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 XIV THE LIFE OF LORD HOUGHTON the present generation the name of Lord Houghton represents, in the apt terms of his biographer, a social moderator and leisured literary expert. But the original Monckton Milnes was known as something more than this, as a serious and effective writer and a busy and apparently dissatisfied politician. Mr. Wemyss Reid renders full justice to him in his earlier character. Lingering survivors will prefer the anticipated judgment of posterity, and will be inclined to think less of his real success in literature or his supposed disappointment in politics than of those qualities which made him the centre of a vast circle of friends, and gave him a singular and brilliant position at the point where letters, politics, and society met.

He was the son of a country gentleman, who, having refused to be Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-five, lived to decline the offer of a peerage forty-seven years later. The remainder of his career does not maintain the level of his lofty abnegation. In early youth he convinced both friends and rivals that he was equal to the best of his contemporaries ; but he never afterwards cared to live up to that reputation. A remark of Lord Palmerston on his second speech in the House of Commons, a remark of his own, after following the army from Brussels to Paris, to the effect that the Prussians were of no use at all at Waterloo, make it doubtful whether his early fame or his later obscurity was better earned. He became a man of