The Project Gutenberg eBook of Story of My Life, volumes 4-6, by Augustus J. C. Hare.

BY

AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE
AUTHOR OF “MEMORIALS OF A QUIET LIFE.”
“THE STORY OF TWO NOBLE LIVES.”
ETC. ETC.

VOLUME IV

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1900
[All rights reserved]

PREFACE

WITH the exception of the last two chapters, these three volumes were printed at the same time with the first three volumes of “The Story of my Life” in 1896, therefore many persons are spoken of in them as still living who have since passed away, and others, mentioned as children, have since grown up.

Reviews will doubtless, in general, continue to abuse the book, especially for its great length. But personally, if I am interested in a story, I like it to be a long one; and there is no obligation for any who dislike a long book to read this one: they may look at a page or two here and there, where they seem promising; or, better still, they can leave it quite alone: they really need have nothing to complain of.

In the later volumes I have used letters for my narrative even more than in the former. Many will feel with Dr. Newman that “the true life of a man is in his letters.... Not only for the interest of a biography, but for arriving at the inside of things, the publication of letters is the true method. Biographers varnish, they assign motives, they conjecture feelings, but contemporary letters are facts.”

CONTENTS PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. IV

XVI

IN MY SOLITARY LIFE

I SPENT the greater part of the fiercely cold winter of 1870-71 in complete seclusion at Holmhurst, entirely engrossed in the work of the “Memorials,” which had been the last keen interest of my Mother’s life. In calling up the vivid image of long-ago days spent with her, I seemed to live those days over again, and I found constant proof of her loving forethought for the first months of my solitude in the materials which, without my knowledge, and without then the slightest idea of publication, she must have frequently devoted herself to arranging during the last few years of her life. As each day passed, and the work unravelled itself, I was increasingly convinced of the wisdom of her death-bed decision that until the book was quite finished I should give it to none of the family to read. They must judge of it as a whole. Otherwise, in “attempting to please all, I should please none: shocking nobody’s prejudices I should enlist nobody’s sympathies.”

Unfortunately this decision greatly ruffled the sensibilities of my Stanley cousins, especially of Arthur Stanley and his sister Mary, who from the first threatened me with legal proceedings if I gave them the smallest loop-hole for them, by publishing a word of their own mother’s writing without their consent, which from the first, also, they declared they would withhold. They were also “quite certain” that no one would ever read the “Memorials” if they were published, in which I always thought they might be wrong, as people are so apt to be when they are “quite certain.”

My other cousins did not at first approve of the plan of the “Memorials,” but when once completely convinced that it had been their dear aunt’s wish, they withdrew all opposition.

Still the harshness with which I was now continually treated and spoken of by those with whom I had always hitherto lived on terms of the utmost intimacy was a bitter trial. In a time when a single great grief pervades every hour, unreasonable demands, cruel words, and taunting sneers are more difficult to bear than when life is rippling on in an even course. I was by no means blameless: I wrote sharp letters: I made harsh speeches; but that it was my duty to fight in behalf of the fulfilment of the solemn duty which had devolved upon me, I never doubted then, and I have never doubted since. In the fulfilment of that duty I was prepared to sacrifice every friend I had in the world, all the little fortune I had, my very life itself. I felt that I must learn henceforth to act with “Selbständigkeit,” which somehow seems to have a stronger meaning than independence; and I believe I had in mind the maxim of Sœur Rosalie—“Faites le bien, et laissez dire.”

A vivid impression that I had a very short time to live made me more eager about the rapid fulfilment of my task. I thought of the Spanish proverb, “By-and-by is always too late,” and I often worked at the book for twelve hours a day. My Mother had long thought, and latterly often said, that it was impossible I could long survive her: that when two lives were so closely entwined as ours, one could not go on alone. She had often even spoken of “when we die.” But God does not allow people to die of grief, though, when sorrow has once taken possession of one, only hard work, laboriously undertaken, can—not drive it out, but keep it under control. It is as Whittier says:—

I had felt the gradual separation of death. At first the sense of my Mother’s presence was still quite vivid: then it was less so: at last the day came when I felt “she is nowhere here now.”

It was partly owing to the strong impression in her mind that I could not survive her that my Mother had failed to make the usual arrangements for my future provision. As she had never allowed any money to be placed in my name, I had—being no legal relation to her—to pay a stranger’s duty of £10 per cent on all she possessed, and this amounted to a large sum, when extended to a duty on every picture, even every garden implement, &c.[2] Not only this, but during her lifetime she had been induced by various members of the family to sign away a large portion of her fortune, and in the intricate difficulties which arose I was assured that I should have nothing whatever left to live upon beyond £60 a year, and the rent of Holmhurst (fortunately secured), if it could be let. I was urged by the Stanleys to submit at once to my fate, and to sell Holmhurst; yet I could not help hoping for better days, which came with the publication of “Walks in Rome.”

Meanwhile, half distracted by the unsought “advice” which was poured upon me from all sides, and worn-out with the genuine distress of my old servants, I went away in March, just as far as I could, first to visit the Pole Carews in Cornwall, and then to the Land’s End, to Stephen Lawley, who was then living in a cottage by the roadside near Penzance. I was so very miserable and so miserably preoccupied at this time, that I have no distinct recollection of these visits, beyond the image on my mind of the grand chrysoprase seas of Cornwall and the stupendous rocks against which they beat, especially at Tol Pedn Penwith. I felt more in my natural element when, after I had gone to Bournemouth to visit Archie Colquhoun,[3] who was mourning the recent loss of both his parents, I was detained there by his sudden and dangerous illness. While there, also, I was cheered by the first thoughts for a tour in Spain during the next winter.

“Penzance, March 13, 1871.—I know how much and sadly you will have thought to-day of the last terrible 13th of March, when we were awakened in the night by the dear Mother’s paralytic seizure, and saw her so sadly changed. In all the anguish of looking back upon that time, and the feeling which I constantly have now of all that is bright and happy having perished out of my life with her sweet presence, I have much comfort in thinking that we were able to carry out her last great wish in bringing her home, and in the memory of the three happy months of comparative health which she afterwards enjoyed there. Many people since I left home have read some of the ‘Memorials’ I am writing, and express a sense of never having known before how perfectly beautiful her character was, and that in truth, like Abraham, they ‘entertained an angel unawares.’ Now that dear life, which always seemed to us so perfect, has indeed become perfected, and the heavenly glow which came to the revered features in death is but a very faint image of the heavenly glory which always rests upon them.”

“Stewart’s Hotel, Bournemouth, March 30, 1871.—The discussion of a tour in Spain comes to me as the pleasant dream of a possible future.... It is of course easy for us to see Spain in a way in a few weeks, but if one does not go in a cockney spirit, but really wishing to learn, to open one’s eyes to the glorious past of Spain, the story of Isabella, the Moorish dominion, the boundless wealth of its legends, its proverbs, its poetry—all that makes it different from any other country—we must begin in a different way, and our chief interest will be found in the grand old cities which the English generally do not visit—Leon, Zaragoza, Salamanca; in the wonderful romance which clings around the rocks of Monserrat and the cloisters of Santiago; in the scenes of the Cid, Don Roderick, Cervantes, &c.

“You will be sorry to hear that I am again in my normal condition of day and night nurse, in all the varying anxieties of a sick-room. I came here ten days ago to stay with Archie Colquhoun, whom I had known very little before, but who, having lost both father and mother lately, turned in heart to me and begged me to come to him. On Tuesday he fell with a great crash on the floor in a fit, and was unconscious for many hours.... It was a narrow escape of his life, and he was in a most critical state till the next day, but now he is doing well, though it will long be an anxious case.[4] You will easily understand how much past anguish has come back to me in the night-watches here, and I feel it odd that these duties should, as it were, be perpetually found for me.”

In May I paid the first of many visits to my dear Lady Waterford at Highcliffe, her fairy palace by the sea, on the Hampshire coast, near Christ Church, and though I was still too sad to enter into the full charm of the place and the life, which I have enjoyed so much since, I was greatly refreshed by the mental tonic, and by the kindness and sympathy which I have never failed to receive from Lady Waterford and her friend Lady Jane Ellice. With them, too, I was able to discuss my work in all its aspects, and greatly was I encouraged by all they said.

For many years after this, Highcliffe was more familiar to me than any other place except my own home, and I am attached to every stone of it. The house was the old Mayor’s house of Les Andelys, removed from Normandy by Lord Stuart de Rothesay, but a drawing shows the building as it was in France, producing a far finer effect than as it was put up in England by Pugin, the really fine parts, especially the great window, being lower down in the building, and more made of. In the room to which that window belonged, Antoyne de Bourbon, King of Navarre, died. The portraits in the present room of the Duchess of Suffolk and her second husband, who was a Bertie, have the old ballad of “The Duchess of Suffolk” inscribed beneath. They fled abroad, and their son Peregrine, born in a church porch, was the progenitor of the present Berties. I have myself always inhabited the same room at Highcliffe—one up a separate stair of its own, adorned with great views of the old Highcliffe and Mount Stuart, and with old French furniture, including a chair worked in blue and red by Queen Marie Amélie and Madame Adelaïde. The original house of Highcliffe was built on land sold to Lord Stuart by a Mr. Penlees, who had had a legacy of bank-notes left him in the case of a cocked-hat—it was quite full of them. Mr. Penlees had built a very ugly house, the present “old rooms,” which Lord Stuart cased over. Then he said that, while Lady Stuart was away, he would add a few rooms. When she came back, to her intense consternation, she found the new palace of Highcliffe: all the ornaments, windows, &c., from Les Andelys having been landed close by upon the coast. I always liked going with Lady Waterford into the old rooms, which were those principally used by Lady Stuart, and contained a wonderful copy of Sir Joshua which Lady Waterford made when she was ten years old. There was also a beautiful copy of the famous picture of Lord Royston, done by Lady Waterford herself long ago; a fine drawing of the leave-taking of Charles I. and his children—Charles with a head like the representations of the Saviour; and a portrait of the old Lady Stuart, “Grannie Stuart,” with all the wrinkles smoothed out. “Oh, if I am like that, I am only fit to die,” she said, when she saw it.[6]

“Mr. M. was remonstrated with because he would not admire Louis Philippe’s régime. He said, ‘No, I cannot; I have known him before so well. I am like the peasant who, when he was remonstrated with because he would not take off his hat to a new wooden cross that was put up, said he couldn’t parceque je l’ai connu poirier.’”

“Some one spoke to old Lady Salisbury [7] of Adam’s words—‘The woman tempted me, and I did eat.’ ‘Shabby fellow,’ she said.”

“Lady Anne Barnard [8] was at a party in France, and her carriage never came to take her away. A certain Duke who was there begged to have the honour of taking her home, and she accepted, but on the way felt rather awkward and thought he was too affectionate and gallant. Suddenly she was horrified to see the Duke on his knees at the bottom of the carriage, and was putting out her hands and warding him off, when he exclaimed, ‘Taisez-vous, Madame, voilà le bon Dieu qui passe.’ It was a great blow to her vanity.”

“Old Lord Malmesbury [9] used to invent the most extraordinary stories and tell them so well; indeed, he told them till he quite believed them. One was called ‘The Bloody Butler,’ and was about a butler who drank the wine and then filled the bottles with the blood of his victims. Another was called ‘The Moth-eaten Clergyman;’ it was about a very poor clergyman, a Roman he was, who had some small parish in Southern Germany, and was a very good man, quite excellent, absolutely devoted to the good of his people. There was, however, one thing which militated against his having all the influence amongst his flock which he ought to have had, and this was that he was constantly observed to steal out of his house in the late evening with two bags in his hand, and to bury the contents in the garden; and yet when people came afterwards by stealth and dug for the treasure, they found nothing at all, and this was thought, well ... not quite canny.

“Now the diocesan of that poor clergyman, who happened to be the Archbishop of Mayence, was much distressed at this, that the influence of so good a man should thus be marred. Soon afterwards he went on his visitation tour, and he stopped at the clergyman’s house for the night. He arrived with outriders, and two postillions, and four fat horses, and four fat pug-dogs, which was not very convenient. However, the poor clergyman received them all very hospitably, and did the best he could for them. But the Archbishop thought it was a great opportunity for putting an end to all the rumours that were about, and with a view to this he gave orders that the doors should be fastened and locked, so that no one should go out.

“When morning came, the windows of the priest’s house were not opened, and no one emerged, and at last the parishioners became alarmed, for there was no sound at all. But when they broke open the doors, volleys upon volleys of moths of every kind and hue poured out; but of the poor clergyman, or of the Archbishop of Mayence, or of the outriders and postillions, or of the four fat horses, or of the four pug-dogs, came out nothing at all, for they were all eaten up. For the fact was that the poor clergyman really had the most dreadful disease which bred myriads of moths; if he could bury their eggs at night, he kept them under, but when he was locked up, and he could do nothing, they were too much for him. Now there is a moral in this story, because if the people and the Archbishop had looked to the fruits of that excellent man’s life, and not attended to foolish reports with which they had no concern whatever, these things would never have happened.

“These were the sort of things Lord Malmesbury used to invent. Canning used to tell them to us.”

“I call the three kinds of Churchism—Attitudinarian, Latitudinarian, and Platitudinarian.”

“Holmhurst, June 12, 1871.—In a few days’ solitude what a quantity of work I have gone through; and work which carries one back over a wide extent of the far long-ago always stretches out the hours, but how interesting it makes them! I quite feel that I should not have lived through the first year of my desolation without the companionship of this work of the ‘Memorials,’ which my darling so wisely foresaw and prepared for me. Daily I miss her more. Now that the flowers are blooming around, and the sun shining on the lawn, and the leaves out on the ash-tree in the shade of which she used to sit, it seems impossible not to think that the suffering present must be a dream and that she is only ‘not yet come out;’ and what the empty room, the unused pillow are, whence the sunshine of my life came, I cannot say. On Thursday I am going for one day to Hurstmonceaux, to our sacred spot. The cross is to be put up then. It is very beautiful, and is only inscribed:—

No other words are needed there; all the rest is written in the hearts of the people who loved her.

“I have been thinking lately how all my life hitherto has been down a highway. There was no doubt as to where the duties were; there could be no doubt whence the pleasures, certainly whence the sorrows would come. Now there seem endless byways to diverge upon. But all the interest of life must be on its highway: the byways may be beautiful and attractive, but never interesting.”

“Sept. 26.—I much enjoyed my Peakirk visit to charming people (Mr. and Mrs. James) and a curious place—an oasis in the Fens, the home of St. Pega (sister of St. Guthlac), whose hermitage with its battered but beautiful cross still remains. I saw Burleigh, like a Genoese palace inside; and yesterday made a fatiguing but worth while pilgrimage, for love of Mary Queen of Scots, to Fotheringhay. One stone, but only one, remains of the castle which was the scene of her sufferings; so people wondered at my going so far. ‘Why cannot you let bygones be bygones?’ said young W. to me. However, the church is very curious, and contains inscriptions to a whole party of Plantagenets—Richard, Earl of Cornwall; Cicely, Duchess of York; Edward, father of Edward IV.—for Fotheringhay, now a hamlet in the fen, was once an important place: the death of Mary wrought the curse which became its ruin.”

I have said little for many years of the George Sheffield who was the dearest friend of my boyhood. He had been attaché at Munich, Washington, Constantinople, and was now at Paris as secretary to Lord Lyons. In this my first desolate year he also had a sorrow, which wonderfully reunited us, and we became perhaps greater friends than we had been before. Another of whom I saw much at this time was Charlie Dalison. A younger son of a Kentish squire of good family, he went—like the young men of olden time—to London to seek his fortunes, and simply by his good looks, winning manners, and incomparable self-reliance became the most popular young man in party-giving London society; but he had many higher qualities.

I needed all the support my friends could give me, for the family feud about the “Memorials” was not the only trouble that pressed upon me at this time.

It will be recollected that, in my sister’s death-bed will, she had bequeathed to me her claims to a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It was the very fact of this bequest which in 1871 made my poor Aunt Eleanor (Miss Paul) set up a counter-claim to the picture, which was valued at £2000.

Five-and-twenty years before, the picture had been entrusted for a time to Sir John Paul, who unfortunately, from some small vanity, allowed it to be exhibited in his own name instead of that of the owner. But I never remember the time when it was not at Hurstmonceaux after 1845, when it was sent there. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was an intimate family friend, painted it in the house of Bishop Shipley, when my father was two and a half years old. It was painted for my great-aunt Lady Jones, widow of the famous Orientalist. Lady Jones adopted her nephew Augustus Hare, and brought him up as her own son, but, as she died intestate, her personalty passed, not to him, but to her only surviving sister, Louisa Shipley. Miss Shipley lived many years, and bequeathed the portrait to her youngest nephew, Marcus Hare. But Marcus gave up his legacy to my Uncle Julius, who always possessed the picture in my boyhood, when it hung over the dining-room chimney-piece at Hurstmonceaux Rectory. Uncle Julius bequeathed the portrait, with all else he possessed, to his widow, who transferred the picture at once to my adopted mother, as being the widow of the adopted son of Lady Jones.

The claim of the opposite party to the picture was that Mrs. Hare (“Italima”) had said that Lady Jones in her lifetime had promised to give her the picture, a promise which was never fulfilled; and that my sister, after her mother’s death, had said at Holmhurst, “If every one had their rights, that picture would belong to me, as my mother’s representative, for Lady Jones promised it to my mother,” also that she proved her belief in having a claim to it by bequeathing that claim to me. But the strongest point against us was that somehow or other, how no one could explain, the picture had been allowed to remain for more than a year in the hands of Sir John Paul, and he had exhibited it. Though the impending trial about the picture question was very different from that at Guildford, the violent animosity displayed by my poor aunt made it most painful, in addition to the knowledge that she (who had inherited everything belonging to my father, mother, and sister, and had dispersed their property to the four winds of heaven, whilst I possessed nothing which had belonged to them) was now trying to seize property to which she could have no possible moral right, though English law is so uncertain that one never felt sure to the last whether the fact of the picture having been exhibited in Sir John Paul’s name might not weigh fatally with both judge and jury.

For the whole month of November I was in London, expecting the trial every day, but it was not till the evening of the 6th of December that I heard that it was to be the next morning in the law-court off Westminster Hall. The court was crowded. My counsel, Mr. Pollock, began his speech with a tremendous exordium. “Gentlemen of the jury, in a neighbouring court the world is sitting silent before the stupendous excitement of the Tichborne trial: gentlemen of the jury, that case pales into insignificance—pales into the most utter insignificance before the thrilling interest of the present occasion. On the narrow stage of this domestic drama, all the historic characters of the last century and all the literary personages of the present seem to be marching in a solemn procession.” And he proceeded to tell the really romantic history of the picture—how Benjamin Franklin saw it painted, &c. I was called into the witness-box and examined and cross-examined for an hour by Mr. H. James. As long as I was in the region of my great-uncles and aunts, I was perfectly at home, and nothing in the cross-examination could the least confuse me. Then the counsel for the opposition said, “Mr. Hare, on the 20th of April 1866 you wrote a letter, &c.: what was in that letter?” Of course I said I could not tell. “What do you think was in that letter?” So I said something, and of course it was exactly opposite to the fact.

As witnesses to the fact of the picture having been at the Rectory at the time of the marriage of my Uncle Julius, I had subpœnaed the whole surviving family of Mrs. Julius Hare, who could witness to it better than any one else, as they had half-lived at Hurstmonceaux Rectory after their sister’s marriage. Her two sisters, Mrs. Powell and Mrs. Plumptre, took to their beds, and remained there for a week to avoid the trial, but Dr. Plumptre [10] and Mr. (F. D.) Maurice had to appear, and gave evidence as to the picture having been at Hurstmonceaux Rectory at the time of their sister’s marriage in 1845,[11] and having remained there afterwards during the whole of Julius Hare’s life. Mr. George Paul was then called, and took an oath that, till he went to America in 1852, the picture had remained at Sir John Paul’s; but such is the inattention and ignorance of their business which I have always observed in lawyers, that this discrepancy passed absolutely unnoticed.

The trial continued for several hours, yet when the court adjourned for luncheon I believed all was going well. It was a terrible moment when afterwards Judge Mellor summed up dead against us. Being ignorant, during my mother’s lifetime, of the clause in Miss Shipley’s will leaving the picture to Marcus Hare, and being anxious to ward off from her the agitation of a lawsuit in her feeble health, I had made admissions which I had really previously forgotten, but which were most dangerous, as to the difficulty which I then felt in establishing our claim to the picture. These weighed with Judge Mellor, and, if the jury had followed his lead, our cause would have been ruined. The jury demanded to retire, and were absent for some time. Miss Paul, who was in the area of the court, received the congratulations of all her friends, and I was so certain that my case was lost, that I went to the solicitor of Miss Paul and said that I had had the picture brought to Sir John Lefevre’s house in Spring Gardens, and that I wished to give it up as soon as ever the verdict was declared, as if any injury happened to it afterwards, a claim might be made against me for £2000.

It took everybody by surprise, and it was the most triumphant moment I ever remember. All the Pauls sank down as if they were shot. My friends flocked round me with congratulations.

The trial took the whole day, the court sitting longer than usual on account of it. The enemy immediately applied for a new trial, which caused us much anxiety, but this time I was not required to appear in person. The second trial took place on the 16th of January 1872, before the Lord Chief Justice, Judge Blackburn, Judge Mellor, and Judge Hannen, and, after a long discussion, was given triumphantly in my favour, Judge Mellor withdrawing his speech made at the former trial, and stating that, after reconsideration of all the facts, he rejoiced at the decision of the jury.

As both trials were gained by me, the enemy had nominally to pay all the costs, but still the expenses were most heavy. It was just at the time when I was poorest, when my adopted mother’s will was still in abeyance. There were also other aspirants for the picture, in the shape of the creditors of my brother Francis, who claimed as representing my father (not my mother). It was therefore thought wiser by all that I should assent to the portrait being sold, and be content to retain only in its place a beautiful copy which had been made for me by the kindness of my cousin Madeleine Shaw-Lefevre. The portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds was sold at Christie’s in the summer of 1872 for £2200, and is now in the National Gallery of America at New York.

A week after the trial, on the 13th of December, I left England for Spain. It had at first been intended that a party of five should pass the winter there together, but one after another fell off, till none remained except Miss Wright—“Aunt Sophy”—who joined me in Paris. The story of our Spanish tour is fully told in my book “Wanderings in Spain,” which appeared first as articles in Good Words. These were easily written and pleasant and amusing to write, but have none of the real value of the articles which I afterwards contributed on “Days near Rome.” I will only give here, to carry on the story, some extracts from my letters.

