it made me many friends, and led to a correspondence with Lord Houghton which has been of priceless advantage. The experience has been oft repeated, and I have spent many seasons in London since, knowing well her artists and litterateurs, her hospitable nobility, and have even a slight acquaintance with her admirable Royal family.
In later days General Badeau presented me with his Life of Grant; I have it, with his autograph. It is a noble book, and does both honor. Later on, with all his friends, I felt very much astonished at, and terribly disappointed by, the attack which he made on his dying chief. No one could mistake Badeau's style, nor that of General Grant; therefore his assumption, if he ever made it, that he was the author of that last wonderful book, which the dying hero wrote with death clutching him by the throat, made me feel, as it did many, that Badeau was profoundly ungrateful. He is gone now, and I desire to lay this flower on his grave: he was a man of talent, filled with good impulses, when I knew him; what he became afterwards I do not know. I did not see him for ten years before his death, but read his occasional papers with great pleasure.
Nobody in England had a better chance to see and observe the different phases of such characters as Lord Houghton than had Badeau, and he knew well the noble ladies about whom he wrote so admirably The lady of Strawberry Hill had never so good a portrait painted of her. Countess Waldegrave, who had risen from the lowly position of the daughter of Braham, the singer, to being one of the first women in English society — a woman as famous in her day as Lady Cassell Holland was in hers — rendered herself completely up to Badeau's pencil; and the sketches of the Queen, the visit
