He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord Acton, relating how, a Roman Catholic, yet respecting enlightenment and devoted to books, he once set up and edited a “Quarterly Review,” with a notion of reconciling the Light and the Dark as well as he could; but the “Prince of Darkness, the Pope,” interposed, and ordered him to stop the “Review.” He was compelled to obey; not, he told people, on any religious ground, but because relations and others would have made his life a bore to him if he had been contumacious against the Holy Father. Kinglake was strongly attracted by W. E. Forster, a “rough diamond,” spoken of at one time as a possible Prime Minister. Beginning life, he said, as a Quaker, with narrow opinions, his vigour of character and brain-power shook them off. Powerful, robust, and perfectly honest, yet his honesty inflicted on him a doubleness of view which caused him to be described as engaging his two hands in two different pursuits. His estimate of Sir R. Morier would have gladdened Jowett’s heart; he loved him as a private friend; eulogized his public qualities; rejoiced over his appointment as Ambassador at St. Petersburg, seeing in him a diplomatist with not only a keen intellect and large views, but vibrating with the warmth, animation, friendliness, that are charmingly _un_-diplomatic. Of Carlyle, his life-long, though not always congenial intimate, he used to speak as having great graphic power, but being essentially a humourist; a man who, with those he could trust, never pretended to be in earnest, but used to roar with glorious laughter over the fun of his own jeremiads; “so far from being a prophet he is a bad Scotch joker, and knows himself to be a wind-bag.” He blamed Froude’s revelations of Carlyle in “The Reminiscences,” as injurious and offensive. Froude himself he often likened to Carlyle; the thoughts of both, he said, ran in the same direction, but of the two, Froude was by far the more intellectual man. Staunch friend to the few, polite, though never effusive, to the many, he also nourished strong antipathies. The appearance in Madame Novikoff’s rooms of a certain Scotch bishop invariably drove him out of them, “Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge’s,” he called him. To Von Beust (the Austrian Chancellor), who spoke English in a rapid half-intelligible falsetto, he gave the name of _Mirliton_ (penny trumpet). His allusions to Mirliton and to the Bishop frequently mystified Madame Novikoff’s guests. For he loved to talk in cypher. Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf his brother Eliot’s journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquialisms, inexplicable to all but their two selves.