SOCIAL LIFE 171
home to London we were invited to Ockham Park after tea-time, for a quiet farewell call. Lord Lovelace was exceptionally agreeable, the conversation was general, and the evening passed by most pleasantly. It had been arranged that his carriage should take us back ; he accompanied us to it, and wished us good-bye in the most friendly and courteous manner. No one outside his household, and very few of these, saw him again alive. It appeared that he dressed himself for dinner, and after coming downstairs fell dead on the floor.
I saw much of Richard, afterwards Sir Richard, Burton and of Lawrence Oliphant in those days. There were exceedingly pleasant social gatherings held after each meeting of the Geographical Society of geographers and others, who were invited by Admiral Murray to his rooms in the Albany. He was an excellent host, and justly popular among a great variety of men whom he had the tact to bring harmoniously together in his chambers. Bishop Wilberforce, who prided himself on worldly savoir faire, was occasionally a guest; Burton was habitually there, but his usual conversation in those days was not exactly of a stamp suitable to episcopal society. I was present at the first introduction of these two men, whose behaviour was most comic, each trying to act the part appropriate to the other, and, I must add, doing it most successfully, and to all appearance quite naturally. Burton was a great reader, generally to be seen at the Athena tiin with a folio volume before him, and he was a prodigious note-taker during his travels. lie lent me his notebook on Zanzibar, of which I shall shortly speak again, and I was astonished at
