Here he worked through the morning; the afternoon took him to the “Travellers,” where his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. Chenery, usually expected him; then at eight o’clock, if not, as Shylock says, bid forth, he went to dine at the Athenæum. His dinner seat was in the left-hand corner of the coffee-room, where, in the thirties, Theodore Hook had been wont to sit, gathering near him so many listeners to his talk, that at Hook’s death in 1841 the receipts for the club dinners fell off to a large amount. Here, in the “Corner,” as they called it, round Kinglake would be Hayward, Drummond Wolff, Massey, Oliphant, Edward Twisleton, Strzelecki, Storks, Venables, Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American Ticknor, and a few more; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, when in Scotland, sending hampers of pheasants to the company. “Hurried to the Athenæum for dinner,” says Ticknor in 1857, “and there found Kinglake and Sir Henry Rawlinson, to whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling. We pushed our tables together and had a jolly dinner. . . . To the Athenæum; and having dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and Stirling, I hurried off to the House.” In later years, when his voice grew low and his hearing difficult, he preferred that the diners should resolve themselves into little groups, assigning to himself a _tête-à-tête_, with whom at his ease he could unfold himself. No man ever fought more gallantly the encroachments of old age—_on sut être jeune jusque dans ses vieux jours_. At seventy-four years old, staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on riding over to Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick Pollock was staying. “I mastered,” he said, in answer to remonstrances, “I mastered the peculiarities of the Brighton screw before you were born, and have never forgotten them.” Vaulting into his saddle he rode off, returning with a schoolboy’s delight at the brisk trot he had found practicable when once clear of the King’s Road. Long after his hearing had failed, his sight become grievously weakened, and his limbs not always trustworthy, he would never allow a cab to be summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his lodgings. But he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten Row, and more reluctantly still his continental travel. Foreign railways were closed to him by the _Salle d’Attente_; he could not stand incarceration in the waiting-rooms.