" 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.
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