The patronage of the Captaincy of Deal Castle belongs to the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. When Lord Clanwilliam died Lord Granville, who was Lord Warden, appointed Lord Sydney in his place; at the same time, lest there should be any misconception, Lord Granville, with that courtesy of which he was such a master, wrote and told Lord Beaconsfield what he had done. The answer was short and characteristic: “Hughenden Manor, October 21st, 1879. “MY DEAR LORD, “Happy Sydney to be your neighbour! “Yours sincerely, “BEACONSFIELD.” His notes were always charming. When he was living in Whitehall he wrote to Count Pierre Schuvaloff, the Russian Ambassador, inviting him to a little informal dinner, saying, “You will make six ladies happy and five men jealous.” “Mon cher ami,” Schuvaloff said, when he showed me the note, “elles étaient toutes grandmères!” He had, by the by, a very high opinion of Schuvaloff’s ability. When he came back from Berlin he was talking to me one day about the Congress, and the different statesmen and diplomatists who had taken part in it, with several of whom I was acquainted. Prince Gortchakoff and Schuvaloff were the two Russian representatives, but Prince Gortchakoff was a very different man from the Gortchakoff whom I had known some fifteen years before at St. Petersburg. He had grown old and feeble, and, as Lord Beaconsfield put it, lachrymose. Schuvaloff had to fight his battle alone, and, said Lord Beaconsfield, “I was amazed at the way in which he held his own against us all.” With all his dandified, rather frivolous ways, Schuvaloff struck him as a very strong foeman. That Bismarck shared this view of Count Schuvaloff is evident from his “Gedanken und Erinnerungen.” Between Bismarck and Prince Gortchakoff there had long been a sort of silent feud. Gortchakoff rather posed as if he had been something like a Mentor to Bismarck, who latterly grew to look upon him with ill-disguised contempt. He laughed at his vanity, his boastfulness, and even at his readiness to accept a diplomatic snuffbox mounted in diamonds, provided that they were “de bonnes grosses pierres” (“Gedanken,” etc., Vol. II., p. 125). For Schuvaloff, on the contrary, Bismarck had a great liking, and, indeed, the correspondence between the two statesmen bears witness to an exceptional degree of respect and even affection on both sides (II., 249-252).