“Paris, Dec. 14, 1871.—How different France and England! At Holmhurst I left a green garden bright with chrysanthemums and everlastings: here, a pathless waste of snow up to the tops of the hedges became so deep near Creil that, as day broke, we remained fixed for an hour and a half in the midst of a forest, neither able to move backwards or forwards. And by the side of the rail were remains of a frightful accident of yesterday—engine smashed to bits, carriages cut in half, the linings hanging in rags, cushions lying about, &c. The guard was not encouraging—‘Oui, il y avait des victimes, pas beaucoup, mais il y a toujours des victimes.’ ... The state of Paris is unspeakably wretched, hillocks of snow, uncarted away and as high as your shoulder, filling the sides of the streets, with a pond in the intervening space. The Tuileries (after the Commune) looks far worse than I expected—restorable, but for the present it has lost all its form and character. We went inside this morning, but were soon warned out on account of the falling walls weakened by the frost.”

“Pau, Dec. 20.—I was glad to seize the opportunity of Aunt Sophy’s wishing for a few days’ rest before encountering Spain to pay a visit to the Taylors.[12] ... This morning I have walked on the terrace of the park, and lived over again many of those suffering scenes when we were here before. Truly here I have no feeling but one of thankfulness for the Mother’s release from the suffering body which was so great a burden to her. I went to the Hotel Victoria, and looked up at the windows of the rooms where, for the first time, we passed together through the valley of the Shadow of Death.”

“Jan. 2.—You will imagine how the long-ago came back to me at Pau—the terrible time when we were hourly expecting the blow which has now fallen, and which we both, I know, feel daily and hourly. But I think it was in mercy that God spared us then: we were better prepared for our great desolation when it really came, and in the years for which our beloved one was given back to us, she was not only our most precious comfort and blessing, for her also they were filled with comfort, in spite of sickness, by the love with which she was ever surrounded. When I think of what the great blank is, life seems quite too desolate; but when I think of her now, and how her earthly life must have been one of increasing infirmity, instead of the perfected state from which I believe she can still look down upon us, I am satisfied.

“Convent of Montserrat, in Catalonia, Jan. 4, 1872.—At the best of times you would never have been able to travel in Spain, for great as is the delight of this unspeakably glorious place, I must confess we paid dear for it in the sufferings of the way. The first day introduced us to plenty of small hardships, as, a train being taken off al improviso, we had to wade through muddy lanes—and the Navarre mud is such mud—in pitch darkness, to a wretched hovel, where we passed the night with a number of others, in fierce cold, no fires or comforts of any kind. From thence (Alasua) we got on to Pamplona, our first picturesque Spanish town, where we spent part of Christmas Day, and then went on to Tudela, where we had another wretched posada; no fires; milk, coffee, and butter quite unknown, and the meat stewed in oil and garlic; and this has been the case everywhere except here, with other and worse in-conveniences.

“At Zaragoza we were first a little repaid by the wonderful beauty of the Moorish architecture—like lace in brick and stone, and the people as well as the place made a new world for us; but oh! the cold!—blocks of ice in the streets and the fiercest of winds raging.... No words certainly can describe the awful, the hideous ugliness of the railway the whole way here: not a tree, not a blade of grass to be seen, but ceaseless wind-stricken swamps of brown mud—featureless, hopeless, utterly uncultivated. However, Manresa is glorious, a sort of mixture of Tivoli (without the waterfall) and Subiaco, and thence we first gazed upon the magnificent Monserrat.

“We have been four days in the convent. I never saw anything anywhere so beautiful or so astonishing as this place, where we are miles and miles above every living thing except the monks, amid the most stupendous precipices of 3000 feet perpendicular, and yet in such a wealth of loveliness in arbutus, box, lentisc, smilax, and jessamine, as you can scarcely imagine. Though it is so high, and we have no fires or even brasieros, we scarcely feel the cold, the air is so still and the situation so sheltered, and on the sunlit terraces, which overlook the whole of Catalonia like a map, it is really too hot. The monks give us lodging and we have excellent food at a fonda within the convent walls, and are quite comfortable, though it must be confessed that my room is so narrow a cell, that when I go in it is impossible to turn round, and I have to hoist myself on the little bed sideways.

“It has been a strange beginning of the New Year. We breakfast at eight, and all day draw or follow the inexhaustibly lovely paths along the edges of the precipices. Yesterday we ascended the highest peak of the range, and were away nine hours—Aunt Sophy, the maid, and I; and nothing can describe the sublimity of the views across so glorious a foreground, to the whole snowy Pyrenean ranges and the expanse of blue sea.

“I act regular courier, and do all the work at inns, stations, &c., and Miss Wright is very easy to do for, and though very piano in misfortunes, is most kind and unselfish. The small stock of Spanish which I acquired in lonely evenings at Holmhurst enables me to get on quite easily—in fact, we never have a difficulty; and the kindness, civility, and helpfulness of the Spanish people compensates for all other annoyances. No one cheats, nor does it seem to occur to them. All prices are fixed, and so reasonable that my week’s expenses have been less than I paid for two dismal rooms and breakfast only in Half-Moon Street.”

“Barcelona, Jan. 9.—We arrived here on the evening of the Befana—a picturesque sight. It was coming into perfect summer, people out walking in the beautiful Rambla till past 12 P.M., ladies without bonnets and shawls. It is a very interesting place, full of lovely architecture, with palms, huge orange-trees, and terraces, and such a deep blue sea.”

“Barcelona, Jan. 17.—We have good rooms now, but everywhere the food is shocking. At the table-d’hôte one of the favourite dishes is snail-soup, and as the snails are cooked in their shells, it does not look very tempting. If the food were improved, this coast would be better for invalids in winter than the Riviera, as it is such a splendid climate—almost too dry, as it scarcely ever rains for more than fifty days out of the 365. The late Queen ordered every tree in the whole of Spain which did not bear fruit to be cut down, so the whole country is quite bare, and so parched and rocky that often for fifty miles you do not see a shrub, but in some places there are palms, olives, oranges, and caroubas.

“We are very thankful for the tea which Miss Wright’s maid makes for us in a saucepan.”

“Tarragona, Jan. 19.—We delighted in Barcelona, and wondered it did not bring people to this coast instead of to the south of France.... We get on famously with the Spaniards. I talk as much as I can, and if I cannot, smile and look pleased, and everybody seems devoted to us, and we are made much of and helped wherever we go. It is quite different from Italy: and we are learning such good manners from the incessant bowing and complimenting which is required.”

“Cordova, Feb. 6.—We broke the dreadful journey from Valencia to Alicante by sleeping at Xativa, a lovely city of palms and rushing fountains with a mountain background, but the inn so disgusting we could not stay. Alicante, on the other hand, had no attraction except its excellent hotel, with dry sheets, bearable smells, no garlic, and butter. The whole district is burnt, tawny, and desolate beyond words—houses, walls, and castle alike dust-colour, but the climate is delicious, and a long palm avenue fringes the sea, with scarlet geraniums in flower. With Elche we were perfectly enraptured—the forests of palms quite glorious, many sixty feet high and laden with golden dates; the whole place so Moorish, and the people with perfectly Oriental hospitality and manners. We spent four days there, and were out drawing from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon; such subjects—but I lamented not being able to draw the wonderful figures—copper-coloured with long black hair; the men in blue velvet, with mantas of crimson and gold and large black sombreros.

“It was twenty-three hours’ journey here, and no possible stopping-place or buffet. But as for Miss Wright, she never seems the worse for anything, and is always equally kind and amiable. She is, however, very piano in spirits, so that I should be thankful for a little pleasant society for her, as it must have been fearfully dull having no one but me for so long.

“We were disappointed with Murcia, though its figures reach a climax of grotesque magnificence, every plough-boy in the colours of Solomon’s temple. But though we had expected to find Cordova only very interesting, it is also most beautiful—the immense court before the mosque filled with fountains and old orange-trees laden with fruit, and the mosque itself, with its forest of pillars, as solemn as it is picturesque.”

“Seville, Feb. 10.—The dirt and discomfort of the railway journey to Cordova was quite indescribable, but the mosque is glorious. It is so large that you would certainly lose your way in it, as it has more than a thousand pillars, and twenty-nine different aisles of immense length, all just like one another. We made a large drawing in the court with its grove of oranges, cypresses, and palms, and you would have been quite aghast at the horrible beggars who crowded round us—people with two fingers and people with none; people with no legs and people with no noses, or people with their eyes and mouths quite in the wrong place.

“The present King (Amadeo) is much disliked and not likely to reign long. Here at Seville, in the Carnival, they made a little image of him, which bowed and nodded its head, as kings do, when it was carried through the street, and all the great people went out to meet it and bring it into the town in mockery; and yesterday it was strangled like a common criminal on a scaffold in the public square; and to-day tens of thousands of people are come into the town to attend its funeral.

“The Duchesse de Montpensier, who lives here, does a great deal of good, but she is very superstitious, and, when her daughter was ill, she walked barefoot through all the streets of Seville: the child died notwithstanding. She and all the great ladies of Seville wear low dresses and flowers in their hair when they are out walking on the promenade, but at large evening parties they wear high dresses, which is rather contrary to English fashions. Miss Wright’s bonnet made her so stared at and followed about, that now she, and her maid also, have been obliged to get mantillas to wear on their heads instead, which does much better, and prevents their attracting any attention. No ladies ever think of wearing anything but black, and gentlemen are expected to wear it too if they pay a visit.

“I often feel as if I must be in another state of existence from my old life of so many years of wandering with the sweet Mother and you, but that life is always present to me as the reality—this as a dream. There is one walk here which the dear Mother would have enjoyed and which always recalls her—a broad sunny terrace by the river-side edged with marble, which ends after a time in a wild path, where pileworts are coming into bloom under the willows. I always wonder how much she knows of us now; but if she can be invisibly present, I am sure it is mostly with me, and then with you, and in her own room at Holmhurst, whence the holy prayers and thoughts of so many years of faith and love ascended.”

“Seville, Feb. 13.—Ever since we entered Andalusia it has poured in torrents, but even in fine weather I think we must have been disappointed with Seville. With such a grand cathedral interior and such beautiful pictures, it seems hard to complain, but there never was anything less picturesque than the narrow streets of whitewashed houses, uglier than the exterior of the cathedral, or duller than the surrounding country. Being Carnival, the streets are full of masks, many of them not very civil to the clergy—the Pope being led along by a devil with a long tail, &c. Every one speaks of the Italian King (Amadeo) as thoroughly despised and disliked, and his reign (in spite of the tirades in his favour in English newspapers) must now be limited to weeks; then it must be either a Republic, Montpensier, or Alfonso. Here, where they live, the Montpensiers are very popular, and they do an immense deal of good amongst the poor, the institutions, and in encouraging art. Their palace of San Telmo is beautiful, with a great palm-garden. When we first came, we actually engaged lodgings in the Alcazar, the great palace of the Moorish kings, but, partly from the mosquitoes and partly from the ghosts, soon gave them up again.”

“Algeciras, Feb. 25.—Though we constantly asked one another what people admired so much in Seville, its sights took us just a fortnight. Our pleasantest afternoon was spent in a drive to the Roman ruins in Italica, and we took Miss Butcher with us, who devotes her life to teaching the children in the Protestant school, for which she gets well denounced from the same cathedral pulpit whence the autos-da-fé were proclaimed, in which 34,611 people were burnt alive in Seville alone!

“What a dull place Cadiz is. Nothing to make a feature but the general distant effect of the dazzling white lines of houses rising above a sapphire sea. We had a twelve hours’ voyage to Gibraltar. I was very miserable at first, but revived in time to sketch Trafalgar and to make two views in Africa as we coasted along. At last Gibraltar rose out of the sea like an island, and very fine it is, far more so than I expected, though we have not seen the precipice side of the rock yet. As we turned into the bay of Algeciras, numbers of little boats put out to take us on shore, and we are so enchanted with this place that we shall remain a few days in the primitive hotel. Our sitting-room opens by large glass doors on a balcony. Close below is the pretty beach with its groups of brilliant figures—Moors in white burnooses, sailors, peasants in sombreros and fajas. Across the blue bay, calm as glass, with white sails flitting over it, rises the grand mass of the Rock, with the town of Gibraltar at its foot. All around are endless little walks along the shore and cliffs, through labyrinths of palmito and prickly pear, or into the wild green moorlands which rise immediately behind, and beyond which is a purple chain of mountains. It is the only place I have yet seen in Spain which I think the dear Mother would have cared to stay long at, and I can almost fancy I see her walking up the little paths which she would have so delighted in, or sitting on her camp-stool amongst the rocks.”

“Gibraltar, March 2.—It was strange, when we crossed from Algeciras, to come suddenly in among an English-talking, pipe-smoking, beer-drinking community in this swarming place, where 5000 soldiers are quartered in addition to the crowded English and Spanish population. The main street of the town might be a slice cut out of the ugliest part of Dover, if it were not for the numbers of Moors stalking about in turbans, yellow slippers, and blue or white burnooses. Between the town and Europa Point, at the African end of the promontory, is the beautiful Alameda, walks winding through a mass of geraniums, coronillas, ixias, and aloes, all in gorgeous flower: for already the heat is most intense, and the sun is so grilling that before May the flowers are all withered up.

“I am afraid we shall not be allowed to go to Ronda. Mr. Layard has sent word from Madrid to the Governor to prevent any one going, as the famous brigand chief Don Diego is there with his crew. We had hoped to get up a sufficiently large armed party, but so many stories have come, that Aunt Sophy and her maid, Mrs. Jarvis, are getting into an agony about losing their noses and ears.

“The Governor, Sir Fenwick Williams, has been excessively civil to us, but our principal acquaintance here is quite romantic. The first day when we went down to the table-d’hôte, there were only two others present, a Scotch commercial traveller, and, below him, a rather well-looking Spaniard, evidently a gentleman, but with an odd short figure and squeaky voice. He bowed very civilly as we came in, and we returned it. In the middle of dinner a band of Scotch bagpipers came playing under the window, and I was seized with a desire to jump up and look at them. Involuntarily I looked across the table to see what the others were going to do, when the unknown gave a strange bow and wave of permission! With that wave came back to my mind a picture in the Duchesse de Montpensier’s bedroom at Seville: it was her brother-in-law, Don Francisco d’Assise, ex-King of Spain! Since then we have breakfasted and dined with him every day, and seen him constantly besides. This afternoon I sat out with him in the gardens, and we have had endless talk—the result of which is that I certainly do not believe a word of the stories against him, and think that, though not clever and rather eccentric, he is by no means an idiot, but a very kind-hearted, well-intentioned person. He is kept here waiting for a steamer to take him to Marseilles, as he cannot land at any of the Spanish ports. He calls himself the Comte de Balsaño, and is quite alone here, and evidently quite separated from Queen Isabella. He never mentions her or Spain, but talks quite openly of his youth in Portugal and his visits to France, England, Ireland, &c.

“I have remained with him while Miss Wright is gone to Tangiers with her real nephew, Major Howard Irby. This beginning of March always brings with it many sad recollections, the date—always nearing March 4—of all our greatest anxieties, at Pau, Piazza di Spagna, Via Babuino, Via Gregoriana. It is almost as incredible to me now as a year and a half ago to feel that it is all over—the agony of suspense so often endured, and that life is now a dead calm without either sunshine or storm to look forward to.

“The King says that of all the things which astonish him in England, that which astonishes him most is that the Anglo-Catholics (so called), who are free to do as they please, are seeking to have confession—‘the bane of the Roman Catholic religion, which has brought misery and disunion into so many Spanish homes.’ One felt sure he was thinking of Father Claret and the Queen, but he never mentioned them.”

“March 6.—The poor King left yesterday for Southampton—a most affectionate leave-taking. He says he will come to Holmhurst: how odd if he does!”

“Malaga, March 17.—Our pleasantest acquaintances at Gibraltar were the Augustus Phillimores, with whom we spent our last day—in such a lovely garden on the side of the Rock, filled with gigantic daturas, daphnes, oranges, and gorgeous creeping Bougainvillias. Admiral Phillimore’s boat took us on board the Lisbon, where we got through the voyage very well, huddled up under cloaks on deck through the long night. There is nothing to see at Malaga—a dismal, dusty, ugly place.”

“Hôtel Siete Suelos, Granada, March 19.—We had a dreadful journey here—rail to Las Salinas and then the most extraordinary diligence journey, in a carriage drawn by eight mules, at midnight, over no road, but rocks, marshes, and along the edge of precipices—quite frightful. Why we were not overturned I cannot imagine. I could get no place except at the top, and held on with the greatest difficulty in the fearful lunges. We reached Granada about 3½ A.M., seeing nothing that night, but wearily conscious of the long ascent to the Siete Suelos.

“How lovely was the morning awakening! our rooms looking down long arcades of high arching elms, with fountains foaming in the openings of the woods, birds singing, and violets scenting the whole air. It is indeed alike the paradise of nature and art. Through the first day I never entered the Alhambra, but sat restfully satisfied with the absorbing loveliness of the surrounding gorges, and sketched the venerable Gate of Justice, glowing in gorgeous golden light. This morning we went early to the Moorish palace. It is beyond all imagination of beauty. As you cross the threshold you pass out of fact into fairyland. I sat six hours drawing the Court of Blessing without moving, and then we climbed the heights of S. Nicolas and overlooked the whole palace, with the grand snow peaks of Sierra Nevada rising behind.”

“Granada, April 1—Easter Sunday.—To-day especially I do not feel as if I was at Granada, but in the churchyard at Hurstmonceaux. I am sure Mrs. Medhurst and other loving hands will have decorated our most dear spot with flowers. Aunt Sophy is most kind, only too kind and indulgent always, but the thought of the one for and through whom alone I could really enjoy anything is never absent from me. I feel as if I lived in a life which was not mine—beautiful often, but only a beautiful moonlight: the sunlight has faded.”

“Toledo, April 11.—We had twelve hours’ diligence from Granada, saw Jaen Cathedral on the way, and joined the railroad at the little station of Mengibar. Next morning found us at Aranjuez, a sort of Spanish Hampton Court, rather quaint and pleasant, four-fifths of the place being taken up by the palace and its belongings, so much beloved by Isabella (II.), but since deserted. We went to bed for four hours, and spent the rest of the day in surveying half-furnished palaces, unkempt gardens, and dried-up fountains, yet pleasant from the winding Tagus, lilacs and Judas-trees in full bloom, and birds singing. It was a nice primitive little inn, and the landlord sat on the wooden gallery in the evening and played the guitar, and all his men and maids sang round him in patriarchal family fashion.

“On the whole, I feel a little disappointed at present with this curious, desolate old city: the cathedral and everything else looks so small after one’s expectations, and the guide-books exaggerate so tremendously all over Spain.

“My last day at Granada was saddened by your mention of what is really a great loss to me—dear old Mr. Liddell’s death,[13] so kind to me ever since I was a little boy, and endeared by the many associations of most happy visits at Bamborough and Easington. I had also sad news from Holmhurst in the death of dear sweet Romo, the Mother’s own little dog, which no other can ever be.”

“Madrid, April 20.—We like Madrid better than we expected. It is a poor miniature of Paris, the Prado like the Champs Elysées, the Museo answering to the Louvre, though all on the smallest possible scale. It has been everything to us having our kind friends Don Juan and Doña Emilia de Riaño here, and we have seen a great deal of them. They have a beautiful house, full of books and pictures, and every day she has come to take us out, and has gone with us everywhere, taking us to visit all the interesting literary and artistic people, showing us all the political characters on the Prado, escorting us to galleries, &c., and in herself a mine of information of the most beautiful and delightful kind—a sort of younger Lady Waterford. She gives a dreadful picture of the immorality of society in Madrid under the Italian King, the want of law, the hopelessness of redress; that everything is gained by influence in high places, nothing by right. A revolution is expected any day, and then the King must go. The aristocratic Madrilenians all speak of him as ‘the little Italian wretch,’ though they pity his pretty amiable Queen. All seem to want to get rid of him, and, whatever is said by English newspapers, we have never seen any one in Spain who was not hankering after the Bourbons and the handsome young Prince of Asturias, who is sure to be king soon.

“The pleasantest of all the people Madame de Riaño has taken us to visit are the splendid artist Don Juan de Madraza and his most lovely wife.[14]

“The Layards have been very civil. At a party there we met no end of Spanish grandees. The Queen’s lady-in-waiting (she has only two who will consent to take office), Marqueza d’Almena, was quite lovely in white satin and pearls—like an old picture.”

“Segovia, April 28.—I was quite ill at Madrid with severe sore throat and cough, and this in spite of the care I was always taking of myself, having been so afraid of falling ill. But it is the most treacherous climate, and, from burning heat, changes to fierce ice-laden winds from the Guadarama and torrents of cold rain. I was shut up five days, but cheered by visits from Madame de Riaño, young Arthur Seymour an attaché, and the last day, to my great delight, the well-known Holmhurst faces of Mr. and Mrs. Scrivens (Hastings banker), brimming with Sussex news. Mr. Layard was evidently very anxious to get us and all other travelling English safe out of Spain, but we preferred the alternative, suggested by the Riaños, of coming to this ‘muy pacifico’ place, and waiting till the storm was a little blown over. Madrid was certainly in a most uncomfortable state, the Italian King feeling the days of his rule quite numbered, houses being entered night and day, and arrests going on everywhere. I do not know what English papers tell, but the Spanish accounts are alarming of the whole of the north as overrun by Carlists, and that they have taken Vittoria and stopped the tunnel on the main line.

“It was a dreadful journey here. The road was cut through the snow, but there was fifteen feet of it on either side the way on the top of the Guadarama. However, our ten mules dragged us safely along. Segovia is gloriously picturesque, and the hotel a very tolerable—pothouse.”

“Salamanca, May 5.—One day at the Segovia table-d’hôte we had the most unusual sight of a pleasing young Englishman, who rambled about and drew with us all afternoon, and then turned out to be—the Duchess of Cleveland’s younger son, Everard Primrose.[15]

“May-day we spent at La Granja, one of the many royal palaces, and one which would quite enchant you. It is a quaint old French château in lovely woods full of fountains and waterfalls, quite close under the snow mountains; and the high peaks, one glittering mass of snow, rise through the trees before the windows. The inhabitants were longing there to have the Bourbons back, and only spoke of the present King as ‘the inoffensive Italian.’ Even Cristina and Isabella will be cordially welcomed if they return with the young Alfonso.

