RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES,LORD HOUGHTON[77].
It is much to be regretted that Lord Houghton did not write his own biography. Those who know his delightfulMonographs, Social and Personal, can form some idea of how he would have treated it. From his early years he lived in society—not merely the society to which his birth naturally opened the door, but a varied society of his own creating. He had an insatiable curiosity. It is hardly too much to say that in his long life he was present at every ceremony of importance, from the Eglinton Tournament to the Œcumenical Council; he knew everybody who was worth knowing, both at home and abroad—not merely as chance acquaintances, but as friends with whom he maintained a correspondence; he wasboth a politician and a man of letters, a friend of the unwashed and the associate of princes. What a book might have been written by such a man on such a subject! But, alas! though he often spoke of writing his own life, he died before he had leisure even to begin it; and, instead, we have to content ourselves with the volumes before us. They are good—unquestionably good; they abound with amusing stories and brilliant witticisms; but we confess that we laid them down with a sense of disappointment which it is hard to define. Perhaps it was beyond the writer’s ability to draw so complex a character—a man of many moods, a creature of contradictions, a master of whatnotto do andnotto say, as a lady of fashion told him to his face; perhaps he was overweighted by a wish to bring into prominence those solid qualities in his hero which society often failed to discover, while judging only ‘the man of fashion, whose unconventional originality had so far impressed itself upon the popular mind that there was hardly any eccentricity too audacious to be attributed to him by those who knew him only by repute[78].’ We are not so presumptuous as to suppose that we canpaint a portrait of Lord Houghton that will satisfy those who were his intimate friends; but we hope to present to our readers at least a faithful sketch of one for whom we had a most sincere admiration and respect.
Richard Monckton Milnes was born in London, June 19, 1809. His father, Robert Pemberton Milnes, then a young man of twenty-five, and M.P. for the family borough of Pontefract, had just flashed into sudden celebrity in the House of Commons by a brilliant speech in favour of Mr Canning, which saved the Portland Administration, and would have made Mr Milnes’s political fortune, had he been so minded. But when Mr Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or as Secretary of War, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, no: I will not accept either; with my temperament, I should be dead in a year.’ That he had entered Parliament with high hopes, and confidence in his own powers to win distinction there, is plain from the well-known story (which his son evidently believed) that he laid a bet of 100l.that he would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in five years. But, when the time came, he declined to ‘take occasion by the hand,’ and sat down under theoaks of Fryston to spend the rest of his life, just half a century, in the placid uniformity of a country gentleman’s existence. His abandonment of public life, and his refusal to return to it in any form, even when, late in life, Lord Palmerston offered him a peerage, were unsolved riddles to his contemporaries. Those who read these volumes will have but little difficulty in finding the answer to it. He was endowed with a proud independence of judgment which could never bind itself to any political party, and a critical fastidiousness which made him hesitate over every question presented to him. These two qualities of mind were conspicuous in his son, and barred to some extent his advancement, as they had barred his father’s. It must not, however, be imagined that the elder Milnes was an indolent man. Far from it. He was a daring rider to hounds, a scientific agriculturist, an active magistrate, a stimulator of the waning Toryism of Yorkshire by speeches which showed what the House of Commons had lost when he left it, and ardently curious about men of note and events of interest—another characteristic which descended to his son. Occasionally, too, he yielded to a love of excitement which Yorkshirecould not gratify, and revisited London, to tempt the fickle goddess who presides over high play—a taste which cost him dear, for it compelled him to pass several years of his life in comparative obscurity abroad, while the rents in his fortune, due to his own and his brother’s extravagance, were being slowly repaired. We have been told, by one who knew him late in life, that he was a singularly loveable person—the delight of children and young people—full of jokes, and fun, andpersiflage. ‘You could never be sure whether he spoke in jest or in earnest,’ said our informant. Here again one of the most obvious characteristics of his son makes its appearance.
The boyhood of Richard Milnes may be passed over in a sentence. A serious illness when he was ten years old put an end to his father’s intention of sending him to Harrow, and he was educated at home, or near it, till he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1827. He was entered as a fellow-commoner—a position well suited to the training he had received, for it gave him the society of men older than himself, while he was looking out for congenial friends among men of his own age. His college tutor was Mr Whewell,and it was doubtless at his suggestion that he went to read classics with Thirlwall, then one of the resident Fellows. On one of his later visits to Cambridge Lord Houghton told an interesting story of their relations as pupil and instructor. After a few days’ trial Thirlwall said to him: ‘You will never be a scholar. It is no use our reading classics together. Have you ever read the Bible?’ ‘Yes, I have read it, but not critically,’ was the reply. ‘Very well,’ said Thirlwall, ‘ then let us begin with Genesis.’ And so the rest of the term was spent in the study of the Old Testament. Mr Reid is, no doubt, right in saying that, for ‘the making of his mind,’ Milnes was more deeply indebted to Thirlwall than to any other man. But Thirlwall was not merely the Gamaliel at whose feet Milnes was willing to sit; he became the chosen friend of his heart. Lord Houghton was once asked to name the most remarkable man whom he had known in his long experience. Without a moment’s hesitation he replied ‘Thirlwall’; and the numerous letters which Mr Reid has printed show that the friendship was equally strong on both sides.
