In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in December, 1891. It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection. The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle. Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took, by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous as the moment was. There is a passage in _Eleanor_ which commemorates first this playful sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl, is lunching at the Embassy. "Ah! my dear lady!" said the Ambassador, "how few things in this world one does to please one's self! This is one of them." Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers--with a charming and paternal freedom. "Have you enjoyed yourself?--have you lost your heart to Italy?" said her host stooping to her....