyrambics and cried, "What a lovely spot this is, Bishop! It is so Swiss." "Yes, ma'am," blandly replied old Harry of Exeter, "it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and there are no mountains here." To one of his clergy desiring to renew a lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as the fine on renewal. The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said, "Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly your lordship has got the lion's share." "But, my dear sir, I am sure you would not wish me to have that of the other creature."

Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate. Bishop Wilberforce, whose powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always ready to use them where retaliation was possible--not in the safe enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the platform and the House of Lords. At the great meeting in St. James's Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts of "Speak up, my lord." "I am already speaking up," replied the Bishop in his most dulcet tone; "I always speak up; and I decline to speak down to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery." Every one whose memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will remember the melancholy circumstances under which Lord Westbury had to resign his office. When he was leaving the Royal Closet after surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen's hands, Lord Westbury met the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen. It was a painful encounter, and in reminding the Bishop of the occurrence when next they met, Westbury said, "I felt inclined to say, 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'" The Bishop in relating this used to say, "I never in my life was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, 'Yea, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity.' But by a great effort I kept it down, and said, 'Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?'" The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting. The Bishop urged that it had a worldly appearance. The clergyman replied that it was not a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop had been present. The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house, but was never within three rooms of the dancing. "Oh, if it comes to that," replied the clergyman, "I never am within three fields of the hounds."

One of the best replies--it is scarcely a repartee--traditionally reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott. A brother-Fellow of Oriel had behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott: "My friend, I'm afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night." "My dear fellow, I assure you I observed nothing unusual."

In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke's talk. A good instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke's sympathy, said, "I have the greatest contempt for Aristotle." "But not that contempt which familiarity breeds, I should imagine," was Sherbrooke's mild rejoinder. "I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night," I once heard a lady say, "and a place to spare. Lord Sherbrooke, will you come? If you are engaged, I must take the Bishop of Gibraltar." "Oh, that's no good. Gibraltar can never be taken."

In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said, "we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to me that the New Historians prove too much--indeed, they prove the very point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College."

Lord Beaconsfield's excellence in conversation lay rather in studied epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came forward, a young, penniless, unknown coxcomb, to contest High Wycombe against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some one in the crowd shouted, "We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what do you stand on?" "I stand on my head," was the prompt reply, to which Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before. "What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats, and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr. ----."