1 An unscrupulous man might have retained them, as, though Spanish
property, they had been stolen by the French and then captured by the
Duke.



16 A FRAGMENT

more shelves for all these huge Parliamentary Reports.
They will soon outfoUo us out of our houses and homes."
I had never heard that most significant phrase before ;
I could not find it in any dictionary. It may have
been used then for the first time ; at any rate, it came
naturally and characteristically from one who had
known so well how to oidfanJc his enemies.

Before leaving the room, the Duke said to Miss
Burdett-Coutts, " What are you going to do with your
opera-box this evening ? " She replied that it would
be entirely at his service, as she was going into the
country. " Then write me an order for it at my desk,
if you please." It was while she was writing this
order, that relying on the Duke's being a little deaf,
I whispered to her that if I were not afraid of annoy-
ing him I would ask the Duke to write his name for
me, while she was writing her name for him. " What 's
that you were saying ? " he exclaimed ; and on my
confession, he added, " With all my heart," and pro-
ceeded to write " Wellington " for me on a scrap of
paper, dated May 29, 1847.

Five years later the Duke died, and England was
mourning for him almost at the same moment at which
we were mourning for Webster.

In the years 1824-25 (while I was in college), four
young Englishmen visited the United States together,
all of whom had distinguished careers, and one of
whom became Prime Minister. They were Edward
Stanley, then Mr. Stanley, afterward Lord Stanley,
and ultimately fourteenth Earl of Derby ; Henry



OF AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 17

Labouchere, afterward Lord Taunton ; John Stuart-
WoRTLEY, afterward second Lord Wharnclifte; and
John Evelyn Denison, afterward Speaker of the
House of Commons and Viscount Ossington. Webster,
who knew them all, as I subsequently did, had given
me letters to Denison and Lord Stanley; and I had
hardly returned from leaving my letter and card at the
latter's house in St. James Square before a note
reached me from him, expressing his great regard for
Mr. Webster, and fixing an evening for my dining
with him. It was one of my first ceremonious banquets
in London, and I can recall the name of no one
present, except myself, who did not rejoice in some
title of nobility. The Duke of Richmond, the Marquis
of Exeter, the Earl of Desart with his then young and
beautiful countess. Lord Redesdale, and others, made
up a good representation of the Conservative party.
As I was the only Commoner, my turn came last in
going down to dinner ; but I found a seat reserved for
me next to the Duke of Richmond and Lady Stanley,
and I could not have been more agreeably placed.
Before the ladies had retired. Lord Stanley called to
me across the table to inquire whether I had heard
lately from his friend Webster, and asked me to join
him in drinking the latter's health. This was the best
introduction I could have had to the rest, and secured
me cordial attentions.

A few evenings afterward, I heard Stanley speak for
more than an hour in the House of Lords, and was
fully able to understand and appreciate the great
celebrity he had acquired as an orator. Few English

2



18 A FKAGMENT

statesmen, indeed, had enjoyed greater celebrity for
eloquence, at so early an age, while he was in the
House of Commons. When I heard him first, he was
by no means old ; but sharp and severe attacks of the
hereditary malady of so many old English families
had somewhat subdued his fiery tone, and the House
of Peers was not altogether a field for the Hotspur
quality which he had exhibited in the Commons or on
the hustings. But there was a rich melody in his
tones, and a faultless finish in his phrases and periods,
and a masterly arrangement and treatment of his
topics, which commanded the deepest attention and
admiration. I heard him thirteen years, and again
nearly twenty years, afterward, when the fire was
burning still lower, and within a twelvemonth of his
death. But his singular charm of tone and thought
and illustration and manner were still unimpaired.

He was a fine classical scholar ; and the translation
into English blank verse of Homer's Iliad, published
by him a few years before his death, and which had
been the diversion of his leisure hours, will secure him
an enviable remembrance in literary history. The late
George Ticknor, no mean critic, said to me one day,
"Have you read Lord Derby's Homer?" And on my
replying that I was reading it at the moment, he con-
tinued : '' Well, I have read almost the whole of it, and
have compared the most noted passages both with the
original Greek, and with Pope and Chapman and other
translators, and I like it better than any. I do not
beheve Wordsworth could have done it so well, if he
had tried ; and some of the most striking passages seem



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 19

to me rendered just as Milton himself would have
rendered them had he undertaken the work." Not
long after, I asked an eminent Greek professor of Har-
vard University (Sophocles) whether he had read it,
and he replied : " Every word of it, and I think it the
most faithful to the original of all the English transla-
tions." Such tributes — one from a master in English,
and the other from a master in Greek — make up a
judgment which can hardly be appealed from or
reversed.

Lord Derby died at only seventy years of age, in
1869, leaving a son, the recently deceased fifteenth
earl of that name, who more than once discharged the
duties of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs with
signal ability, and who, with more than his father's
practical wisdom, though with less of his eloquence,
added new lustre to a historic title. I saw much of
him during a visit he paid to Washington when I was
Speaker. In later years I was repeatedly his guest in
London, and he sometimes favored me with letters
upon public affairs.

I had no letter to Lord Brougham, but no one could
be a week in London society without seeing him, or a
night in the House of Lords without hearing him. I
may add, that no one who had ever seen or ever heard
him would be in any danger of forgetting how he
looked or how he spoke. That peculiar " Paul Pry "
figure and physiognomy, that upturned feature ever
on the scent of something, that quick nervous gait with
the glaring stripes on his habitual trousers, could never



20 A FRAGMENT

be mistaken. I met him twice at the table of Lord
Ljndhurst, on two successive visits to England at an
interval of nearly thirteen years, but the lapse of time
had left its mark upon everything and everybody
except Brougham. He was the same restless, inquisi-
tive, loquacious, almost garrulous, person in 18G0 as in
1847, full of experience, full of information, full of
ambition, eager for applause, eager for controversy,
never weary of work, never tired of talk, and of whom
it might be doubted whether he was most anxious to
shine in social or in public life, — as a statesman, or as
a ladies' man.

I heard him make a long and eloquent speech on
the limitation by statute of the hours of labor to ten
hours, or it may have been to eight hours. In the
course of it he alluded to the condition and example
of the United States ; and as he pronounced the name
of our country, he paused for an instant and gathered
himself up for one of those long and involved paren-
theses in which he delighted to indulge, and which
he began somewhat as follows: "The United States,
my Lords, — a country for which I once had some
respect, and of which I should be glad, if it were in
my power, to speak respectfully at this moment, but
which has so outrag-ed the sense of the civilized world
by" — I forget by what, but it -vvas undoubtedly by
something connected with the Mexican War, which was
then raging, or with the annexation of Texas, or with
the toleration of slavery.

So violent was his tone toward this countrv, that
one or two peers present to whom I was personally



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 21

known and by whom I was recognized, — the late Lord
Clarendon for one, — expressed to me a deep regret
that I should have been there to hear such an out-
break, but then added that there was a meaning to
it which I ought to understand. He proceeded to
tell me that a beautiful American lady, for whom
Brougham had a special admiration, had promised to
come down to the House of Lords that evening to hear
him speak, and that he had waited a considerable time
to conduct her to the ladies' gallery ; but a headache
or other indisposition had prevented her from coming,
and so Brougham had vented his impatience and
disappointment in this parenthetical attack upon her
country. The lady, not having been there to hear it,

— indeed, there would have been nothing of the sort
to hear had she been able to keep her appointment,

— was probably never aware how severe an attack
her beauty and her headache conjoined had cost her
countrv.

But Lord Brougham's bark was ever worse than his
bite. These impetuous sallies of severity and sarcasm
were really only parentheses in the powerful and bril-
liant speeches of this remarkable orator, whose elo-
quence both at the bar and in the two Houses of Par-
liament, during a long term of years, was hardly
inferior to that of any man of his time.

Nor was his eloquence confined only to public places
and occasions. He had few equals for that conversa-
tional wit, humor, anecdote, and off-hand repartee
which are the life of a dinner-table. I recall a dinner-
party given by Miss Burdett-Coutts on the day on



22 A FRAGMENT

which she had laid the corner-stone of the beautiful
churcli built by her in the district associated with her
father Sir Francis Burdett's parliamentary service, and
as a memorial of his labors, — Avhen Lord Dundonald,
who had just been restored to the honors of which he
had been unjustly deprived, and Lord Brougham,
and many others of her father's old friends were
assembled around her ; and when the brilliancy of the
feast and of the company was quite eclipsed by the
scintillations and coruscations of Brouo;ham's wit and
anecdote. I dare not attempt to describe them.

Nor was Lord Brougham by any means unwilling to
recognize a great American example, when an oppor-
tunity offered itself. There is no nobler tribute to the
pre-eminent glory of Washington than that sentence
of Brougham's, which he repeated in the same pre-
cise words on two separate occasions, ten or twelve
years apart : " It will be the duty of the historian
and the sage in all ages to let no occasion pass of
commemorating this illustrious man ; and, until time
shall be no more, will a test of the progress which
our race has made in wisdom and virtue be derived
from the veneration paid to the immortal name of
Washington."

I was dining in company with him in 1860, just after
he had repeated in an address at the University of
Edinburgh this memorable sentence, which I had
quoted from him twelve years before in laying the
corner-stone of the National Monument to Washington ;
and I ventured to allude to the repetition, and to my
having had such good reason for remembering the



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 23

sentence. He said at once that he was proud to have
the sentence remembered by an American, and that he
had used it twice designedly, in the same precise words,
as an evidence that it was his dehberate judgment on
Washington's career and character. So we agreed to
exchange addresses ; and the next day he sent me not
only his Edinburgh discourse, but a volume also of
" Tracts, Mathematical and Physical," which he had
just published, with an autograph inscription.

Of Lord Lyndhurst, — an American by birth, as is
well known, — I can recall but little beyond what I
said in announcing his death to the Massachusetts
Historical Society, of which he was an Honorary
Member. It is all printed in their Proceedings for
November, 1863, and in the second volume of my
Addresses and Speeches. A sentence or two will
suffice for these reminiscences : —

"He was one of the few parliamentary orators, of
late years, who commanded attention beyond the limits
of his own land, and whose speeches, on foreign and
domestic questions alike, were read with interest and
eagerness in all parts of the world. There are those
here who remember well how emphatically Mr. Webster
spoke, on his return from England many years ago, of
the clearness, cogency, and true eloquence which char-
acterized a speech of Lyndhurst's which he himself
had been fortunate enough to hear. Like Webster, he
was especially remarkable for the power and precision
with w^hich he stated his case, and for the lucid order
in which he arranged and argued it. His advancing



24 A FRAGMENT

age seemed only to add mellowness and richness to
his eloquence, while it greatly enhanced the inter-
est with which he was listened to. As late as 1860,
when he was on the verge of his eighty-ninth year,
he made a speech on the respective rights of the
two Houses of Parliament, which was regarded as
a model of argument and oratory, and which made
London ring anew with admiration of ' the old man
eloquent.'

" No one who has enjoyed his hospitality will soon
forget his genial and charming manners, and the almost
boyish gayety and glee with which he entered into the
amusements of the hour. The last time I saw him,
less than four years ago, he rose from his own dinner-
table, and placing one arm on the shoulder of our
accomplished associate, Mr. Motley, and the other on
my own, he proceeded tow^ard the drawing-room, —
remarking playfully, as he w^ent, that he believed he
could always rely safely on the support of his fellow-r
Bostonians. . . . Living to the great age of nearly
ninety-two years, with almost unimpaired faculties,
taking a lively and personal interest to the end both
in public affairs and in social enjoyments, and dying at
last the senior peer of England, — his name and fame
will not soon be forgotten. It may safely be said, that
Boston has given birth to but few men — perhaps
only to one other, Franldin — who will have secured
a more permanent or prominent place in the world's
history."

Boston certainly may be proud of having given a
Lord Chancellor to England. Lyndhurst held that
high office three times.



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 25

I cannot remember whether my introduction to
Samuel Rogers, the poet, in connection with whom,
as the author of the " Pleasures of Memory," nothing
ought to be forgotten, was from Webster or Everett ;
but he did full honor to whichever it was, by calling
at once and offering me the kindest attentions. Noth-
ing could be more characteristic than one of his first
notes to me : —

My dear Mr. Winthrop, — Pray, pray come and break-
fast with me at quarter before 10, any morning or every

morning.

Yours ever, S. Rogers.^

And so I breakfasted with him repeatedly, — twice,
absolutely alone; more frequently with five or six

others.

