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Monographs, Personal and Social.  By Lord Houghton.  New York:  Holt & Williams.

Lord Houghton is one of those fortunate persons who seem to find without trouble the exact niches in life which Nature has designed them to fill.  There probably never entered the world a man more eminently made to appreciate the best kind of “high life” which London has offered in the present century; and he has been able to avail himself of it to his heart’s content.  The son of a Yorkshire squire in affluent circumstances and of high character, Monckton Milnes was not spoilt by finding, as he might have done had he been the heir to a dukedom, the world at his feet; whilst at the same time all the good things were within his reach by a little of that exertion which does so much toward enhancing the enjoyment of them.  From the period of his entry upon London life he displayed that anxiety to know celebrities which, though in a somewhat different way, was a marked feature of his contemporary and acquaintance, Crabb Robinson; and the story illustrative of this tendency which gained him the sobriquet of “the cool of the evening” will be always associated with the name he has since merged in a less familiar title.

Lord Houghton has now passed through some sixty London seasons, during which he has been more or less acquainted with nearly every social and literary celebrity in the English metropolis.  Having regard to this circumstance, and the fact of his possessing a polished and graceful style of expressing himself, one would naturally expect a great deal from this volume of reminiscences.  Nor will such expectations be entirely disappointed.  The monographs are eight in number, and will be read with varying degrees of interest, according to the taste of the reader, as well as the subjects and quality of the papers.  The portrait which will perhaps be the newest to American readers is that of Harriet, Lady Ashburton, wife of the second Baring who bore that title.  Lady Ashburton was daughter of the earl of Sandwich, and Lord Houghton says of her:  “She was an instance in which aristocracy gave of its best and showed at its best, although she may have owed little to the qualities she inherited from an irascible race and to an unaffectionate education”—­a sentence reminding us of a remark in the London Times, that “with certain noble houses people are apt to associate certain qualities—­with the Berkeleys, for instance, a series of disgraceful family quarrels.”  Lady Ashburton appears to us from this account to have been a brilliant spoilt child of fortune, who availed herself of her great social position to do and say what, had she remained Lady Harriet Montagu with the pittance of a poor nobleman’s daughter, she would hardly have dared to do or say.  It is one of the weak points of society in England that a woman who has rank, wealth, and ability, and contrives to surround herself with men of wit to whom she renders