“On May 2nd we left Segovia and went for one night to the Escurial—such a gigantic place, no beauty, but very curious, and the relics of the truly religious though cruelly bigoted Philip II. very interesting. Then we were a day at Avila, at an English inn kept by Mr. John Smith and his daughter—kindly, hearty people. Avila is a paradise for artists, and has remains in plenty of Ferdinand and Isabella, in whose intimate companionship one seems to live during one’s whole tour in Spain. It was a most fatiguing night-journey of ten hours to Salamanca, a place I have especially wished to see—not beautiful, but very curious, and we have introductions to all the great people of the place.

“I shall be very glad now to get home again. It is such an immense separation from every one one has ever seen or heard of, and such a long time to be so excessively uncomfortable as one must be at even the best places in Spain. Five-o’clock tea, which we occasionally cook in a saucepan—without milk of course—is a prime luxury, and is to be indulged in to-day as it is Sunday.”

“Biarritz, May 12.—We are thankful to be safe here, having seen Zamora, Valladolid, and Burgos since we left Salamanca. The stations were in an excited state, the platforms crowded with people waiting for news or giving it, but we met with no difficulties. I cannot say with what a thrill of pleasure I crossed the Bidassoa and left the great discomforts of Spain behind. What a luxury this morning to see once more tea! butter!! cow’s milk!!!”

“Paris, May 20.—Most lovely does France look after Spain—the flowers, the grass, the rich luxuriant green, of which there is more to be seen from the ugliest French station than in the whole of the Spanish peninsula after you leave the Pyrenees. I have spent the greater part of three days at the Embassy, where George Sheffield is most affectionate and kind—no brother could be more so. We have been about everywhere together, and it is certainly most charming to be with a friend who is always the same, and associated with nineteen years of one’s intimate past.”

“Dover Station, May 23.—On Monday George drove me in one of the open carriages of the Embassy through the Bois de Boulogne to S. Cloud, and I thought the woods rather improved by the war injuries than otherwise, the bits cut down sprouting up so quickly in bright green acacia, and forming a pleasant contrast with the darker groves beyond. We strolled round the ruined château, and George showed the room whither he went to meet the council, and offer British interference just before war was declared, in vain, and now it is a heap of ruins—blackened walls, broken caryatides.[16] What a lovely view it is of Paris from the terrace: I had never seen it before. Pretty young French ladies were begging at all the park gates for the dishoused poor of the place, as they do at the Exhibition for the payment of the Prussian debt. George was as delightful as only he can be when he likes, and we were perfectly happy together. At 7 P.M. I went again to the Embassy. All the lower rooms were lighted and full of flowers, the corridors all pink geraniums with a mist of white spirea over them. The Duchesse de la Tremouille was there, as hideous as people of historic name usually are. Little fat Lord Lyons was most amiable, but his figure is like a pumpkin with an apple on the top. It is difficult to believe he is as clever as he is supposed to be. He is sometimes amusing, however. Of his diplomatic relations with the Pope he says, ‘It is so difficult to deal diplomatically with the Holy Spirit.’ He boasts that he arrived at the Embassy with all he wanted contained in a single portmanteau, and that if he were called upon to leave it for ever to-day, the same would suffice. He has collected and acquired—nothing! He evidently adores George, and I don’t wonder!”

“Holmhurst, May 24, 1872.—You will like to know I am safe here. I found fat John Gidman waiting at the Hastings station, and drove up through the flowery lanes to receive dear Lea’s welcome—most tearfully joyous. The little home looks very lovely, and I cannot be thankful enough—though its sunshine is always mixed with shadow—to have a home in which everything is a precious memorial of my sacred past, where every shrub in the garden has been touched by my mother’s hand, every little walk trodden by her footsteps, and where I can bring up mental pictures of her in every room. In all that remains I can trace the sweet wisdom which for years laid up so much to comfort me, which sought to buy this place when she did, in order to give sufficient association to make it precious to me; above all, which urged her to the supreme effort of returning here in order to leave it for me with the last sacred recollections of her life. In the work of gathering up the fragments from that dear life I am again already engrossed, and Spain and its interests are passing into the far away; yet I look back upon them with much gratitude, and especially upon your long unvaried kindness and your patience with my many faults.”

“May 26.—To-night it blows a hurricane, and the wind moans sadly. A howling wind, I think, is the most melancholy natural accompaniment which can come to a solitary life. After this, I must give you—to meditate on—a beautiful passage I have been reading in Mrs. Somerville—‘At a very small height above the surface of the earth the noise of the tempest ceases, and the thunder is heard no more in those boundless regions where the heavenly bodies accomplish their periods in eternal and sublime silence.’”

It is partly the relief I experienced after Spain and the animation of ever-changing society which make me look back upon the summer of 1872 as one of the happiest I have spent at Holmhurst. A constant succession of guests filled our little chambers, every one was pleased, and the weather was glorious. I was away also for several short but very pleasant glimpses of London, and began to feel how little the virulence of some of my family signified when there was still so much friendship and affection left to me.

“Holmhurst, June 21, 1872.—I am feeling ungrateful for never having written since my happy fortnight with you came to a close, a time which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to enjoy anything again, and which made me feel there might still be something worth living on for, so much kindness and affection did I receive from so many. It is pleasant too to think of your comfortable home, which rises before me in a gallery of happy pictures, and I know it all so well now, from the parrot in Mrs. Jarvis’s room to the red geraniums in your window. I have had Mrs. and Miss Kuper here, and now I am alone, no voice but that of the guinea-fowls shrieking ‘Come back’ in the garden. I miss all my London friends very much, but suppose one would not enjoy it if it went on always, and certainly solitude is the time for work: I did eleven hours of it yesterday. As regards my books, I feel more and more with Arnold that a man is only fit to teach as long as he is himself learning daily.”

“Holmhurst, June 25.—‘Poor Aunt Sophy’ would not have thought she had done nothing to cheer me, could she have seen the interest with which I read her letter and returned to it over and over again. Such a letter is quite delightful, and here has the effect of one reaching Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, so complete is the silence and solitude when no one is staying here.

“How I delight in knowing all that the delightful human beings are about, of whom I think now as living in another hemisphere. I should like to see more of people—perhaps another year I may not be so busy: that is, I long for the cream which I enjoyed with you, but I should not care for the milk and water of a country neighbourhood. If one has too much people-seeing, however, even of the London best, one feels that it is ‘a withering world,’[19] and that if—

“I have been made very ill-tempered all day because Murray, during my absence in Spain, has published a second edition of my Oxfordshire Handbook, greatly altered, without consulting me, and it seems to me utterly spoilt and vulgarised. He is obliged by his contract to give me £40, but I would a great deal rather have seen the book uninjured and received nothing.”

“Holmhurst, August 18, 1872.—There seems quite a chaos of things already to be said to the dear cousin who has so long shared our quiet life, and who has so much care for the simple interests of this little home. Much have I missed her—in her chair, with her crotchet; sitting on the terrace; and especially in the early morning walk yesterday, when the garden was in its richest beauty, all the crimson and blue flowers twinkling through a veil of dewdrops, and when ‘the gentleness of Heaven was on the sea,’ as Wordsworth would say. I am grieved to think of you in London, instead of in your country home.

“Our visit to Hurstmonceaux was thoroughly enjoyed by Mr. and Mrs. Pile.[21] For myself, I shall always feel such short visits produce such extreme tension of conflicting feelings that they are scarcely a pleasure. Most lovely was the drive for miles through Ashburnham beech and pine woods and by its old timber-yard. At Lime Cross we saw Mrs. Isted at her familiar window, and the dear woman sat there all the afternoon to have another glimpse on our return. We drove to the foot of the hill and walked up to the church. Our sacred spot looked most peaceful, its double hedge of fuchsia in full flower, and the turf as smooth as velvet. We had luncheon in the church porch, and then went to the castle, and back through the park uplands, high with fern, to Hurstmonceaux Place. How often, at Hurstmonceaux especially, I now feel the force of Wordsworth’s lines:

“Holmhurst, Sept. 6, 1872.—If my many guests of the last weeks have liked their visits, I have most entirely enjoyed having them and the pleasant influx of new life and new ideas. Dear old Mrs. Robert Hare is now very happy here, and most grateful for the very small kindness I am able to show. I have pressed her to make a long visit, as it is a real delight to give so much pleasure, though humbling to think that, when one can do it so easily, one does not do it oftener. She is quite stone-deaf, so we sit opposite one another and correspond on a slate.[22] On Tuesday I fetched Marcus Hare from Battle. He also is intensely happy here; but his aunts, the Miss Stanleys, have written to refuse to see him again or allow him to visit them, because he has been to see the author of the ‘Memorials.’ I took him to Hurstmonceaux yesterday, and lovely was the first flush of autumn on our dear woods, while the castle looked most grand in the solemn stillness of its misty hollow. Next week I shall have George Sheffield here.”

In September I paid a pleasant visit to my cousin Edward Liddell, whom I found married to his sweet wife (Christina Fraser Tytler) and living in the Rectory in Wimpole Park in Cambridgeshire, close to the great house of our cousin Lord Hardwicke, which is very ugly, though it contains many fine pictures.[23] In the beginning of October I was at Ford with Lady Waterford, meeting the Ellices, Lady Marion Alford, and Lady Herbert of Lea, who had much to tell of La Palma, the estatica of Brindisi, who had the stigmata, and could tell wonderful truths to people about their past and future. Lady Herbert had been to America, Trinidad, Africa—in fact, everywhere, and in each country had, or thought she had, the most astounding adventures—living with bandits in a cave, overturned on a precipice, &c. She had travelled in Spain and was brimful of its delights. She had armed herself with a Papal permit to enter all monasteries and convents. She had annexed the Bishop of Salamanca and driven in his coach to Alva, the scene of S. Teresa’s later life. The nuns refused to let her come in, and the abbess declared it was unheard of; but when Lady Herbert produced the bishop and the Papal brief, she got in, and the nuns were so captivated that they not only showed her S. Teresa’s dead body, but dressed her up in all S. Teresa’s clothes, and set her in S. Teresa’s arm-chair, and gave her her supper out of S. Teresa’s porringer and platter. “Can you see Lady Jane Ellice’s face,” I read in a letter from Ford to Miss Leycester, “as Lady Herbert ‘goes on’ about the Blessed Paul of the Cross, the holy shift of S. Teresa, and the saintly privileges of a hermit’s life?” The first evening she was at Ford Lady Herbert said:—

“Did you never hear the story of ‘La Jolie Jambe’? Well, then, I will tell it you. Robert, my brother-in-law, told me. He knew the old lady it was all about in Paris, and had very often gone to sit with her.

“It was an old lady who lived at ‘le pavillon dans le jardin.’ The great house in the Faubourg was given up to the son, you know, and she lived in the pavillon. It was a very small house, only five or six rooms, and was magnificently furnished, for the old lady was very rich indeed, and had a great many jewels and other valuable things. She lived quite alone in the pavillon with her maid, but it was considered quite safe in that high-terraced garden, raised above everything else, and which could only be approached through the house.

“However, one morning the old lady was found murdered, and all her jewels and valuables were gone. Of course suspicion fell upon the maid, for who else could it be? She was taken up and tried. The evidence was insufficient to convict her, and she was released, but every one believed her guilty. Of course she could get no other place, and she was so shunned and pointed at as a murderess that her life was a burden to her.

“One day, eleven years after, the maid was walking down a street when she met a man, who, as she passed, looked suddenly at her and exclaimed, ‘Oh, la jolie jambe!’ She immediately rushed up to a sergeant-de-ville and exclaimed, ‘Arrêtez-moi cet homme.’ The man was confused and hesitated, but she continued in an agony, ‘Arrêtez-le, je vous dis: je l’accuse, je l’accuse du meurtre de ma maîtresse.’ Meanwhile the man had made off, but he was pursued and taken.

“The maid said at the trial, that, on the night of the murder, the windows of the pavilion had been open down to the ground; that they were so when she was going to bed; that as she was getting into bed she sat for a minute on its edge to admire her legs, looked at them, patted one of them complacently, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, la jolie jambe!’

“The man then confessed that while he had been hidden in the bushes of the garden waiting to commit his crime, he had seen the maid and heard her, and that, when he met her in the street, the scene and the words rushed back upon his mind so suddenly, that, as if under an irresistible impulse, his lips framed the words ‘Oh, la jolie jambe.’ The man was executed.”

“Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, had a sheep-dog to which he was quite devoted, and which used to go out and collect his sheep. One day in winter a thick snow came on, and Hogg was in the greatest anxiety about his flocks. He called his dog and explained all the matter to him, telling him how he was going all round one side of the moors himself to drive in his sheep, and that he was to go the other way and collect. The dog understood perfectly. Late in the evening the Shepherd returned perfectly exhausted, bringing in his flock through the deep snow, but the dog had not come back. Hour after hour passed and the dog did not return. The Shepherd, who was devoted to his dog, was very anxious about it, when at last he heard a whining and scratching at the door, and going out, found the dog bringing all his sheep safe, and in its mouth a little puppy, which it laid at its master’s feet, and instantly darted off through the snow to seek another and bring it in. The poor thing had puppied in the snow, but would not on that account neglect one iota of its duty. It brought in its second puppy, laid it in its master’s lap, looked up wistfully in his face as if beseeching him to take care of it, and—died.”

Lady Marion Alford is a real grande dame. Some one, Miss Mary Boyle, I think, wrote a little book called the “Court of Queen Marion,” descriptive of her and her intimate circle. At Ford she talked much of the pleasure of Azeglio’s Ricordi, how he was the first Italian writer who had got out of the ‘conciosiachè style,’ and she was delightful with her reminiscences of Italy:—

“Once when I was spending the summer in Italy I wanted models, and I was told by an old general, a friend of mine, that I had better advertise, send up to the priests in the mountains, and tell them to send down all the prettiest children in their villages to be looked at: the lady wanted models; those she chose she should pay, the others should each have sixpence and a cake. I was told I had better prepare for a good many—perhaps a hundred might come. When the day came, I never shall forget our old servant’s face when he rushed in—‘Miladi, Miladi, the lane is full of them.’ There were seven hundred. It was very difficult to choose. We made them pass in at one door of the villa and out at the other. Those we selected we sent into the garden, and from these we chose again. Some were perfect monsters, for every mother thought her own child perfection. Those we selected to come first were a lovely family of three children with their mother. They were to come on a Wednesday. The day came, and they never appeared: the next, and still they did not come. Then we asked our old general about it, and he said, ‘The fact is, I have kicked my carpenter downstairs this morning because he said you were sending for the children to suck their blood, and they all think so.’ They none of them ever came.

“Our old maid Teresa was of a very romantic turn of mind. We used, when I was a child, to live in the Palazzo Sciarra, where the ‘Maddalena della Radice’ is. She used to stand opposite to the picture and exclaim in gulpy tones, ‘Sono bestia io, e non capisco niente, ma questo me pare—pittoresco.’ My little sister, when our father was away, stood one day at the top of the stairs and said, ‘Io son padrona di casa, e no son padrona di casa: voi siete la servitu, e non siete la servitu.’ Teresa exclaimed, ‘Questa diavola, com’ é carina.’ We used to hear Teresa talking to our other maid, and they boasted of the number of times they had been beaten by their husbands. One day—it was during the French occupation, when the bread was doled out—Teresa took her tambourine with her when she went to get it, for they all loved flirting with the soldiers; and when her husband asked her what it was for, she said it was to bring back the bread in. But when she got inside the circle of soldiers, they had a merry saltarello. The husband was kept back outside the circle, and stood there furious. At first she laughed at him, but then when he went away and came back again, she got really frightened. And when she came out of the circle he flogged her with a whip all the way back to the Trastevere, and she ran before him screaming.

“How curious it is that ‘Est locanda’ is still to be seen in Roman windows of houses to be let—the one little relic of Latin: and how odd the word for lodgings being the same in all languages—Quartier, Quartos, Quartiere, Quarter, &c.”

“As we were leaving Gibraltar, three of the shells from the practising fell quite close to our yacht. ‘Are you not very much frightened?’ said a French gentleman on board. ‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘How could I be? our men are such perfect marksmen;’ but of course I was dreadfully.”

This story is wonderfully characteristic of the speaker: the Empress Catherine might have given such an answer. About ghosts Lady Marion was very amusing:—

“When I went to Belvoir with Lady Caroline Cust, they danced in the evening. I went upstairs early, for I was tired. As I was going to my room, Lady Jersey—it was wrong of her, I think—said, ‘Oh, I see you are put into the ghost-room.’ I said, ‘I am quite happy; there are no real ghosts here, I think.’—‘Well,’ said Lady Jersey, ‘I can only say Miss Drummond slept there last night, and she received letters of importance this morning and left before breakfast.’ Well, I went into my room, and lit the candles and made up the fire, but very soon I gave a great jump, for I heard the most dreadful noise close at my elbow—Oh-o-oo-oo!’ I thought of course that it was a practical joke, and began to examine every corner of the room, thinking some one must be hidden there; then I rang my bell. When my maid came in I said, ‘Now don’t be frightened, but there is some one hidden in this room somewhere, and you must help me to find him.’ Very soon the noise came again. Then Lady Caroline came, and she heard it: then her maid came. The noise occurred about every five minutes. We examined everything and stood in each corner of the room. The noise then seemed close to each of us. At last Lady Caroline said, ‘I can stand this no longer, and I must go,’ and she and her maid went away and shut themselves into the next room. Then I said to my maid, ‘If you are frightened you had better go,’ but she protested that she would rather stay where she was; after what she had heard, anything would be better than facing the long lonely passages alone. However, just at that moment ‘Oh-o-oo-oo!’ went off again close to her ear, and with one spring she darted out of the room and ran off as hard as ever she could. I went courageously to bed and determined to brave it out. But the thing went to bed too, and went off at intervals on the pillow close to my face. And at last it grated on my nerves to such a degree that I could bear it no longer, and I dragged a mattress into Lady Caroline’s room and slept there till dawn. The next morning I also received letters of importance and left before breakfast.

“Before I left, I sent for the housekeeper, and said, ‘You really should not put people into that room,’ and told her what had happened. She was much distressed, and told me that there really was no other room in the house then, but confessed it had often happened so before. Some time after I went over to Belvoir with some friends who wanted to see the castle, and the housekeeper then told me that the same thing had happened again in that room, which was now permanently shut up.”

Other guests at Ford were Mrs. Richard Boyle (known as E. V. B.), and her daughter—very quaint and original, and the mother a capital artist. We went to the Rowting Lynn, a beautiful spot surrounded with rocks overhung by old oak-trees. “Did you enjoy your walk?” said Lady Waterford to Mrs. Boyle as we came in. “Yes, excessively. You never told me you had a waterfall. You offered me a coal-pit, but the waterfall you forgot to mention.”

Lady Waterford was herself more delightful than ever. As Marocetti said of her, “C’est un grand homme, mais une femme charmante.” Here are some scraps from her conversation:—

“That is a sketch of L. H. She did not know I was drawing her. She looks sixteen, but is quite middle-aged. Mama used to say she was like preserved green peas. Preserved green peas are not quite so good as real green peas, but they do very nearly as well.’

“I always take a little book with me in the train and draw the things as I pass them. That is some railings against a sunset sky when it was almost dark: I thought it was like a bit of Tintoret.

“How trying it is to be kept waiting for people. Don’t you know the Italian proverb?—

“How beautiful the singing was in our young days—Grisi and Mario and Lablache, who went straight to one’s heart and fluttered there.

“Some one, old Madame de Flahault I think it was, asked what she could give as a present. It must be ‘très rare et pas coûteux,’ and it was suggested that she should give a lock of her hair.

“You are like the old lady who said she had never had a ripe peach in her life, because when she was young all the old people had them, and when she grew old all the young people had them.

“I am longing to read ‘Marjory,’[25] but I cannot when I have my house full—my novel en action. When people are here and tell me their little stories, that is what I like best to read.”

“Crook Hall, Lancashire, Oct. 20, 1872.—My visit at Ford was perfectly enchanting, and I made several new friendships there in what you think my sudden way, especially one with Lord Ronald Gower, which I think may become a pleasure. I much enjoyed, too, making friends with Mr. Beaumont and Lady Margaret B., one of the very best types of a fine lady it is possible to meet, almost funnily aristocratic in all her ideas, and high-minded in proportion. Her little person is arrayed in gowns which were as much things of beauty in their way as a mountain landscape; there is such a difference between ‘smart dress,’ and such a lovely harmony of shade and colour, as one can scarcely think of as mere clothing. Then I saw a great deal of the dear Lady Waterford, and am more than ever instructed and touched by her beautiful, noble, holy life. It is absolutely impossible to her to ‘think any evil,’ and so, to her, the best side of every one comes out. As an easier ‘let down’ than anything else, I accepted an invitation from thence to Lord and Lady Grey for three days at Howick on the wild sea-coast, and enjoyed my visit immensely. No one has more completely ‘l’art de narrer’ than Lady Grey, and he is full of old-fashioned courtesy and kindness, such winning manners and heart-whole goodness.

“My ‘Memorials’ are out! Ere this all will have it. I know there will be much abuse and many varieties of opinion, but I am conscious of having carried out the book as I believe to be best for others, not for myself, and in this consciousness can bear what is said. ‘Je laisse couler le torrent,’ as Mme. de Sevigné used to say. One thing I dread is, that people should think I am a better person than I am, on reading the book: for I suppose it is always the fact that a man’s book is the best of him, his thought better than his life. But in any case, it is a relief to have it out (as Arthur and Mary Stanley, at the last moment, persuaded Mr. Murray to go to my publishers to try to stop the publication), yet it is also a wrench to part with the occupation and chief thought of two desolate years.”

“Dalton Hall, Oct. 28.—A second edition of the ‘Memorials’ was called for before it had been out three days. I have had many letters about it—charming ones from Mrs. Arnold and the old Baroness de Bunsen. The olive-bearing dove has gone out with healing on his wings, and all the mists are cleared off and the long-standing feuds of the Hare family healed by the book. Still the Stanleys make no sign.

“I certainly do suffer very much when people mean me to do so, to a degree which must be quite satisfactory to them; but then in compensation I always enjoy very much when it is the reverse. It is as I read somewhere—‘He who is the first to be touched by the thorns is soonest awake to the flowers.’

“From the Oswald Penrhyns’ at Huyton I saw in the same day two great houses—the vast and hideous Knowsley, which interested me from its connection with my Mother’s youth, and the glorious old hall of Speke, which has an air of venerable beauty quite unrivalled. Then I went for some days to Lord Brougham’s, a delightful place, full of tapestry and pictures, but though it looks old, really a modern castle, with the ruins of the truly ancient castle on the river-bank hard by.”

