The grumpy, coarse old warrior had been invited to Strathfieldsaye in September for partridge shooting. In a field bordering a wood a number of cock pheasants were strutting about in all the confidence of a close month. This was too much for the Marshal, who was immediately seized with an uncontrollable desire to slay one. The Duke of Wellington consulted Smith the keeper, who opined that “We might put it down in the book as a partridge.” So the Marshal stalked an old cock on the ground, blazed and missed him—fired a second time and wounded the bird, who tried to run away, but the ambassador rushed after him, caught him and dashed his brains out against a tree, crying out, “Enfin, brigand! je te tiens!” “That,” said the Duke to Smith, as they were watching the achievement, “is the great Field-Marshal Duke of Malakoff, who smoked out four hundred Arabs in a cavern in Algeria.” “Well, your grace,” answered the keeper contemptuously, “a man who would treat a cock-pheasant like that, and in September too, there is no saying what he might not do to a Arab.” As I write, the ghosts of bygone days rise up before me. The ghosts of men who were wise and great and noble; the ghosts of women who fulfilled their mission in life by being supremely beautiful, gracious, and attractive. That was the secret of their power—of their influence; invested with those regalia they ruled their world. Of literary or artistic society at Lady Palmerston’s Saturdays there were scarcely any representatives; indeed, Dicky Doyle, and Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, were almost alone. Lord Lytton was there, but rather like Macaulay, because he was a statesman, than on account of his success in Letters. And yet there were great men at that time—Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, Tennyson and Browning, were the kings of book-land, but they had to be sought elsewhere. Little Holland House, where the Prinseps and Watts ruled the roast, was a better covert to draw for the priests of Apollo and the Muses than Cambridge House. Another lady whose salon in Carlton Gardens was famous, was Frances, Lady Waldegrave. Her theatricals and her gatherings attracted the best of London. She was a capital actress, and always managed to collect a good company in support of her own talent. Her brother, Mr. Braham, was stage manager. I was the _jeune premier_. At Strawberry Hill she gave delightful, almost historic dinners, which often ended in being moonlit garden parties, where the guests would wander in a midsummer night’s dream, until the first glimmer of dawn reminded them that they were some miles from home and that even fairies must be flitting back from the poetry of flirtation under the stars to the prose of daylight.