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.