In November I went north again to stay for the first time at Bretton near Wakefield, a great house in the Black Country, built by the famous “Madam Beaumont,” who followed the example of her ancestors in making an enormous fortune by her skilful management of her lead-mines. It is recorded that when Mr. Pitt was dining with her, and all her magnificent plate was set out, she exclaimed, with pardonable pride, “That is all the lead-mines,” when he replied, “Oh, really, I thought it was silver,” and would talk on, to her great annoyance, and never allow her a moment to explain. I had made friends with her grandson, Wentworth Beaumont, at Ford, when he was there with his wife Lady Margaret, whom I have always regarded as the most thoroughly pleasant specimen in existence of a really fine lady. Her powers of conversation were boundless, her gift of repartee unequalled, and her memory most extraordinary. She was the daughter of Lady Clanricarde, celebrated for her conversational talents, and whom I remember Lady Carnarvon describing as “the most agreeable woman in England, because she was not only massive, but lively.” Lady Margaret was like a little queen amongst her guests, entertaining with the simplicity of real kindness and thoughtfulness for others, whilst her manner was equally agreeable to all, and she never usurped attention, but rather exerted herself to draw others out and to show the best side of them. She could be alarming as an enemy, but she was a most faithful friend, and would exert herself to take definite trouble for her friends, never deserting them unless they were proved to be really unworthy. She was not exactly pretty, but her animation was more charming than mere beauty. Dress with her was not a mere adjunct, but was made as much a thing of poetic beauty as a landscape or a flower. She was devoted to her husband, but theoretically she disapproved of love in a general way. Still she was only worldly in principle and not in practice, and she was ever a devoted mother to her children, seeking their real happiness rather than their advancement before the world.[27] I have often been at Bretton since my first visit there, and always enjoyed it from the constant animation which the hostess shed around her; the excessive comfort of the house and of the thoroughly well-regulated household; the plenty of time for work and writing, and yet the constant variety afforded by the guests coming and going: while with the children of the house I was very intimate, and with the youngest, Hubert, long on terms of almost elder-brotherly affection. Lady Francis Gordon was generally at Bretton when I have been there, rather an amusing than an agreeable person, but an immense talker. One of her first remarks to me was characteristic—“I am quite past the age of blushing: when I want to do anything of that kind, I what they call flush now.” I have frequently seen Colonel Crealock [28] at Bretton, who drew animals so splendidly. He told me once—

“Old Lady Selby of the Mote at Ightham had been out to some grand party in all her diamonds and jewels. She slept in a room which still remains the same, hung all round with tapestry representing events in the life of Julius Caesar. Through this room was the dressing-room, in which she kept her jewels and valuables. On the night of her return from the party, as she was undressing and taking off her jewels, she looked up at the figure of Julius Caesar in the tapestry, and thought she saw something peculiar in one of his eyes. She looked again, and felt sure the eye moved. She quietly proceeded, however, to take off her jewels and put them away. Having done that, she locked the jewel-case, left it in the dressing-room, and went to bed.

“She had not been in bed long when a man appeared in the room with a candle and a knife. Coming up to the bed, he passed the light again and again close before her eyes. She bore it without flinching in the least, only appeared to become restless and turned over in her sleep. Then he proceeded to the dressing-room and became occupied over the jewels. As soon as she was aware that he was entirely engrossed, she darted out of bed, banged to the door of the dressing-room, locked it on the outside, and rang violently for assistance. When help came, and the door was opened, they found the man strangled from trying to get through the iron bars of the window.

“Bretton Park, Nov. 21, 1872.—To-day we went—Lady Francis Gordon, Mrs. Lowther, Mr. Doyle, and I—to luncheon at Walton, an extraordinary house in the middle of a lake, which belonged to the Roman Catholic Mr. Waterton, the great ornithologist. It is approached by a long drawbridge and is most curious. A Mr. Hailstone lives there now, a strange man, who spends his large fortune on antiquities, and has a wife who writes on lace, and wonderful collections.[30] Their son has never eaten anything but buttered toast, cheese, and port-wine (has never tasted meat, vegetables, or fruit), but is eight years old and very flourishing.

“Lord and Lady Salisbury are here. The latter can only be described by the word ‘jocund,’ except when she does not wish to make acquaintance or desires to snub people, when she becomes hopelessly impenetrable. There is a party of fourteen, all new to me, but I get on very well. They look upon me as an aboriginal from another hemisphere, and indeed they are that to me; but it is too new a set to feel the least shy in. There is great satisfaction in being only a background figure, and Lady Margaret is quite charming, the house handsome, and the park pretty. We all went to church this morning in a sort of family drawing-room in the grounds, the vulgar herd screened off by red curtains, only the clergyman in his pulpit visible above the screen.”

I made a very interesting excursion with Lady Margaret and some of her guests to Haworth, the wild weird home of the Brontës on the Yorkshire fells, where the steep street with the stones placed edgeways, up which the horses scramble like cats, leads to the wind-stricken churchyard, with its vast pavement of tombstones set close together. On one side of this is the dismal grey stone house where the three unhappy sisters lived, worked, and suffered, with the window at the side through which Patrick Brontë used to climb at night. Not a tree is to be seen in the neighbourhood except the blackened lilac before the Rectory door. Nature is her dreariest self, and offers no ameliorations. The family were buried beneath their pew in the church,[31] so that Charlotte, the last survivor, sat in church over the graves of her brothers and sisters. The people seemed half savage, most of all the Rector, who violently hurled Lady Margaret and Lady Catherine Weyland from his door when they asked to see the house, being bored, I suppose, by the pertinacity of visitors.

The Brontës were really Pronty—Irish—but when old Mr. Brontë went to college, he did the wise thing of changing his name, and the family kept to it.

I went for two days from Bretton to Lord Houghton at Fryston, which has since been burnt, but which was so filled with books of every kind that the whole house was a library, each bookcase being filled with a different subject—the French Revolution, Demonology and Witchcraft, &c., &c. Lady Houghton was living then, a most gentle, kind woman, a sister of Lord Crewe. From Lord Houghton I received constant kindness and protection from my first entering upon a literary life, and, in spite of his excessive vanity, I was always sincerely attached to him. “Butterfly to the hasty eye, he was firm in his friendships, firmest of all in his fearless championship of the weak, the strugglers, the undeservedly oppressed.” As Johnson says of Garth—“he communicated himself through a very wide extent of acquaintance.” His conversation was always interesting, but I have preserved scarcely any notes of my visit to Fryston, and chiefly remember his mentioning that Sydney Smith had said to him, what I have so often thought, “It is one of the great riddles of life to me why good people should always be so dreadfully stupid.” He also spoke of the many proverbs which discouraged exertion in “doing good,” from the Persian “Do no good, and no harm will come of it,” to the French—

Talking of the Baroness Burdett Coutts, Lord Houghton said, “Miss Coutts likes me because I never proposed to her. Almost all the young men of good family did: those who did their duty by their family always did. Mrs. Browne (Miss Coutts’ companion) used to see it coming, and took herself out of the way for ten minutes, but she only went into the next room and left the door open, and then the proposal took place, and immediately it was done Miss Coutts coughed, and Mrs. Browne came in again.”

“Dec. 10, 1872.—Went to visit the Ralph Duttons at Timsbury near Romsey. The house is in a flat, and sees nothing but clipped laurel hedges. Mr. Dutton is a sporting politician: Mrs. Dutton a politician too, but on the other side. Both are full of pleasant conversation, and most kind. Regarding English country-houses, however, it is as Carlyle truly says, ‘Life may be as well spent there as elsewhere by the owners of them, who have occupations to attend to. For visitors, when large numbers are brought together, some practice is required if they are to enjoy the elaborate idleness.’

“We drove to visit Mr. Cowper Temple at Broadlands—a pleasant liveable house with beautiful flowers and pictures, the most remarkable of the latter being Guercino’s ‘Hagar and the Angel’—an angel which poises and floats, and Sir J. Reynolds’ ‘Infant Academy’ and ‘Babes in the Wood.’ In Mr. Cowper Temple’s room upstairs is Edward Clifford’s family group of the ‘Maimed and Halt’ being called in to the feast, the figures being those of the Cowper-Temples, Augustus Tollemaches, Lord Roden, Lady Palmerston, and Clifford’s favourite drummer. They are wonderful likenesses, but it is a strange picture, with our Saviour looking in at the window.”

“Dec. 13.—I arrived at Hatfield in the dark. A number of carriages from the house met the guests at the station. As I emerged from it, a little groom touched his hat and said, ‘Please, sir, are you the Lord Chancellor?’ I thought I must have grown in dignity of aspect. The Lord Chancellor was expected, and came later in the evening.

“I found Lord and Lady Salisbury in the library, lined with Burleigh books and MSS. Mr. Richmond the artist was with them. He has the most charming voice, which, quite independently of his conversation, would make him agreeable. He talked of the enormous prices obtained for statues and pictures at the present time, while Michelangelo only got £90 and a block of marble for the great David at Florence, and Titian the same for his Assumption at Venice. He spoke of the amount of chicanery which existed amongst artists even then—how the monks, and the nuns too, would supply them with good ultra-marine for their frescoes, and how they would sell the ultra-marine and use smalt. He described how Gainsborough never could sell anything but portraits: people came to him for those, but would not buy his other pictures, and his house was full of them when he died. Gainsborough gave two pictures to the carrier who brought his other pictures from Clifton to London: the carrier would take no fare, so he painted his waggon and horses and another picture and gave them to him: these two pictures have been sold lately for £18,000.

“Besides the Lord Chancellor Selborne with his two pleasant unaffected daughters, Miss Alderson was here the first day, and Sir Henry and Lady Maine. With the last I rambled in search of adventures in the evening, and we walked in the long gallery, which is splendid, with a gilt ceiling, only it is incongruous to see the old panelled wall brilliantly lighted with gas.

“Lord Salisbury is delightful, so perfectly easy and unaffected: it would be well if little great men would take pattern by him. Lady Salisbury is equally unassuming, sound sense ever dropping from her lips as unconsciously as Lady Margaret Beaumont’s bon-mots.”

“Dec. 14.—Lady Salisbury showed us the house. In the drawing-room, over the chimney-piece, is a huge statue of James I. of bronze. It is not fixed, but supported by its own weight. A ball was once given in that room. In the midst of the dancing some one observed that the bronze statue was slowly nodding its head, and gave the alarm. The stampede was frightful. All the guests fled down the long gallery.

“In the same room is a glorious portrait of Lord Salisbury’s grandmother by Reynolds. It was this Lady Salisbury who was burnt to death in her old age. She came in from riding, and used to make her maid change her habit and dress her for dinner at once, as less fatiguing. Then she rested for two or three hours with lighted candles near her, and read or nodded in her chair. One evening, from the opposite wing of the house, the late Lord Salisbury saw the windows of the rooms near hers blazing with light, and gave the alarm, but before anybody could reach his mother’s rooms they were entirely burnt—so entirely, that it would have been impossible to identify her ashes for burial but for a ruby which the present Lady Salisbury wears in a ring. A little heap of diamonds was found in one place, but that proved nothing, as all her jewels were burned with her, but the ruby her maid identified as having put on her finger when she dressed her, and the ashes of that particular spot were all gathered up and buried in a small urn. Her two favourite dogs were burnt with her, and they are probably buried with her.[32] It was this Lady Salisbury who was inadvertently thrown down by a couple waltzing violently down the long gallery, when Lord Lytton, who was present, irreverently exclaimed:

“In ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill Sykes is described as having seen the fire at Hatfield as he was escaping from London.

“In the dining-room there is a portrait by Wilkie of the Duke of Wellington, painted when he was here after the battle of Waterloo. There is also at Hatfield a beautiful picture of Mary Queen of Scots at fifteen.[34] This, however, is not the authentic portrait. There is another, a replica of that at Hardwicke, taken in a widow’s dress shortly before her execution, which is one of the three portraits certainly painted from life. It was sent by the Queen to the Duke of Norfolk and intercepted by Lord Burleigh. One of the other two portraits belonged to Louis Philippe. As Sir Henry Bulwer was waiting for an audience of the king, another gentleman was in the room with him. The portrait of Queen Mary hung on the wall. The stranger looked at it, walked backwards and forwards to it, and examined it again and again. At last he walked up to Sir Henry Bulwer and said, ‘Can you tell me, sir, whom that portrait represents?’—‘Yes, I can,’ said Sir Henry; ‘but will you tell me why you ask?’—‘Because it is the lowest type of criminal face which is known to us.’ The stranger was Fouché the famous detective.

“In Lady Salisbury’s own room is a picture of Miss Pine, Lord Salisbury’s other grandmother, by Sir Joshua; also the Earl and Countess of Westmoreland and their child, by Vandyke; also a curious picture of a lady.

“‘She was desperately wicked,’ said Lady Salisbury, ‘and therefore it is quite unnecessary to say that she was very religious. She endowed almshouses—‘Lady Anne’s Almshouses,’—they still exist, and she sent her son to Westminster with especial orders that he should be severely flogged, when he was seventeen, and so soured his temper for life and sent him to the bad entirely; and none but ‘a thoroughly highly-principled woman’ could do such a villainous action as that. The son lived afterwards at Quixwold, and led the most abominably wicked life there, and died a death as horrible as his life. He sold everything he could lay hands on, jewels and everything, all the old family plate except one very ugly old flat candlestick and six old sconces, which were painted over mahogany colour, and so were not known to be silver. His is the phantom coach which arrives and drives up the staircase and then disappears. Lord Salisbury heard it the other night when he was in his dressing-room, and dressed again, thinking it was visitors, and went down, but it was no one.’

“There is a picture of Elizabeth by Zucchero in the famous dress, all eyes and ears, to typify her omniscience, and with the serpent of wisdom on her arm: she loved allegorical dress. Her hat is here—an open-work straw hat—and in the recess of the gallery her cradle, with A. R. for Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth hated Hatfield. She was here in her childhood and all through Mary’s reign, and she constantly wrote from hence complaints to her father, to Mary, and to the Ministers, and they told her she must bear it; but she hated it, and after she became queen she never saw Hatfield again. The relics of her remain because James I. was in such a hurry to exchange Hatfield for Theobalds, on account of the hunting there, that he did not stop to take anything away.

“In the afternoon we had games, charades—Pilgrim, Pirate, Scullion, and stories.”

“Dec. 15.—Breakfast at a number of little round tables. I was at one with Miss Palmer, the Attorney-General, and his daughter Miss Coleridge. The Attorney-General told a story of a Mr. Kerslake, who was 6 feet 8 inches in height. A little boy in the Strand, looking up at him, said, ‘I say, Maister, if you was to fall down, you’d be halfway t’ome.’

“My cough prevented my going out, but we had Sunday-afternoon service in the chapel, with beautiful singing. In the evening Lady Salisbury asked me to tell stories to all the party, and it was sufficiently alarming when I saw the Lord Chancellor in the first row, with the Attorney-General on one side of him and Lord Cairns on the other. In repeating a story, however, I always think of a bit of advice Mr. Jowett gave me long ago—‘Try to say everything as well as you can say it.’ The Attorney-General afterwards told us—

“There is at Clifton a Mr. Harrison, who is the second medical authority there, a man of undoubted probity and reputation. He told me this.

“At Clifton lived a Mrs. Fry with her brother-in-law and his two daughters, Elizabeth and Hephzibah. These were persons who, like many Bristol people, had large property in the West Indies—the Miles’s, for instance, made their fortunes there. The elder daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in the West Indies, and when she fell into bad health, her father took the opportunity of taking her back to benefit by her native air, when he went to look after his West Indian property, leaving his younger daughter, Hephzibah, with Mrs Fry.

“They had not been gone long when Hephzibah took a chill, and in a very few days she died. Mr. Harrison attended her. Some days after he called as a friend upon Mrs. Fry, when she said, ‘I want to tell you something which has happened to me: I have seen Elizabeth.’—’ Impossible,’ said Mr. Harrison. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it was so. I was sitting reading the “Promise”’ (so I believe ‘Friends’ always call the Bible), ‘when I fell into a state which was neither sleeping nor waking, and in that state—I was not asleep—I saw Elizabeth standing by me. I spoke to her, and, forgetting what had happened in my surprise, I told her to call her sister. But she said to me that she had seen her sister already, and that she was in a box, and had a great deal of sewing about her chest. She especially used the word “sewing:” then she vanished away, and the place in the Promise where I had left off was changed: some one had turned it over.’ Mr. Harrison noted all this.

“Some time after came a letter from the father to Mrs. Fry, written before he had heard of Hephzibah’s death. After speaking of other matters he said, ‘I must now tell you of a very curious circumstance which has occurred, and which is much on my mind. The other day Elizabeth, who had been much better, and who is now nearly well, surprised us by falling into a stupor, and when she came to herself she would insist upon it that she had been to Clifton, and that she had seen you and Hephzibah, and that Hephzibah was in a long box, with a great deal of sewing upon her chest: and she says so still.’ The dates were precisely the same.

“Hephzibah’s death was so sudden that there was a post-mortem examination, though it was not considered necessary to distress Mrs. Fry by telling her of it. On this occasion Mr. Harrison was unable to be present. He went afterwards to the student of the hospital who was there, and who remembered all about it, and he said—what Mr. Harrison had not previously known—that after the examination the body was sewn up, with a great deal of sewing upon the chest.”

“Dec. 16.—The Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Tait arrived before afternoon-tea, at which there was much lively conversation. Apropos of Radicalism and the conversation of Bishops, Lord Salisbury mentioned Sydney Smith’s saying that he would ‘rather fall a victim to a democratic mob than be sweetly and blandly absorbed by a bishop.’

“In speaking of Jenny Lind, Mr. Richmond said that she had ‘none of the warm ruddy glow of the sunny South in her character, it was rather the soft calm beauty of Swedish moonlight.’ He spoke of the faces he had drawn—of the interest of the ugly faces, if the lines had character; of the difficulty of translating a face like a moon or a footstool; that still such faces were quite the exception, and that he believed the reason why he succeeded better than some others of his confraternity was that he was better able to realise to himself the good in the character of his subjects.”

“Dec. 17.—Mr. Richmond was at the same little table at breakfast. He talked of great writers and talkers, how their art was not the creation of something new, but the telling of old things well in a new dress—the bringing up the thoughts long bedridden in the chambers of their own brain.

“He talked of Carlyle—of how his peculiarities began in affectation, but that now he was simply lost in the mazes of his own vocabulary. One night, he said, he met a man at Albert Gate at 12 P.M., who asked for a light for his cigar. He did not see who it was till, as he was turning away, he recognised Carlyle, who gave a laugh which could be heard all down Piccadilly as he exclaimed, ‘I thought it was just any son of Adam, and I find a friend.’ It was soon after the Pope’s return to Rome, and Mr. Richmond spoke of him. ‘The poor old Pope,’ said Carlyle, ‘the po-o-r old Pope! He has a big mouth! I do not like your button-holes of mouths, like the Greek statues you are all so fond of.’

“Our third at the breakfast-table was a Mr. Jeffreys. Mr. Richmond said afterwards that he was a conchologist, which he regarded as the very tail of science—the topmost twig of the tree looking up at the sky.”

“Dec. 19.—Yesterday I drew the gallery and chapel. There is something mediæval in the band playing all dinner-time, yet without the sound being overwhelming, from the great size of the room; in the way the host and hostess sit in the middle like royalty, and in the little lovely baskets of hot-house flowers given to each lady as she goes down the staircase to dinner.”

“Dec. 20.—The last collection of guests have included the Duke of Wellington, the Cowleys, Lord and Lady Stanhope, and M. and Madame de Lavalette—all full of interest. Certainly Hatfield is magnificent and grandly kept up. I had much talk with Mrs. Lowe,[35] who delights in tirades against Christianity. She said how absurd it was to expect belief in the Bible, when no one could agree upon so recent a subject as Lord Byron: that half the Bible was contrary to all reason: that it was monstrous to suppose that the Deity could enjoin a murder like that of Isaac, &c.”

“Dec. 27, East Sheen.—Mrs. Stuart Wortley came to luncheon. She remarked how that which was most striking in Italy was not the effect of light, but of shadow. Into the shadows of England you could not penetrate, but the shadows of Italy were transparent; the more you looked into their cavernous depths, the more you saw there, discovering marvels of beauty which existed there in repose.

“She told us that the secret of ‘the Haunted House in Berkeley Square’ is that it belonged to a Mr. Du Pré of Wilton Park. He shut up his lunatic brother there in a cage in one of the attics, and the poor captive was so violent that he could only be fed through a hole. His groans and cries could be distinctly heard in the neighbouring houses. The house is now to be let for £100 the first year, £200 the second, £300 the third, but if the tenant leaves within that time, he is to forfeit £1000. The house will be furnished in any style or taste the tenant chooses.”

“Holmhurst, Jan. 10, 1873.—I have had a pleasant visit at Battle Abbey. The Duchess (of Cleveland) received me very kindly. The house is comfortable and the library is first-rate, and there is always a pleasure in a house which has ruins, cloisters, haunted yew walks—history, in fact—in its garden. The Duke, who is one of the few living of my father’s old friends, was very cordial; and Lord and Lady Stanhope, whom I am devoted to, arrived with me. The rest of the guests were Harry Stanhope, a clergyman, Colonel and Mrs. Heygarth, Colonel and Mrs. Byng, Mr. Newton the Lycian archæologist, Mr. Planché the Somerset Herald, and Mr. Campbell of Islay—a party which had plenty of good materials. We drew, acted, and all tried to make ourselves agreeable. The Duchess was a perfect hostess, amused us all very much, and was intensely amused herself.”

My book “Wanderings in Spain,” came out in the autumn of 1872, and met with a more enthusiastic reception from the public than anything I have ever written. Three editions were called for in six weeks, but there the sale ended.[36] The reviews were rapturously laudatory, but I felt at the time how little reliance was to be placed upon their judgment, though for the moment it was agreeable. The Times declared that no one ought to go to Spain without the book; the Athenæum, that only in one instance had pleasanter sketches fallen under its notice; while the Spectator blew the loudest trumpet of all:—

“In this least commonplace, and yet most comprehensive of works of travel, we find everything we have previously learnt of that comparatively unworked mine of history, art, poetry, and nature, Spain, as well as a great deal which is entirely novel. But the old is placed in a dazzling light of fancy, association, and suggestion, and the new is captivating. The skies of Spain shine, the wide-sweeping breezes blow, the solemn church music swells, the ancient grandeur, gravity, and dignity of the history and life of the country, the old Moorish magnificence, the splendid chivalry, the religious enthusiasm, the stern loyalty and narrow pride of the races of Arragon and Castile, all live again in the vivid pages of this book.”

