I have spoken of his familiarity with rather out-of-the-way books. Upon one occasion we were talking of Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy and of Lowe’s refusal, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, to purchase the contents of King Priam’s treasure house—a decision which I greatly regretted. I mentioned that Lowe snuffed out the suggestion with a quotation: “Etiam periere ruinæ” was all that he said. “Ah!” said Lord Beaconsfield, “from Lucan’s ‘Pharsalia,’ a fine poem.” The quotation is of course well known, but as Lucan is not one of the authors whom the head masters have taken under their wing, I much doubt whether there were two men in the two Houses of Parliament who could have said offhand whence it came, or have given an opinion as to the merits of the poem. Deeply read as he was, I never heard him talk of modern literature. The only comparatively modern book that I knew him to praise was “Walpole’s Letters.” Of those he spoke with enthusiasm: “No man need be dull who possesses ‘Walpole’s Letters.’” Indeed, although he was himself a man of letters, and had the deepest veneration for his father as a literary man, he had but little knowledge of the writers of his own day. Probably he was too much absorbed by politics to care for the society of the literary brotherhood. On one occasion he asked me whether there was any man whom he could invite to his official dinner on the Queen’s birthday as the representative of letters. His answer to a fine lady who at one of the Foreign Office parties asked him “whether he wanted a really good novel?” raised much laughter. “My dear, when I want a good novel I write it.” Lord Beaconsfield as an actor was inimitable. He was a master of stage effect, and he never gave a better example of his histrionic powers than when, in 1877, he was attacked upon his appointment of Mr. Pigott to the Controllership of the Stationery Office, which a committee of the House of Commons had declared ought to be filled by a professional stationer and printer. Ignoring this for wise and practical reasons, when the office became vacant he appointed to the post, which was worth £1,500 a year, Mr. Pigott, a clerk in the War Office. The truffle dogs of the House of Commons scented a job, and yapped all the more fiercely when they found out that Mr. Pigott was the son of the former rector of Hughenden. The Conservative Whips somehow mismanaged the affair, and a vote of censure was passed in the lower House by a majority of four votes. There was a great commotion in the country and the _Times_ condemned the appointment as “too splendidly audacious.”