R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

16 The Marquess of Creweintimate with the Emperor Napoleon III when he wasan exile in England, his sense of public right, which, withall his tendency to make allowance for the follies andshortcomings of mankind, could assert itself firmly whena line had to be drawn, was outraged by the coup d'etat,and he had barely seen its author except on officialoccasions in Paris. Beyond this, by a vein of sentimentalitywhich ran through his complex character, he wasattracted to the German nature, and to one type ofGerman literature, rather than to the cleaner cut mentalityof France. His sympathies, therefore, were drawnto the German side, at any rate in the earlier stages ofthe war, until he was moved by the privations of Paris,and the sufferings of some of his personal friends.He maintained a fairly regular attendance at theHouse of Lords during this period, but had no excitementto match that which befell him just before itopened, when his intervention in favour of Essays andReviews brought about the famous duel of words betweenLord Westbury and Bishop Wilberforce. All this time hewas one of the principal champions of the measure forpermitting marriage with a deceased wife's sister, andwhen, years after his death, the law was changed, hisdevotion to the cause was not forgotten.As the years passed, he found composition less easy,apart from the physical difficulty of holding a pen, anddictation never came naturally to him. More than thirtyyears before, Carlyle, enthusiastically praising my father'sarticle on Emerson in the Westminster Review, had added,6 You will write a book one day which we shall all like, inprose it shall be, if I may vote. A novel, an emblematicpicture of English society as it is? Done in prose withthe spirit of a poet, what a book were that!' His familyand many of his friends had long expressed a similar wish,feeling that in some respects he possessed a better