Heenan was the husband of the beautiful poetess, Ada Isaac Menken, whose talent Swinburne admired so much, and who dedicated her poems to Charles Dickens. When she was on the stage her wonderful beauty created a _furore_ in _Mazeppa_. I took a special interest in Heenan because he was a pupil of Aaron Jones, to whom I have alluded in my account of Oxford days, and who went out to America in 1858. In the words of the Chinese sage, we were _T’ung yen_ (“same ink”), that is to say, we had dipped our pens in the same ink, which, being further interpreted, means that we were pupils of the same master. So much can a Confucius say in two syllables. Let me go back a year. In the autumn of 1859 came the volunteer movement—a clarion cry in answer to the memorial of the French colonels who were spurring on their Emperor to make war upon this country. All England was bristling with martial ardour. The Duke of Westminster, then Lord Grosvenor, started the Queen’s Westminsters; Lord Elcho the London Scottish; Lord Ranelagh, the “Brompton Garibaldi”[27] as he was called, the South Middlesex. Most of us clerks joined the movement. Wylde, who had seen service in Spain with Sir de Lacy Evans, became second in command to Lord Ranelagh, and, when his colonel died, succeeded him; I was one of the early recruits of the Queen’s Westminsters. We had great fun, but it needed no little courage to appear in uniform, for the grey tunics were irresistible as matter for chaff by the many-headed. The Foreign Office had always been active in volunteering, for when the Queen reviewed the Volunteers in Hyde Park in 1860, one of the privates in the Queen’s Westminsters was old Mr. Byng—“Poodle” Byng—about whose identity Sir Herbert Maxwell has got into such a muddle in his “Life of Lord Clarendon.” He had been a clerk in the Foreign Office and had been a private in the Volunteers when they were reviewed by King George the Third. He was called “Poodle” on account of his crisp, curly hair—made a _mésalliance_—and continued to be a pet in Society as a bachelor until his death. I remember how, in one of the extravaganzas by Planché brought out by Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris at the Lyceum, a huge poodle was brought upon the stage. There was a large gathering of well known people in the audience, and Poodle Byng was in a box with some great ladies. When the great curly dog came to the front there was loud applause, and the stalls turned their glasses upon Mr. Byng, who stood up in his box and bowed his acknowledgments of the compliment. Sir Herbert Maxwell confounds him with Mr. Byng, a Privy Councillor, another well-known man of political importance, whereas the Poodle could not lay claim to being anything—unless, indeed, it was something to have been reviewed by George the Third and half a century later by Queen Victoria.