One great advantage to a stranger in breakfasting
with Rogers alone was this : he could tell over again
his oldest and best stories, with the assurance that they
had not been heard before. In a mixed party, on the
other hand, one or more persons were certain to have
heard them previously, and this restrained and discon-
certed him.

At one of these tete-a-tetes, I remember that he
dwelt almost entirely on the Duke of Wellington.
He told me that many years before, when he was din-
ing in company with the great English hero, the Duke
said : " I wonder why it is that nobody ever invites me
to dine on Sundays. I get three or four invitations
for every other day of the week ; but on Sunday, after

1 There was no date to this note.



26 A FRAGMENT

going to church [for the Duke was a regular attendant
on public worship], I have only a late lonely dinner at
home, and a desolate evening." As soon as Rogers
reached home, he sat down and wrote two or three in-
vitations on this wise : —

" Mr. Rogers requests the honor of the Duke of Welling-
ton's company at dinner on Sunday next, at 7| o'clock."

" Mr. Rogers requests the honor of the Duke of Welling-
ton's company on Sunday week [giving the date of the fol-
lowing Sunday], at 7| o'clock."

Sending them both together to Apsley House, an
affirmative answer to both was received without delay ;
and the Duke dined habitually with Rogers for many
Sundays in succession during that season, and perhaps
during more than one season.

Roo;ers took care to avoid introducing^ stranojers or
ceremonious company to these dinners, — asking only
two or three of the particular friends of the Duke, so
that he should converse entirely without constraint.
Of these conversations Rogers made careful record ;
and on one of the mornings I was with him alone, he
sent his confidential servant upstairs for his journals
of that period, and read to me many interesting pas-
sages from them, particularly one of the Duke's account
of his resigning his post in 1830, " rather," as he said,
" than be the head of a faction." This was about the
time of his greatest unpopularity, when his windows
were broken by the mob. Rogers ended by telling me
what I could not have imagined before, that the Duke
never saw Napoleon Bonaparte. He may have brought



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 27

the focus of his field-glass to bear upon him, in looking
at some group at Waterloo, but he never consciously
saw the Emperor.

I remember well, too, Rogers's reading to me at
length, as the most striking scene he had ever met
with in the records of real life, the account of Colonel
the Hon. Frederick Ponsonby's sufferings on the field of
Waterloo, as given in a little work called " A. Voice
from Waterloo," by Sergeant-Major Cotton. I bought
this book from the Sergeant-Major himself at Mont St.
Jean soon afterward, while he was guiding me over
the field of the battle. The account of Colonel Pon-
sonby is found at page 244, and is as follows : —

" Colonel Ponsonby, of the 12th Lt. Dragoons, gives the
following account of himself on being wounded. He says :
' In the melee [thick of the fight] I was almost instantly dis-
abled in both my arms, losing first my sword, and then my
rein ; and followed by a few of my men who were presently
cut down, no quarter being asked or given, I was carried
along by my horse, till receiving a blow from a sabre, I fell
senseless on my face to the ground. Recovering, I raised
myself a little to look round, being at that time in a condi-
tion to get up and run away, when a lancer passing by cried
out, " Tu n'es pas mort, coquin ! " and struck his lance
through my back. My head dropped, the blood gushed into
my mouth, a difficulty of breathing came on, and I thought
all was over. Not long after, a skirmisher stopped to plun-
der me, threatening my life. I directed him to a small side-
pocket, in which he found three dollars, all I had ; but he
continued to threaten, tearing open my waistcoat, and leaving
me in a very uneasy posture.

" ' But he was no sooner gone, than an officer bringing up
some troops, and happening to halt where I lay, stooped
down, and addressing me, said he feared I was badly



