Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/263

 that my eyebrows were on a level with the top of his head. It is the biggest head I ever saw—bigger than Macavoy's. He addressed me in English with—'I am very happy, sir, to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance'—and so set the conversation in that language, but he does not speak it so well as I had heard. His vocabulary is limited, his utterance slow, and he speaks with a certain German or Swiss accent.

"Herein, however, I perhaps did him an injustice from comparing his English with Montalembert's with whom I had spent several hours of the previous day. Hours of continuous single combat, in which I accused him of being that detestable character, a Frenchman more English than the English themselves, and so trying to blot out the ancient love and loyalty which ran between his country and Ireland. I got it all out—three hours of it in his library with a marshal of Louis Quatorze and a knight of the Golden Fleece looking down from the walls in dismay. But at the end he put his arm round my neck and seduced me. 'Why aren't you in Parliament—why aren't you in Parliament?' he said, 'You think we know more than we do. Your words stun me.' And like a palavering and insinuating deluder, as he is, when I was going away, he would still clasp me by the shoulders and hold me by the hand, and say, 'Why aren't you in Parliament?' I had not the cruelty to retort, 'Why aren't you?' I was speaking of Montalembert's English—which is the most masterly thing I ever heard. I don't know any Englishman who speaks such good English in conversation. It is quite as good as Gladstone's is in public parole—and with the fine French glancing academic grace, and the inbred ancient nobility of his manner, the effect is a thing not to be forgotten. I saw a good deal of him—I visited him, he visited me, and I went to Madame la Comtesse's reception—but I did not feel somehow that we were cordial at the end."

Charles Kean and his gifted wife were at this time in Melbourne, and all cultivated people had the highest enjoyment in their acting and reading, especially the lady's. I have never seen a finer piece of comedy than a bit of Mrs. Kean's performance of Portia, in which, without uttering