Our host was a great patron and connoisseur of the drama, and encouraged private theatricals; and I remember a successful evening in which Tom Taylor, and my friend Gowran Vernon[58] assisted me. Lord Shelburne[59] had lately brought with him from Paris a collection of those monster heads which are so often introduced into pantomimes, and we were bent on utilising these valuable properties. Footnote 58: Hon. Gowran Vernon, second son of Robert, first Lord Lyveden. Footnote 59: The late and fourth Lord Lansdowne. It chanced that evening that among the guests, both gentlemen and ladies, there were three or four more than commonly tall, and we therefore imagined the representation of a scene in the land of Brobdingnag, each performer wearing one of the pantomime heads. To me the smallest was allotted, wearing as it did a simpering expression of innocence, bordering on imbecility, as in a juvenile costume I assumed the character of the youthful Glumdalclitch. The eldest hope of the house, then a lovely little boy, dressed in a sailor’s suit, was supposed (by a stretch of imagination) to have been washed on shore, as the diminutive Gulliver. He was presented to me by my gigantic parent as a plaything. Does His Excellency, the Governor-General of India,[60] remember that evening when he cast upon me the most captivating glances of anger and indignation, while I knelt down to caress and admire my newly-acquired flotsam? His anger has long passed away, but not my admiration, for in the little Gulliver of those days I honour the independent Politician, and the high-minded statesman of these. Footnote 60: Henry, present Marquess of Lansdowne, was Governor-General of India from 1888 to 1894. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXVII ALTHORP