his best. He also follows him to Grillion's, which was the occasion of some of his literary work, and he says with truth that no place suited him better. For it was originally a parliamentary club, founded on the practice of pairing for dinner ; so that men who had spoken at each other from five to eight might drink wine with each other between eight and ten. It was enriched by a very choice flavour of unparliamentary intellect. Lord Houghton was also a member of the club, but he was elected late in life so late that he was insensible to the compliment, and it contributed little to his pleasure.
Most of his early associates died before him, and he had not the faculty of attaching himself to new people. Sir Charles MacCarthy, his most trusted confidant and correspondent of his prime, died in 1864. At that time Lord Houghton had already become acquainted with a Liverpool merchant, of whom he writes, "I look on him as the last of my friends of mature life." Henry Bright was a man whose refined charm of manner and excellent attainments made him an invaluable companion, after the death of Sir William Stirling Maxwell, whom Houghton was with difficulty dissuaded from pronouncing, in the lifetime of Carlyle, the first of literary Scotsmen. He wrote to Bright : "He, I, and you were the only real men of letters in Great Britain." In spite of the habitual exaggeration, all those who knew the man to whom these words were addressed will recognise the truth that was in them. He was a more careful scholar than his friend, but he loved literature for its own sake, without profit or display, and not in quest of hard-working truths. He had not health for sustained effort, and he spent on reviews of the books of the day, and in running to ground topics cast up in familiar table-talk, knowledge sufficient for a considerable reputation. Four weeks before his death he dictated a letter informing Houghton that he was very seriously ill, and he added with his dying hand this postscript : "Should we not meet, let me here thank you for a friendship of nearly twenty-five years, which has added so greatly to the brightness and happiness of my