The most picturesque of Roman historians said of one of his heroes that he wasfelixopportunitate mortis; it might be said of Milnes, with regard to Cambridge, that he wasfelix opportunitate vitæ. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a period in which so many men who afterwards made their mark in the world have been gathered together there; and, with a happy facility for discovering and attracting to himself whatever was eminent and worth knowing, it was not long before he became intimate with the best of them. Nearly forty years afterwards, in 1866, on the occasion of the opening of the new rooms of the Union Society, he commemorated these friends of his early years in a speech of singular beauty and sincerity:
‘There was Tennyson, the Laureate, whose goodly bay-tree decorates our language and our land; Arthur, the younger Hallam, the subject ofIn Memoriam, the poet and his friend passing, linked hand in hand, together down the slopes of fame. There was Trench, the present Archbishop of Dublin, and Alford, Dean of Canterbury, both profound Scriptural philologists who have not disdained the secular muse. There was Spedding, who has, by a philosophical affinity, devoted the whole of his valuable life to the rehabilitation of the character of Lord Bacon; and there was Merivale, who—I hope by some attraction of repulsion—has devoted so much learning to the vindication of the Cæsars. There were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest war—Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was portrayed by thedramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion. There was Venables, whose admirable writings, unfortunately anonymous, we are reading every day, without knowing to whom to attribute them; and there was Blakesley, the “Hertfordshire Incumbent” of theTimes. There were sons of families which seemed to have an hereditary right to, a sort of habit of, academic distinction, like the Heaths and the Lushingtons. But I must check this throng of advancing memories, and I will pass from this point with the mention of two names which you would not let me omit—one of them, that of your Professor of Greek, whom it is the honour of Her Majesty’s late Government to have made Master of Trinity; and the other, that of your latest Professor, Mr F. D. Maurice, in whom you will all soon recognize the true enthusiasm of humanity’ (vol. ii. p. 161).
Mr Reid tells us that Tennyson sought Milnes’s acquaintance because ‘he looks the best-tempered fellow I ever saw.’ Hallam proclaimed him to be ‘a kindhearted fellow, as well as a very clever one, but vain and paradoxical.’ Milnes himself put Hallam at the head of those whom he knew. ‘He is the only man of my standing,’ he wrote, ‘before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’
It was hardly to be expected that Milnes, with his taste for the general in literature rather than the particular, would achieve distinction in the Cambridge of 1830. We have seen howThirlwall disposed of his classical aspirations, and in mathematics he fared no better. He read hard, and hoped for distinction in the college examination. But he had overtaxed his energies; his health gave way, and he was forced to give up work altogether for some days. Happily, the benefit a man derives from his three years at a university need not be measured by his honours, and we may be sure that the experience of men and books that Milnes gained there was of greater service to him than a high place in any Tripos would have been. He roamed in all directions over the fields of knowledge; phrenology, anatomy, geology, political economy, metaphysics, by turns engaged his attention; he dabbled in periodical literature; he acted Beatrice inMuch Ado about Nothing, and Mrs Malaprop inThe Rivals; he made an excursion in a balloon with the celebrated aeronaut, Mr Green; he wrote two prize-poems,TimbuctooandByzantium, but only to be beaten by Tennyson and Kinglake; he obtained a second prize for an English declamation, and a first prize for an English essay,On the Homeric Poems; he became a member of the club known as ‘The Apostles,’ in which he maintained a kindly interest to theend of his life; and last, but by no means least, he was a constant speaker at the Union.
It is impossible, at a distance of just sixty years, to form an exact estimate of the success of Milnes in those debates. But that it was something more than ordinary, is, we think, certain; for otherwise he would not have ventured to present himself at the Oxford Union in December 1829, in the character of a self-selected missionary, who hoped to carry light and leading into the dark places of the sister University. As this expedition has been twice described by Milnes himself, first in a letter to his mother soon after his return to Cambridge, and secondly in a speech at the opening of the new building of the Cambridge Union Society in 1866; and also, more or less fully, by four of his contemporaries, Sir Francis Doyle, Mr Gladstone, Cardinal Manning, and Dean Blakesley, it is clear that it was regarded by himself and his friends, both at the time and afterwards, as something uncommon and remarkable, and we feel sure that we shall be excused if we try to give a connected narrative of what really took place.
Doyle had ‘brought forward a motion at the Oxford Union that Shelley was a greaterpoet than Byron[79].’ According to Blakesley, ‘the respective moral tendency of the writings of Shelley and Byron[80]’ was the subject under debate. Doyle states that he acted ‘under Cambridge influences’; and that his motion was ‘an echo of Cambridge thought and feeling,’ words which probably refer to the then recent reprint of Shelley’sAdonaisat Cambridge. The debate, he proceeds, ‘was attended by three distinguished members of the Cambridge Union, Arthur Hallam, Richard Milnes, and Sunderland’; or, to use the words of what may be called his second account, taken from a lecture on Wordsworth delivered forty-three years afterwards, ‘friends of mine at Cambridge took the matter up and appeared suddenly on the scene of action.’ That this was the true state of the case, and that there was little or no premeditation about the excursion, is made still clearer by Milnes’ first account. After mentioning that he had been to Oxford, he proceeds:
‘I wanted much to see the place and the men, and had no objection to speak in their society; so, as they had agood subject for debate (the comparative merits of Shelley and Byron), and Sunderland and Hallam were both willing to go—and the Master, when he heard what was our purpose, very kindly gave us anExeat—we drove manfully through the snow, arriving in time to speak that evening....
‘Sunderland spoke first after Doyle, who opened, then Hallam, then some Oxonians, and I succeeded. The contrast from our long, noisy, shuffling, scraping, talking, vulgar, ridiculous-looking kind of assembly, to a neat little square room, with eighty or ninety young gentlemen, sprucely dressed, sitting on chairs or lounging about the fire-place, was enough to unnerve a more confident person than myself. Even the brazen Sunderland was somewhat awed, and became tautological, and spoke what we should call an inferior speech, but which dazzled his hearers. Hallam, as being among old friends, was bold, and spoke well. I was certainly nervous, but, I think, pleased my audience better than I pleased myself[81].’
In his second account, written thirty-six years afterwards, Milnes gives greater prominence to the Union Society than, we think, is consistent with the facts. It might easily be argued, after reading it, that the three Cambridge undergraduates had been selected by the Society to represent it. This exaggeration of the part played by the Union was perhaps only natural on an occasion when the speaker must have felt almost bound to magnify the influence of that Society on all departmentsof Cambridge life. After mentioning Arthur Hallam and Sunderland, he says:
‘It was in company with Mr Sunderland and Arthur Hallam that I formed part of a deputation sent from the Union of Cambridge to the Union of Oxford; and what do you think we went about? Why, we went to assert the right of Mr Shelley to be considered a greater poet than Lord Byron. At that time we in Cambridge were all very full of Mr Shelley. We had printed theAdonaisfor the first time in England, and a friend of ours suggested that as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, and greatly ill-treated, it would be a very grand thing for us to go to Oxford and raise a debate upon his character and powers. So, with full permission of the authorities[82]we went....
