Here and there in the Memoir are glimpses of the world of literature with which he was often in touch. He discusses with Swinburne a much- disputed reference in Shelley's Epipsychidion. In 1872 Browning reads his Red Cotton Nightcap Country at 76, Sloane Street. There are admiring references to the work of George Eliot, and to Mrs. Lynn Linton—'perhaps the cleverest woman I know.' When he goes to the United States, we get his warmly drawn picture of the Boston group—Emerson, Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, Longfellow, Lowell, Dr. Collyer, and Dr. Hedge.
[Footnote: See Chapter VI. (Vol. I., p. 60).]
Recording Stepniak's suggestion that Bismarck, Mazzini, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the three greatest conversationalists of our times, 'I said that, having known all three, I agreed that they were remarkable, although I myself found Mazzini a little of the bore. Disraeli was sometimes very good, although sometimes singularly silent; but there were once two Russians that I put in the first rank—Herzen and Tourgénief.'
Questions relating to one literary personality alone receive full-length treatment in the Memoir. On any point that concerned Keats Sir Charles was always keenly interested. He may be said to have inherited the Keats tradition and the Keats devotion from his grandfather, and anyone connected with Keats found easy way to his sympathy and attention. It was his intervention which finally obtained for Keats's sister, Mme. Llanos, a regular Civil List pension in 1880. When the Lindon family sold to Mr. Buxton Forman Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, Mme. Llanos wrote 'from Madrid saying how greatly she was vexed that her brother's love-letters should have been placed before the world,' and 'I had a good deal of correspondence with Lord Houghton over this matter…. [Lord Houghton] wrote:
'"My Dear Dilke,
'"Since the Athenaeum fixed my place in poetical literature between Rogers and Eliza Cook, I have naturally not read that journal, but I have been shown a capital flagellation of those unfilial wine-merchants. [Footnote: Miss Brawne married Louis Lindon, a wine-merchant.] I thought I had even gone too far in my elegant extracts—with which you furnished me. I have, alas! no poetical amours to be recorded, out of which my family can make anything handsome."'
The letter ends with an invitation to lunch and 'talk Keats.'
Sir Charles notes further:
'About this time (1878) Mr. Buxton Forman announced for publication the Keats Love-Letters, which I certainly thought I had in a vague way bought for the purpose of preventing publication. They had been long in my possession, but the son of Fanny Brawne had claimed them, and I, having no written agreement, had found it necessary to give them up—although what I had bought and paid for, unless it was the right to prevent publication, I do not know.'
About this time Mr. John Morley proffered a request that Sir Charles would write a monograph on Keats for his English Men of Letters. Lord Houghton thought that a "new view" from Sir Charles "would have great interest"; but he decided to decline the undertaking.