The Publishers' Circle Book Trade Dinner, held last week, was
enlivened by some delightful literary reminiscences from Sir George Trevelyan, who responded to the toast of "Literature." Amongst the rare privileges he had enjoyed was that of riding with Mr. Carlyle a good many of the thirty thousand miles which he rode while engaged on "Frederick the Great." "When he was no longer equal to horse exercise we took long walks together round and round the parks, and on one occasion, all of a sudden, d propos of nothing, he began slowly to pay out for my benefit an extemporary biography of Lord Chatham, the most wonderful soliloquy to which I ever listened. I have been shown over Venice by Mr. Ruskin as cicerone in his gondola, and I was introduced by Mr. Robert Browning to Waring, a sad disenchantment, when the hero of the inimitable poem had become a weary-looking old man like any other." While holding that a man's coevals were the best judges of his work, Sir George showed that he possessed an enviable capacity for appreciating his juniors. Dwelling on the relation of literature to politics, he humorously regretted the halcyon days in the third quarter of the eighteenth century when Peers and landowners kept their libraries as well supplied as their cellars, "whereas in our time smart people, and people who want to be thought smart, buy not books but motors."
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