We had a very interesting debate ... but we were very much shocked, and our vanity was not a little wounded, to find that nobody at Oxford knew anything about Mr Shelley. In fact, a considerable number of our auditors believed that it was Shenstone, and said that they only knew one poem of his, beginning, “My banks are all furnished with bees.” We hoped, however, that our apostolate was of some good...[83].’
Sir Francis Doyle is provokingly brief in his account of the performances of his Cambridge allies. Sunderland, he tells us, ‘spoke with great effect, though scarcely, I believe,with the same fire that he often put forth on more congenial subjects. Then followed Hallam, with equal if not superior force.’ Of Milnes he says but little. After recounting the discomfiture of a speaker from Oriel, who while declaiming against Shelley suddenly caught sight of him, he adds: ‘Lord Houghton then stood up, and showed consummate skill as an advocate.... After him there was silence in the Union for several minutes, and then Mr Manning of Baliol rose.’ He was on the side of Byron; and when the votes were taken the members present agreed with him.
Mr Gladstone, in a conversation with the author of the life of Cardinal Manning, has given a rather different account of the matter:
‘There was an invasion of barbarians among civilized men, or of civilized men among barbarians. Cambridge men used to look down upon us at Oxford as prim and behind the times. A deputation from the Society of the Apostles at Cambridge, consisting of Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam, and Sunderland, came to set up among us the cult of Shelley; or at any rate, to introduce the School of Shelley as against the Byronic School at Oxford—Shelley that is, not in his negative, but in his spiritual side. I knew Hallam at Eton, and, I believe, was the intermediary in bringing about the discussion[84].’
This view, that the commission of the three knights-errant emanated from the Apostles, and not from themselves, or from the Union Society, is borne out to some degree by Blakesley’s account. But for this we have no space. We will conclude with Manning’s admirable description of the scene. It occurs in a letter dated 3 November, 1866—just after Lord Houghton had made his speech at the Cambridge Union.
‘I do not believe that I was guilty of the rashness of throwing the javelin over the Cam. It was, I think, a passage of arms got up by the Eton men of the two Unions. My share, if any, was only as a member of the august committee of the green baize table. I can, however, remember the irruption of the three Cambridge orators. We Oxford men were precise, orderly, and morbidly afraid of excess in word or manner. The Cambridge oratory came in like a flood into a mill-pond. Both Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam took us aback by the boldness and freedom of their manner. But I remember the effect of Sunderland’s declaration and action to this day. It had never been seen or heard before among us; we cowered like birds, and ran like sheep.... I acknowledge that we were utterly routed. Lord Houghton’s beautiful reviving of those old days has in it something fragrant and sweet, and brings back old faces and old friendships, very dear as life is drawing to its close.’
Mr Milnes had always wished that his son should become distinguished in that Houseof Commons where he had himself made so brilliant adébut. With this object in view, he had urged him to cultivate speaking in public, and probably the only part of his Cambridge career which he viewed with complete satisfaction was his interest in, and success at, the Union Debating Society. But even in this they did not quite agree. Mr Milnes urged his son to take a decided line, and to lead the Union. But the only answer he could get was, ‘If there is one thing on which I have ever prided myself, it is on having no politics at all, and judging every measure by its individual merits. A leader there must be a violent politician and a party politician, or he must have a private party. I shall never be the one or have the other.’ Again, they were at variance on the burning question of the day, the Reform Bill. Mr Milnes, though a Conservative, was in favour of it; his son described it as ‘the curse and degradation of the nation.’ Further, while exhorting his son to prepare himself for public life, with a singleness of purpose that, if adhered to, would have excluded other and more congenial pursuits, Mr Milnes warned him that his circumstances would not allow him to enter parliament. Nowonder, therefore, that the young man became perplexed and melancholy, and more than ever anxious to find a refuge for his aspirations in literature.
While these questions were pending between father and son, the pecuniary embarrassments to which we have already alluded entered upon an acute stage, and in 1829 the whole family left England for five years. If Mr Milnes ever submitted his own actions to the test of rigorous examination, he must have concluded that he had himself brought about the very result which he was most anxious to prevent; for it was this enforced residence on the Continent which, more than any other influence, shaped the character of his son. Mr Milnes evidently wished him to become a country gentleman like himself, and, if he must write, to be ‘a pamphleteer on guano and on grain.’ Instead of this, while he kept his loyalty to England with unbroken faith, he divested himself of English narrowness, and acquired that intimate knowledge of the other members of the European family, and, we may add, that catholicity of taste, for which he was so conspicuous. Probably no public man of the present century understood the Continent sowell as Milnes. In many ways he was a typical Englishman; but he was also a citizen of the world.
