Lord Houghton

“ I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;—Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin! How I wished this evening for Lord Bute! How I could preach to him!—The servants wanted to lay me in the great apartment—what! to make me pass the night as I had done my evening! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court which cut off her father’s head, and imagining it could please her. ”

“ I went for two days from Bretton to Lord Houghton at Fryston, which has since been burnt, but which was so filled with books of every kind that the whole house was a library, each bookcase being filled with a different subject—the French Revolution, Demonology and Witchcraft, &c., &c. Lady Houghton was living then, a most gentle, kind woman, a sister of Lord Crewe. From Lord Houghton I received constant kindness and protection from my first entering upon a literary life, and, in spite of his excessive vanity, I was always sincerely attached to him. ”

“ Lord Houghton was so very individual a man that it was impossible to call him a typical Englishman. He liked to gather oddities and geniuses around his table, and he was always particularly friendly to Americans. ”

“ Lord Houghton—to me the kindest and most welcoming of hereditary friends—had a personality and a position altogether his own. His appearance was typically English; his manner as free and [Pg 157] forthcoming as a Frenchman's. Thirty years before he had been drawn by a master-hand as Mr. Vavasour in Tancred, but no lapse of time could stale his infinite variety. He was poet, essayist, politician, public orator, country gentleman, railway-director, host, guest, ball-giver, and ball-goer, and acted each part with equal zest and assiduity. ”

“ There never lived so perfect a host. His sympathy was genius, and his hospitality a fine art. He was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of "Auld Lang Syne," and when a young man came up from Oxford or Cambridge to begin life in London, he was certain to find that Lord Houghton had travelled on the Continent with his father, or had danced with his mother, or had made love to his aunt, and was eagerly on the look-out for an opportunity of showing gracious and valuable kindness to the son of his ancient friends. ”

“ Everybody knows that Lord Houghton was the most tolerant of men in all matters of faith and opinion; but he did not allow mere carelessness or idleness to serve as an excuse for the disregard of religious observances. My usual time for visiting Fryston was on Saturday, when I was free from the charge of my paper for four-and-twenty hours. My kind friend always insisted on Sunday morning that instead of going to church I should spend the morning in strolling in the park, either alone or in his delightful company. ”

“ Ubi bene ibi patria; wherever Lord Houghton may have settled himself, he is equally surrounded with the signs of elegance and ease ; therefore, to adopt the Latin proverb, he is at home everywhere, even as, wherever he receives them, he makes the guests whom he delights to entertain with his graceful hospitality emphatically at home too. On the present occasion, however, let us elect to visit him within easy driving distance of Pontefract, which he represented for twenty-five years on both sides of the House, at Fryston Hall. A house more delightful than this it is difficult to imagine. ”

“ One day when lunching at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting at dinner by the celebrated Lady E—— of T——, who was indulging in a long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation. "When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my feet." ”

“ I could fill a volume with reminiscences of his talk, as I used to hear it during my frequent visits to Fryston, and of the warmth of his sympathy with one who had no claim upon him. I have made many friends in the course of my life, and looking back upon the list I am constrained to say that I have made more friends through the mediumship of Lord Houghton than through that of any other man. ”

“ Lord Houghton must have been a welcome guest in a country where humour and the capacity for after-dinner speeches are so warmly appreciated as in America. No more brilliant after-dinner speaker ever existed than Richard Monckton Milnes, and the capacity for public speech, which was such a characteristic of the first Lord Houghton, exists no less gracefully in his poetic and now Vice-Regal son ”

“ Puis c'est Lord Houghton, qui avait de l'esprit et de la psychologie. Il venait de gagner une livre a un jeune homme de ressources très modestes, au cours d'une partie de whist, et comme il empochait la pièce: "Ah! mon cher enfant," dit-il, "le grand Lord Hertford, que les sots appellent le méchant Lord Hertford, avait accoutumé de dire: Il n'y a pas de plaisir à gagner de l'argent à un homme qui ne sent point sa perte. Comme c'est vrai!" ”

“ March 12.—Yesterday Lord Houghton and I sat very long after breakfast with the Duke, who talked of his diplomatic life. He was appointed from St. Petersburg to Paris, and the revolution which enthroned Louis Philippe occurring just then, he hurried his journey. When he reached Frankfort, Chad, who was minister there, assured him that he would not be allowed to enter France, but, provided with a courier passport, he pushed on, and crossed the frontier without difficulty. At Paris the barricades were still up. ”

“ At the end of a month Houghton was persuaded by ‘certain good and learned men,’ including Stokesley, bishop of London, that the cause was not one for which it was lawful to suffer. He therefore undertook to comply conditionally, with some necessary reservations, and was sent back to the cloister. The royal commissioners went there with the lord mayor for the oath, and it was refused. They went again, with the threat of instant imprisonment for the whole community, and then all the monks swore as they were required, protesting that they submitted only as far as it was lawful for them so to do. ”

“ If Houghton was distinguished as a brilliant conversational centre and extractor of men's thoughts, it was a gift which has left no permanent trace behind. Sir George Trevelyan, in the life of the best English talker of his time, has little to record, and Mr. Wemyss Reid has no description of a Symposium — nothing as interesting as Hawthorne's breakfast on the 11th of July 1856, where he met Ticknor and the Brownings, Lord Lansdowne and Macaulay. Unfortunately Milnes, who heard so much, wrote down very little. ”

“ Houghton, Lord, at Torquay, 58; his enormous acquaintance, 59; his dry wit and humor, 60; his social advice to the author, 60; breakfast party given in London by, 103; his remarkable defense of one of the author's novels, 172; in the Highlands, 177. Houghton, old Catholic house in Yorkshire, 155. —— Sir Robert Walpole's, in Norfolk, 151. Howard, Kenneth, 96. Hoy, island of, its colossal cliffs, 300. Hugel, Baron von, Austrian diplomat, 237. Human Document, A, 255-278. Huxley as Mr. Storks in The New Republic, 87-88. ”

