"All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word." Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to an unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, "my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life during the reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry." Madame Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon. "LE PAUVRE KINGLAKE, DECONTENANCE, REPONDIT TOUT BASINTIMIDE COMME UN ENFANT QU'ON MET DATES LE COIN: OUI - NON - PASPRECISEMENT."
He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some mischance at a MATINEE MUSICALE, he was asked by the hostess what kind of music he preferred. His preference, he owned, was for the drum. One thinks of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "LA TROMPETTEMARINE EST UN INSTRUMENT QUI ME PLAIT, EL QUI EST HARMONIEUX"; we are reminded, too, of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and hurrying away whenever music was performed, once from an adjoining room in his father's house heard Jenny Lind sing "I know that my Redeemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told her that she had given him an idea of what people mean by music. Once before, he said in all seriousness, the same feeling had come over him, when before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo rendered by four hundred drummers.
Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duelling, as having impaired the higher tone of good breeding current in his younger days, and 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." 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.