The unusual success which was attending my “Walks in Rome,” and the many notes which I already possessed for a similar work in the neighbourhood, made me now devote my time to “Days near Rome,” and in January I left England to make Rome a centre from whence to revive my recollection of the towns I had already visited in the Campagna and its surrounding mountains, and to examine and sketch those I had not yet seen. Altogether, “Days near Rome” is the one of my books in the preparation of which I had the greatest enjoyment, and from which I have had least disappointment since its publication.[37] I was, however, terribly ill soon after my arrival at Rome, and nearly died there.

“Paris, Jan. 19, 1873.—I have felt most dolorous on the journey, and often repented having decided to come abroad: I so dread seeing Rome again. Still, as last year I added £252 to my income by small writings exclusive of the ‘Memorials,’ I must look upon it as a profession, and of course as such it is very pleasant. This morning I am cheered by George Sheffield’s pleasure at seeing me, and I am going to dine with the Comte and Comtesse de Clermont-Tonnerre.”

“Florence, Jan. 23.—All descriptions of ‘sensations’ in the Mont Cenis tunnel must be pure imagination. It is exactly like any other tunnel. I came all the way from Paris with two American ladies, one of them very handsome, but the sort of person who said, ‘I guess I am genteelly well satisfied’ when she had finished her dinner, and that she had read ‘Walks in Rome,’ which ‘was a very elegant book, a very elegant book indeed.’”

“81 Via della Croce, Rome, Jan. 27.—I left Florence on a still, mizzly morning. How familiar all the dear places seemed on the way, and yet how changed the feeling with which one saw them—Thrasymene, Perugia, Assisi, Spoleto—all so much to us, so woven into our lives, and I was thankful for the twilight obscurity before the steep of Fidenae rose beside us, and then the towers of the beloved city crested the hill, the hill down which my darling drove so often in her little carriage to the Ponte Salario and the Ponte Nomentano, drinking in the full beauty of the historic loveliness. On Saturday I removed to these rooms in the house of Voight, a German artist, much beloved by the Bunsens, and indeed married to his old still-existing Signora from their house. I think that the rooms will answer sufficiently, though, as the Voights have never let rooms before, there is a terrible amount of talking over everything I need. The whole family, of three generations, were called into council the first time I desired to have an egg for breakfast, and then it came in raw, and yesterday the scene was repeated. However, ‘pazienza.’

“On Sunday I went up first to the Pincio, and I cannot say—indeed no one could understand—all that that walk is to me, where day after day, for so many feeble winters, we helped my darling along; whence she looked down upon the windows so sacred to her in the San Sebastianello; where every shrub was familiar and commented upon, as not even those in the garden at Holmhurst have ever been. Nothing has been more our garden. It seemed almost sacrilege to see the changes, and they are not many. In the afternoon I went again with my old friend Stopford Sackville.

“It has been a great effort—a gasp—coming here, but I am thankful now that I came. There is something in the simple greetings of all our poor friends—‘Lei stá solo adesso—ahi poverino!’—far more to me than anything else could be, and the very trees and ruins talk to me, only that as she saw her Augustus’s, so I see my Mother’s name engraven on every stone. In some ways I seem every day to make fresh acquaintance with my solitary life.

“It is perfect summer here, the Villa Doria a sheet of flowers, anemones of every hue, violets almost over. ‘How full of sources of comfort has God made this lovely woe-world,’ as Mrs. Kemble says.”

“Feb. 1.—I have been very ill for the last three days with Roman fever, which has brought on a violent return of my cough. It all came from going out for one instant upon the balcony at night without extra clothing: in that instant I felt the seizure like a stab, and the most violent shivering fits came on immediately. Perhaps the chill of these rooms has something to do with it. I feel much the absence of the sympathising help I have had here in illness before, especially of Lea’s good food and attentions; and now, if I ask even for a cup of tea, the commotion is enough to bring the house down.... I am especially sorry to be shut up at this time, as there are so many pleasant people in Rome, not least the really charming Prince Arthur, to whom I was presented the other day, and whom I think most engaging, and hope—if I can only get better—to see more of next week, when I have been asked, and have promised, to go with him to several sights. Amongst his suite is Sir Howard Elphinstone, a capital artist, who is quite a friend of mine, and went out drawing with me before I was taken ill.

“The old interest of Rome has wonderfully passed away, not only to me, but I think also to many others. The absence of pope, cardinals, and monks; the shutting up of the convents; the loss of the ceremonies; the misery caused by the terrible taxes and conscription; the voluntary exile of the Borgheses and many other noble families; the total destruction of the glorious Villa Negroni and so much else of interest and beauty; the ugly new streets in imitation of Paris and New York, all grate against one’s former Roman associations. And to set against this there is so very little—a gayer Pincio, a live wolf on the Capitol, a mere scrap of excavation in the Forum, and all is said.

“Old Beppino (the beggar of the Trinità steps) escaped from a bad accident the other day and announced it thus—‘Ho mancato póco d’andare in Paradiso, che Dio me ne guarda!’”

“Il Tempietto, Feb. 4.—Since I last wrote I have been terribly ill. On Friday night I was seized with feverish convulsions, and with loss of speech for four hours. The first night I was too ill to call for any help, but next morning kind Dr. Grigor came, and I decided to forfeit the rent of my other rooms and move up here to our dear old apartment, having more than ever the immoral conviction I have always had, that one never does anything economical without doing something very foolish also. These dear rooms have all their old homelike charm. I sit in the Mother’s chair with her little table by my side, and Madame da Monaca, our old landlady, is perfectly charmed to have me back.”

“Feb. 9.—I have still some sparks of life in me, which really two days ago I did not feel, it has been such a suffering illness and the cough has quite worn me out. I am sure, in thinking of dangerous illness henceforward, I shall always remember the long nights here, nights of pain and fever, tossing restlessly and longing for the morning, and first knowing it had dawned by the tinkling bells of the goats coming to be milked under the windows, followed by the familiar cry of—

“Charlie Dalison, who has been in Rome, has been most kind, and the Archbishop of Dublin and Mrs. Trench, living just underneath, have been incessant in their attentions. Endless little comforts have also been supplied to me by the constant kindness of two ladies who live together, Miss Freeman Clarke, an American authoress, who has visited all the places in Italy connected with Dante, and drawn and described them; and Miss Foley, a most charming young sculptress, as clever as she is attractive.”[39]

“Feb. 16.—Last week I felt as if life was really passing away—such was my utter exhaustion and suffering.... After a most kind touching note about the ‘Memorials,’ I have had an hour’s visit from Lord Chichester, and he is coming again often. I constantly see Lady Ashburton, who rains her benefits upon me. I am doing all I can to be able to go out with the Prince soon, having put him off again and again with a greater pang each time, but I wish I could feel a little less dreadfully weak.

“I think the ‘Memorials’ will soon reach a sale like that of the Récit d’une Sœur. Hatchard is pushing the ‘Alton Sermons’ under its shadow. ‘Wanderings in Spain’ also sells beyond all expectation.”

It was on the 18th of February that I was first able to have one of my lectures for Prince Arthur. It was arranged for the Palace of the Cæsars. I had asked him if Lady Ashburton and her daughter might go with us, and to this he had consented. Lady Ashburton insisted upon coming to fetch me, but, knowing her unpunctual habits, I was most unwilling she should do so. Nothing else would serve her, however, and she promised again and again to be punctual. However, the time came and she did not arrive. Having secured no other carriage I waited minute after minute in an agony, and not till after the time at which we ought to have been at the Palatine did Lady Ashburton appear on the Pincio. When we reached the Palatine, the Prince and all his suite were still in the road, unable to enter without my order. “I have been waiting ten minutes,” he said, “and they wouldn’t let me in.” It was a terrible beginning. However, his lively pleasure and active interest in all that was to be seen soon made me at home with him. If anything especial attracted his notice, he generally asked, “Do you think my brother and sister (the Prince and Princess of Wales) saw this?”

A few days after, I had another lecture for the Prince on the Cœlian. This time I refused altogether to go with Lady Ashburton, and when I arrived ten minutes before the time at the steps of S. Gregorio, found that she had already been there half-an-hour, walking up and down in the dew! This time the Prince was even pleasanter than before. Generally he begged that his name might not be mentioned, but this was necessary to get into the garden of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which at that time was always closed. While we were in the church, a monk came up to me and said that the General of the Passionists was coming to pay his respects to the Prince. I said, “Sir, the General of the Passionists is coming to have the honour of being presented to you.” The Prince began to say “No, no, no,” but at that moment the white robes of the abbot appeared in the doorway, followed by a whole train of monks. The Prince immediately did the right thing, receiving them and speaking to them on the steps of the tribune, and I have often thought what a picture the scene would have made. In the shadow of royalty, Lady Ashburton was the first woman allowed to visit the Passionist garden, but to the Prince’s great annoyance, three Americans (probably not knowing who it was) got in too, by pretending to belong to our party. They followed us afterwards to the Villa Mattei. The Prince then asked Lady Ashburton to sit down near the entrance, and we raced up and down the walks, with the Americans cantering after us, and eventually slipped under one of the high box hedges, returned by the concealed way, snapped up Lady Ashburton, and escaped from the Villa, the gates of which were locked behind us; and how those Americans got out I have never known.

I was truly sorry when the Prince went away to Naples. He sent me from thence some friends of his—Colonel Crichton and his most sweet wife Lady Madeleine (a daughter of Lord Headfort, who has died since), and asked me to do what I could for them. I knew that this meant lectures of the same kind which I had given for the Prince himself, and thus was originated my long course of Roman lectures.

At one of my lectures at the Palace of the Cæsars a curious thing happened. We were about forty in number, and I had taken my company all over the palace, explaining and telling the story of the different rooms as we went. Finally, as was my habit, I assembled them on the slope towards the Forum for a sort of recapitulation and final discourse on all we had seen. I had observed a stranger who had attached himself to our party looking more and more angry every minute, but the “why” I could not understand. When I had concluded, the stranger stepped forward, and in a very loud voice addressed the whole party—“Gentlemen and ladies, it is not my habit to push myself forward, and it is excessively painful to me to do it on the present occasion; but there are some things which no gentleman ought to pass unnoticed. All that this person has been telling you about the Palace of the Cæsars, he has had the effrontery to relate to you as if it were his own. You will be astounded, gentlemen and ladies, to hear that it is taken, word for word—word for word, without the slightest acknowledgment, from Mr. Hare’s ‘Walks in Rome!’”

I only said, “Oh, I am so much obliged to you. I did not know there was anybody in the world who would defend my interests so kindly. I am Augustus Hare.”

“Il Tempietto, Rome, March 9, 1873.—I am much better, but still have fever every three days. The weather is glorious, and Miss Wright, who arrived ten days ago, is revelling in the hot sunshine.

“On Monday we had an enchanting expedition to Veii; there were twelve riders and five carriages. I went with Miss Baring [40] and her governess, and we had quite a banquet near the waterfall, with the old castle of Isola Farnese opposite, and the woods around us carpeted with cyclamen, violets, and blue and white anemones, while the cliffs were snow-drifted with laurustinus. After luncheon, the adventurous part of the company, the Sackvilles, Miss Wright, &c., went on with me to the Ponte Sodo and the painted tombs—such a hot walk through the woods, but we came back to Rome before sunset.

“At the end of this week I have a lecture on the Christian history of the Trastevere.

“I think a Republic here will soon follow that of Spain. Victor Emmanuel is so hated, and the profligacy of the Court and the cruel taxes are hastening the end. People already shout ‘Viva la Republica’ and bawl Garibaldian hymns all night. I wonder whether you would think the freedom of religious worship a compensation for the moral changes here—the shops always open on Sundays, which were formerly so strictly closed, the churches deserted, stalls for infidel books in the streets, and an ostentatious immorality which was formerly unknown. In the Carnival, in insulting reference to the Pope, a pasteboard dome of St. Peter’s was made to travel up and down the Corso in a car, with a parrot imprisoned in a cage on the top, ‘pappagallo’ being Italian for a parrot, and ‘Papa Gallo’ a nickname given to Pio Nono during the French occupation. The parrot struggled and fluttered through the first day, but it died of sea-sickness in the evening, and afterwards it appeared stuffed. The Pope has felt bitterly the confiscation of the convents and other religious institutions which the Sardinian Government, when it first entered Rome, promised so strictly to respect; and triduos have been held at St. Peter’s and at S. Ignazio to implore that the spoliation may be averted, or that a judgment may follow the spoiler. In St. Peter’s twenty thousand persons were collected on Sunday afternoon to join with one voice in this supplication. Pius IX. took no part in the manifestation: on Sunday afternoon he is quietly occupied as a bishop in the Sala Regia, in explaining the Epistle and Gospel for the day, and praying with the people of the different Roman parishes, who come to him in turn, attended by their priests. Amongst the nuns who have suffered most are the Poor Clares of S. Lorenzo Panisperna, who, when they were driven out of the greater part of their convent in February 1872, were allowed to retain and fit up a few small rooms, from which they are now forcibly ejected altogether. The nuns of S. Antonio on the Esquiline, who plaited all the palms used in the processions at St. Peter’s, were driven out more than a year ago, though their convent has never hitherto been used for anything else. The nuns of S. Giacomo alla Lungara are reduced to absolute beggary. The Carmelites of S. Maria Vittoria have been driven out, and their Superior died of a broken heart on the day of their ejection. The nuns of S. Teresa, when driven out of their convent, were permitted to take refuge in that of Regina Cœli, where they were allowed to fit up a corridor with canvas partitions: now they are driven out again, in spite of solemn promises, and without any compensation. If the dowries of all these ladies, given to them by their parents exactly as marriage portions are given, were restored, comparatively little could be said, but their fortunes are all confiscated by the Government. A pitiful allowance is promised, just sufficient to keep body and soul together, but even this is seldom paid; for instance, in the case of the nuns of S. Teresa, the ‘assegno’ for the first half of 1871 was not paid till October 1872, and since then nothing has been paid. In the same way it is supposed that the conventual buildings and gardens are paid for at a valuation, yet the real value of those of the Cappuccini, in one of the most important situations of the town, is £40,000, and it is expropriated at 4000 francs (£160), while even this is to be paid in paper and at great intervals of time. Amongst the last institutions seized are the Orphan Asylum of the Quattro Incoronati, and the Conservatorio Pio, an especial and beloved institution of Pio Nono, intended as a school for servants and for instructing young girls in household work.[43]

“The heads of the clerical schools have inquired from Pius IX. whether their pupils were to salute Queen Margaret when she passed them. ‘Certainly,’ answered the Pope; ‘is she not a member of the royal house of Savoy?’

“There is a stall for Bibles now opposite S. Carlo. A great dog manages it, such a fine beast. He cannot be expected to do all the business, so he just receives the customers, and, when any one wants a Bible, he puts his feet up and barks.

“I am very glad to hear of Sir George Grey having given the ‘Memorials’ to the Queen, and I have a most kind letter from Lord Stanhope, delighted with ‘Wanderings in Spain.’”

“March 17.—Yesterday I drove with Lady Ashburton to Castel Fusano; Miss Wright, Miss Howard, and Walter Jekyll going in another carriage, and we picnicked under the grand old pine-trees, and had a delicious day, wandering through the labyrinths of sweet daphne and rosemary, and over carpets of cyclamen in fullest bloom.

“I have had several more lectures. There was a party of forty, which is the largest I can manage, at the one on the Early Christian Church in the Trastevere. We met on the Island, where I gave a sort of preliminary discourse, and led my troop to everything connected with the Christian martyrs. To-morrow I have the same kind of lecture on the Esquiline. Mrs. Locke and her pretty charming little grand-daughter [45] unexpectedly joined us at S. Cecilia, and seemed much interested, never having visited the Roman sights before. I dined with them last night—an exceptionally pleasant party, as Mrs. Locke, the Duchess, and the little Countess move about constantly all evening, and do their utmost to amuse their guests, unlike most stiff Italian hostesses. They seem to me to have three grades of beauty, the grandmother’s being the highest.”

“14 Trinità de’ Monti, March 29.—There are many quiet hours here, such as one gets nowhere else, and yet endless society of the most interesting kind; troops of visitors of every sort, and what contrasts those of a single day furnish—Madama de Bonis at breakfast, for help with her photographs; then Rosina the poor donna; then Lady Howard de Walden and a daughter; then Signor Monachesi, the Italian master; then the Marchese Carcolo, fresh from Perugia; then three ugly old ladies, whose names I failed to discover, who wanted to be told where to live, how to live, and what to live upon; then Mrs. Foljambe from Villa Savorelli; then Signor Altini the sculptor, to ask for recommendations: and this is only an ordinary Roman day, yet I cannot feel it is a useless life.”

“Albano, April 6.—Yesterday, after dining with Mrs. Lockwood, I went to meet Princess Alice at the S. Arpinos’. They have a beautiful suite of rooms in the Bonaparte Palace, the same in which ‘Madame Mère’ died. Many ambassadors and Roman princes and princesses were there, but only five English. I was presented at once to Prince Louis, who is very German and speaks very broken English, but is much better-looking than his photographs. He talked for a long time about Rome and my book. Later in the evening I was presented to the Princess. She said at once, ‘Oh, I know your face, I have seen you before,’ and with royal memory recollected all about coming to see my Mother, &c. She said, ‘I have gone about everywhere with your book, and I am so pleased to be able to say that I have found out a mistake in it: you say that the church at the Navicella was designed by Michelangelo, and it was not; it was designed by Raffaelle: I know all about it, for my dear father had the original plan and sketch for it. My dear father always took a great interest in the Navicella. I have been to see the martyrdoms at S. Stefano: they are quite shocking.’ She talked for some time, then some one else was brought up. She is grown much fatter and prettier, and was very simply dressed in high slate-coloured silk with a pearl necklace. We all stayed till she left at 11 P.M., and then made an avenue down the reception rooms, through which she passed, saying a little separate word to each lady.

“Mrs. Locke [46] said Princess Margherita was deep in ‘Walks in Rome,’[47] and had desired her to get me to tell her (Mrs. Locke) a ghost-story, and then come and retail it immediately!

“Yesterday I went with Lady Howard and her daughter and Miss Wright to Tusculum and Frascati. I never saw the Villa Mondragone before. How very grand it is, and the view was exquisitely lovely—such blue shadows cast by the clouds upon the pink campagna. All the ascent to Tusculum was fringed with cyclamen, large purple violets, laurustinus, and blue and white anemones, also the loveliest little blue squills.

“On Wednesday I met Miss Wright and Miss Howard at Albano, and we had an interesting afternoon amongst the huge Cyclopean remains of Alatri, driving on in the beautiful gloaming to Ferentino, where we slept at a primitive but clean Italian tavern. The next day we reached Segni, a Pelasgic city on the very highest peak of the Volscian mountains. On Friday I joined Lady Howard de Walden and her two daughters, and with them revisited the glorious old Papal citadel of Anagni, where Boniface VIII. was imprisoned, and where there are many relics of him, though to me Anagni has an even deeper interest, because from its walls you can see, on the barren side of the mountain, the brown building of Acuto, where my sister’s revered friend Maria di Matthias preached the sermons which had such an extraordinary influence throughout this wild country.”

“Subiaco, April 16.—We spent Good Friday on the seashore at Porto d’Anzio, a delightful place, overgrown with gorgeous pink mesembryanthemum, and with huge remains of Nero’s palace projecting far into the sea. For Easter we were at Velletri, and on Monday drove through the blooming country to Cori, where, after seeing the beautiful temple, we rode along the edge of stupendous precipices to Norba, and the man-deserted flower-possessed fairy-like town of Ninfa, returning by the light of the stars—‘le Ninfe eterne’ of Dante. Tuesday we went to Palestrina, an extraordinary place with a perfectly savage population; and Wednesday we came hither through Olevano, which is a paradise of beauty. This place seems quite as grandly beautiful as we thought it fifteen years ago.”

“Rome, April 28.—I parted with my kind Miss Wright at Tivoli, and next day returned to Rome in the public omnibus.”[50]

A few days later I left Rome again with Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot Feilden and the Misses Crawford (daughters of Mrs. Terry, and sisters of Marion Crawford) for a tour in the Ciminian Hills, which always comes back to me as a dream of transcendent loveliness.

We left the railway at Civita Castellana, an unspeakably beautiful place, which I drew in the early dewy morning, sitting on the edge of its tremendous rocky gorge, above which Soracte, steeped in violet shadows, rises out of the tender green of the plain. On May-day we ascended Soracte, queen of lovely mountains, mounting gradually from the rich lower slopes into the excelsior of olives, and thence to steeps of bare grey rock, crowned—in the most sublime position—by the ruined monastery of S. Silvestro. It is the most exquisite drive from Civita Castellana, by Nepi, with a great machicolated castle overhanging a foaming waterfall, and Sutri—“the key of Etruria”—with its solemn Roman amphitheatre surrounded by some of the grandest ilexes in the world, to Ronciglione. Hence we visited Caprarola, and I will insert a little extract from “Days near Rome” about this expedition, it reminds me of so wondrously beautiful and delightful a day.

“From the little deep-blue lake of Vico it is a long ascent, and oh! what Italian scenery, quite unspoilt by the English, who never come here now. The road is generally a dusty hollow in the tufa, which, as we pass, is fringed with broom in full flower, and all the little children we meet have made themselves wreaths and gathered long branches of it, and wave them like golden sceptres. Along the brown ridges of thymy tufa by the wayside, flocks of goats are scrambling, chiefly white, but a few black and dun-coloured creatures are mingled with them, mothers with their little dancing elf-like kids, and old bearded patriarchs who love to clamber to the very end of the most inaccessible places, and to stand there embossed against the clear sky, in triumphant quietude. The handsome shepherd dressed in white linen lets them have their own way, and the great rough white dogs only keep a lazy eye upon them as they themselves lie panting and luxuriating in the sunshine. Deep down below us, it seems as if all Italy were opening out, as the mists roll stealthily away, and range after range of delicate mountain distance is discovered. Volscian, Hernican, Sabine, and Alban hills, Soracte nobly beautiful—rising out of the soft quiet lines of the Campagna, and the Tiber winding out of the rich meadow-lands into the desolate wastes, till it is lost from sight before it reaches where a great mysterious dome rises solemnly through the mist, and reminds one of the times when, years ago, in the old happy vetturino days, we used to stop the carriage on this very spot, to have our first sight of St. Peter’s.

“Near a little deserted chapel, a road branches off on the right, a rough stony road enough, which soon descends abruptly through chestnut woods, and then through deep clefts cut in the tufa and overhung by shrubs and flowers, every winding a picture, till in about half-an-hour we arrive at Caprarola. Why do not more people come here? it is so very easy. As we emerge from our rocky way, the wonderful position of the place bursts upon us at once. The grand, tremendous palace stands backed by chestnut woods, which fade into rocky hills, and it looks down from a high-terraced platform upon the little golden-roofed town beneath, and then out upon the whole glorious rainbow-tinted view, in which, as everywhere we have been, lion-like Soracte, couching over the plain, is the most conspicuous feature. The buildings are so vast in themselves, and every line so noble, every architectural idea so stupendous, that one is carried back almost with awe to the recollections of the great-souled Farnese who originated the design, and the grand architect who carried it out. S. Carlo Borromeo, the great patron of idle almsgiving, came hither to see it when it was completed, and complained that so much money had not been given to the poor instead. ‘I have let them have it all little by little,’ said Alessandro Farnese, ‘but I have made them earn it by the sweat of their brows.’

“Are we really in Arcadia, when the old steward opens the door from the dark halls where the Titanic forms of the frescoed figures loom upon us through the gloom, to the garden where the brilliant sunshine is lighting up long grass walks between clipped hedges, adding to the splendour of the flame-coloured marigolds upon the old walls, and even gilding the edges of the dark spires of the cypresses which were planted three hundred years ago? From the upper terraces we enter an ancient wood, carpeted with flowers—yellow orchis, iris, lilies, saxifrage, cyclamen, and Solomon’s seal. And then we pause, for at the end of the avenue we meet with a huge figure of Silence, with his finger on his lips.

“Here an artificial cascade tumbles sparkling down the middle of the hillside path, through a succession of stone basins, and between a number of stone animals, who are sprinkled with its spray, and so we reach an upper garden before the fairy-like casino which was also built by Vignola. Here the turfy solitudes are encircled with a concourse of stone figures in every variety of attitude, a perfect population. Some are standing quietly gazing down upon us, others are playing upon different musical instruments, others are listening. Two Dryads are whispering important secrets to one another in a corner; one impertinent Faun is blowing his horn so loudly into his companion’s ears that he stops them with both his hands. A nymph is about to step down from her pedestal, and will probably take a bath as soon as we are gone, though certainly she need not be shy about it, as drapery is not much the fashion in these sylvan gardens. Above, behind the Casino, is yet another water-sparkling staircase guarded by a vast number of huge lions and griffins, and beyond this all is tangled wood and rocky mountain-side. How we pity the poor King and Queen of Naples, the actual possessors, but who can never come here now. The whole place is like a dream which you wish may never end, and as one gazes through the stony crowd across the green glades to the rosy-hued mountains, one dreads the return to a world where Fauns and Dryads are still supposed to be mythical, and which has never known Caprarola.”

We spent several days at Viterbo—“the city of beautiful fountains”—which has never been half appreciated by travellers, and made many curious excursions into Etruria, which are all described in my book; and then proceeded to Orvieto—all-glorious Orvieto. Once more I will quote “Days near Rome.”

“Long before reaching Orvieto, one comes in sight of it. It occupies an Etruscan site. On turning the crest of the hills which shelter Bolsena, one looks down into a wide valley filled with the richest vegetation,—peach-trees and almonds and figs, with vines leaping from tree to tree and chaining them together, and beneath, an unequalled luxuriance of corn and peas and melons, every tiniest space occupied. Mountains of the most graceful forms girdle in this paradise, and, from the height whence we first gaze upon it, endless distances are seen, blue and roseate and snowy, melting into infinity of space; while, from the valley itself, rises, island-like, a mass of orange-coloured rock, crowned with old walls and houses and churches, from the centre of which is uplifted a vast cathedral, with delicate spray-like pinnacles, and a golden and jewelled front,—and this is Orvieto.

“The first impression is one which is never forgotten,—a picture which remains; and the quiet grandeurs of the place, as time and acquaintance bring it home to one, only paint in the details of that first picture more carefully.

“We descend into the plain by the winding road, where wains of great oxen are always employed for the country-work of the hillside, and we ascend the hill on which the city stands and enter it by a gate in rocky walls. The town is remarkably clean, but one has always the feeling of being in a fortress. Unlike Viterbo, gaiety and brightness seem to have deserted its narrow streets of dark houses, interspersed with huge tall square towers of the Middle Ages, and themselves, in the less frequented parts, built of rich brown stone, with sculptured cornices to their massive doors and windows, and resting on huge buttresses. From one of the narrowest and darkest of these streets we come suddenly upon the cathedral, a blaze of light and colour, the most aërial gothic structure in the world, every line a line of beauty. There is something in the feeling that no artists worked at this glorious temple but the greatest architects, the greatest sculptors of their time, that no material was used but that which was most precious, most costly, and which would produce the most glorious effect, which carries one far away from all comparisons with other earthly buildings—to the description in the Revelation of the New Jerusalem. The very platform on which the cathedral stands is of purple Apennine marble; the loveliest jaspers and pietre dure are worked into its pinnacles and buttresses; the main foundation of its pictured front is gold. A hundred and fifty-two sculptors, of whom Arnolfo and Giovanni da Pisa are the greatest names handed down to us, worked upon the ornamentation near the base: sixty-eight painters and ninety workers in mosaic gave life to the glorious pictures of its upper stories. All the surroundings are harmonious—solemn old houses, with black and white marble seats running along their basement, on which one may sit and gaze: a tower surmounted by a gigantic bronze warrior, who strikes the hours with the clash of his sword upon a great bell: an ancient oblong palace with gothic arches and flat windows, where thirty-four popes have sought a refuge or held a court at different times—all serving as a dark setting to make more resplendent the glittering radiancy of the golden front of the temple in their midst.

“No passing traveller, no stayer for one night, can realise Orvieto. Hours must be passed on those old stone benches, hours in reading the wondrous lessons of art, of truth, of beauty and of holiness which this temple of temples can unfold. For Orvieto is not merely a vast sculpture-gallery and a noble building, but its every stone has a story to tell or a mystery to explain. What depths of thought are hidden in those tremendous marble pictures between the doors! First the whole story of Genesis, then the Old Testament story which followed Genesis, leading on to the birth of Christ; then the story of our Saviour’s life upon earth; and lastly, the lesson of His redemption wrought for us, in the resurrection of the dead to the second life. Even the minor figures which surround these greater subjects, how much they have to tell us! Take the wondrous angels which surround the story of Christ; the Awe-stricken Angel of the Salutation, the Welcoming Angel of the Flight into Egypt, the Praying Angel of the Temptation, the Suffering Angel of the Betrayal, the Agonised Angel (and, oh, what a sublime figure, with its face covered with its hands!) of the Crucifixion, the Angel, rapt in entire unutterable beatitude, of the Resurrection. Or let us look at the groups of prophets, who, standing beneath the life of Christ, foresee and foretell its events,—their eager invocation, their meditation, their inspiration, their proclamation of that which was to be.”

My companions returned to Rome from Orvieto and I went on to Florence, where I found two old friends of my childhood—Ann-Emilia and Kate Malcolm, the latter of whom has always been one of the most agreeable and charming women I have ever known.[58] I remember her telling me, on this occasion, of a friend of hers who was one day sitting at the end of her terrace at a retired watering-place, and heard a bride and bridegroom talking together beneath. “My dear,” said the bridegroom, “I think it would not be unpleasant if a friend were to turn up this evening.”—“My dear,” retorted the bride, “I should be thankful to see even an enemy.” She had also a story of an old Scotch minister, who, being summoned to marry some couples, thus addressed them:—“Ma freends, to many, marriage is a great curse: ma freends, to some marriage is a great blessing: ma freends, to all marriage is a great uncertainty: wull ye risk it?” and they all said “Yes.” With the Malcolms I saw much of Sir James Lacaita. He was very full of convents and their abuses. He told me that he had personally known a nun who was forced into a convent to prevent her from marrying the man she loved; but he made a silken ladder, and, by bribing the gardener, got it fixed to her window. The nun escaped, but was in such a hurry to descend, that she slid down the cords, cut open both her hands, and bore the marks all her life. Her lover was rich, had relays of horses, and they escaped to Sicily, were married at once, and had eleven children. Lacaita also told me:—

“A beautiful girl of good family was left £6000 by her father, on condition that she did not enter a convent. To prevent her doing so, he ordained that the money should revert to her brother in case of her becoming a nun.

“The girl hated the very idea of a convent, but the brother made a compact with an abbess to give her a third of the girl’s fortune if they could force her to take the veil. She resisted vigorously, though the brother’s wife ill-treated her in every possible way, and she had no other home. She possessed a lover, who professed great devotion, but never would come to the point. At last the time came when the brother had arranged for her to go to the convent. Her treatment was such that she had no other course. Her lover came and pitied her. She implored him: she knelt at his feet: she stretched out her hands: she said, ‘You know you can save me;’ but he feared the priests, the Church, and her brother too much. As she knelt there, her sister-in-law opened the door. Then her horror at her position was so great, she at once declared that she would take the veil: she only wished the event hurried on.

“At last the day of the sacrifice arrived. Lacaita was present. The bride came in, in her wedding splendour, fière, darting defiance at them all; but Lacaita said he never should forget the shriek she gave when all was over and the grille closed upon her.

“The remorse of the lover began at once: he never spoke to a woman for twenty years: then he—— married!”

Lacaita also told me a most interesting story concerning persons whom he had known, of which I forget the details, but the substance was that—

A beautiful girl in Sicily, of very noble family, was engaged by her parents to make a magnificent marriage with an Italian prince of the highest rank, who had never seen her, and had only heard the report of her beauty. As she loved another, she made great friends with the gardener’s daughter, and persuaded her—for she was very lovely also—to personate her, which the peasant girl, pleased at the notion of being a princess, was very willing to do. Meantime the young Countess, supposed to have gone to her nuptials, eloped with the lover she preferred. The peasant bride was married, but her prince soon began to think she was wonderfully little educated, for he had heard of her great learning as well as her beauty, and especially of her wonderful artistic powers, and two years after he obtained a divorce on the plea that she was married under a false name.

From Florence I went to Cremona and Bergamo, lingering at them and seeing them thoroughly in glorious weather, which made one observe that, though the Southern Italian skies are the opal ones, the Northern are the blue.

I spent June (1873) in London. At luncheon at Lady Marion Alford’s I met Mr. Carlyle, who was full of the “Memorials.” He said, “I do not often cry and am not much given to weeping, but your book is most profoundly touching, and when the dear Augustus was making the hay I felt a lesson deep down in my heart.” He talked of Lady Ashburton--“Ah! yes, Lady Ashburton is just a bonnie Highland lassie, a free-spoken and open-hearted creature as ever was; and Hattie Hosmer, she is a fanciful kind of a being, who does not know yet that art is dead.” Finally he went off into one of his characteristic speeches. “That which the warld torments me in most is the awful confusion of noise. It is the devil’s own infernal din all the blessed day long, confounding God’s warks and His creatures—a truly awfu’ hell-like combination, and the warst of a’ is a railway whistle, like the screech of ten thousand cats, and ivery cat of them all as big as a cathédral.”

“London, June 14, 1873.—I have seen and heard much that is interesting. Yesterday I met Lord Aberdeen at luncheon, and liked him very much. Then I went to old Lady Wensleydale’s afternoon reception, intending to stay ten minutes, and did stay two hours and a half, it was so agreeable, and I saw so many old friends. Mrs. W. Lowther is always pleasant, the rooms are delightful, and the charming garden full of flowers.”

“June 19.—Dined with Lord Ravensworth—a very pleasant party, to meet poor Lord Durham, whom I had not seen since his great sorrow. He looks as if he had cried night and day ever since, and did cry in a corner when a touching song was sung about a young wife. I was very glad to meet him again. He is quite devoted to his thirteen children, and the eldest girl, of thirteen, manages everything.”

“July 3.—The most extraordinary thing the Shah has done has been offering to buy Lady Margaret Beaumont (to carry off to Persia) for £500,000!”

“July 24, 1873.—I went to luncheon with Lady Barrington, and found her still in tears for the Bishop of Winchester’s [61] death. He had dined with her a few days before, and she had spoken of the pleasure it would be to him to go to Farnham. ‘Oh, I shall never go to Farnham,’ he said; ‘the old Bishop of Winchester will long survive me;’ and so it was. ‘Oh, what a joyful surprise for him!’ said Carlyle when he heard of the Bishop’s sudden death. ‘He is our show man for the Church of England,’ Hugh Pearson used to say.

“Dined at Lord Salisbury’s, and sat between Miss Alderson and Lady Cork. I had always heard of Lady Cork as one of the best talkers in London, but was not prepared for such a display of summer lightning as it was. Here is a trifling specimen.

“Lord Salisbury.—‘I am so glad he speaks English. I find it such an extra fatigue to have to struggle with a foreign tongue, and to think of the words as well as the ideas.’

“Lady Cork.—‘Well, I am afraid when I talk, I think neither of the one nor the other.’

“Lady C.—‘Wha-a-at, or I had better use that most expressive French expression ‘Plait-il?’ ... We have only one English sentence which would do as well—‘I beg your parding’—with a g.’”

“July 26.—I reached Chevening about 6 P.M. It is a dull square white house with wings, but was once red, and was designed by Inigo Jones, from whom it retains the old plan, not only of the building, but of the straight avenue, the lake, and the fountain with water-lilies before the door. Between the house and the lake is the loveliest of flower-gardens, a wilderness of old-fashioned flowers, most perfectly charming. Here Lady Stanhope was sitting out with Lord and Lady Carnarvon and Lord and Lady Mahon. Lord Carnarvon is agreeable and his wife most lovely and piquant. Lady Mahon, very prettily dressed en bergère, looked like a flower herself as she moved in her bright blue dress through the living labyrinth of colour.

“Lady Carnarvon gave an amusing account of her visit to Dulwich College, of which her husband is a governor, and how she had produced a great effect by remarking that they used a new pronunciation of Latin; ‘and my little girl behaved very well too, and, though she was most awfully bored, smiled and bowed at all the right moments.... We came away before the speeches, which were all quite horrid, I believe, except Carnarvon’s, and that I am quite sure was very nice indeed.”

“Lord Stanhope talked of chess—a Persian game: in Germany they retain the old names: checkmate is Shahmate. He said when the Shah of Persia was in London it was quite impossible to make him understand how the telegraph worked, until some one had the presence of mind to say, ‘If your Majesty will imagine an immense dog, so big that his tail is in London while his head is in Teheran, your Majesty will see that if some one treads upon his tail in London, he will bark in Teheran.’

“Lord Stanhope spoke of the total absence of commissariat management in England, so that, if there was an invasion, the salvation of the country would positively have to be abandoned to Messrs. Spiers & Pond.

“Lord Carnarvon asked why Oxford was like an old Roman arsenal ‘Because the honours are classes, the men are puppes, and the women are nautes.’”

“Sunday, July 28.—We had a dull missionary sermon at church, in which the clergyman spoke of the poor Bishop of Winchester’s death as if it was a judgment for his crimes. After service Lady Airlie talked of the ‘Memorials,’ which she discussed as we walked round the lake. She spoke much of prevailing religious opinions, and said that it would be as difficult to believe in complete inspiration now as to believe in witchcraft. I startled her by telling her I did believe in witchcraft, and told something of Madame de Trafford. In the afternoon we drove with Lord Stanhope to Knockholt Beeches and back by the steep park drive. The country was quite lovely. Lord Stanhope entertained us constantly with that essence of courtesy and good-breeding which almost makes you feel as if you were the entertainer and the obliging, instead of the entertained and the obliged—indeed such perfection of courteous kindness I have never seen elsewhere in any one. I walked with Lady Airlie up to the beeches, and she talked of Lady Waterford, whom, she said, she worshipped afar off, as I did nearer.”

“July 29.—A long talk about art and drawing and Italy with old Mr. Cheney, who said, speaking of the best buildings, ‘They are much too good for this generation: it will destroy them because they are so beautiful.’ He is so pleasant that I could understand a bit of a dialogue I overheard between him and Lady Airlie.

“Lady A.—‘I am so sorry Englishwomen are not like French: they have not always le désir de plaire.’

“Mr. C.—Well I confess I always like Englishwomen best, and even their manners seem to me far more charming.’

“Lady A.—‘Oh, yes; I can quite understand that all must have le désir de plaire when they are near you.’

“I walked with Mahon in the gardens and up the hill, crushing the wild thyme and sweet marjory, and then drove with Lord Stanhope, a long charming drive up the Brasted hill, by poor Vine’s Gate and Chartwell, both of many associations. He stopped the carriage to have some foxgloves gathered, and said how the name pleased him, for the plant was the fairies’ own special flower, and the name came from folks’ love. He would only have one great stem of each foxglove gathered, the rest must be left for the fairies. Lord Stanhope told me that when he took Macaulay up that hill he looked long at the view and then said, ‘How evident it is that there has never been, can never have been, an invasion here: no other country could supply this view.”

“Lord Stanhope talked much of the poet Claudian, so superior to Statius—his descriptions so picturesque, especially that of an old man who had never been outside the walls of his native city, and how they took him out in his extreme old age, and of all that he said, &c.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 10, 1873.—I enjoy your detailed letters. In them a breeze from the outer world sweeps in upon my solitude. Not that it is quite solitude either, for Charlotte Leycester is still here, and Fanny Tatton is at Hastings, and often coming up to luncheon, and Miss Cole has been here for ten days, and her sister Louisa for three. Both these old friends are most pleasant and charming, and I was very glad to receive here again those whom the dear Mother was so fond of seeing in her little home. And we talked much of her, they so truly feeling all that she was, that it is as if a fragrance out of her beautiful past was hallowing their lives.

“The little Hospice has been full all summer. The present inmates are most romantic in title as well as dress—‘Sister Georgina Mary, Sister Mildred, and Sister Lilian.’ They come from St. Alban’s, Holborn, so you may imagine that Charlotte Leycester has already had some passages at arms with them. But they are truly excellent as well as pleasant guests, and I console Charlotte by telling her that if she likes to supply me with any suffering Methodists when they are gone, I shall be equally glad to see them. Certainly, the only real pleasure in having any money is the opportunities it gives.

“Admirable, holy, saint-like, as I think dear Charlotte Leycester, her Sabbatarianism is a sore small trial to me when she lives with me for months. I love her most dearly, but I often long to say to her something like the words of Bussy-Rabutin, ‘Souvent on arrive à la même fin par différentes voies: pour moi, je ne condamne pas vos manières, chacun se sauve à sa guise; mais je n’irai point à la béatitude par le chemin que vous suivez.’”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 19, 1873.—Yesterday I took Hugh Pearson [62] to Hurstmonceaux. The walk through the wild ferny park and its decaying beeches was most delightful, with the softest lights and shadows glinting over the delicate distances of the Levels. What a place of memories it is! every tree, every pathlet with the reminiscences of so many generations.”

“Sept. 30.—I came to Binstead Wyck [63] from Thornhill. It is a charming family home on the edge of a deep declivity, with wide views into the purple hollows between the beech-trees. From the windows we could see Blackmoor, whither we went the next day—the great modern mediæval house of the Lord Chancellor Selborne, set down, as it were, anywhere in an utterly inexpressive part of his large low-lying property, but with pleasant Scotchified views of heath and fir plantations. The Chancellor, pleasant and beaming, was kind, Lady Selborne very nice, and the four daughters charming. The next day we went to ‘White’s Selborne,’ through bowery lanes, where the hedges are all bound together by clematis. It is a beautiful village, just under a wooded hill called ‘the Hanger.’ The old house of Gilbert White is now inhabited by a striking old man, Mr. Bell, a retired dentist, the beneficence, the ‘Bon Dieu,’ of the neighbourhood. He showed us his lovely sunny lawn, with curious trees and shrubs, sloping up to the rich wooded hillside, and, in the house, the stick, barometer, and spectacles of Gilbert White.

“The adjoining property belonged to Sir Charles Taylor. His father was a fine old man, and some of his jokes are still quoted.

“‘How are you, sir? I hope you are quite well,’ said a young man who came on a visit.

“‘A mortal disease! and pray what may that be?’ said the young man, aghast.

“Close to Selborne we saw the source of the Wey—a pretty spring tumbling over a rock near the road.”

“Oct. 4-10.—A charming visit at Shavington, the great desolate brick house of Lord Kilmorey.[64] It has very little furniture, but some fine pictures, the best of them, by Gainsborough, representing an Hon. Francis Needham of the Grenadier Guards, who was poisoned at a magistrates’ dinner at Salthill in 1773. Lady Fanny Higginson [65] talked much of their old neighbours the Corbets of Adderley: how, when Lady Corbet was a child, she squinted very much, and how Dr. Johnson, when she was introduced to him, said, ‘Come here, you little Squintifinko’—which gave her the greatest horror of him. When the family doctor called at Adderley, it was generally just before dinner, and Lady Corbet used to ask him to stay for it, and he found this so pleasant that he came very often in this way, merely for the sake of the dinner; but when his bill came in, she found all these visits charged like the others. She returned it to him with his visits divided into two columns, one headed ‘Official’ and the other ‘Officious,’ and she always afterwards spoke of him as ‘the officious official.”

“Ford Castle, Oct. 18, 1873.—The long journey and the bitterly cold drive across the moors from Belford almost made me think before arriving that absence must have exaggerated the charms of this place; but the kind welcome of the hostess in the warm library, brilliant with flowers and colour, soon dispelled all that. There is only a small party here, what Lady Waterford calls a pension des demoiselles—the two Miss Lindsays (Lady Sarah’s daughters), Mrs. and Miss Fairholme, Lady Taunton and her daughter, and Lady Gertrude Talbot. All are fond of art and not unworthy of the place.

“I should like you to see it. No description gives any idea, not so much of the beautiful old towers, the brilliant flower-beds in the embrasures of the wall, the deep glen of old beeches, the village clustering round its tall fountain, and the soft colouring of the Cheviots and Flodden,—as of the wonderful atmosphere of goodness and love which binds all the people, the servants, the guests, so unconsciously around the beautiful central figure in this great home. Each cottage garden is a replica—the tiniest replica—of Lady Waterford’s own, equally cared for by her; each village child nestles up to her as she appears, the very tiny ones for the sugar-plums which she puts into their pockets, the elders to tell her everything as to a mother. And within the house, everything is at once so simple and so beautiful, every passage full of pictures, huge ferns, brilliant geraniums, tall vases, &c. In the evening Lady Waterford sings as delightfully as ever, and in all the intervals talks as no one else can—such exquisite stories of olden times, such poetical descriptions of scenery, and all so truth-inspiring because so wonderfully simple.”[66]

“Oct. 19.—You will never guess what I was doing yesterday—preaching to the children!