“ The truest thing that was ever said of him was said by William Edward Forster at the Cosmopolitan Club one night, when Houghton was leaving it. Someone said, referring to Houghton, "He's a good man to trust when you're in trouble, for he'll stand by you." "He'll do more than that," responded Forster; "he'll stand by a man not only in trouble but in disgrace, and I know nobody else who will." This was where the finer trait in Houghton's independence of character came in. ”

“ Then Miss Houghton spoke with the marvellous self-possession of her nature.
“I knew my own name and my mother's from the beginning,” she said, “and Monsieur Van Muyden, and the old house, and the Flemish bonne in the Rue Neuve. I remember them all when a child. I used often to sleep there, and the night before I left Bruges I still remember playing with the baron's old sword. I remember my mother coming to see me at school in England, a convent-school, where I was very happy, and giving me these bracelets. She told me never to part with them; she said she would not be with me long. ”

“ Houghton is a young man, probably twenty-eight years of age, rather regular features, Grecian nose, light whiskers, mustache and goatee; hair dark brown. He was voluble and straightforward in his testimony. ”

“ He was always ready to espouse the cause of a man upon whom the world was frowning, but happily this quality is not uncommon among our nobler natures. That which was most uncommon in Houghton's character was his willingness to befriend a man even when he knew that the disgrace into which he had fallen was not undeserved. ”

“ Houghton.
“Only an uneventful love story, with a man of solitary habits, who digs clams because it amuses him and makes a garden, and keeps clear of his neighbors, a charmingly drawn girl, a rich father who is not spoiled, and a proud mother who is humanized by the birth of a grandchild. There is a good deal of landscape and sky and sea in the narrative, which depends for its charm largely on atmosphere and sentiment.”—Outlook.
“His is a diction which, one is tempted to believe, is born of William John Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the various authors of the Bible. ”

“ But though he shines as a writer of what may be called, without disparagement, poetical trifles, there is also a serious strain by no means contemptible in his verse. Strangers Yet is a fine specimen of pathos. In Poems, Legendary and Historical, however, Houghton is less successful, and the best of them do not bear comparison with Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, which belong to the same class. Houghton’s critical work in prose is on the whole more valuable than his verse, for there his culture told, and the lack of high imagination is less felt. ”

“ We often wished, when we heard of Queen Adelaide or the Duke of Wellington being ill, that they would send for Mr Hoggins; but, on consideration, we were rather glad they did not, for, if we were ailing, what should we do if Mr Hoggins had been appointed physician-in-ordinary to the Royal Family? As a surgeon we were proud of him; but as a man—or rather, I should say, as a gentleman—we could only shake our heads over his name and himself, and wished that he had read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters in the days when his manners were susceptible of improvement. ”

“ There will soon be grand doings in that city, for the Queen is going to be married.” [153]
Then the young man implored the South-wind to take him there. The South-wind answered:
“It is pretty far from here, and you don’t know the way; but take this apple, and wherever it rolls do you follow it, and you will come to Muhlenberg.”
The young man bade the South-wind adieu and followed the apple, going on for a long, long time. Suddenly he came upon some robbers. He went up to them as if they were old acquaintances, exclaiming, “Good-day to you, brothers! Are you right well? ”

“ Now Graybeard saw plainly that the Master had played a trick upon him, and he quickly seized him by the nape of the neck. At this moment the moujik came [92] running up, crying from afar, “Hold on, my falcon-badger! By my faith, I will not rumple a hair of your head!”
So the moujik killed the Fox and stripped off his skin, saying to the Badger, “You may go free; his skin is worth five kopeks, but yours only two. Go, in God’s name!”
“It wasn’t fair of Reinecke,” observed the little boy.
“No, it wasn’t fair, and so he got punished,” said the grandmother. ”

“ HOUGHTON or HOUTONE, ADAM de (d. 1389) , bishop of St. David's and chancellor of England, was born at Caerforiog in the parish of Whitchurch, near St. David's, but his name clearly shows that his family was of English or Norman origin. Foss's conjecture that he was a son of John de Houghton, baron of the exchequer in 1347, seems untenable. Adam de Houghton was educated at Oxford, where he took the degree of doctor of laws. In 1337 Adam de Houton of Oxford, clerk, was in trouble for having wounded John le Blake of Tadyngton (Wood, Hist. and Antiq. i. 434) . ”

“ Henry, Maurice made a bad woman Jacky's mother; he owes her nothing. But do you mean to say that you don't think he owes the child a decent father?"
"My darling," Henry Houghton said, tenderly, "you are really a little crazy. You are like your stars, you so 'steadfastly pursue your shining,' that you fail to see that, in this dark world of men, there has to be compromise. If this impossible situation should arise—which God forbid!—if the explosion should come, and Eleanor should leave him, of course Maurice wouldn't marry the woman! ”

“ And if he wanted more income, had not he his pen, and was not he very popular with the periodicals? But he was always wanting to take great farms, without any money to stock them. He was hand and glove with great men in Edinburgh, Professor Wilson, and Scott, and the like; he was aye going to Abbotsford and Lord Napier's; and so he thought himself a very great man too, and Mrs. Hogg thought herself a great woman, and looked down on her neighbors. These poets think nothing's good enough for them. Hogg paid the duke no rent, but he caught his fish, and killed his game ”

“ Now James Houghton, at the age of twenty-eight, inherited a splendid business in Manchester goods, in Woodhouse. He was a tall, thin, elegant young man with side-whiskers, genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity: a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful. Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older than himself, daughter of a Derbyshire squire. ”