'Lady Waldegrave pressed me to go to Strawberry Hill on a particular Saturday in the month—the only one, I think, on which, as a fact, I did not go—to meet the Prince of Wales, but as she playfully took me to task at the same time for not attending levees, I connected the two things, and thought she had been asked to speak to me, and declined. I told her that I had left off going to levees in 1865, before I left Cambridge, for no reason except that they bored me; and that if I were suddenly to go, people would think that I had changed my views, and wished it to be known that I had changed them, for they thought that my not going was connected with my opinions, which, however, it was not.'
There is a note early in this year:
'I was engaged at this moment on an attempt to form a circle of friends who would be superior, from the existence with them of a standpoint, to the mere ordinary political world, and I began doing my best to meet frequently those whom I most liked—John Morley, Dillwyn, Leonard Courtney, and Fitzmaurice, prominently among the politicians; and Burton (Director of the National Gallery), Minto, and Joseph Knight, prominently among the artists and men of letters. All these were men with something noble in their natures, or something delicate and beautiful, full of sterling qualities.'
Minto was the well-known man of letters. Joseph Knight, for many years dramatic critic of the Athenaeum, and, later, editor of Notes and Queries, was perhaps the best known and most beloved of Bohemians, a pillar of the Garrick Club, and one of the men to whose tongue came ceaselessly apt and unexpected quotations from Shakespeare. He had the same passion as old Mr. Dilke for accumulating books, and like him, too, was a living catalogue to his own library, or libraries, for he accumulated and sold two in his lifetime.
Another man of letters needs no introduction:
'A wreck of glasses attests the presence of Swinburne. He compared himself to Dante; repeatedly named himself with Shelley and Dante, to the exclusion of all other poets; assured me that he was a great man only because he had been properly flogged at Eton, the last time for reading The Scarlet Letter when he should have been reading Greek; confessed to never having read Helvétius, though he talked of Diderot and Rousseau, and finally informed me that two glasses of green Chartreuse were a perfect antidote to one of yellow, or two of yellow to one of green. It was immediately after this that Theodore Watts- Dunton took charge of him and reduced him to absolute respectability.'
Sir Charles tells stories of a remarkable political and literary personage.
'Lord Houghton's anecdotes were rendered good by the remarkable people that he had known…. He once about this time said to me: "I have known everyone in the present century that was worth knowing." With a little doubt in my mind, I murmured, "Napoleon Bonaparte?" "I was taken to Elba when I was a boy," said Houghton instantly. I thought his recollections of the first Emperor apocryphal. There was, however, a chance that the father—who was in Italy—did take the child to Elba.'
Another story, of which Lord Houghton was not the narrator, but the subject, came to Sir Charles during a party at Lady Pollock's, and concerned the dinner which had preceded the party.
'It had been at seven o'clock in honour of Tennyson, who would not dine at any other hour, and Tennyson sat on one side of the hostess, and Lord Houghton on the other; and the latter was cross at being made to dine at 7, preferring to dine at 8.30, and sup, after dinner, at 11. The conversation turned on a poem which had been written by Tennyson in his youth, and Tennyson observed "I have not even a copy myself—no one has it." To which Lord Houghton answered: "I have one. I have copies of all the rubbish you ever wrote."—A pause.—"When you are dead I mean to publish them all. It will make my fortune and destroy your reputation." After this Tennyson was heard to murmur, "Beast!" It must have been a real pleasure to him to find himself survive his brother poet.