LONDON'. 



63 



dmongsc them were Motley and Grote. After luncheon I 

 walked about Chevening Park for nearly an hour with Grote, 

 and was much interested by his conversation and pleased by 

 the simplicity and absence of all pretension in his manners. 



Long ago I dined occasionally with the old Earl, the 

 father of the historian ; he was a strange man, but what little 

 I knew of him I liked much. He was frank, genial, and 

 pleasant. He had strongly marked features, with a brown 

 complexion, and his clothes, when I saw him, were all brown- 

 He seemed to believe in everything which was to others utter- 

 ly incredible. He said one day to me, " Why don't you give 

 up your fiddle-faddle of geology and zoology, and turn to the 

 occult sciences ? " The historian, then Ivord Mahon, seemed 

 shocked at such a speech to me, and his charming wife much 

 amused. 



The last man whom I will mention is Carlyle, seen by me 

 several times at my brother's house, and two or three times 

 at my own house. His talk w^as very racy and interesting, 

 just like his writings, but he sometimes went on too long on 

 the same subject. I remember a funny dinner at my broth- 

 er's, where, amongst a few others, were Babbage and Lyell, 

 both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced every 

 one by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages 

 of silence. After dinner Babbage, in his grimmest manner, 

 thanked Carlyle for his very interesting lecture on silence. 



Carlyle sneered at almost every one : one day in my house 

 he called Grote's ' History ' " a fetid quagmire, with nothing 

 spiritual about it." I always thought, until his ' Reminis- 

 cences ' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this 

 now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a 

 depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent, man ; and it 

 is notorious how heartily he laughed. I believe that his 

 benevolence was real, though stained by not a little jealousy. 

 No one can doubt about his extraordinary power of drawing 

 pictures of things and men — far more vivid, as it appears to 

 me, than any drawn by Macaulay. Whether his pictures of 

 men were true ones is another question. 



