rament, and taste. As far
as I know, he had not a drop of foreign blood in his veins, yet his
nature was essentially un-English.

A country gentleman who frankly preferred living in London, and a
Yorkshireman who detested sport, made a sufficiently strange phenomenon;
but in Lord Houghton the astonished world beheld as well a politician
who wrote poetry, a railway-director who lived in literature, a
_libre-penseur_ who championed the Tractarians, a sentimentalist who
talked like a cynic, and a philosopher who had elevated conviviality to
the dignity of an exact science. Here, indeed, was a "living
oxymoron"--a combination of inconsistent and incongruous qualities which
to the typical John Bull--Lord Palmerston's "Fat man with a white hat in
the twopenny omnibus"--was a sealed and hopeless mystery.

Something of this unlikeness to his fellow-Englishmen was due, no doubt,
to the fact that Lord Houghton, the only son of a gifted, eccentric, and
indulgent father, was brought up at home. The glorification of the
Public School has been ridiculously overdone. But it argues no blind
faith in that strange system of unnatural restraints and scarcely more
reasonable indulgences to share Gibbon's opinion that the training of a
Public School is the best adapted to the common run of Englishmen. "It
made us what we were, sir," said Major Bagstock to Mr. Dombey; "we were
iron, sir, and it forged us." The average English boy being what he is
by nature--"a soaring human boy," as Mr. Chadband called him--a Public
School simply makes him more so. It confirms alike his characteristic
faults and his peculiar virtues, and turns him out after five or six
years that altogether lovely and gracious product--the Average
Englishman. This may be readily conceded; but, after all, the
pleasantness of the world as a place of residence, and the growing good
of the human race, do not depend exclusively on the Average Englishman;
and something may be said for the system of training which has
produced, not only all famous foreigners (for they, of course, are a
negligible quantity), but such exceptional Englishmen as William Pitt
and Thomas Macaulay, and John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, and Richard
Monckton Milnes.

From an opulent and cultivated home young Milnes passed to the most
famous college in the world, and found himself under the tuition of
Whewell and Thirlwall, and in the companionship of Alfred Tennyson and
Julius Hare, Charles Buller and J