and best stories were French. He went to Italy and Germany for curiosity and amusement ; but for the society of Paris he had a real preference. His Orleanist sympathies were one of the chief factors in his career. They were not interrupted by his acquaintance with his London comrade Napoleon, and neither of them suffered by his attachment to Lamartine, from whom, in despite of Lord Aberdeen, he raised a sum of money. There was no exaggeration in Disraeli's joke about his entertaining royalties and revolutionists. Once, walking away with one of his guests, I was stopped by a friend who asked me who the small boy was. The small boy was Louis Blanc, who was explaining his belief in the survival of Lewis the Seventeenth. For a man who loved varieties of character and cultivated the art of conversation, there could be no doubt of the pre-eminence of France.
When he was eighteen, Spurzheim drew his horoscope in terms which amounted to saying that he would never do much harm or much good. Aubrey de Vere, who remembers him in 1831, fills in the outline as follows: "He had not, as it seemed to me, much of solid ambition, nor did he value social distinction as much as intellectual excitement and ceaseless novelty." Houghton said of himself with much point and candour : "Having no duties to perform, I am obliged to put up with pleasures." When he appeared in London, the worldly sage of the day, Sam Rogers, seeing that he was a fine gentleman, but also a scholar and a wit, drew a shaft from his ancient experience which did not fall wide : "Get on by pleasing the women, the men will hate ye."
M. Taine, when he said that the English were dull talkers — "Ils ne savent pas s'amuser avec la parole" — can have known very little of Milnes. Others of his set talked as well or better, and had more of their own to say ; but there was no other man who made the pleasure of conversation the business of life. His philosophy of society was not fanciful or frivolous, as, in the outer circle, men supposed. He took a warm and intelligent interest in many things, in which conversation was the common
