The name Richard seems to me to have some significance in confirmation of the above story. Is it likely that if the child had been Lady Hertford’s, she should have chosen the name of her eldest legitimate and deeply-loved son, to bestow it upon an inconvenient accident? To me it seems utterly incredible. Moreover, would it not have been far more likely that she should have tried to smuggle away an unnecessary infant of her own than that she should have dragged the child into all the publicity of the home about which there had already been too much slanderous gossip? Again, Lady Hertford was a woman possessed of great wealth in her own right. Why, if Sir Richard was her son, did she leave the whole of her fortune to her second son, Lord Henry Seymour, and a mere trifle to the favourite to whom she was so kind a patroness? Obviously she relied upon Lord Hertford, as his father, to do everything for him. Not only the facts, but even the whole probabilities, are against the preposterous and malicious story that he was her son. That the old lady was devotedly attached to Sir Richard and made a great pet of him, and that he returned her affection with interest, was a matter of common knowledge. I have seen many letters of hers which attest the fact. When she travelled, he made all the arrangements for her, and took entire charge of her comfort, his bed being made outside her door when they slept at inns in the old posting days. He was her devoted slave, her most faithful watch-dog. Upon his services as secretary, Lord Hertford, as I have said, placed entire reliance, but his office was not altogether a bed of roses. The great man, as a patron, was strict and sometimes severe. Sir Richard, with a taste for speculation on the Bourse, was sometimes in rather strait circumstances, out of which his patron helped him, not without reproof, to the tune of a good many thousand pounds. I have seen a document showing that Lord Hertford in 1854 paid twenty thousand pounds on this account through Messrs. Rothschild. There is in the Wallace Collection a certain engraved crystal tazza of Italian workmanship, a very lovely little gem. Sir Richard, in his poor days, picked it up for a few francs in an old sort of rag-and-bone shop in a street in the neighbourhood of the Temple. Some time afterwards, being rather hard up, he took it to Lord Hertford and asked him to buy it. “No,” was the answer, “I won’t have it. I will not encourage your extravagance; you must learn to be more economical.”