The first resting-place of the family was Boulogne, and there Milnes made his first acquaintance with Frenchmen and their literature. The romantic school was beginning to engross public attention, and Victor Hugo—then, as afterwards, the ‘stormy voice of France’—became his favourite French poet. But, great as was the interest which Milnes felt in France, he was too eager for knowledge to be content with one language and one literature, and, rejecting his father’s suggestion that he should spend some time in Paris, he spent most of the summer and autumn of 1830 at Bonn, in order to learn German. We suspect that he must have taken this step at the suggestion of Thirlwall, for it was he who introduced him to Professor Brandis, and probably also to the veteran Niebuhr. Thence, his family having migrated to Milan, he crossed the Alps, and made his first acquaintance with Italy, which became, we might almost say, the country of his adoption. He felt a deep sympathy for the Italian people in their aspirations for liberty, and though, as was natural athis age, he enjoyed the society of the Austrian vice-regal Court, he longed to see the foreigner expelled from Italy. Other Italian cities were visited in due course, and, lastly, Rome. Where-ever he went, he managed, with a skill that was peculiarly his own, to know the most interesting people, and to be welcomed with equal warmth by persons of the most opposite opinions. It was no small feat to have known both Italians and Austrians at Milan; but at Rome, besides his English acquaintances, he formed lasting friendships with the Chevalier Bunsen and his family, and with Dr Wiseman, M. Rio, M. Montalembert, and other catholics of distinction. The Church of Rome must always have great attractions for a young man of deep feeling and with no settled principles of faith, and we gather that Milnes was at one time not indisposed to join it. His feelings in that time of unrest and perplexity are well indicated in the following lines, written at Rome in 1834:
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,Watch every action, but not catch one tone;Amid a thousand breathless votaries,To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—Are images of that which, hour by hour,Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.‘The Beauty of the past before my eyesStands ever in each fable-haunted place,I know her form in every dark disguise,But never look upon her open face;O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,Yet just enough to make the sickened mindGrieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome diseaseOf Past and Present is an alien thing,Thou pure Existence! whose severe decreesForbid a living man his soul to bringInto a timeless Eden of sweet ease,Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wingIn death upon me—if that way aloneThy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,Watch every action, but not catch one tone;Amid a thousand breathless votaries,To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—Are images of that which, hour by hour,Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.‘The Beauty of the past before my eyesStands ever in each fable-haunted place,I know her form in every dark disguise,But never look upon her open face;O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,Yet just enough to make the sickened mindGrieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome diseaseOf Past and Present is an alien thing,Thou pure Existence! whose severe decreesForbid a living man his soul to bringInto a timeless Eden of sweet ease,Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wingIn death upon me—if that way aloneThy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,Watch every action, but not catch one tone;Amid a thousand breathless votaries,To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—Are images of that which, hour by hour,Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,
And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;
To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,
Watch every action, but not catch one tone;
Amid a thousand breathless votaries,
To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—
Are images of that which, hour by hour,
Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.
‘The Beauty of the past before my eyesStands ever in each fable-haunted place,I know her form in every dark disguise,But never look upon her open face;O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,Yet just enough to make the sickened mindGrieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.
‘The Beauty of the past before my eyes
Stands ever in each fable-haunted place,
I know her form in every dark disguise,
But never look upon her open face;
O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,
Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,
Yet just enough to make the sickened mind
Grieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.
‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome diseaseOf Past and Present is an alien thing,Thou pure Existence! whose severe decreesForbid a living man his soul to bringInto a timeless Eden of sweet ease,Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wingIn death upon me—if that way aloneThy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’
‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome disease
Of Past and Present is an alien thing,
Thou pure Existence! whose severe decrees
Forbid a living man his soul to bring
Into a timeless Eden of sweet ease,
Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wing
In death upon me—if that way alone
Thy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’
An interesting picture of Milnes at about this period has been drawn by Mr Aubrey de Vere, whom he visited in Ireland during one of his brief absences from Italy.
‘He remained with us a good many days, though when he left us they seemed too few. We showed him whatever of interest our neighbourhood boasts, and he more than repaid us by the charm of his conversation, his lively descriptions of foreign ways, his good-humour, his manifold accomplishments, and the extraordinary range of his information, both as regards books and men. He could hardly have then been more than two-and-twenty, and yet he wasalready well acquainted with the languages and literatures of many different countries, and not a few of their most distinguished men, living or recently dead. I well remember the vivid picture which he drew of Niebuhr’s profound grief at the downfall of the restored monarchy in France, at the renewal of its Revolution in 1830. He was delivering a series of historical lectures at the time, and Milnes was one of the young men attending the course. One day they had long to wait for their Professor; at last the aged historian entered the lecture-hall, his form drooping, and his whole aspect grief-stricken. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have no apology for detaining you; a calamity has befallen Europe which must undo all the restorative work recently done, and throw back her social and political progress—perhaps for centuries. The Revolution has broken out again’ (vol. i. p. 115).
One episode of these foreign experiences deserves a separate notice. In 1832 Milnes spent some months in Greece with his friend Mr Christopher Wordsworth, a scholar whoseAthens and Atticahas long been a classical text-book. But Milnes was more powerfully attracted by the sight of Grecian independence than by the relics of her ancient glory. The volume which he published on his return, calledMemorials of a Tour in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical(his first independent literary venture, it may be remarked), contains but scanty references to antiquity. He was keenly interested in the efforts of Greece to obtain asettled government of her own, and through all the drawbacks and discomforts which, as a traveller, he had to endure from the Greeks, he firmly adhered to the cause of freedom. He even advocated the immediate restoration of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. But Milnes had a mind which was singularly free from prejudice, and even in those early days he had learnt to consider both sides of every question, and to keep his sympathies controlled by his judgment. He probably approached Greece with the enthusiasm for a liberated nation which had so deeply stirred even the most indifferent in England; but he left it ‘with an affection for the Turkish character which he never entirely lost, and which enabled him in very different days, then far distant, to understand the political exigencies of the East better than many politicians of more pretentious character and fame.’
We have dwelt on Milnes’s early years at some length, because their history throws considerable light on his subsequent career, and accounts for most of the difficulties that he experienced when he made his first entrance into London society. ‘Conceive the man,’ said Carlyle: ‘a most bland-smiling, semi-quizzical,affectionate, high-bred, Italianised little man, who has long olive-blonde hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society!’ If the rough Scotch moralist was not in an unusually bad humour when he wrote these words, it is not to be wondered at that Milnes was regarded for a time as a dangerous person, ‘anxious to introduce foreign ways and fashions into the conservative fields of English life.’ But this dislike of him was very transient, and in less than a year after his return to England he had ‘made a conquest of the social world.’ That he was still looked upon as an oddity seems certain, and even his intimate friend Charles Buller could exclaim: ‘I often think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct;’ but people soon became willing to accept him on his own terms for the sake of his wit and brilliancy, and, we may add, of his kind heart. Some nicknames that survived long after their application had lost its point, are worth remembering as illustrations of what was once thought of him; perhaps still more for the sake of the letter which Sydney Smith wrote on being accused, quite groundlessly, of having invented them.
