The late Lord Houghton was one of the men of note who I met occasionally at the houses of friends. I had known him in Italy and he was always kind to me and invited me to his Christmas parties at Frystone, which were said to be delightful, but to which I did not go. For a poet he had an extraordinarily rough exterior and blunt manner. One day we had a regular set-to argument lasting a long time. He attacked the order of things with the usual pessimist observations on all the evil in the world, and implied that I had no reasonable right to my faith. I answered as best I could, with some earnestness, and he finally concluded the discussion by remarking with concentrated contempt: “You might almost as well be a Christian!” Next day I went to Westminster Abbey and was sitting in the Dean’s pew, when, to my amusement Lord Houghton came in just below, with a party of ladies and took a seat exactly opposite me. He behaved of course with edifying propriety, but I could not help reflecting with a smile on our argument of the night before, and wondering how many members of that and similar congregations who were naturally counted by outsiders as faithful supporters of the orthodox creed, were as little so, au fond, as either Lord Houghton or I.
With Carlyle, though I saw him very frequently, I never interchanged more than a few banal words of civility. When his biography appeared, I was, (as I frankly told the illustrious biographer) exceedingly glad that I had never given him the chance of attaching one of his pungent epigrams to my poor person. I had been introduced to him by a lady at whose house he happened to call one afternoon when I was sitting with her, and where he showed himself (as it seems to me the roughest men invariably do in the society of amiable Countesses),—extremely apprivoisé. Also I continually met him out walking with one or other of his great historian friends, who were also mine, but I avoided trespassing on their good nature; or addressing him when he walked up and down alone daily before our door in Cheyne Walk,—till one day when he had been very ill, I ventured to express my satisfaction in seeing him out of doors again. He then answered me kindly. I never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men who knew him personally, and therefore had means which I did not possess, of estimating him aright. To me his books and himself represented an anomalous sort of human Fruit. The original stock was a hard and thorny Scotch peasant-character, with a splendid intellect superadded. The graft was not wholly successful. A flavour of the old acrid sloe was always perceptible in the plum.
The following letter was received by Dr. Hoggan in reply to a letter to Mr. Carlyle concerning Vivisection:
“Keston Lodge, Beckenham,
“28th August, 1875.
“Dear Sir,
“Mr. Carlyle has received your letter, and has read it carefully. He bids me say, that ever since he was a boy when he read the account of Majendie’s atrocities, he has never thought of the practice of vivisecting animals but with horror. I may mention that I have heard him speak of it in the strongest terms of disgust long before there was any speech about public agitation on the subject. He believes that the reports about the good results said to be obtained from the practice of vivisection to be immensely exaggerated; with the exception of certain experiments by Harvey and certain others by Sir Charles Bell, he is not aware of any conspicuous good that has resulted from it. But even supposing the good results to be much greater than Mr. Carlyle believes they are, and apart too from the shocking pain inflicted on the helpless animals operated upon, he would still think the practice so brutalising to the operators that he would earnestly wish the law on the subject to be altered, so as to make Vivisection even in Institutions like that with which you are connected a most rare occurrence, and when practised by private individuals an indictable offence.
“You are not sure that the operators on living animals ‘can be counted on your fingers.’ Mr. Carlyle with an equal share of certainty believes Vivisection and other kindred experiments on living animals to be much more largely practised, and that they are by no means uncommonly undertaken by doctors’ apprentices and ‘other miserable persons.’
“You are mistaken if you look upon the Times as a mirror of virtue; on this very subject when it at first began to be publicly discussed last winter, it printed a letter from ... which your letter itself would prove to be altogether composed of falsehoods.
“With Mr. Carlyle’s compliments and good wishes,