The guests at those parties would have furnished the sitters for a whole National Portrait Gallery. The great Lord Shaftesbury, his gigantic stature towering above all others, the solemn gravity of his rather melancholy countenance relieved by its goodness and loving kindness. His wife, Lady Palmerston’s eldest daughter, still beautiful in spite of her handsome family of grown-up sons and daughters; her sister, Lady Jocelyn, irresistibly fascinating; Lord John Russell’s diminutive figure, with pinched, eager features, reminding one of Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, the divine begging-letter writer; Lord Clarendon, sunny and handsome, as radiant and eager as if he had not all his life been a martyr to gout and the affairs of State—both poison; Delane, the Jupiter of the _Times_, burly and genial, compeller of men; Borthwick, of the _Morning Post_, who achieved the feat of writing for the _Owl_ a letter signed by the French Emperor of such apparent authenticity that the Emperor actually contradicted it. Laurence Oliphant, a mystic in lavender kid gloves, full of spiritualism, strange creeds, and skits upon Society; Macaulay, a whirlwind of talk and knowledge; Lord Sherbrooke, that wonderful Albino blinking out of his pink, almost blind eyes, delighting everybody with his conversation and himself with the belief that his chief joy was in the contemplation of beautiful scenery which, alas! he never saw. The Duke of Newcastle, red and bearded; Mr. Gladstone; Disraeli—for the drawing-room at Cambridge House was a neutral territory, on which foes might meet in pseudo amity. Quin, the great homœopath, dealing in allopathic doses only where wit and fun and good, kindly humour were concerned. Bernal Osborne, always brilliant; Alfred Montgomery, one of the very few remaining bright satellites of the firmament in which Lady Blessington and D’Orsay shone as the chief stars; Charles Villiers, a host in himself; Charles Greville, the writer of the famous memoirs; and how many others! But why go on making a sort of _Morning Post_ list of the famous men of those days! Of some of them I shall speak later. What a dream of Fair Women! The Duchess of Manchester—like the lovely Gunning, twice a Duchess—then in the heyday of her beautiful youth; Lady Constance Grosvenor, with the majesty of a Juno and the smile of a Hebe; Mrs. Dick Bulkeley, who looked as if she had sat for Millais’ “Cinderella” and had come straight out of fairy-land; Lady Mary Craven, the very type of lovely English womanhood bursting from bud into bloom; Baroness Alphonse de Rothschild, with liquid almond-shaped eyes, and the sweet complexion of a tea-rose, and how many more!