was dressed in unusual style, lunched with Dr. and Mrs. E. J.
Burton. "Isabel looks very smart to-day," observed Mrs. E. J. Burton.
"Yes," followed Burton, "she always wears her best when we go to see my
dear Louisa."

Burton took a pleasure in sitting up late. "Indeed," says one of his
friends, "he would talk all night in preference to going to bed, and,
in the Chaucerian style, he was a brilliant conversationalist, and his
laugh was like the rattle of a pebble across a frozen pond." "No man
of sense," Burton used to say, "rises, except in mid-summer, before
the world is brushed and broomed, aired and sunned." Later, however,
he changed his mind, and for the last twenty years of his life he was a
very early riser.

Among Burton's wedding gifts were two portraits--himself and his
wife--in one frame, the work of Louis Desanges, the battle painter whose
acquaintance he had made when a youth at Lucca. Burton appears with
Atlantean shoulders, strong mouth, penthouse eyebrows, and a pair of
enormous pendulous moustaches, which made him look very like a Chinaman.
Now was this an accident, for his admiration of the Chinese was always
intense. He regarded them as "the future race of the East," just as
he regarded the Slav as the future race of Europe. Many years later
he remarked of Gordon's troops, that they had shown the might that was
slumbering in a nation of three hundred millions. China armed would be
a colossus. Some day Russia would meet China face to face--the splendid
empire of Central Asia the prize. The future might of Japan he did not
foresee.

Says Lady Burton: "We had a glorious season, and took up our position
in Society. Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes) was very much attached
to Richard, and he settled the question of our position by asking his
friend, Lord Palmerston, to give a party, and to let me be the bride of
the evening, and when I arrived Lord Palmerston gave me his arm.... Lady
Russell presented me at Court 'on my marriage.'" [181]

Mrs. Burton's gaslight beauty made her the cynosure of all eyes.

42. At Lord Houghton's.

At Fryston, Lord Houghton's seat, the Burtons met Carlyle, Froude, Mr.
A. C. Swinburne, who had just published his first book, The Queen Mother
and Rosamund, [182] and Vambery, the Hungarian linguist and traveller.
Born in Hungary, of poor Jewish parents, Vambery had for years a fierce
struggle with poverty. Having found his way to Constantinople, he
applied himself to t