annoyance, at the price of some mistakes, he very deliberately strove to raise and humanise the social tone, and his house was not only a school of colloquial art, but of proper self-control. He had the opportunities, the large acquaintance with men, the versatile interest in ideas, the international position. Above all, he had the purpose and the energy. In this sense it is not an exaggeration to say that the object he sought was influence.
The rare and subtle essence which constituted so much of the enjoyment of his life was evanescent. If Houghton was distinguished as a brilliant conversational centre and extractor of men's thoughts, it was a gift which has left no permanent trace behind. Sir George Trevelyan, in the life of the best English talker of his time, has little to record, and Mr. Wemyss Reid has no description of a Symposium — nothing as interesting as Hawthorne's breakfast on the 11th of July 1856, where he met Ticknor and the Brownings, Lord Lansdowne and Macaulay. Unfortunately Milnes, who heard so much, wrote down very little. He stays at Val Richer, but only tells us that Guizot's grandchild preferred jelly to hare. He pays a visit to Tocqueville and has nothing to report. His memory was better furnished than his correspondence. He used to relate that at Tocqueville somebody incautiously spoke of people who marry beneath their rank. There was a moment of chill silence, until the host, taking his wife's hand, said, "Moi aussi, j'ai fait une mésalliance ; et Dieu ! que cela m'a réussi." Milnes has written somewhere what he remembered of the man whom he complacently called his French double. The papers to which his biographer has had access leave all this to perish, and it is hard to believe that there were no notebooks left and forgotten under lock and key. For it is to the life of Houghton that Englishmen would look for something that they could compare to the dialogues of the dead preserved by Roederer and Villemain and Falloux.
His biographer knew him well in later life, and was drawn to the sturdy Yorkshire Liberal who was not always apparent behind the self-caricaturist of Brook Street. He
