LORD HOUGHTON. 
379 
ances. Prior to his journey many Americans of distinction had 
found their way to Fryston, but since then he has been still more 
intimately associated with all that is best in American society. 
During his later years more than one serious blow fell upon him. One 
of these was the partial destruction of Fryston Hall by fire a few 
years ago. Upon that occasion the magnificent library, which it had 
been Jhe work of Lord Houghton's life to accumulate, was happily 
spared from the flames, but it was saved amid so much confusion that 
not a few valuable volumes were never recovered, whilst the work of 
re-arranging them was one which engaged the noble owner's attention 
and taxed his energies down to a very recent period. It is impossible 
in the space at our disposal to mention even a small proportion of 
the men and women of eminence whom Lord Houghton entertained 
from time to time at Fryston. We must not however, pass by the 
great name of Carlyle. Between the author of "Sartor Resartus" 
and Lord Houghton there was a friendship of the very warmest kind, 
one which lasted from the days of Carlyle's struggles and obscurity 
down to the moment of his death. It is, indeed, no small tribute to 
the character of the noble qualities of the man whose death we now 
mourn that of all the persons mentioned in the " Memorials" of 
Carlyle recently given to the world, he is the only one of whom the 
Sage of Chelsea invariably speaks with admiration and affection, the 
only man apparently who never fell under the lash of his bitter and 
censorious criticism. Thackeray, too, was another of the intimate 
friends of Lord Houghton, and the admirers of the author of " Vanity 
Fair" who remember a certain little sketch, entitled " Going to see a 
man hanged," will be interested to learn that "X.," the Member of 
Parliament to whose companionship Thackeray alluded, was Mr. 
Monckton Milnes. Of the great poet who so recently deprived Lord 
Houghton of the claim to be the only poet in the House of Lords he 
was the life-long friend, and it is no secret that the pension that was 
conferred upon Tennyson while still a young man, by Sir Robert Peel, 
a pension which bore such noble fruit in the shape of those great 
poems which the Poet Laureate was subsequently enabled to pro- 
duce, was obtained for him through the instrumentality of Lord 
Houghton. Charles Dickens, with whose ancestors the family of 