“In the morning, to my great surprise, Mr. Neville, the clergyman, came while Lady Waterford was at the school, to say he had no help that day: would I help him? There was a service for children in the church: would I undertake the sermon part? I thought it quite impossible, and utterly refused at first, only promising to read the Morning Lessons. However, in the afternoon, when I found it was not only wished but wanted, I consented. I took one of Neale’s Sermons as a foundation, and then discoursed—half story, half sermon; the story being of the departure of the swallows from Etal and Ford and Flodden at this time of year; the training from their parents—so much depending upon whether they attended or not, whether they practised their wings in preparation for the long journey or were idle; then of the temptations they had to idleness, &c.; of the journey, the crossing the sea (of death in the moral), of the difficulty of crossing alone, of the clinging of some to the mast of a ship (the Saviour), which bore them through the difficulties. I was dreadfully alarmed at the idea, but, having once begun, had no difficulty whatever, and it all came quite fluently without any seeking, though beforehand I could think of nothing to say; so that Lady Waterford said the only fault the children would find was that it was so much longer than their usual sermons. There was a great congregation of children, and all the guests in the house, and many of the servants.”

“Oct. 16.—Mrs. Fairholme talked of her visit to Jedburgh—that she had said to the old man who showed it, ‘Do you know, I admire your abbey a great deal more than Melrose.’—‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is no doubt it is a great deal the finer; but then you know, Ma’am, Sir Walter has cast such a halloo over Melrose that it has thrown everything else into the shade.’”

“Oct. 17.—Mrs. Fairholme brought down a beautiful miniature of an unknown lady to breakfast, which was the subject of much discussion. Lady Waterford said how she had designed a series of drawings for the whole ‘Story of a Picture.’

“1. A Louis XIV. beauty sitting to a painter, with all her adorers—a whole troop of them—behind her, quite beautiful, radiant, and vain-glorious.

“3. A young girl à l’Empire, with her waist in her mouth, waving her hand towards the portrait, and telling the servant to take that ugly old picture up to the garret.

“‘Do you know,’ said Lady Waterford to-day, ‘that Jane Ellice has got one convert to her teetotalism; and do you know who that is? That is me. I have not touched wine for six months. I think it is good for the household. They used to say, if they saw me as strong as a horse, “Ah! there, look at my lady; it is true she is as strong as a horse, but then she always has all the wine she wants,” but now they say, “My lady has no wine at all, and yet you see she is as strong as a horse.”’

“Mrs. Fairholme spoke of Curramore, and how she disliked somebody who pretended that the beautiful terraces there were designed by herself and not by Lady Waterford. With her generous simplicity, Lady Waterford said, ‘Oh, I don’t see why you should do that at all: I think it was rather a compliment, for it showed she admired the terraces, or she would not have wished it to be supposed that they were due to her.’

“Miss Fairholme was tired. ‘Now do rest,’ Lady Waterford said—‘there is the sofa close by you—qui vous tend les bras;’ and then she talked to us of old Lady Balcarres, ‘the mother of Grandmama Hardwicke’—the severe mother, who, when one of her little boys disobeyed her, ordered the servants to fling him into the pond in front of the house. He managed to scramble out again; she bade them throw him in a second time, and a second time he got out, and, when she ordered it a third time, he exclaimed in his broad Scotch accent, ‘Woman, wad ye droun yer ain son?’

“In the afternoon we were to have gone to the Heathpool Lynn, but did go to Langley Ford by mistake—a very long walk, after leaving the carriage, up a bleak moorland valley. I walked chiefly with Miss Lindsay. She talked of the extraordinary discovery of the well at Castle Hedingham by ‘a wise woman’ by the power of the hazel wand—the hazel twig bending on the right spot, not only upon the ground itself, but upon the representation of it on the map. She talked of the blind and dumb Sabbatarianism of the Presbyterians. She asked a respectable poor woman how she liked the new preacher. ‘Wad I presume?’ she replied.”

“Oct. 18.—This morning Lady Waterford wished that the Misses Lindsay had been dressed alike even in details. ‘It is a law of nature, I think, that sisters should dress alike. A covey of partridges are all alike; they do not want to have feathers of different colours; and why not children of the same family?’

“We had a charming walk to Etal in the afternoon—lovely soft lights on the distant hills, and brilliant reflections of the autumnal foliage in the Till. We went to the castle, and then down the glen by St. Mary’s Oratory and Well. Lady W. talked of the beauty of the sedges and of their great variety—of the difficult law, or rather no law, of reflections. Then of marriages—of the number of widows being so much greater than that of widowers, and of the change which the loss of a husband made in all the smallest details of life: of the supreme desolation of Lady Charlotte Denison, ‘after a honeymoon of forty-three years.’ Old Lady Tankerville was of another nature. She was urging a widowed friend to do something. ‘Oh, but my cap, my cap!’ groaned the friend. ‘Comment,’ exclaimed Lady Tankerville, ‘c’est le vrai bonnet de la liberté.’

“Speaking of complexions—‘My grandmother used to say,’ said Mrs. Fairholme, ‘that beauty “went out” with open carriages. “Why, you are just like men, my dear,” she said, “with your brown necks, and your rough skins, and your red noses. In our days it was different; young ladies never walked, ate nothing but white meat, and never washed their faces. They covered their faces with powder, and then put cold cream on, and wiped it off with a flannel: that was the way to have a good complexion.’”

“‘I think it was Henri III.,’ said Lady Waterford, ‘who used to go to sleep with raw veal chops on his cheeks, and to cover his hands with pomade, and have them tied up to the top of the bed by silk cords, that they might be white in the morning.’”

“Oct. 21.—Lady Waterford talked of her maid Rebekah, who lived with her so long. ‘The mistake was that we were together as girls and used to romp together; and so, when I married, she thought she was to rule me. But she became the most dreadful tyrant: Tina used to say I wore her as a hair-shirt.’”

“Oct. 23.—Lady Waterford talked of ‘Grandmama Hardwicke’—how terrified she was of robbers: that one day, when she was going to cross a wide heathy common, she said, ‘If any one comes up to the carriage, I shall give up all I have at once: I shall give him no chance of being violent.’ Soon after, a man rode up. ‘Oh, take my money, but spare my life,’ exclaimed Lady Hardwicke, and threw her purse at him. ‘My good woman, I don’t want your purse,’ said the man, who was a harmless traveller.”

“Oct. 24.—Lord Houghton arrived. He is rather crusty, but most amusing. His conversation is always interesting, even when no one else can speak, and he seems to be saying, with Sydney Smith, to the art circle here—‘My dears, it’s all right; you keep with the dilettanti: I go with the talkettanti.’ He talked of Alnwick. ‘It was there I first met Père Hyacinthe. He did not strike me as anything remarkable. One evening he gave us a “Meditation.” It was just a falling into a topic and going on upon it; but nothing original or particular. I heard his sermons at Rome. He used to say a thing and then back out of it; but under the pulpit sat three Inquisitors, and they were finding him out all the time. One thing he said—speaking of religious differences—was, “N’oublions jamais que le premier crime du monde était une querelle entre deux sacerdos.”’

“Lord Houghton talked of the Bonapartes, and of the graves of Josephine and Hortense at Rueil, and of Madame Mère. ‘I had a very narrow miss of seeing Madame Mère, and I am very sorry I did not do it, for it would only have cost a scudo. She was a very long time dying, it was a kind of lying in state, and for a scudo the porter used to let people in behind a screen which there was at the foot of the bed, and they looked at her through the joinings. I was only a boy then, and I thought there was plenty of time, and put it off; but one day she died.’

“‘One of the prettiest ghost stories I ever heard is that of General Radowitz. He was made Governor of Frankfort, and not being able to go himself, and having servants who had lived with him a long time and knew all his tastes, he sent them on before him to secure a suitable house and get everything ready. They chose an excellent house, with a large garden full of lilacs and laburnums, overlooking the glacis. When General and Madame Radowitz arrived some time after, they found everything as they wished, and began to question their old servants as to how they had got on, and especially as to the neighbours. The servants said that the next villa was inhabited by a person who was quite remarkable—a lady who was always known in Frankfort as the “weisse Frau,”—a very sweet, gentle person, who was full of charity and kindness, and greatly beloved. She had, however, quite lost her memory as to the past since the death, very long ago, of her lover in battle: she had even forgotten his name, and answered to all questions about him or her own past, “Ich weiss nicht! ich weiss nicht!” but always with a sweet sad smile. And she had lived in the place so long, that, every one belonging to her having passed away, no one really knew her history. Yet, while her mind was gone as to the past, as to the practical present she was quite herself, went to market and transacted her own affairs.

“‘Gradually the confidential maid of Madame Radowitz made friends with the servants of the “weisse Frau”—for the gardens of the two houses joined—and from servants’ gossip the Radowitz family learnt a good deal about her, and from all around they heard of her as greatly respected, but always the same, sad and sweet, always dressed in white, never remembering anything.

“‘One day the “weisse Frau,” who had taken a great fancy to the maid of Madame Radowitz, invited her to come to her at twelve o’clock the next day: she said she expected some one; indeed, she pressed the maid to come without fail. The maid told her mistress, who said certainly she had better go; she should on no account wish so excellent a person as the “weisse Frau” to be disappointed.

“‘When the maid went, she found the little salon of the “weisse Frau” in gala decoration, the table laid and bright with flowers, and places set for three. The Frau was not in her usual white dress, but in a curious old costume of rich brocade, which was said to have been intended for her wedding-dress. She still said she expected some one, but when asked who it was, looked distressed and bewildered, and only said “Ich weiss nicht!”

“‘As it drew near twelve o’clock she became greatly agitated—she said he was coming. At length she threw the windows wide open, and gazing out into the street, looked back and said, “Er kommt! er kommt!” She had a radiant expression no one remembered to have seen before; her eyes sparkled, every feature became animated—and as the clock struck twelve, she went out upon the landing, appeared to enfold some one invisible in her arms, and then walking very slowly back into the room, exclaimed “Hoffmann,” and sank down dead!

“‘In the supreme moment of life she had remembered the long-forgotten name.’

“On Wednesday Lady Waterford took her books and drawing, and went to the forge to spend the afternoon with ‘Frizzle’—a poor bedridden woman there, to whom thus, not by a rapid visit, she brings enough sunshine and pleasure once every week to last for the other six days. Often she sings by the bedside, not only hymns, but a whole variety of things. I drove Mrs. Fairholme to the Routing Lynn, and we came in for one of the fiercest storms I ever knew; not rain or snow, but lumps of ice, an inch and a half long, blowing straight upon us from the Cheviots. Lady Waterford came in delighted. ‘I do enjoy a difficult walk. When it is winter, and the ground is deep in snow and the wind blowing hard, I steal out and take a walk and enjoy it. I try to steal out unobserved; I do not like the servants to get into a state about me, but I am generally betrayed afterwards by a wet petticoat or something.’”

“Oct. 25.—Last night Lord Houghton talked much about Mrs. Harcourt’s diaries, which he had edited (she was lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte), but the royal family had cut out so much as to make them not worth publishing. When the poor Princesses heard of another German prince marrying, they used to say in a despairing tone, ‘Another chance lost.’

“At Weymouth, Mrs. Harcourt described going to see the royal family in the evening. ‘I ventured,’ she said, ‘to express my regret that the Queen should have had so unfavourable a morning for her water expedition,’ whereat Prince William somewhat coarsely replied, ‘I only wish the accursed bitch would have spewed her soul up, and then we should have had some peace in the house.’

“The Duke of York was the only one of his sons the King really cared for, and he said that the Duke’s faults were the cause of his madness.

“This morning, before leaving, Lord Houghton talked of Howick, that he thought it a very dull place, while Lady Waterford and I maintained that it was a most pleasant, attractive family home. He said the Greys were very self-important but not conceited: that he agreed with Charles Buller, who said, ‘No, the Greys are certainly not conceited: they only demand of you that you should concede the absolute truth of one single proposition, which is, that it has pleased Providence in its inscrutable wisdom to endow one family with every conceivable virtue and talent, and, this once conceded, the Greys are really rather humble than otherwise, because they feel they do not come up to their opportunities.’

“He said, ‘It is very interesting to remember that all the beasts are Saxon, but when they become meat they become Norman.’

“Raby Castle, Oct. 31, 1873.—My visit here has been very pleasant, the Duchess cordial, and a delightful party. It includes Count Beust, the Austrian Ambassador, the Duchess of Bedford and Lady Ela, Sir James and Lady Colville, Mr. and Mrs. Leo Ellis, Mr. Doyle, Mr. Burke, Lady Chesham and her daughter, Lord and Lady Boyne, Lord Napier and his son, Henry Cowper (most amusing), Mr. Duncombe Shafto, and several others; but my chief pleasure has been making friends with young Lord Grimston, whom I think out and out one of the very nicest fellows I ever met.”

“Raby Castle, Nov. 1.—The first morning I was here, as I was walking on the terraced platform of the castle with Lady Chesham, she talked of the silent Cavendishes, and said it was supposed to be the result of their ancestor’s marriage with Rachel, Lady Russell’s daughter; that after her father’s death she had always been silent and sad, and that her descendants had been silent and sad ever since. ‘Lord Carlisle and his brother were also silent. Once they travelled abroad together, and at an inn in Germany slept in the same room, in which there was also a third bed with the curtains drawn round it. Two days after, one brother said to the other, “Did you see what was in that bed in our room the other night?” and the other answered, “Yes.” This was all that passed, but they had both seen a dead body in the bed.’

“The Duchess expects every one to devote themselves to petits jeux in the evening, and many of the guests do not like it. There is also a book in which every one is expected to write something when they go away. There is one column for complaints: you are intended to complain that your happy visit has come to an end, or something of that kind. There is another column of ‘Why you came’—to which the natural answer seems to be ‘Because I was asked.’ Some one wrote—

“I have, however, really enjoyed my visit very much indeed, and on taking leave just now I wrote—

“One evening I told a story, unfortunately; for if I ever afterwards escaped to my room after five o’clock, there came a tap and a servant—‘Their Graces want you to come down again’—always from their insatiable love of stories.”

“Nov. 7, 1873, Bretton.—After three days with the dear cousins at Ravensworth, I am glad to find myself again in this pleasant house, where I have been rapturously welcomed by the children, especially by little Hubert. I have found the Motleys here. He is very agreeable; and the daughters, especially Mrs. Ives, [68] to whom her husband left £6000 a year after one month of married life, are very pleasant. Motley was shut up for a long time in his room the other day, and when he came in announced that he had just finished the preface (which was the winding up) of his new book. All the other ladies began fulsome compliments, but Miss Susie Motley, jumping up and throwing her arms round his neck, exclaimed, ‘Oh, you dear foolish old thing, how could you go and spend so much time over what you may be quite sure nobody will ever read?’ Lady Margaret has just said—

“‘Then why don’t I dot mine? Now there is an opportunity for you to make a pretty speech.’

“‘Why, how stupid you are! Because they are capital eyes (i’s). And now, having provided thus much food for your mind, I will go and look after your body by ordering the dinner.’

“I was very sorry to leave the happy cordial party at Ravensworth of eleven young cousins, most easy to get on with certainly, though I had never seen some of them before. But, directly I arrived, one of them came forward and said, ‘Please remember, Augustus, that my name is only Nellie, and my sisters are Har and Pem and Vicky, and my cousins are,’ &c. At Lamesley Church we had the oddest sermon, with such sentences as—‘Our first father would insist upon eating sour fruit, and has set all his descendants’ teeth on edge ever since.’”

“Highclere Castle, Nov. 12, 1873.—This is a beautiful park, with every variety of scenery, hill, valley, woods, with an undergrowth of rhododendron, a poetical lake! and is so immense—thirteen miles round—that one never goes out of it, and rather feels the isolation of the great house in the centre, which, though very handsome, is not equal to the place. Lady Carnarvon is very lovely and winning, and boundlessly interesting to listen to: one understands Mr. Delane saying that he believed that there could be no successor to Lady Palmerston till he saw Lady Carnarvon. She says that she has hitherto been too exclusive; that henceforth she shall wish to fill her house more with people of every shade—‘for Carnarvon’s sake.’ As I watch her, I am perpetually reminded of Longfellow’s lines—

“The guests are Sir Stafford, Lady, and Miss Northcote, Mr. and Mrs. Chandos Leigh, Mr. Herman Merivale, the Charles Russells, and Mr. Forester and his son and daughter-in-law, all pleasant people, yet on the whole not so well-fitting a party as I have usually fallen in with. The little daughter of the house—Winifred—is the most delightful and unspoilt of children.”

“A captain was crossing to America in his ship, with very few sailors on board. One day one of them came up to him on the deck and said that there was a strange man in his cabin—that he could not see the man’s face, but that he was sitting with his back to the door at the table writing. The captain said it was impossible there could be any one in his cabin, and desired the sailor to go and look again. When he came up, he said the man was gone, but on the table was the paper on which he had written, with the ink still wet, the words—‘Steer due south.’ The captain said that, as he was not pressed for time, he would act on the mysterious warning. He steered due south, and met with a ship which had been long disabled and whose crew were in the last extremity.

“The captain of the disabled ship said that one of his men was a very strange character. He had himself picked him up from a deserted ship, and since then he had fallen into a cataleptic trance, in which, when he recovered, he declared that he had been in another ship, begging its captain to come to their assistance. When the man who had been sent to the cabin saw the cataleptic sailor, he recognised him at once as the man he had seen writing.

“He was staying at Harrow, and very late at night was summoned to London. Exactly as the clock struck twelve he passed the headmaster’s door in a fly. Both he and the friend who was with him were at that moment attracted by seeing a hackney-coach at the door—a most unusual sight at that time of night, and a male figure, wrapped in black, descend from it and glide into the house, without, apparently, ringing, or any door being opened. He spoke of it to his friend, and they both agreed that it was equally mysterious and inexplicable. The next day, the circumstance so dwelt on Mr. Merivale’s mind, that he returned to Harrow, and going to the house, asked if the headmaster, Dr. Butler, was at home. ‘No,’ said the servant. Then he asked who had come at twelve o’clock the night before. No one had come, no one had been heard of, no carriage had been seen; but Dr. Butler’s father had died just at that moment in a distant county.

“When the 34th Regiment was quartered at Gibraltar, it had the stupidest and dullest set of officers that can possibly be imagined; they not only knew nothing, but they preferred to know nothing; and especially were they averse to learning anything of Spanish, which was certainly very short-sighted of them, as it cut them off from so many social pleasures. But nevertheless they all very much admired a beautiful young Spanish señorita who was living at Gibraltar, and pretended that they were not otherwise than in her good graces, which of course was simply bombast, as none of them knew a word of Spanish and scarcely a word of French, so that not one of them had ever spoken to her.

“One day, while the regiment was at Gibraltar, a young ensign came to join, who had never been abroad before, and who knew even less of any foreign language than his comrades. Nevertheless, in a short time he had taken cue by them, and pretended more than all the others to be in the good graces of the young lady, and was well laughed at accordingly.

“One evening at mess one of the officers mentioned that the señorita was going to Cadiz. ‘No, she is not,’ said the young ensign. ‘Oh, you young jackanapes,’ said his fellow-officers, ‘what can you know about it? You know nothing about her.’—‘Yes,’ he said sharply, ‘I do. She is not going to Cadiz; and what is more, I beg that her name may not be brought forward in this way at mess any more: I am engaged to be married to her.’

“There was a universal roar, and an outcry of ‘You don’t suppose we are going to believe that?’ But the ensign said, ‘I give you my word of honour as an officer and a gentleman that I am engaged to be married to her.’

“Then the Colonel, who was present, said, ‘Well, as he represents it in this way, we are bound to believe him.’ And then, turning to the young ensign, said, ‘Now my dear fellow, as we do accept what you say, I think you need not leave us up in the clouds like this. Will you not tell us how it came about? You cannot wonder that we should be a little surprised, when we know that you do not speak a word of Spanish and only two or three words of French, that you should be engaged to be married to this young lady.’

“‘Well,’ said the ensign, ‘since you accept what I say, yes, I do not wonder that you are a little surprised. I do not mind telling you all about it. It is quite true I do not understand a word of Spanish,

and only three or four words of French, but that does not matter. After the ball at the Convent the other day (the house of the Governor of Gibraltar is called ‘the Convent’) we went out upon the balcony, and we watched the moonlight shimmering on the waves of the sea, and I looked up into her eyes, and I said, “Voulez vous?” and she said, “Quoi?”—and I said, “Moi;” and she said, “Oui”—and it was quite enough.’

“In the churchyard here is an epitaph ‘To the memory of J. T. C., a man of great uprightness and integrity, and, as far as is consistent with human imperfection, an honest man.”[69]

“Sonning, Nov. 17, 1873.—It is quite curious how intimately this parish and its Rector (Hugh Pearson) are bound together. The Rectory is less his house than that of all his parishioners, and it is perfectly open to them at all times. The choir is most amusing, the ‘poor dear chicks,’ as the Rector calls them, combing each other’s hair in the vestry before coming into church. A number of young men are constant intimates of the house, especially ‘Ken,’ Kenneth Mackenzie; ‘Spes,’ Hope; and ‘Francis,’ Lord Francis Harvey. There was once a bishopric here, a fact which was disputed by Professor Stubbs at Oxford, who said it was at Ramsbury, upon which the Vicar immediately left his card on him as ‘Bishop of Sonning.’

“Speaking of Arthur Stanley’s absence of mind, H. P. has been describing how one day driving from Monreale to Palermo with their carpet-bags on the seat before them, Arthur suddenly complained of the cold. ‘Well, you had better put something on,’ said H. P. ‘I will,’ said Arthur. H. P. went on with his book, till, after some time, suddenly looking up, he saw Arthur, who was also busily engaged in reading, entirely clothed in white raiment. He had put on his night-shirt over all his other clothes, without thinking what he was doing, and they were just driving into the streets of Palermo!”

“Ascot Wood, Jan. 5, 1874.—I came to London three weeks ago in a thick fog, such as Charles Lamb would have said was meat, drink, and clothing. One day I went with Lady Ashburton to visit Mr. Carlyle. It was most interesting—the quaint simple old-fashioned brick house in Cheyne Row; the faded furniture; the table where he toiled so long and fruitlessly at the deification of Frederick the Great; the workbox and other little occupatory articles of the long dead wife, always left untouched; the living niece, jealous of all visitors, thinking that even Lady Ashburton must have either testamentary or matrimonial intentions; and the great man himself in a long grey garment, half coat, half dressing-gown, which buttoned to the throat and fell in straight folds to the feet or below them, like one of the figures in Noah’s Ark, and with the addition, when he went out with us, of an extraordinary tall broad-brimmed felt hat, which can only be procured at a single village in Bavaria, and which gave him the air of an old magician.

