conditions of the
office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A
cynical man of the world who was present said, "What a tiresome rule! I
think I should keep my diary all the same." "Then," replied the young
lady, "I am afraid you would not be a maid of _Honour_."

In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting
figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in
life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one
knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no
considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank--"Now, Luttrell, we're
all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me." Eyeing his questioner
gravely, Luttrell made answer, "It is an odd question; but as you, Lady
Holland, ask it, I don't mind telling you. If I live till next year, I
shall be--devilish old."

For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen,
for Lord Holland's genial humour, and for Lady Holland's indiscriminate
insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay's Life and Charles Greville's
Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs. Most of these
verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some
social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was
really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.

Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh,
who, as the writer of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, had been the foremost
apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of
Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution
and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement
champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O'Coighley, the
priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and
France, was the basest of mankind. "No, Mackintosh," replied that sound
though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; "he might have been much worse. He
was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he
might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a
renegade."

These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age.
Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the
Greville Memoirs--that mine of social information in which I have so
often quarried--came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was,
if he had read them. He replied,