‘Dear Milnes,—Never lose your good temper, which is one of your best qualities, and which has carried you hitherto safely through your startling eccentricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a lost man. No man can combine the defects of opposite characters. The names of “Cool of the evening,” “London Assurance,” and “In-I-go Jones,” are, I give you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of importance; they are safety-valves, and if you could by paying sixpence get rid of them, you had better keep your money. You do me but justice in acknowledging that I have spoken much good of you. I have laughed at you for those follies which I have told you of to your face; but nobody has more readily and more earnestly asserted that you are a very agreeable, clever man, with a very good heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and that you amply deserve to be retained in the place to which you had too hastily elevated yourself by manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic people. I thank you for what you say of my good-humour. Lord Dudley, when I took leave of him, said to me: “You have been laughing at me for the last seven years, and you never said anything that I wished unsaid.” This pleased me.
‘Ever yours,
‘Sydney Smith[86].’
When we read that Milnes ‘made a conquest of society,’ it must not be supposed that he was a mere pleasure-seeker. On the contrary, as Mr Reid says in another place, ‘he had too great a reverence for what was good and pure and true, too consuming a desire to hold his own with the best intellects of histime, and, above all, too deep a sympathy with the suffering and the wronged to allow him to fall a victim to these temptations.’ From the first, then, he ‘sought to combine the world of pleasure and the world of intellect.’ A list of his friends would contain the names of the best-known men of the day, but, at the same time, men who had but little in common: Carlyle, Sterling, Maurice, Spedding, Thackeray, Tennyson, Landor, Hallam, Rogers, Macaulay, Sydney Smith. ‘He became an intimate member of circles differing so widely from each other as those of Lansdowne House, Holland House, Gore House, and the Sterling Club’; and as a host he was notorious for mingling together the most discordant social elements. Disraeli sketched him inTancredunder a disguise so thin that nobody could fail to penetrate it:
‘Mr Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. 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. He prided himself on figuring as the socialmedium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust’ (vol. i. p. 337).
When some one asked if a celebrated murderer had been hanged, the reply he got was: ‘I hope so, or Richard will have him at his breakfast-table next Thursday;’ and Thirlwall, when his friend was on the brink of marriage, thus alludes to past felicity:
‘It is very likely, nay certain, that you will still collect agreeable people about your wife’s breakfast-table; but can I ever sit down there without the certainty that I shall meet with none but respectable persons? It may be an odd thing for a Bishop to lament, but I cannot help it’ (vol. i. p. 448).
After all it seems probable that Milnes himself, and not the lion of the hour, was the chief attraction at those parties. He delighted in the best sort of conversation—that which he called ‘the rapid counterplay and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,’ and he did his best to revive the practice of that almost forgotten art—l’art de causer. As Mr Reid says:
‘How brilliant and amusing he was over the dinner-table or the breakfast-table was known to all his friends. Overflowing with information, his mind was lightened by a bright wit, whilst his immense stores of appropriate anecdotes enabled him to give point and colour to every topic which was brought under discussion’ (vol. i. p. 189).
At the same time he did not fall into the fatal error of taking the talk into his own hands, and delivering a monologue, as too many social celebrities have done before and since. He had the happy art of making his guests talk, while he listened, and threw in a remark from time to time, to give new life when the conversation seemed to flag. Carlyle, in a letter written to his wife during his first visit to Fryston, gives us a lifelike portrait of Milnes when thus engaged:
‘Richard, I find, lays himself out while in this quarter to do hospitalities, and of course to collect notabilities about him, and play them off one against the other. I am his trump-card at present. The Sessions are at Pontefract even now, and many lawyers there. These last two nights he has brought a trio of barristers to dine, producing champagne, &c.... Last night our three was admitted to be a kind of failure, three greater blockheads ye wadna find in Christendee. Richard had to exert himself; but he is really dexterous, the villain. He pricks you with questions, with remarks, with all kinds of fly-tackle to make you bite, does generally contrive to get you into some sort of speech. And then his good humour is extreme; you look in his face and forgive him all his tricks’ (vol. i. p. 256).
As a pendant to this we will quote Mr Forster’s description of Milnes and Carlyle together:
‘Monckton Miles came yesterday and left this morning—a pleasant, companionable little man—delighting in paradoxes, but good-humoured ones; defending all manner of people and principles in order to provoke Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have succeeded to his heart’s content, and for a time we had a most amusing evening, reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a fierce cat’s tail backwards, and getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks. He managed to avoid the threatened scratches’ (vol. i. p. 387).
Milnes entered Parliament in 1837 as Conservative member for Pontefract. His friends were rather surprised at his selection of a party, for even then his views on most subjects were decidedly Liberal. Thirlwall, for instance, wrote:
‘I can hardly bring myself now to consider you a Tory, or indeed as belonging to a party at all; and although I am aware how difficult, and even dangerous, it is for a public man to keep aloof from all parties, still my first hope as well as expectation as to your political career is that it may be distinguished by some degree of originality’ (vol. i. p. 199).
