An exceptionally brilliant man, agreeable, a profound scholar, a witty _raconteur_ and noted for a remarkable memory, of which several surprising instances are still recorded, Mr Ward, in common with so many of his contemporaries, was also a celebrated _gourmet_, and experienced the popularity of the host who provides dinners of unusual excellence for his friends. In view of these recommendations, his eccentricities were treated with leniency by those who suffered from them; none the less, they were apt to occasion most of his acquaintances, including the Stanhopes, considerable alarm. For, a singularly absent-minded man, Mr Ward was not only in the habit of unconsciously uttering aloud his most secret reflections in a voice which could not fail to reach the ears of those most concerned, but his often uncomplimentary criticisms were sometimes, in complete mental aberration, actually addressed to the subject of his thoughts. At a dinner party this was extremely embarrassing, and when he was seen, according to his usual habit, to be engaged in stroking his chin contemplatively, preparatory to giving vent unwittingly to severe strictures upon his host or his fellow guests, universal uneasiness might be observed to prevail amongst all present. Still more, such remarks on his part were apt to be uttered in a fashion calculated further to upset the gravity of those who overheard them. Even in ordinary conversation Mr Ward had a curious trick of employing two voices of a totally different type--one, Marianne Stanhope described as being drawn from the cellar, the other, as having its origin in more celestial regions. At one moment he spoke in the deepest bass, and the next in the highest tenor, these different tones sometimes succeeding each other with a rapidity which was singularly disconcerting, and which strangers found so perplexing that it was with difficulty they could believe two different persons were not addressing them in such varied notes. Yet, with all this eccentricity, his conversation was so well worth listening to that the matter and not the manner of it remained in the minds of his guests. Therefore, it was with universal regret that, during his later years, and after he had been Foreign Secretary under Lord Goderich, his friends learnt how his peculiarities had developed into mania, and how he had been placed under restraint. Nor was he the only guest destined afterwards to be the victim of a tragic fate, amongst those present at the dinner party with which Mrs Stanhope began the season of 1807. Another man, then in the heyday of popularity and fame, was doomed to a yet sadder close to his meteoric career.