jfreDciich peter 5)elme''lRa^cUfte 263 



performed Ben Jonson's ' Every Man in his Humour ' 

 at Lord Lytton's seat, Knebworth, in 1850, Delme- 

 Radcliffe was asked to write the epilogue, and he 

 acquitted himself so brilliantly of the task that the 

 Right Hon. John Wilson Croker, in his speech at the 

 Annual Dinner of the Literary Fund, shortly afterwards, 

 paid him this high compliment : ' The whole Punch 

 party have been fairly beaten at their own weapons by 

 " The Country Squire," associated with them in theatricals 

 at Knebworth, and were I called upon to bestow the 

 prize for the greatest amount of wit and pungency, I 

 should not hesitate to award it to the Knebworth 

 epilogue.' 



In 1869, when Mrs Beecher Stowe made her monstrous 

 accusation against Lord Byron, Delme-RadclifFe rushed 

 chivalrously into print in defence of the poet's sister, 

 whose fair fame was so atrociously aspersed. His 

 eloquent and indignant letter to the Daily Telegraph 

 created a sensation, and is thus referred to in Black- 

 wood's Magazine^ where a touching allusion is made to 

 the death of Mr Delme-Radcliffe's eldest son, a gallant 

 officer of the Scots Fusiliers, who fell while leading his 

 men up the slopes of the Alma. The passage is worth 

 quoting, and I therefore subjoin it. 



' Mrs Stowe might perhaps fancy that the lapse ot more 

 than half a century, and the death of nearly every one 

 of those illustrious men whose friendship for Byron is 

 matter of history, would secure her foul calumny from 

 challenge. Happily this is not so. The age of chivalry 

 is not past. The blood that beat high on the field of 

 Crecy, and that was freely, and alas ! fatally, poured out 

 at the Alma, brooks no concealment, seeks no shield 

 under a nom de pluvie. Mr Delme-Radclifife in a letter 