These hopes were realized to an extent that none of Milnes’s friends would have expected or perhaps desired. From the outset he maintained an independence of thought and action which did him the utmost credit as a man of honour, but which ruined his chancesof obtaining that success which is measured by the attainment of official dignity. And yet, as Mr Reid tells us, he was more ambitious of political than of literary distinction. But the fates were against him. In the first place, his oratorical style did not suit the House, though as an after-dinner speaker he was conspicuously successful. He ‘had modelled himself on the old style of political oratory, and gave his hearers an impression of affectation.’ Then he would not vote straight with his party. He took a line of his own about Canada and the Ballot; he voted on the opposite side to Peel on the question of a large remission of capital punishments; and he wroteOne Tract More, ‘an eloquent and earnest plea for toleration for the Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm,’ which shocked the Protestants in general, and the electors of Pontefract in particular. Perhaps he was too much in earnest; perhaps he was not a sufficiently important person to be silenced by office; perhaps, as Mr Reid says, ‘public opinion in England always insists upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the man of letters and the man of affairs;’ but, whatever might be the reason, Sir Robert Peel passed him overwhen forming his Administration in 1841—nay, rather, appears never to have turned his thoughts in his direction. Milnes was grievously disappointed, but with characteristic lightheartedness set at once to work to make himself more thoroughly fit for the post he specially coveted, the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. He went to Paris, got intimate with Guizot, De Tocqueville, Montalembert—‘that English aristocrat foisted into the middle of French democracy’—and other leading statesmen. Through them, and by help of his natural gift of knowing everybody he wished to know, he managed to include Louis Philippe among those by whom he was accepted as a sort of unaccredited English envoy. He kept Peel informed of the views of Guizot and the King, and Peel replied with a message to the former in a letter which shows that he was quite ready to make use of Milnes, though not to reward him. On his return he gave Peel a general support on the Corn Laws, while regretting that his ‘measures were not of a more liberal character;’ he interested himself in the passing of the Copyright Bill, a measure in respect of which he was accepted as the representative of men of letters; andhe travelled in the East, no doubt to study Oriental politics on the spot. A letter he wrote to Peel from Smyrna is full of shrewd observation and far-reaching insight into the Eastern Question; but, on his return, he published a volume of poems calledPalm Leaves. Now Peel, like a certain Hanoverian monarch who hated ‘boetry and bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had written a pamphlet calledThe Real Union of England and Ireland, on which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post, but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this itcannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it. As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards:
‘Via medianever answers in politics, and somehow or other I never can get out of it. My Laodicean spirit is the ruin of me. From having lived with all sorts of people, and seen good in all, the broad black lines of judgment that people usually draw seem to me false and foolish, and I think my own finer ones just as distinct, though no one can see them but myself’ (vol. i. p. 360).
Before long Milnes found a more congenial position on the opposite side of the House. But it must not be supposed that he rushed into sudden and rancorous opposition to his old leader. So long as Peel remained in office, he allowed no personal considerations to interfere with his support of him; and he steadily refused to join those who rebelled when he announced his conversion to Free Trade. Meanwhile, his interest in the burning question of the day being little more than formal, he turned his attention to a social question in which he had long been interested, and introduceda Bill for the establishment of reformatories for juvenile offenders. Among the many combinations of opposite tastes and tendencies with which Milnes was fond of startling the world, could one more curious be imagined than this—the literary exquisite and the criminal unwashed? But in fact this is only a single instance out of many which could be produced to show that the cynical selfishness he affected was only a mask which hid his real nature; perhaps assumed for the sake of concealing from his left hand what his right hand was doing so well. The proposal, we are told, ‘was scoffed at by many politicians of eminence when it was first put forward.’ But Milnes was not to be daunted by rebuffs, and ‘he persevered with his proposal, until he had the great happiness of seeing reformatories established under the sanction of the law, and of becoming himself the president of the first and greatest of these noble institutions, that at Redhill.’ His very genuine sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, especially when young, is testified to by one of his intimate friends, Miss Nightingale:
‘His brilliancy and talents in tongue or pen—whether political, social, or literary—were inspired chiefly by good-willtowards man; but he had the same voice and manners for the dirty brat as he had for a duchess, the same desire to give pleasure and good. Once, at Redhill, where we were with a party, and the chiefs were explaining to us the system in the court-yard, a mean, stunted, villainous-looking little fellow crept across the yard (quite out of order, and by himself), and stole a dirty paw into Mr Milnes’s hand. Not a word passed; the boy stayed quite quiet and quite contented if he could but touch his benefactor who had placed him there. He was evidently not only his benefactor, but his friend’ (vol. ii. p. 7).
Milnes had been called a Liberal-Conservative during the first ten years of his parliamentary life. He now became a Conservative-Liberal; but the transposition of the adjective made little, if any, change in his political conduct. He was as insubordinate in the latter position as he had been in the former. He took Lord Palmerston as his leader and chosen friend; but he did not always side with him. In the debates on the Conspiracy Bill, after the attempt of Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III., Milnes spoke and voted against his chief; and on the measure for abolishing the East India Company he was equally indifferent to the claims of party. As time went on, he drifted out of party politics altogether; and both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which he entered in 1863,it was to measures of a private character, or to measures of social reform, that he gave his attention. He advocated help to Lady Franklin in her expedition to clear up the mystery of her husband’s fate; he was in favour of female suffrage; of the abolition of public executions; and he led the agitation for legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. At the same time he cordially supported the Liberal party on all great occasions. Speaking of the abortive Reform Bill of 1866, Mr Reid remarks:
‘Houghton held strongly to the Liberal side throughout the movement, and again afforded proof of the fact that his elevation to the House of Lords had strengthened, rather than weakened, his faith in the people and in popular institutions. Early in April he presided at one of the great popular meetings in favour of Reform. The scene of the meeting was the Cloth Hall at Leeds—a spot famous in the political history of the West Riding—and Lord Houghton’s speech was as advanced in tone as the most thoroughgoing Reformer could have wished it to be. He was, indeed, one of the very few peers who took an open and pronounced part in the agitation of the year’ (vol. ii. p. 151).
This is only one instance, out of many that could be adduced. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought of some of the later developments of his party. It is almost needless to say that he never regardedLord Beaconsfield as a serious politician. On the eve of his return from Berlin in 1878, he writes: ‘I hope to be in my place on Thursday, to see the reception of the Great Adventurer. Whether from knowing him so well, or from the sarcastic temperament of old age, the whole thing looks to me like a comedy, with as much relation to serious politics as Punch to real life.’ At the same time he had not been a thoroughgoing supporter of Mr Gladstone’s agitation against the Turks, and he had warned that statesman so far back as 1871, that ‘a demon, not of demagoguism, but of demophilism, is tempting you sorely.’
Advancing years and disappointed hopes caused no abatement in his interest in foreign affairs. The events of 1848 had been specially interesting to him; and at the close of that year he produced what Mr Reid well describes as ‘a striking and instructive’ pamphlet, entitledA Letter to the Marquis of Lansdowne. The author reviews the events of the year, and supports the thesis that ‘the Liberals of the Continent had not proved themselves unworthy of the sympathy of England.’ We have no room for an analysis of this masterly work, but we cannot refrain from quoting one remarkablepassage in which he foreshadows French intervention in Italy. After describing measures by which Austria intended to make the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom a second Poland, he proceeds:
‘And France, whatever be her adventures in government, will not easily have so dulled her imagination or quelled her enthusiasm as to be unmoved by appeals to the deeds of Marengo and Lodi, and to suffer an expiring nation at her very door to cry in vain for help and protection, not against the restraints of an orderly authority, but against fierce invaders intent upon her absolute destruction’ (vol. i. p. 413).
This pamphlet made a great sensation. In England it was received, for the most part, with dislike and apprehension. Carlyle was almost alone in praising it. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘it is the greatest thing he has yet done; earnest and grave, written in a large, tolerant, kind-hearted spirit, and, as far as I can see, saying all that is to be said onthatmatter.’ But the strongest proof of the power of the pamphlet is the fact that the Austrians stopped the writer on the Hungarian frontier when travelling with his wife in 1851, as a person who could not breathe that revolutionary atmosphere without danger to the empire. In his later years foreign travel became almost anecessity to Lord Houghton; and as he had then fewer ties to bind him to England, his absences were more frequent and more prolonged. He travelled in France, no longer as an envoy without credentials, but for his private information, or to be the guest of Guizot and De Tocqueville; he became the friend of the accomplished Queen of Holland; he represented the Geographical Society at the opening of the Suez Canal; he made a triumphal progress through the United States; and only three years before his death he went again to Egypt and Greece.
Throughout his life Milnes approached public events with a singular sobriety of judgment. He was never led away by popular clamour, but formed his opinions, on principle, after mature deliberation. It is almost needless to add that he generally found himself on the unpopular side. When England went mad over the Crimean war, Milnes wrote calmly: ‘For my own part I like neither of the combatants, though I prefer a feeble and superannuated despotism as less noxious to mankind than one young and vigorous, and assisted by the appliances of modern intelligence.’ During the American civil war, he ‘broke away fromhis own class, and ranged himself on the side of the friends of the North, with an earnestness not inferior to that of Mr Bright and Mr Forster.’ Mr Reid tell us that this conduct won for Milnes that popularity with the masses, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which all his previous efforts had failed to obtain, and that he found himself, to his great surprise, one of the popular idols. In 1870, again, he was on the unpopular side: ‘I am Prussian to the backbone,’ he wrote, ‘which is a pure homage to principle, as they are the least agreeable people in the world.’
We have been at pains to set forth Milnes’s political acts and convictions in some detail, because he has been frequently represented as a gayfarceur, who took up politics as a pastime. It is not, however, as a politician that he will be remembered, but as a man of letters. In his younger days he achieved distinction as a writer of verse, and Landor hailed him as ‘the greatest poet now living in England.’ This judgment may nowadays provoke a smile; but, though it is not to be expected that his poems will recover their former popularity, they hardly deserve to have fallen into complete neglect. As Mr Reid says:
‘A great singer he may not have been; a sweet singer with a charm of his own he undoubtedly was; nor did his charm consist alone in the melody of which he was a master. In many of his poems real poetic thought is linked with musical words; whilst in everything that he wrote, whether in verse or in prose, one may discern the brightest characteristics of the man himself: the catholicity of his spirit; the tenderness of his sympathy with weakness, suffering, mortal frailty in all its forms; the ardour of his faith in something that should break down the artificial barriers by which classes are divided, and bring into the lives of all a measure of that light and happiness which he relished so highly for himself’ (vol. ii. p. 438).
For his prose works, or at least for some of them, we predict a very different fate. We do not like even to think of an age that will refuse to admire the charming style, the real dramatic power, the exquisite tact, and the fine taste which distinguish hisLife of Keats, and hisMonographs, to which we have already alluded. Other essays, probably of equal merit, lie scattered in Reviews and Magazines. We hope that before long we may see the best of these collected together. Such a series, which would cover a period of nearly sixty years, would form a most important chapter in the history of English literature.
Besides his reputation as a writer, Milnes occupied an unique position towards the worldof letters, which it is not quite easy to define. It is not enough to say that he was a Mæcenas, though he knew and entertained the whole literary community both in London and at Fryston—a house which, as Thackeray said, ‘combined all the graces of the château and the tavern’; or that he was always ready to lend a helping hand to those in distress, though he spent a fortune in generously and delicately assisting others. His peculiar characteristics were a rare gift in detecting merit, and an untiring energy in bringing it out, and setting it in a position where it could bloom and flourish and be recognized by other people. In effecting this he spared no pains, and shrank from no annoyance. Often, indeed, he must have risked his own popularity by his importunity for favours to be conferred on others. Mr Reid describes at length the amusing scene between him and Sir Robert Peel, when he solicited and obtained pensions for Tennyson and Sheridan Knowles, of neither of whom the Minister had ever heard; and to Milnes must also be allowed the credit of having been the first, or nearly the first, to bring into prominent recognition the merits of Mr John Forster. He possessed, too, in a very high degree, thegift of sympathy, and, as a consequence, of influence. ‘Ever since I knew you,’ said his friend Macarthy, ‘you have been the chief person in my life; a friend and brother and confessor—the end and aim of all my actions and hopes’; and Robert Browning, in a long and most interesting letter, written to ask Milnes to use his interest to get him appointed secretary to the minister whom England, as he then believed, ‘must send before the year ends to this fine fellow, Pio Nono[87],’ admits that his own interest in Italy was due in the first instance to Milnes’s influence. ‘One gets excited,’ he says, ‘at least here on the spot, by this tiptoe strained expectation of poor dear Italy, and yet, if I had not known you, I believe I should have looked on with other bystanders.’ We have said that he was charitable; but to say this is to give an imperfect idea of the efforts he would make for literary men in difficulties. When Hood was in distress he found that he ‘preferred to receive assistance in the shape of gratuitous literary work for his magazine rather than in money.’ Milnes not only contributed himself, but ‘canvassed right and left among his friends for contributions.’Nor was his help confined to the person whose work he valued. ‘The interest and friendship which the genius had aroused,’ says Mr Reid, ‘was extended to his or her friends and connexions. Many a widow and many an orphan had occasion to be thankful that the husband or father had during his lifetime excited the admiration of Milnes. Years after the death of Charlotte Brontë we find him trying to smooth the path of her father, and to secure preferment in the Church for her husband.’ This is only one instance out of many that might be adduced. Again, he seemed to regard his critical faculty as a trust for the benefit of others, and was never more congenially employed than in drawing attention to some young poet who had no influential friends. In proof of this we will only refer our readers to the touching story of poor David Gray, whom he nursed with almost feminine tenderness, and whose poem,The Luggie, he edited; and to his early recognition of the genius of Mr Swinburne, to whose merits he drew attention by an article in theEdinburgh Review. In close connexion with this kind help to men of whom he knew little or nothing may be mentioned his interest in the Newspaper PressFund. The formation of such a fund was strenuously resisted, we are told, by the most influential members of the Press; but Milnes, from the first, brought the whole weight of his social influence to its support, and contributed, more than any other man, to its permanent and successful establishment.
