"He was invited to Beaconsfield," Crabbe wrote in his short autobiographical sketch, "the seat of his protector, and was there placed in a convenient apartment, supplied with books for his information and amusement, and made a member of a family whom it was honour as well as pleasure to become in any degree associated with."

It was probably soon after the publication of The Library that Crabbe paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, and was welcomed as a guest by Burke's wife and her niece as cordially as by the statesman himself.

In the course of conversations at Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than to medicine.

It was the reporting of Beaconsfield's Aylesbury speech, not a stenographic report, for that they had from the English press, but a letter on the occasion as a demonstration.

I went to Aylesbury, and, as Beaconsfield was to speak twice,once at the farmers' ordinary and then at the assembly rooms,I dined at the ordinary; and as all the places in the assembly rooms had been taken before the dinner was over, I had to employ some assurance to hear the principal speech.

As soon as the company rose from the table, I pushed through to where Beaconsfield was standing, and, presenting my card as correspondent of the New York "Herald," asked him to be kind enough to put me in the way of hearing him, explaining why I had lost my chance through remaining to hear him at the dinner.

It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall, Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of our walks; on his part with the most dispassionate appreciation and kindness of manner.

Here, too, you will find Lord ACTON, who deeply disapproved of Mr. GLADSTONE'S conduct in paying a memorial tribute of respect and eulogy to Lord BEACONSFIELD.

Jordans, the burial-place of William Penn, the great English Quaker and philanthropist, lies on a by-road in Buckinghamshire, leading from Chalfont St. Peter to Beaconsfield.

" Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than in the foregoing passage.

An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the present hour impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which, even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's judgment quoted abovethat "he was a poet, and a true poet."

In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy.

Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describesno doubt from authentic sourcesa family dinner at the end of the eighteenth century: "The ample tureen of potage royal had a boned duck swimming in its centre.

Lord Beaconsfield, quizzing John Wilson Croker in Coningsby, says: "He bored his audience with too much history, especially the French Revolution, which he fancied was his forte, so that the people at last, whenever he made any allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had seen the guillotine."

The following description is taken from Lord Beaconsfield, who is drawing a character derived in part from Sir Francis Burdett (1770-1840), and in part from George Byng, who was M.P. for Middlesex for fifty-six years, and died in 1847:"He was the Father of the House, though it was difficult to believe that from his appearance.

I concluded my last chapter with a quotation from Lord Beaconsfield, describing parliamentary speaking as it was when he entered the House of Commons in 1837.

Lord Beaconsfield, speaking in the last year of his life to Mr. Matthew Arnold, said that the task of carrying Mr. Forster's Coercion Bill of 1881 through the House of Commons "needed such a man as Lord Derby was in his youtha man full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, who carried the House irresistibly along with him"no mean tribute from a consummate judge.

Writing in 1844, Lord Beaconsfield thus described him:"He is not a natural orator, and labours under physical deficiencies which even a Demosthenic impulse could scarcely overcome.

It is not unreasonable even in that later generation which can still recall the frank but high-bred gaiety of the great Lord Derby, the rollicking good-humour and animal spirits of Bishop Wilberforce, the saturnine epigrams of Lord Beaconsfield, the versatility and choice diction of Lord Houghton, the many-sided yet concentrated malice which supplied the stock in trade of Abraham Hayward.

Lord Beaconsfield described "a still gallant figure, scrupulously attired; a blue frock coat, with a ribboned button-hole; a well-turned boot; hat a little too hidalgoish, but quite new.

This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield's conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame.

But, as Lord Beaconsfield observes in a more than usually grotesque passage of Lothair, "We must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea."

That most successful of all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of German princes.

He has the Corpus Poetarum and Shakespeare and Pope at his finger-ends, and his intimate acquaintance with the political history of England elicited a characteristic compliment from Lord Beaconsfield.

Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpassed; and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, whose "sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos," were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius.