He always followed his friend’s doings with attention. ‘I have just risen,’ he writes July 31, 1883, ‘in a state of singular emotion after perusing your Demosthenic oration at Portsmouth’; and again, ‘I wonder how things are going to-night. I dare say you are delivering a telling speech. (It is the dinner hour, 8.30 P.M.!) How I wish I was there to listen and cheer!’ And again (August 17, 1883): ‘You appear to have been sustaining the whole weight of Opposition. I hope you mean to take a good holiday when it is all over. I am quite clear that W. E. G. has been very much bothered by your Suez Canal questions.’ At another time he counsels reserve: ‘I read with interest both your speeches at Banbury and at Portsmouth, and think that they were as good as the occasion admitted of or demanded. At the same time I wish I could convince you of what Chief Justice Morris calls “the energy of silence.”... Gorst and I took a walk on Sunday on Hampstead Heath. I have never been there before. There is a capital inn there called “Jack Straw’s Castle,” where Gorst and I agreed the Fourth Party ought to go for Saturday and Sunday during the Session to recruit their strength’ (October 2, 1882). He was bitterly offended by the opposition which on various grounds--partly, no doubt, to annoy him--was threatened against his brother’s candidature for the Carlton Club. ‘I am more vexed,’ he wrote from Gastein, ‘than I can tell you about this business of Blandford and the Carlton Club. I wrote to Dyke before starting, particularly enjoining on him the necessity of making no move unless the consent of the committee was assured. And now how can anyone occupy a more unpleasant position than Blandford does? He has publicly changed his politics, to please me more than for any other reason, and owing to H. Chaplin’s action his overtures to the Conservatives are spurned.... H. Chaplin and Baron de Worms together will soon make the Tory party too hot to hold me. I shall certainly take my name off the Carlton when I return to town, and a very little would make me consummate H. C.’s and B. de W.’s joy by retiring altogether from the party and Parliament. They do not know how easy it would be to get rid of me. I am sick of politics, which only play the dickens with one’s health, and are a dreadful tie. I think the party occupies a worse position now than it did in 1880. But its leading members are so purblind, so given over to the most utter infatuation, that I believe they are of opinion that the country would replace them in power. I only trust, for the sake of the country, that they are as mistaken as I believe them to be.’ (August 8, 1883.) Here is the account of a most famous event of which Gastein was the scene:--