Nor should his kindness to young men be forgotten. He may have sought their society in the first instance from the pleasure he took in all that was bright, and entertaining, and unaffected; but, as we have already tried to point out, his motives were commonly underlaid by some serious purpose which it was not always easy to discover. We do not maintain that he was specially successful in drawing young men out, for his own talk was often scrappy, anecdotical, and difficult to follow; still less do we mean that he tried to influence them in any particular direction by improving conversation, or the enunciation of any special opinions in politics or literature. But he certainly made his juniors feel sure of his sympathy and his good-will.
Of Milnes’s religious opinions it is difficult to give any positive account. His family had been Unitarian; at college he became anEvangelical; soon afterwards he fell under the influence of Irving, whom he proclaimed to be ‘the apostle of the age.’ Then, during his residence in Italy, as we have already mentioned, he chose Dr Wiseman for his intimate friend, and the higher Roman Catholic clergy had hopes of his conversion. ‘Mezzofanti,’ wrote one of his friends in 1832, ‘is full of hopes that you will return to the bosom of her whom Carlyle calls “the slain mother”.’ But, during this same period, while passing through what he calls ‘the twilight of his mind,’ he was the friend of Sterling and Maurice and Thirlwall, under whose influence he was hardly likely to submit to an infallible Church. He himself said that he was prevented from joining the Church of Rome by the uprising of a Catholic school in the Church of England. To this movement, as we have seen, he was deeply attached, and both spoke and wrote in its defence. In one of his commonplace books he called himself a Puseyite sceptic; sometimes he said he was a crypto-Catholic, and to the last he never entirely shook off the impressions of his youth. But Mr Reid is probably right in describing him as ‘a tolerant, liberal-minded man, apt to look at religion from many differentpoints of view.’ We are not aware that he ever took part in any directly religious movement, or ever declared his allegiance to the Church of England except as a political organization. Partly from a love of paradox, partly from a habit of looking round a question rather than directly at it, he would have had something to say in defence of almost any system of religion, while his unfeigned charity would induce him to adopt that which recognized most fully the claims of suffering humanity.
Lord Houghton died at Vichy, August 11, 1885. He had been in failing health for some time, but the end was sudden and unexpected. Only a few hours before it came he had been entertaining a mixed company at thetable d’hôteby the brilliancy and variety of his conversation. It might almost be said that he died, as he had lived, in society.
We have tried to eliminate what we believe to have been the real Milnes from a cloud of misrepresentations and erroneous judgments—for both of which, it must be remembered, he was himself directly responsible. We leave to our readers the task of passing sentence on a singularly amiable, if eccentric, personality. Some opinions expressed by those who understoodhim and valued him will appropriately close this article. When he was young his friends recognized in him what Dr Johnson would have called the potentiality of greatness, though they doubted whether he would have sufficient steadiness of purpose to achieve it. ‘Your gay and airy mind,’ wrote Tennyson in 1833, ‘must have caught as many colours from the landscape you moved through as a flying soap-bubble—a comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such.’ ‘I think you are near something very glorious,’ said Stafford O’Brien, ‘but you will never reach it.’ Mr Aubrey de Vere decided that ‘he had not much solid ambition. The highlands of life were not what interested him much; its mountains cast their shadows too far and drew down too many clouds.’ But, if Milnes’s well-wishers were compelled to abandon their hopes of any great distinction for their friend, they recognized, with one accord, his charity and his sincerity. If they did not admire him, they loved him. ‘You are on the whole a good man,’ said Carlyle, ‘though with terrible perversities.’ Forster declared that he himself had ‘many friends who would be kind to him in distress, but onlyone who would be equally kind to him in disgrace.’ A distinguished German said of him, ‘Is it possible that an Englishman can be so loveable?’ and Mr Sumner described him as ‘a member of Parliament, a poet and a man of fashion, a Tory who does not forget the people, and a man of fashion with sensibilities, love of virtue and merit among the simple, the poor, and the lowly.’ Lastly, let us cite his own whimsical character of himself, which, though expressed in the language of paradox, is probably, in the main, nearer to the truth than one drawn by any critic could be:
‘He was a man of no common imaginative perceptions, who never gave his full conviction to anything but the closest reasoning; of acute sensibilities, who always distrusted the affections; of ideal aspirations and sensual habits; of the most cheerful manners and of the gloomiest philosophy. He hoped little and believed little, but he rarely despaired, and never valued unbelief, except as leading to some larger truth and purer conviction’ (vol. ii. p. 491).