At Peking he was an unqualified success. The Chinese, impressed like all Asiatics by a fine reverence for lineage and blue blood, saw in him a great gentleman whose transparent honesty they could trust. There were not very many legations in China in his time, but the ministers who were his colleagues, men like M. de Bourboulon, the Frenchman, and General Vlangaly, the Russian, were devoted to him. They listened to him with the most profound respect and affection, and General Vlangaly told me that whenever any knotty problem cropped up the first question was “Qu’en dira Sir Frederic?” His own staff from Wade downwards worshipped him. “Wade is a great mimic,” he said to me once, “mind you ask him whether he has added me to his Gallery of Illustration.”[51] He had done so, for when I asked Wade the question at Peking, he went off at score and told me how on one occasion he was interpreting for Sir Frederic at the Tsung Li Ya-mên (the Foreign Office) when he, Wade, who was pepper itself, got extremely angry, while Sir Frederic was quietly puffing away at his cheroot. “But,” said the Prince Regent, “I see that you are very angry—yet I believe that you are interpreting for Pu Ta Jên (Sir F. Bruce); he, on the contrary, appears to be quite calm—not a bit angry.” “There, Sir Frederic,” said Wade, furious, “the Prince says that you are not angry—that it is only I who am excited.” “Oh! Damme,” drawled Sir Frederic in his large, good-humoured way, taking the cheroot out of his mouth, “tell him I’m deyvlish angry,” and with that, beaming upon Prince Kung and the assembled mandarins, he smoked away as contentedly as before. Wade was telling the story against himself, and as he told it I could almost fancy that Sir Frederic was in the room. The day before I left I went to say good-bye to Sir Frederic. When we shook hands he said, “Remember that when you come back from China you must come to me wherever my post may be! That is to say,” he added with a sigh, “if I survive the age of fifty, which seems to be fatal to all of my family.” The sad “if” was justified! He went out as Minister to the United States, won all hearts there as he did everywhere else, and died of heart failure at some small railway station. I was told afterwards that a tablespoonful of brandy might have saved his precious life! His death in 1867, at the age of fifty-three, was mourned in the East and in the West. 1865