With all this industry, the record of divisions so carefully chronicled by the hard-working M.P. was not of moment to him. If the business did not seem to him important, he had no objection to absent himself and dine at home. He was weatherwise in the assembly, and knew the conditions which might lead to unforeseen disturbance. In questions raised by alteration of rules or standing orders, he was never averse from innovation, and even generally an advocate of change. But while the rules were there he insisted rigorously on their observance, in so far as they affected the larger interests of division or debate. Also he fulfilled punctiliously the prescribed courtesies, making it a usage to be down early and to secure his place, although no one ever thought of appropriating it. He rigidly observed the rule, transgressed by others, which prescribes the wearing of a tall hat by members in the House. The hat which was thus endeared to him by traditional usage is therefore inseparable from Parliamentary memory of him. He was generally to be seen handling a sheaf of papers more than Ministerial in dimensions; and he made his hat the receptacle for them; often it would be crammed to bursting before the speech had concluded. Yet there remained with him always the trace of his younger days of grave dandyism; he never abandoned the Parliamentary frock-coat, and sketches of him in the illustrated papers convey the austere correctness of its folds; and the hat from which so much service was exacted appeared each day unsurpassable in gloss. The intricate mass of historical associations delighted his imagination at Westminster. He took pleasure in all the quaint survivals, from the long-transmitted ceremonial of the Speaker's entrance, the formal knockings of Black Rod, the cry of 'Who goes home?' down to the still continued search before each session for some possible Guy Fawkes. Keenly alive to the past and to the present, he saw with special pleasure any happy grafting of a new usage on to that old stock of memories. Speaking in his constituency after the lying in state of King Edward, which he had attended (standing next to the Prime Minister as the senior Privy Councillor present), he welcomed the precedent which gave a new association to Westminster Hall--that 'epitome of English history.' He recalled to his hearers the outstanding incidents and persons whose record had then come into his mind. His habit of tracing out links with the past made him at Westminster the best and most animated of guides. So it was in Provence, in the Forest of Dean, on the road down from London to Surrey; so it was always in the neighbourhood of his Chelsea home.