Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake [37]
even blamed the Duke of Wellington for proscribing it in the army. He had himself on one occasion sent a cartel, and stood waiting for his adversary, like Sir Richard Strachan at Walcheren, eight days on the French coast; but the adversary never came. Hayward once referred to him, as a counsellor, and if necessary a second, a quarrel with Lord R-. Lord R-'s friend called on him, a Norfolk squire, "broad-faced and breathing port wine," after the fashion of uncle Phillips in "Pride and Prejudice," who began in a boisterous voice, "I am one of those, Mr. Kinglake, who believe R- to be a gentleman." In his iciest tones and stoniest manner Kinglake answered: "That, Sir, I am quite willing to assume." The effect, he used to say, as he told and acted the scene, was magical; "I had frozen him sober, and we settled everything without a fight." Of all his friends Hayward was probably the closest; an association of discrepancies in character, manner, temperament, not complementary, but opposed and hostile; irreconcilable, one would say, but for the knowledge that in love and friendship paradox reigns supreme. Hayward was arrogant, overbearing, loud, insistent, full of strange oaths and often unpardonably coarse; "our dominant friend," Kinglake called him; "odious" is the epithet I have heard commonly bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaintances. Kinglake was reserved, shy, reticent, with the high breeding, grand manner, quiet urbanity, GRATA PROTERVITAS, of a waning epoch; restraint, concentration, tact of omission, dictating alike his silence and his speech; his well-weighed words "crystallizing into epigrams as they touched the air." (26) When Hayward's last illness came upon him in 1884, Kinglake nursed him tenderly; spending the morning in his friend's lodgings at 8, St. James's Street, the house which Byron occupied in his early London days; and bringing on the latest bulletin to the club. The patient rambled towards the end; "we ought to be getting ready to catch the train that we may go to my sister's at Lyme." Kinglake quieted his sick friend by an assurance that the servants, whom he would not wish to hurry, were packing. "On no account hurry the servants, but still let us be off." The last thought which he articulated while dying was, "I don't exactly know what it is, but I feel it is something grand." "Hayward is dead," Kinglake wrote to a common friend; "the devotion shown to him by all sorts and conditions of men, and, what is better, of women, was unbounded. Gladstone found time to be with him, and to engage him in a conversation of singular interest, of which he has made a memorandum."
Another of Kinglake's life-long familiars was Charles Skirrow, Taxing Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose memorable fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting himself no less readily to their theatrical friends - the Bancrofts, Burnand, Toole, Irving - than to the literary set with which he was more habitually at home. He was religiously loyal to his friends, speaking of them with generous admiration, eagerly defending them when attacked. He lauded Butler Johnstone as the most gifted of the young men in the House of Commons; would not allow Bernal Osborne to be called untrue; "he offends people if you like, but he is never false or hollow." A clever SOBRIQUET fathered on him, burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well-known diarist and official, he repelled indignantly. "He is my friend, and had I been guilty of the JEU, I should have broken two of my commandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend's expense, and that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words." He entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dying at Trieste; deeply lamented Sir H. Bulwer's death: "I used to think his a beautiful intellect, and he was wonderfully SIMPATICO to me." But he was shy of condoling with bereaved mourners, believing words used on such occasions to be utterly untrue. He loved to include husband
Another of Kinglake's life-long familiars was Charles Skirrow, Taxing Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose memorable fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting himself no less readily to their theatrical friends - the Bancrofts, Burnand, Toole, Irving - than to the literary set with which he was more habitually at home. He was religiously loyal to his friends, speaking of them with generous admiration, eagerly defending them when attacked. He lauded Butler Johnstone as the most gifted of the young men in the House of Commons; would not allow Bernal Osborne to be called untrue; "he offends people if you like, but he is never false or hollow." A clever SOBRIQUET fathered on him, burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well-known diarist and official, he repelled indignantly. "He is my friend, and had I been guilty of the JEU, I should have broken two of my commandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend's expense, and that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words." He entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dying at Trieste; deeply lamented Sir H. Bulwer's death: "I used to think his a beautiful intellect, and he was wonderfully SIMPATICO to me." But he was shy of condoling with bereaved mourners, believing words used on such occasions to be utterly untrue. He loved to include husband