There was no end to my father’s generosity. His gifts were on a large scale and reached far and wide. He used to collect Breguet watches; but he did not keep them; he gave them away to people who he thought would like one. He had a contempt for half measures, and liked people to do the big thing on a large scale. “So-and-so,” he used to say, “has behaved well.” That meant had been big and free-handed, and above small and mean considerations. He liked the _best_: the old masters, a Turner landscape, a Velasquez, a Watteau; good furniture, good china, good verse, and good acting; Shakespeare, which he knew by heart, so if you went with him to a play such as _Hamlet_, he could have prompted the players; Schiller, Juvenal, Pope, and Dryden and Byron; the acting of the Comédie française, and Ellen Terry’s diction and pathos. Tennyson was spoilt for him by the mere existence of the “May Queen”; but when he saw a good modern thing, he admired it. He said that Mrs. Patrick Campbell in her performance of Mrs. Ebbsmith, which we went to the first night of, was a real _Erscheinung_, and when all the pictures of Watts were exhibited together at Burlington House he thought that massed performance was that of a great man. He was no admirer of Burne-Jones, but the four pictures of the “Briar Rose” struck him as great pictures.
He was quite uninsular, and understood the minds and the ways of foreigners. He talked foreign languages not only easily, but naturally, without effort or affectation, and native turns of expression delighted him, such as a German saying, “Lieber Herr Oberkellner,” or, as I remember, a Frenchman saying after a performance of a melodrama at a Casino where the climax was rather tamely executed, “Ce coup de pistolet était un peu mince.” And once I won his unqualified praise by putting at the end of a letter, which I had written to my Italian master at Florence, and which I had had to send _via_ the city in order to have a money order enclosed with it, “Abbi la gentilezza di mandarmi un biglettino.” This use of a diminutive went straight to my father’s heart. Nothing amused him more than instances of John Bullishness; for instance, a young man who once said to him at Contrexéville: “I hate abroad.”