During a New Year week I was invited by Lord and Lady Lyonesse to a very diverting house-party. This peer, it will be remembered, is the well-known radical philanthropist who owed his title to a lifelong interest in the submerged tenth. Their house, Ivanhoe, is an exquisite gothic structure not unjustly regarded as the masterpiece of the late Sir Gilbert Scott: it overlooks the Ouse. Including our hosts we numbered forty persons, and the personnel, including valets, chauffeurs, and ladies’-maids brought by the guests, numbered sixty. In all, we were a hundred souls, assuming immortality for the chauffeurs and the five Scotch gardeners. On January 2nd somebody produced after dinner a copy of the Petit Parisien relating the plebiscite for the greatest Frenchman of the nineteenth century; another guest capped him with the Evening News list. The famous Pall Mall Gazette Academy of Forty was recalled with indifferent accuracy. Conversation was flagging; our hostess looked relieved; very soon we were all playing a
variation of that most charming game, suck-pencil.
At first we decided to ignore the nineteenth century. The ten greatest living Englishmen were to be named by our votes. Bridge and billiard players were dragged to the polling-station in the green drawing-room. Lord Lyonesse and myself were the tellers. I shivered with excitement. One of the Ultimatelies of Churton Collins seemed to have arrived: it was Götterdämmerung—the Twilight of the Idols. And here is the result of the ballot, which I think every one will admit possesses extraordinary interest:
Hall Caine.
Marie Corelli.
Rudyard Kipling.
Lord Northcliffe.
Sir Thomas Lipton.
Hichens.
Chamberlain.