It would be foreign to my purpose to criticize Lord Houghton as a poet. My object in these chapters is merely to record the characteristic traits of eminent men who have honoured me with their friendship, and among those there is none for whose memory I cherish a warmer sentiment of affectionate gratitude than for him whose likeness I have now tried to sketch. His was the most precious of combinations--a genius and a heart. An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the present hour[4] impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which, even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's judgment quoted above--that "he was a poet, and a true poet." Here is the lyrical cry which, writing in 1843, he puts into the mouth of Greece:-- "And if to his old Asian seat, From this usurped, unnatural throne, The Turk is driven, 'tis surely meet That we again should hold our own; Be but Byzantium's native sign Of Cross on Crescent[5] once unfurled, And Greece shall guard by right divine The portals of the Easter world." FOOTNOTES: [4] March 1897. [5] The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the Conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the Grecian city--among others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus. VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY. In these chapters I have been trying to recall some notable people through whom I have been brought into contact with the social life of the past. I now propose to give the impressions which they conveyed to me of the moral, material, and political condition of England just at the moment when the old order was yielding place to new, and modern Society was emerging from the birth-throes of the French Revolution. All testimony seems to me to point to the fact that towards the close of the eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed by profligacy. Morality, discarded alike by high and low, took refuge in the great Middle Class, then, as now, deeply influenced by Evangelical Dissent. A dissolute Heir-Apparent presided over a social system in which not merely religion but decency was habitually disregarded. At his wedding he was so drunk that his attendant dukes "could scarcely support him from falling."[6] The Princes of the Blood were notorious for a freedom of life and manners which would be ludicrous if it were not shocking. Here I may cite an unpublished diary[7] of Lord Robert Seymour (son of the first Marquis of Hertford), who was born in 1748 and died in 1831. He was a man of fashion and a Member of Parliament; and these are some of the incidents which he notes in 1788:--