His talk in his own house was delightful. It was altogether different from the talk that men heard when they met him at London dinner-tables. Strangely enough, it was at the breakfast-table that he talked best. Most Englishmen are not roused to conversational brilliancy until the day is far spent; but Houghton was at his best at breakfast and immediately afterwards. And how good that best was! He was a walking encyclopaedia, although no man was ever less of "a book in breeches." Whenever I wished to clear up some obscure point in history or politics, in literature or in the personal life of our times, I went to him, and seldom was it that I failed to get the light I wanted. As a judge of character he had no equal among the men I have known, and in the years that have flown since his death I have had the happiness of seeing his forecast of the future of not a few men strikingly realised. The first time I ever heard the name of Lord Rosebery was from his lips, in 1874 or 1875. I had seen the name in print, of course, but to me it was a name, and nothing more. "You don't know Lord Rosebery?" said he one day. "Then mark him well. He is the ablest young man in England, and, I believe, will be Prime Minister before he dies." On another occasion he shocked me for the moment by a deliverance about Mr. Gladstone. It was in 1880, when the great statesman, having won the most brilliant triumph of his life, and finally defeated his great rival, Lord Beaconsfield, was struck down by serious illness a few weeks after he had regained power. "I am so sorry to see that Gladstone is getting better," Houghton said to me as we sat in the library at Fryston. I could hardly believe my own ears, and expressed my surprise at hearing such a sentiment from the lips of one of Mr. Gladstone's greatest admirers. "Don't you see," responded Houghton, "that if he dies now he will be one of the greatest figures in English history? He has just won the greatest triumph a statesman ever enjoyed. It is impossible that he can remain at this dazzling height. _Now_ is the time for him to die." Those who only knew Lord Houghton as a genial cynic would have been surprised if they had known that in his opinion the greatest Englishman of his own time was Lord Shaftesbury, and the greatest Englishwoman Florence Nightingale. Those who were acquainted with his poetry would not have felt this surprise. There is much in his verse, neglected though it now be, which deserves a high place in our national literature. But in his later days--or, rather, throughout his life--the world refused to see his more serious side, and treated him as the humorist and the wit, the cynic, and the kind-hearted but eccentric peer who made it his mission in life to try to fuse the two worlds of society and intellect.