Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his political friends as by his political foes. In the time of Sir Michael Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by a leading Tory light as "a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon." The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord Houghton after he had gone away: "A very clever man with a very clever wife. He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack, so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him. But one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they'll never forgive him!" Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden mantelpieces and wainscotings in the "slums" of Dublin. A brisk trade it seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed splendour of the Irish capital. In the last century, when Dublin was further from London than London now is from New York, the Irish landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the Irish Nationalists I know now are. In this way the Iron Duke came to be born in Dublin, where his father and mother had a handsome town house, whereas when they went up to London they used to lodge, according to old Lady Cork, "over a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street." In those days there must have been a good many fine solidly built and well decorated mansions in Dublin, of a type not unlike that of the ample rather stately and periwigged houses, all British brick without, and all Santo Domingo mahogany within, which, in my schoolboy days, used to give such a dignified old-world air to Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia. It is among such of these as are still standing, and have come to vile uses, that the foragers from London now find their harvest.