I remember a case where it was of vital importance to an acquaintance of his, by no means an intimate, that a certain case should be kept out of the newspapers. Labby sat down at once and wrote off to all the editors of the chief Radical papers—the Conservative press had already been squared—begging them to boycott the case and use their influence with the smaller fry in the same sense. No word of the affair ever saw the light. Now that is a far higher type of kindness than the mere gift of a few pounds the loss of which would not be felt. It was that same kindness which prompted his persistent attacks against the harpies and bloodsuckers who prey upon society. His Christmas Toy Fund was another most benevolent institution. In spite of all the violent abuse to which he was often subjected, I think that he went down to the grave with a record of better work than many men who have died in the odour of sanctity. I knew him fairly well, for though he was about three years older than myself we were at Eton together and afterwards in the Diplomatic Service at the same time, though never at the same post. At the St. James’s Club I once asked him why he was so bitter against the House of Lords. Bitterness he disclaimed with a laugh, but he went on to say in his sneering way, “So long as I bring forward a motion from time to time for the abolition of the Peers, my seat for Northampton is a freehold.” He had just come back from a visit to his constituents who, as he told me—with much humour—had entertained him at a public tea, in the middle of which a little girl about twelve or thirteen years old, with two tails down her back like the Kenwigs children in “Nicholas Nickleby,” was made to stand upon a chair, being too short to be seen otherwise, and began to sing a song the impropriety of which was simply appalling. “I asked the meaning of it,” said Labouchere, “and was told that it was a Malthusian hymn.” It used to be freely said that when his uncle Lord Taunton died he was in hopes that the peerage would be recreated for him. The pranks that he had played when he was in the Diplomatic Service, though innocent enough in their rebelliousness, counted against him—so he had to content himself with abusing the grapes. He could scoff and flout and sneer—no man better—but often he gave the impression of laughing at himself quite as much as at those whom for the moment he might be holding in his thumb-screw. It was as if a man preparing a bitter draught for some other person were careful to keep the dregs for his own use and swallow them. Like Thomas Carlyle’s loud guffaw to which I have alluded elsewhere, his sneers had the back-hitting qualities of a boomerang. He hated the surroundings into which his affectations drove him, and being at heart an aristocrat of the aristocrats, sneered at his class and at himself for being of it and loving it.