The task of an after-dinner speaker is seldom to be argumentative, always to give pleasure, and in that Lord Granville succeeded to perfection; never having had the luck to hear either Dickens or Bishop Wilberforce make such a speech, I look upon him as the greatest master of that peculiar art that I ever listened to. He was so neat and polished, and his points went home with such consummate skill, with never a word too much, that the regret was general when he left off, rubbing his hands together—a favourite trick of his when speaking—and sat down. Like Oliver, we wanted more. As a _raconteur_ he was matchless. His store of anecdotes—never a bad one among them—was as inexhaustible as the conjuror’s bottle, and in his skilful hands they ran no risk of becoming, as he warned his children, “a fearful instrument of torture to mankind.” Another feature in his character which endeared him to Englishmen was his honest love of sport. Throwing off for the moment the cares of State, he would ride straight to hounds, stalk a stag, bring down a rocketer, drive four in hand—at one time, if my memory serves me right, he even kept a pack of harriers at Walmer. But his crown of laurels as a sportsman was won in 1874, as is recorded in his life by Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, when the Liberal retiring Cabinet having been taunted by certain people for their want of sportsmanlike or athletic prowess, in fact as being “a pack of muffs,” he threw down the glove. “I am prepared,” he said, “to challenge the present Ministry to pick their best men and pit them against a like number of the defunct Liberal Government for a ride across country.” As Lord Edmund shows, he had some good men to choose from in Lord Spencer, Lord Halifax and Lord Hartington, all first-rate men to hounds, besides himself, and we know that he, the old Master of the Royal Buckhounds, would not have been unworthy of his colleagues. The challenge led to an amusing correspondence with the gigantic Ward Hunt, a noted “bruiser” with the Pytchley—“Bright,” wrote Lord Granville to Ward Hunt, “is no use, he cannot pronounce the name of your hunt.” A memorable dinner in Carlton House Terrace celebrated the first Cabinet meeting of the new Government, in the Spring of 1880. There was an evening party afterwards to which I, who had been staying at Walmer during the crisis, was invited. The tail was quite a small non-political gathering, but Count Károlyi, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, was among the guests. As soon as he came in, Lord Granville took him up to introduce him to Mr. Gladstone. It was rather an awkward moment, and one which it needed all the host’s consummate tact to manage.