My acquaintance with Henry Labouchere dates, if I remember rightly, from the early spring of 1861. We were both then in the Diplomatic Service, and though not actually employed together, I had just succeeded him as unpaid attaché at the Frankfort Legation, and found him still lingering there when I came to take up my not very onerous duties that year under our chief, Sir Alexander Malet, Edward Malet's father. Labouchere's attraction to Frankfort was not Frankfort itself, but its close neighbourhood to Hombourg, where the gambling-tables still flourished, and where he spent nearly all his time. By rights he ought to have been at St. Petersburg, but pretended that he could not afford to travel to his new post except on foot, and so was staying on waiting to have his expenses paid by Government. His life at that time was an avowedly disreputable one, the society of Hombourg being what it was; and he was looked upon by the more strait-laced ladies of the Corps Diplomatique as something of a pariah. There was a good deal of talk about him, opinions being divided as to whether he was more knave or fool, greenhorn or knowing fellow, all which amused him greatly. He was in reality the good-hearted {70} cynic the world has since acknowledged him to be, with a keen appreciation of the _comédie humaine_, a contempt for aristocratic shams, and a philosopher's taste for low society. I have a coloured caricature I made of him of that date, 1861, in which he is represented as undergoing a conversion to respectability at the hands of Countess d'Usedom, the Olympia of the Bismarck memoirs, and wife of the Prussian Ambassador, with her two Scotch nieces in the preposterous crinoline dresses of the time. He figures in it as a round-faced young man with highly coloured cheeks, and an air of mock modesty which is very characteristic. It is labelled "The Deformed Transformed."