In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting figure was Henry Luttrell.  It was known that he must be getting on in life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one knew.  At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank—­“Now, Luttrell, we’re all dying to know how old you are.  Just tell me.”  Eyeing his questioner gravely, Luttrell made answer, “It is an odd question; but as you, Lady Holland, ask it, I don’t mind telling you.  If I live till next year, I shall be—­devilish old.”

For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen, for Lord Holland’s genial humour, and for Lady Holland’s indiscriminate insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay’s Life and Charles Greville’s Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs.  Most of these verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.

Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice.  Sir James Mackintosh, who, as the writer of the Vindiciae Gallicae, had been the foremost apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution and its authors, their works and ways.  Having thus become a vehement champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O’Coighley, the priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and France, was the basest of mankind.  “No, Mackintosh,” replied that sound though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; “he might have been much worse.  He was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman.  He was a priest; he might have been a lawyer.  He was a rebel; he might have been a renegade.”

These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age.  Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them.  When the Greville Memoirs—­that mine of social information in which I have so often quarried—­came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, if he had read them.  He replied, “No.  I do not feel attracted to them.  I remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton.”  This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled.  In a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady Morley’s comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady Jersey—­the Zenobia of Endymion—­of whom some gushing admirer had said that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of black and diamonds—­“it was like night.”  “Yes, my dear; minuit passe.”  A masculine analogue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the table-talk of Lord Granville—­certainly not an unkindly man—­to whom the late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild.  “It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift.  I should like to find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is rare.”  “Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair.”