There was one side of Leighton’s character which perhaps few people suspected. Underneath the soft, willowy, rather effeminate manner which he affected in general society there lay a foundation of chivalry worthy of a Bayard. For his beloved Academy, as its chosen champion, he was ready to do battle in the most literal sense of the word. The removal of the Duke of Wellington’s statue from the top of Decimus Burton’s arch at Hyde Park Corner, to which I shall refer later, led to a debate in the House of Commons, when Sir Robert Peel the Second took the opportunity to deliver an attack on the Royal Academy whose members he declared to be “people of no very good taste.” He then singled out the President as a target to be shot at in the most vicious manner, quoting Leighton’s evidence in the famous case of Belt v. Lawes, and arguing therefrom that the Royal Academy “was not worthy of consideration in this House;” and he wound up with a rather risky pun, not in the best of taste, which, roared out with a voice which was perhaps the finest—certainly the loudest—that ever electrified the House, convulsed the faithful Commons with laughter. The next morning Leighton came to my office in a fury—his rage at white heat. The affront to himself was nothing, but the Academy had been insulted and as President he must take up the glove, and he was there to consult me as to the propriety of calling out Sir Robert, at the same time suggesting that I, as an old friend and largely concerned in the Hyde Park Corner scheme, should be the bearer of the message. I succeeded in calming him, arguing that after all abuse of the kind was nothing more than a wasteful expenditure of carbonic acid gas, which according to the law of the diffusion of gases would be absorbed and forgotten—nobody being the worse. Nothing came of it, and Leighton went away only half convinced; the argument that duelling was out of fashion carried no weight with it; on that morning he was full of fight and as eager to go and buy a case of pistols as any fire-eating Sir Lucius O’Trigger of the eighteenth century. I did not tell this to Sir Robert Peel, who was a friend of mine, and he died unaware of the terrors from which I had saved him. The honours list of New Year’s Day, 1896, contained Leighton’s name as a peer. His patent was signed on the 24th of January and on the 25th he died, having been a peer for one day, without taking his seat in the House of Lords, and without signing the roll. His funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral was attended by all sorts and conditions of men from the great Lord Salisbury downwards. A notable feature in the service was the chorale of trombones which was written by Beethoven for his own funeral and had never been heard since. The pealing of that solemn dirge, the great sound-waves rolling through the aisles, was soul-stirring. A nobler requiem could not have been chosen.