Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personal friendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last volume of the Disraeli _Life_. But the ultimate parting between himself and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862. If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a fairy-tale.