n a reported discussion in Finsbury whether or
not he should be invited to sit for that borough, he promptly wrote
(November 1861): "It may save some trouble if you will kindly confirm a
sensible gentleman who doubted at that meeting whether I was quite the
man for Finsbury. I am not at all the sort of man; for I believe nothing
would induce me to offer myself as a parliamentary representative of
that place, or of any other under the sun." The only direct attempt to
join a political agitation was his speech at Drury-lane for
administrative reform, and he never repeated it. But every movement for
practical social reforms, to obtain more efficient sanitary
legislation, to get the best compulsory education practicable for the
poor, and to better the condition of labouring people, he assisted
earnestly to his last hour; and the readiness with which he took the
chair at meetings having such objects in view, the help he gave to
important societies working in beneficent ways for themselves or the
community, and the power and attractiveness of his oratory, made him one
of the forces of the time. His speeches derived singular charm from the
buoyancy of his perfect self-possession, and to this he added the
advantages of a person and manner which had become as familiar and as
popular as his books. The most miscellaneous assemblages listened to him
as to a personal friend.

Two incidents at the close of his life will show what upon these matters
his latest opinions were. At the great Liverpool dinner after his
country readings in 1869, over which Lord Dufferin eloquently presided,
he replied to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his objection to
entering public life,[297] that when he took literature for his
profession he intended it to be his sole profession; that at that time
it did not appear to him to be so well understood in England, as in some
other countries, that literature was a dignified profession by which any
man might stand or fall; and he resolved that in his person at least it
should stand "by itself, of itself, and for itself;" a bargain which "no
consideration on earth would now induce him to break." Here however he
probably failed to see the entire meaning of Lord Houghton's regret,
which would seem to have been meant to say, in more polite form, that to
have taken some part in public affairs might have shown him the
difficulty in a free state of providing remedies very swiftly for evils
of long growth. A h