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On the 8th May I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Arthur Balfour for the first time, at a Newspaper and Press Fund dinner, and was struck with the good humour in which he accepted a quick reply I gave him. I was speaking: “It is a common expression, gentlemen, that the Press has improved in the last fifty years, but we are all more tolerant. I recall the time when the leading club in London ceased to take in the leading newspaper because it disapproved of the letters of its War correspondent in the Crimea, who, by describing our untold miseries, saved the remnant of our army.”
I hear acutely when there is a noise, and my speech being favourably received, my ears were unduly sensitive, so I heard Mr. Balfour say in a low, quiet inquiring voice: “Dear me, I wonder which club?” Putting up my hand so that all the room should not hear it, I replied, “Carlton,” which name was received by a burst of laughter by those near, in which Mr. Balfour joined, but with a gesture to the shorthand writers I prevented it being reported.
I had the pleasure on the 26th June of seeing my youngest son win the Riding prize at Sandhurst. The second son won it in 1892, and I had hoped that the eldest one would have succeeded in carrying it off in 1890, but unfortunately he had a riding accident three months before the competition.
In the Spring of the year Sir Redvers Buller, the Adjutant-General, came into my office, which was nearly opposite his room, and, for him an unusual custom, told a story, in the course of which he said: “And then they all became silent and listened attentively.” I interrupted him by the line—
“Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant.
And he capped it at once by repeating—
“Inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto
Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare dolorem.”
I observed: “You don’t know what you are quoting.” “Yes, I do; you quoted the first line of the second book of the Æneid, and I the second and third lines; and in the Virgil we used at Eton it is on the right-hand side of the page when you open the book.”
This proof of memory is more remarkable than my own, as I had re-read Virgil in 1857 for pleasure, and in 1869 before being entered as a student for the Bar.