but now, as I hear, ‘The Times’ is alone, journals of all politics being loud in my praise.  But I never look at any comment on my volumes till long afterwards, and I never in my life wrote to a newspaper.”  Once, when Chenery, the editor, came to join the table at the Athenaeum where he and Mr. Cartwright were dining, Kinglake rose, and removed to another part of the room.  “The Times” had inserted a statement that Madame Novikoff was ordered to leave England, and he thus publicly resented it.  “So unlike me,” he said, relating the story, “but somehow a savagery as of youth came over me in my ancient days; it was like being twenty years old again.”  It came out, however, that “our indiscreet friend Froude” had written something which justified the paragraph, and Kinglake sent his amende to Chenery, with whom ordinarily he was on most friendly terms.

He disliked Irishmen “in the lump,” saying that human nature is the same everywhere except in Ireland.  Parnell he personally admired, though hating Home Rule; and stigmatized as gross hypocrisy the desertion of him by Liberals after the divorce trial.  He was wont to speak irreverently of Lord Beaconsfield, whom he had known well at Lady Blessington’s in early days.  He would have found himself in accord with Huxley, who used to thank God, his friend Mr. Fiske tells us, that he had never bowed the knee either to Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli.  He poured scorn on the Treaty of Berlin.  Russia, he said, defeating the Turks in war, has defeated Beaconsfield in diplomacy.  If Englishmen understood such things they would see that the Congress was a comedy; anyone who will satisfy himself as to what Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then look at the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will see that, thanks to Beaconsfield’s imbecility, Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal diplomatic triumphs that was ever won. {27} A sound entente between Russia and England he thought both possible and desirable; but conceived it to be rendered difficult by the want of steadiness and capacity which, for international purposes, were the real faults of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury.  He repeated with much amusement the current anecdote of Lord Beaconsfield’s conquest of Mrs. Gladstone.  Meeting her in society, he was said to have inquired with tenderness after Mr. Gladstone’s health, and then after receiving the loving wife’s report of her William, to have rejoined in his most dulcet tones, “Ah! take care of him, for he is very very precious.”  He always attributed Dizzy’s popularity to the feeling of Englishmen that he had “shown them sport,” an instinct, he thought, supreme in all departments of the English mind.