28 A FRAGMENT

wounded. I answered that I was, and expressed a wish to
be moved to the rear. He said it was against orders to re-
move even their own men ; but that if they gained the day
(and he understood that the Duke of Wellington was killed,
and that six of our battalions had surrendered), every atten-
tion in his power should be shown me. I complained of
thirst, and he held his brandy bottle to my lips, directing one
of his soldiers to lay me straight on my side, and place a
knapsack under my head. They then passed on into action,
soon perhaps to want, though not to receive, the same assist-
ance ; and I shall never know to whose generosity I was
indebted, as I believe, for my life. By and by, another
skirmisher came up, a fine young man, loading and firing.
He knelt down and fired over me many times, conversing
with me very gayly all the while. At last he ran off, saying,
" Vous serez bien aise d'apprendre que nous allons retirer.
Bon jour, mon ami." It was dusk when two squadrons of
Prussian cavalry crossed the valley in full trot, lifting me
from the ground and tumbling me about cruelly. The battle
was now over, and the groans of the wounded all around me
became more audible. I thought the night never would end.
About this time I found a soldier lying across my legs, and
his weight, his convulsive motions, his noises, and the air
issuing through a wound in his side distressed me greatly, —
the last circumstance most of all, as I had a wound of the
same nature myself. It was not a dark night, and the Prus-
sians were wandering about to plunder. Many of them
stopped to look at me as they passed ; at last one of them
stopped to examine me. I told him that I was a British
officer, and had been already plundered. He did not, how-
ever, desist, and pulled me about roughly. An hour before
midnight I saw a man in an English uniform coming toward
me ; he was, I suspected, on the same errand. I spoke in-
stantly, telling him who I was. He belonged to the 40th,
and he had missed his regiment. He released me from the
dying soldier, and took up a sword and stood over me as a
sentinel. Day broke, and at six o'clock in the morning a



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 29

messenger was sent to Herve ; a cart came for me, and I
was conveyed to the village of Waterloo, and laid in the
bed, as I afterward understood, from which Gordon had
but just before been carried out. I had received seven
wounds ; a surgeon slept in my room, and I was saved by
excessive bleeding.' "



5»
5



It may be conceived that I "supped full of horrors
or rather breakfasted, in hearing this thrilling account
from the sepulchral voice of the old poet.

At another of these b^^eakfasts I met Milman, the
Dean of St. Paul's ; Whewell, the well-known Master of
Trinity ; Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's and historian
of Greece, and Lord Glenelg, a former Secretary of
State for the Colonies, — among whom a discussion
arose as to what, upon the whole, was the best story
ever written. The unanimous voice was for Goldsmith's
" Vicar of Wakefield ; " and on a further inquiry as to
the next best, the general judgment, to my great sur-
prise, for I could not then remember that I had ever
read it, was in favor of Mrs. Inchbald's " Simple Story."
It happened that in Paris, not long afterwards, I picked
up a volume of '• Baudry's European Library," contain-
ing only these two stories bound together. I bought it
at once, and wrote this judgment of these London wits
on the fly-leaf, as a souvenir of the occasion.

x\t still another of these breakfasts I met only ladies,
— the Countess of Orford and her daughter Lady Doro-
thy Walpole, since better known as Lady Dorothy
Nevill, the Dowager Lady Lyttleton, Mrs. Leicester
Stanhope, afterward Countess of Harrington, and Lady
Bulwer-Lytton. This was on the 17th of July, accord-



30 A FRAGMENT

ing to my journal ; and Rogers is said in the Biographi-
cal Dictionaries to have been born on the 31st, a fortnight
later. But the occasion was certainly alluded to as
Rogers's birthday festival, — his eighty -fourth, — and
Lady Bulwer-Lytton took from her bosom an original
ode for the occasion, which she read to him aloud. I
remember, too, his telling me that he had a journal of
sixty-seven years ago, recording a dinner in Paris (at
which he was present) of twelve persons, I think, all
but two or three of whom had afterward died violent
deaths. This must have been at the table of Lafayette,
as in " The Table-Talk of Rogers," published after his
death, he speaks of his first visit to France, just before
the Revolution, as follows (page 41) : —

" When we reached Paris, Lafayette gave us a general invi-
tation to dine with him every day. At his table we once
dined with about a dozen persons (among them the Due de
la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, etc.) most of whom afterward
came to an untimely end."

Rogers must ever be remembered kindly by Ameri-
cans, were it only for the anecdote he was so fond of
recalling of his father, who, on hearing of the first blood
shed at Lexington, — he himself remembered it as a
boy of twelve years old, — put on a full suit of black,
and afterward wore nothing but mourning colors until
his death. He sent me a beautiful copy of his works,
in two volumes, with an autograph inscription, before
I left England, and on my return home I ventured to