He disliked Irishmen “in the lump,” saying that human nature is the same everywhere except in Ireland. Parnell he personally admired, though hating Home Rule; and stigmatized as gross hypocrisy the desertion of him by Liberals after the divorce trial. He was wont to speak irreverently of Lord Beaconsfield, whom he had known well at Lady Blessington’s in early days. He would have found himself in accord with Huxley, who used to thank God, his friend Mr. Fiske tells us, that he had never bowed the knee either to Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli. He poured scorn on the Treaty of Berlin. Russia, he said, defeating the Turks in war, has defeated Beaconsfield in diplomacy. If Englishmen understood such things they would see that the Congress was a comedy; anyone who will satisfy himself as to what Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then look at the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will see that, thanks to Beaconsfield’s imbecility, Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal diplomatic triumphs that was ever won. {140} A sound _entente_ between Russia and England he thought both possible and desirable; but conceived it to be rendered difficult by the want of steadiness and capacity which, for international purposes, were the real faults of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury. He repeated with much amusement the current anecdote of Lord Beaconsfield’s conquest of Mrs. Gladstone. Meeting her in society, he was said to have inquired with tenderness after Mr. Gladstone’s health, and then after receiving the loving wife’s report of her William, to have rejoined in his most dulcet tones, “Ah! take care of him, for he is very _very_ precious.” He always attributed Dizzy’s popularity to the feeling of Englishmen that he had “shown them sport,” an instinct, he thought, supreme in all departments of the English mind.