denominator. He conceived that one who, having the time to surround himself constantly with the best, to spend his time with Macaulay and Carlyle, Tocqueville and Guizot, even with Sherman and Moltke, prefers the casuals of life, is mean and incompetent.
He once propounded a sublime and self-denying definition of a good dinner as civility without consumption. As to company he was less exacting. The severe orthodoxy which requires that a man shall prefer the topics and initiative of others to his own ; that he shall neither insist, nor repeat, nor contradict ; that he shall speak of things, not of persons, and never of himself; that he shall restrain the use of witticism and anecdote, would have been tiresome and ruinous in his eyes. He knew how to draw out of each guest what was in him, to make the talk general, and discourage the eddies and hole-and-corner whisperings which are the grave of good company. He sought not only talent but diversity ; and not only diversity but contrast. He loved the flavour of antagonism, and held that a gentleman is one who can live with adversaries. Vambéry once related at his table things since made public — his journey in disguise to the Mahometan centre of Asia, and the inscription of the Christian captive which nearly betrayed him. Another Eastern traveller chafed visibly under these revelations of the deceitful dervish, uttering gutturals which could be nothing else than Turkish imprecations. When a certain suave prelate, putting on to perfection the Bishop in Little Dorrit, asked the Hungarian by which road he meant to take his next journey, and was answered, "That, my lord, is my secret," everybody felt that Milnes had not lost a day.
He had known what it is to be over-sensitive, to have tender spaces and antipathies, and he knew that these things are to be overcome. Therefore, when you wrote a book, you went to him prepared to find your reviewer ; and if you were the reviewer, you found your victim. The man who shrank from facing a critic or a rival, the lion afraid of a louder roar, was a thing below par, and only fit to be improved away. At the risk of some
