When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he pocketed the coin, "Ah, my dear boy, the _great_ Lord Hertford, whom foolish people called the _wicked_ Lord Hertford--Thackeray's Steyne and Dizzy's Monmouth--used to say, 'There is no pleasure in winning money from a man who does not feel it.' How true that was!--" And when he saw a young friend at a club supping on _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne, he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain _obiter dicta_ which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a really kind heart. "All men are improved by prosperity," he used to say. Envy, hatred, and malice had no place in his nature. It was a positive enjoyment to him to see other people happy, and a friend's success was as gratifying as his own. His life, though in most respects singularly happy, had not been without its disappointments. At one time he had nursed political ambitions, and his peculiar knowledge of foreign affairs had seemed to indicate a special line of activity and success. But things went differently. He always professed to regard his peerage as "a Second Class in the School of Life," and himself as a political failure. Yet no tinge of sourness, or jealousy, or cynical disbelief in his more successful contemporaries ever marred the geniality of his political conversation. As years advanced he became not (as the manner of most men is) less Liberal, but more so; keener in sympathy with all popular causes; livelier in his indignation against monopoly and injustice. Thirty years ago, in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1866, his character and position were happily hit off by Sir George Trevelyan in a description of a walk down Piccadilly:-- "There on warm midsummer Sundays Fryston's Bard is wont to wend, Whom the Ridings trust and honour, Freedom's staunch and jovial friend: Loved where shrewd hard-handed craftsmen cluster round the northern kilns-- He whom men style Baron Houghton, but the Gods call Dicky Milnes." And eighteen years later there was a whimsical pathos in the phrase in which he announced his fatal illness to a friend: "Yes, I am going to join the Majority--and you know I have always preferred Minorities."