Almost all his associations, almost all his friends, were among those whose forbears had made history. He was fascinated by the power of race, though sometimes he could not help remembering that even the descendants of Crusaders were but the mushroom aristocracy of a single night by the side of those of the courtiers of King Solomon. “Don’t talk to me of dukes! Dukes can be made!” he said impatiently on a memorable occasion when a great public dinner was kept waiting for a duke who was to take the chair. But those were mere passing whims. To the end the ladies whose society he courted were those who had been foremost queens of fashion in his boyish days. The Russian Ambassador might sneer at them as being “toutes grand’mères,”—for Dizzy, their race endowed them with the charm of eternal youth; he enwrapped them in a poetical halo which had the magic power of the Fontaine de Jouvence. Chief among them were the three beautiful Forester sisters—Lady Chesterfield, Mrs. Anson and Lady Bradford. Mrs. Anson died comparatively young, but the other two sisters reigned as goddesses in his Olympus so long as he lived. Tithonus grows old; Aurora never. Among his male friends there was none of whom he spoke with such affectionate admiration as he did of Count D’Orsay. Dandy, wit and artist, recognized as the handsomest man of his day, the grandson of a King, the spoilt child of society in Paris and London—the brilliant Frenchman appealed to an Oriental imagination which, as is well known, was always dazzled by splendour and colour. I never saw Count D’Orsay, for he died when I was but fifteen years old, and he had left England for a year or two before that; but according to the testimony of such various men as my father, Lord Beaconsfield, Jem Macdonald, Alfred Montgomery, and others he must have been a striking personality, exceptionally gifted and attractive. Even the great Duke of Wellington could not resist his fascination. I have already mentioned some of the men to whom Dizzy was attached, but there was one for whom he entertained an especial liking and respect, though in him, as his estimate of him quoted by Monypenny shows, he was sensible of some shortcomings. Apart from ancient lineage, which he lacked, Lord Lyndhurst possessed many of the beauties, both of mind and form, in which Lord Beaconsfield recognized the hero. When I knew him the ex-Chancellor was a very old man, for he died at the age of ninety-one in 1863. Aged as he was, his mind was as active and bright as ever, and though he wore a wig, he retained to the end something more than traces of the splendid masculine beauty for which he had once been famous. I have heard men say that when he delivered one of his great speeches he was as good to look upon as he was to hear. He was at one time threatened with blindness, but mercifully his eyes were saved. It was a green old age, noble and beautiful, tended by the love of wife and daughter.