“He talked of Holman Hunt’s picture of the Home at Nazareth, ‘the most unnatural thing that ever was painted, and the most unnatural thing in it the idea that the Virgin should be keeping her “preciosities” in the carpenter’s shop.

“He talked of Landor, of the grandeur and unworldliness of his nature, and of how it was a lasting disgrace to England that the vile calumnies of an insolent slanderer had been suffered to blight him in the eyes of so many, and to send him out an exile from England in his old age.

“He complained much of his health, fretting and fidgeting about himself, and said he could form no worse wish for the devil than that he might be able to give him his stomach to digest with through all eternity.

“We walked out with him in the street, one on each side. I saw the cab-drivers pointing and laughing at the extraordinary figure, and indeed it was no wonder.

“At Mrs. Thornton’s I met Miss Thackeray at dinner, and have seen her since. She is charming, well worthy to be the authoress of her books. She said till the money for ‘Old Kensington’ was spent, she should rest. She spoke of the happiness of bringing up her little niece, of the surroundings of young life which it gave her. She talked much of the ‘Memorials,’ and of the problem how far it was well to be contented with a quiet life as God sent it, and how far one ought to seek for work for Him. When I said something of her books and their giving pleasure; she said, ‘Now let us skip that last sentence and go back to what we were saying before.’

“Colonel and Mrs. Henderson (of the Police Force) were at dinner. He said his father had been executor to old Lord Bridport, who had a box which no one was ever allowed to open, and of the contents of which even Lady Bridport was ignorant. After Lord Bridport’s death, the widow sent for Colonel Henderson to look into things, and then said, ‘I wish you would open that box; one ought to know about it.’ Colonel Henderson did not like doing it, but took the box into the library and sat down before it, with candles by his side. Immediately he heard a movement on the other side of the table, and, looking up, saw old Lord Bridport as clearly as he had ever seen him in his life, scowling down upon him with a furious expression. He went back at once to Lady Bridport and positively refused to open the box, which was then destroyed unopened. He said, ‘I shall never to my dying day forget the face of Lord Bridport as I saw him after he was dead.’

“In Wilton Crescent I saw Mrs. Leycester, who was just come from Cheshire. She said:—

“A brother of Sir Philip Egerton has lately been given a living in Devonshire, and went to take possession of it. He had not been long in his rectory before, coming one day into his study, he found an old lady seated there in an arm-chair by the fire. Knowing no old lady could really be there, and thinking the appearance must be the result of an indigestion, he summoned all his courage and boldly sat down upon the old lady, who disappeared. The next day he met the old lady in the passage, rushed up against her, and she vanished. But he met her a third time, and then, feeling that it could not always be indigestion, he wrote to his sister in Cheshire, begging her to call upon the Misses Athelstan, sisters of the clergyman who had held his living before, and say what he had seen. When they heard it, the Misses Athelstan looked inexpressibly distressed and said, ‘That was our mother: we hoped it was only to us she would appear. When we were there, she appeared constantly, but when we left, we hoped she would be at rest.’

“About ‘ghost-stories’ I always recollect what Dr. Johnson used to say—‘The beginning and end of ghost-stories is this, all argument is against them, all belief is for them.’

“I have had a charming visit here at Ascot to the Lefevres, the only other guest being old Mr. Cole of South Kensington, the incarnation of ‘Father Christmas’ or of ‘Old King Cole.’ He talked of the facility of getting money and the difficulty of keeping it. He said that when he wanted money for a Music School, he asked Sir Titus Salt for a subscription. Sir Titus asked him what he wanted him to give. ‘Whatever you think will look best at the day of judgment,’ said Mr. Cole. Sir Titus signed a cheque for £1000.

“Sir John Lefevre described a place in Essex belonging to a Mr. (now Sir William) and Mrs. Stephenson. When they first went there, the housekeeper said there was one room which it was never the custom to use. For a long time it continued to be unoccupied, but one day, when the house was very full and an unexpected arrival announced, Mrs. S. said she should open and air it, and sent for the key. All the people staying in the house, full of curiosity, went with her when she visited the room for the first time. It was a large panelled room containing a bed like a catafalque, with heavy stuff curtains drawn all round. They drew aside the curtains, and there was the mark of a bloody hand upon the pillow! The room was shut up again from that time forward.”

“Holmhurst, Jan. 22.—George Sheffield is here. He says that the Russian Minister’s wife at Washington called her dog ‘Moreover,’ because of ‘Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.’”

“Holmhurst, Jan. 24.—‘No,’ says Lea, ‘everything is not improving. I always say that everything has been going to the bad since the pudding lost its place.’

“‘Oh, in the old days, the good old days, the pudding always used to be before the meat, and then people were not so extravagant at the butcher’s. Why, old Mr. Taylor [70] used to say to me, “You know, marm,” says he, “we used to tak’ a bit of the dough when the bread was rising, and slip in an apple or two without peeling ’em, and bake ’em in the oven, and that was our dinner you know, marm.”’

“Jan. 25, 1874.—Somehow I have felt as if this volume was closed for ever—closed away with the sweet presence which was so long the sunshine of my life. Yet to-day, while I am alone, sitting once more in the sacred chamber where I have watched her through so many days and nights, I feel constrained to write once more.

“How all is changed to me since then: I can hardly feel as if the two lives were related—hardly as if they could belong to the same person.

“Wonderfully, mysteriously, time has healed—no, not healed, but soothed, even this wound. At first I felt this must always be impossible, life was too blank, but imperceptibly, stealthily, other interests asserted their power, and though the old life is always the life to me, yet I feel all is not over.

“I have always talked of my Mother, and it has been a great comfort. At first it almost shocked people that I should do it. Perhaps the very fact of talking and writing about her myself, and her life being now so much talked of by others, has dried up the agony of my own inner desolation by force of habitude. Yet, oh, my darling! there is never a day, seldom an hour, in which I do not think of her; and sometimes when I am alone,

I take one of her sketch-books, one of her journals or mine, and with them go back into our old life—thus she looked—thus she spoke—thus she smiled.

“At first I was kept up by the sacred work of the ‘Memorials,’ and the necessity of fighting against the violent family opposition to them. This seemed a duty which rose out of her grave, the one duty for which I was prepared to sacrifice everything else in the world. I was determined to fulfil it at whatever cost to myself. And I have fulfilled it—not so well perhaps as I might have done if Arthur and Mary Stanley had not tried to trample and stamp all the spirit out of it. They condemned the book violently and furiously before they read it, and, after reading it, they never had the courage to rescind opinions expressed so frequently and publicly. Still, the world says that it is well, and it will still keep her lamp burning brightly, so that her earthly work is not over yet, and she can still guide others heavenward through the darkness. Besides, not only in the ‘Memorials,’ but in all else, I have felt the truth of Joseph Mazzini’s advice—‘Get up and work; do not set yourself apart. When the Evil One wanted to tempt Jesus, he led Him into a solitude.’

“I was one winter in Spain with Miss Wright. Then not much more than my first desolate year had passed, and I had still that crushed lacerated feeling of utter misery; but I tried to be as bright as I could for my companion’s sake. Last year I was in Italy, and though very ill, and though I felt poignantly the first return to the old scenes, it was better, and all old friends were most kind.

“The dear cousin of my mother’s life, Charlotte Leycester, has been here each year for some months, and other guests come and go through the summer, so that little Holmhurst still gives pleasure.

“At first I was very, very poor, and it was a struggle to have a home; but latterly my books have brought in enough to keep the house, and a great deal to give away besides, which has been most opportune, as several members of the family have sorely needed helping. I have also a little Hospice, where I receive those whom I hear of as in need of thorough change, mental and physical, for a month, sets of sunshine-seekers succeeding each other. My dear Lea is still left to me, and is my greatest comfort, so associated with all that is gone.

“My books have made me almost well known after a fashion, and people are very kind, for, with what Shakspeare calls ‘the excellent foppery of the world,’ many who used to snub me now almost ‘make up to me,’ and all kinds of so-called ‘great people’ invite me to their houses. Sometimes this is very pleasant, and I always enjoy being liked. I do not think it is likely to set me up; I have too strong a feeling of my own real inferiority to the opinion formed of me. Intellectually, I am so ill grounded that I really know nothing well or accurately; and if I am what is called ‘generous,’ certainly that is no virtue, for it pleases myself as well as others. I think it is still with me as George Sand says of herself, ‘Je n’ai pas de bonheur dans la vie, mais j’ai beaucoup de bonheurs.’

“To-morrow I am going abroad again. It is almost necessary for my books; and though I feel bitterly leaving Lea and the little home, I like my mother’s adopted son to earn a reputation; that is all I care for, except that it is always a pleasure to give pleasure. There is a sentence, too, of Carlyle’s which comes back to me—‘We are sufficiently applauded and approved, and ought now, if possible, to go and do something deserving a little applause.’”

XVII

LITERARY WORK AT HOME AND ABROAD

THE success of “Walks in Rome,” and the great pleasure which I had derived from the preparation of my “Days near Rome,” made me undertake, in the spring of 1874, the more ambitious work of “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” in preparation for which I left England at the end of January, accepting on the way an oft-repeated invitation from Mr. and Mrs. de Wesselow to their beautiful home at Cannes.

“Villa La Cava, Cannes, Jan. 30, 1874.—What a view I look upon here from my beautiful room!—a pure blue sky all around, fading into the softest most delicate golden hues where it meets the waveless expanse of sea, upon which the islands seem asleep in the sunshine; on one side the old town of Cannes, with its pier and shipping and the white sails of its boats; on the other, the endless villas, and Mougins, and the mountains—all rising from a wealth of orange and cypress groves; and, close at hand, masses of geraniums and roses and the ‘sunshine tree’ (golden mimosa) in full blossom,—and thus, they say, it has been all winter.

“Paris was at its ugliest. I had a pleasant dinner at the Embassy, and I went to see old Madame Dubois at the top of a house, in her room which is at once sitting-room, bedroom, and kitchen. She was full of the wretchedness of living in a country where your servant had no scruple in telling you she was your equal, and that she was jealous of your being richer than herself. She showed her household treasures, especially a little silver owl, ‘qui est restée longtemps sans se marier, et puis a fait un petit hibou.’

“I left in the evening for my four-and-twenty hours’ journey. The train was crowded, every place full, but, in spite of my seven companions and their twenty-eight handbags, which obliged me to sit bolt upright the whole way, I rather enjoyed it. There is something so interesting in the rapid transitions: the plains of Central France: the rolling hills of Burgundy in the white moonlight: the great towns, Dijon and Lyons, deep down below, and mapped out by their lamps: the dawn over the Rhone valley: the change to blue sky melting into delicate amber: the first stunted olives: the white roads leading, dust-surrounded, to the white cities, Avignon and Tarascon and Arles: the desolate stone-laden Crau: the still blue Mediterranean, and Marseilles with its shipping, and then the granite phase of southern Provence and its growth of heath and lavender and pines.

“On this, the eastern side, Cannes is a new world to me, but on Sunday, with Marcus Hare and G., I went up to the other side, to the Villa S. François and our beloved pine-wood, alive still with sacred memories, where the dear form still might seem to wander with her sunshade and camp-stool, and where we sat on the very stone she used to rest on in ‘the Shepherdesses’ Walk.’ G. is too matter of fact to enjoy this country. When I exclaimed over the glorious beauty and variety of the view of the Rocher de Bilheres, standing out as it does from the supreme point of the forest promontory, with the purple shadows behind it in the deep rift, she could only say, ‘I should be better satisfied if I could ascertain exactly what it is mineralogically.’

“I went with Frank de Wesselow to Vallauris, the walk a perfect series of pictures—the winding road with its glorious sea-views; then, at the chapel, the opening upon all the Alpine range; then the deep hollow ways overhung by old gnarled olives, and peopled by peasants with their mules and baskets.

“Yesterday I had a visit from George Sutherland, whom I looked after in his fever at Rome, full of his spiritualism, of his drawings made under the influence of spirits, who ‘squeeze out just the amount of colour to be used and no more,’ and of his conversations with his dead mother, whom he described as ‘touching him constantly.’

“In the evening we talked of the De Wesselows’ faithful servant Mrs. Manning, of her wonderful power of making people understand her, and how her appreciation of foreigners was entirely in proportion to their doing so. Frank was standing by her one day in the garden when their maid Thérèse passed by. Mrs. Manning said quickly, ‘Teresa, acqua fresca pully, and these things want lavering,’ and, without giving another moment’s attention, went on with what she had been doing. Thérèse, in her slow way, said ‘Yees,’ thinking that she talked English very well, and understood perfectly that she was to give some water to the chickens and that the things wanted washing.”

“Villa Heraud, Cimies, Feb. 6, 1874.—I am writing from a beautiful country villa, where, in sweet Mary Harford,[71] I find the friend of my childhood quite unchanged, though it is fifteen years since I have seen her. In spite of being the mother of six daughters and two sons, she looks still as young as the Mary Bunsen who was carried quite helpless into Hurstmonceaux Place twenty-three years ago. It is a most united family, and you would admire the ‘way in which the six daughters take arms and sing a hymn behind their mother (who plays) after family prayers.”

“Parma, Feb. 12, 1874.—I had so many kind invitations at Nice, I rather longed to remain there. On Sunday I went home after church with Lady Jocelyn and her little grand-daughter. I had not seen her since the loss of her children. Her sweet sad face quite haunts me. I said to her, ‘Do you often drive out.’—‘No,’ she said; ‘I must always walk, or else the days would be too long.’

“I had an interesting railway journey on Monday with Madame Franzoni, who lives in the house at Taggia described in ‘Dr. Antonio.’ She was Swiss. Her husband, of an old Swiss-Italian family, was disinherited on becoming Protestant, and was obliged to become an engineer. His father, still living, has been prevented by his priests from speaking to him for five-and-twenty years, though devotedly fond of him. She took her two little children and made them sing a hymn beneath the tree in which their grandfather was sitting. Tears streamed down the old man’s cheeks, but he would not look at them; he said it must be a lesson to his other children. The mother offered her whole fortune if her son would consent to hear one mass; she believed that one mass would reconvert him. Since then the Protestant part of the family have been dreadfully poor, whilst the rest are immensely rich. Madame Franzoni said that the priests of Taggia were very kind to them privately, but would not recognise them in public.

“When we parted, I gave her my card. Some Americans in the carriage saw it and almost flew into my arms. ‘Oh, the “Quiet Life”—too great happiness,’ &c. Afterwards I had a warning to be careful what subjects one touched upon with strangers, for I said something about the loss of the Ville de Havre. The lady (Mrs. Colt) burst into tears, and her daughter said, ‘Mother’s brother was the judge who was lost; he would not leave his wife, and went down with her in his arms, saying, “Let us die bravely!”’ Afterwards at Genoa I met a young lady (Miss Bulkeley) who went down with her mother. The mother was lost. As the daughter rose, something hurt her head; she put her hand to it and caught a chain, and finding her head above water, called, ‘A woman! help!’ She heard men say, ‘American sailors are saving you,’ but became unconscious and knew nothing for long afterwards. She said it was quite a mistake to say drowning was painless—the oppression on the lungs was agony.

“I enjoyed Genoa and my work there, and made several pleasant Italian acquaintances, the Genoese are so hospitable. The Marchese Spinola showed me all the treasures and pictures of his old palace himself. I suppose I must take this as a great compliment, for I was amused the other day by an anecdote of the Marchesa Spinola, who made herself most agreeable to an Englishman she met at the Baths of Monte Catini. On taking leave, he politely expressed a hope that, as they were both going to Rome in the winter, they might meet there. ‘Mais non, Monsieur,’ she replied; ‘à Monte Catini je suis charmée de vous voir, mais à Rome c’est toute autre chose.’ Yesterday I spent in correcting my account of Piacenza—bitterly cold, children sliding all over the streets, which were one mass of ice.... I had forgotten the intense interest of Parma and its glorious pictures, especially what a grand master Pordenone was.”

“59 B. Mario de’ Fiori, Rome, Feb. 22.—Rome is fearfully modernised, such quantities of new houses built, such quantities of old buildings swept away—the old shell fountain in the Felice, the lion of the Apostoli, the Vintner’s fountain at Palazzo Simonetti, the ruins of the Ponte Salara, and ... all the shrines in the Coliseum, even the famous cross on the wall. The last nearly caused a Revolution. On the Pincio a Swiss cottage is put up, strangely out of place amongst the old statues, and a clock which goes by water. Even the most ardent Protestants too are a little shocked that the famous Quirinal Chapel, so redolent of Church history, should be turned into a cloak-room for balls, and the cloak-tickets kept in the holy water basins. The poverty and suffering amongst the Romans is dreadful, the great influx of Torinese taking the bread out of their mouths.

“You would be amused with the economy of my servants Ambrogio and Maria. They think it most extravagant if I have both vegetables and a pudding, and quite sinful to have soup the same day; and the first day, after I had seen the kitchen fire blazing away all afternoon, and ‘Il Signorino è servito’ was announced very magnificently, behold the dinner was—three larks! But what a pleasure it is to hear again from servants—‘Felicissima notte,’—that sweetest bidding of repose, as Palgrave calls it.”

“March 1.—I know, as usual, far too many people here for comfort, nearly three hundred. But I have enjoyed constant drives with Lady Castletown and her most sweet and charming daughter, Mrs. Lewis Wingfield. The Miss Seymours also are here, and very agreeable, with their very handsome sister, married to the Austrian Count von Lutzow. The Duchesse S. Arpino and her mother and engaging little daughter make their house as pleasant as ever. Mr. Adolphus Trollope has a pretty little daughter who sings most enchantingly.[75] I also like Lady Paget, the Minister’s wife, who is a clever artist in her own way.

“The spoliation of Rome continues every day. Its picturesque beauty is gone. Nothing can exceed the tastelessness of all that is being done—the Coliseum, Baths of Caracalla, and the temples are scraped quite clean, and look like sham ruins built yesterday: all the pretty trees are cut down: the outsides of the mediæval churches (Prassede, Pudentiana, &c.) are washed yellow or painted over: the old fountains are stripped of their ferns and polished: the Via Crucis and other processions are forbidden: and the Government has even sent out the ‘pompieri’ to cut down all the ivy from the aqueducts. I have, however, got back one thing—the Lion of the Apostoli! I went round to a number of people living in that neighbourhood, and engaged them to go in the morning to the Senators in the Capitol and demand its restoration: and a message was sent that the lion should be restored at once. So the little hideous beast goes back this week to his little vacant sofa, where he has sat for more than six hundred years.

“The cardinals have been dying off a good deal lately, and a curious relic of old times was the lying in state of Cardinal Bernabo in the Propaganda Fide—the chapel hung with black, the catafalque with cloth of gold, a chain of old abbots and cardinals standing and kneeling round with tapers, and all the students singing. Pius IX. is well, and Antonelli has never been the least ill, except in the Times, in which he has received the last sacraments.”

“Tivoli, March 22.—I have been greatly enjoying a little mountain tour with Lady Castletown and Mrs. Lewis Wingfield. On Wednesday we spent the day in the villas Aldobrandini and Mondragone at Frascati, and the next morning had the most charming drive by Monte Porzio and Monte Compatri, chiefly through the desolate chestnut forests, to Palestrina. It was the fair of Genazzano, and the whole road was most animated, such crowds of peasants in their gayest costumes and prettiest ornaments. At beautiful Olevano we had just time to go to the little inn and visit my friend of last year, Peppina Baldi. It was a tiring journey thence to Subiaco after such a long day, and we only passed the worst precipices by daylight, so it was quite dark when we reached Subiaco, where we found rooms with difficulty, as, quite unwittingly, we had arrived on the eve of the great festa of S. Benedetto. Most delighted we were, however, of course, and most picturesque and beautiful was the early pilgrimage, with bands of music and singing, up the stony mountain paths. Lady Castletown travels with a second carriage for her maids, so prices naturally rise at first sight of so grand a princess.... On the way here we diverged to the farm of Horace in the Licenza valley, all marvellously unaltered—the brook, the meadows, the vines, the surrounding hills and villages, still just as he described them eighteen hundred years ago. It is a wonderful country, one lives so entirely in the past.”

I have seldom enjoyed Tivoli more than in this spring of 1874. It was then that, sitting in the scene I describe, I wrote the paragraph of “Days near Rome” which I insert here.

“Nothing can exceed the loveliness of the views from the road which leads from Tivoli by the chapel of S. Antonio to the Madonna di Quintiliolo. On the opposite height rises the town with its temples, its old houses and churches clinging to the edge of the cliffs, which are overhung with such a wealth of luxuriant vegetation as is almost indescribable; and beyond, beneath the huge pile of building known as the Villa of Maecenas, the thousand noisy cataracts of the Cascatelle leap forth beneath the old masonry, and sparkle and dance and foam through the green—and all this is only the foreground to vast distances of dreamy campagna, seen through the gnarled hoary stems of grand old olive-trees—rainbow-hued with every delicate tint of emerald and amethyst, and melting into sapphire, where the solitary dome of St. Peter’s rises, invincible by distance, over the level line of the horizon.

“And the beauty is not confined to the views alone. Each turn of the winding road is a picture; deep ravines of solemn dark-green olives which waken into silver light as the wind shakes their leaves—old convents and chapels buried in shady nooks on the mountain-side—thickets of laurustinus, roses, genista, and jessamine—banks of lilies and hyacinths, anemones and violets—grand masses of grey rock, up which white-bearded goats are scrambling to nibble the myrtle and rosemary, and knocking down showers of the red tufa on their way;—and a road, with stone seats and parapets, twisting along the edge of the hill through a constant diorama of loveliness, and peopled by groups of peasants in their gay dresses returning from their work, singing in parts wild canzonetti which echo amid the silent hills, or by women washing at the wayside fountains, or returning with brazen conche poised upon their heads, like stately statues of water-goddesses wakened into life.”

Great was the difficulty of securing any companion for the desolate excursion to the Abruzzi, but at length I found a clever artist, Mr. Donne, who agreed to go with me.

“Sora in the Marsica, April 2.—Mr. Donne and I left the train at Terni, taking diligence to Rieti, the capital of the Sabina. Next day we had a long dreary drive to Aquila, a dismal place, but full of curious remains, surrounded by tremendous snow mountains. Thence we crossed a fearful pass in ghastly barren mountains to Solmona, a wonderful mediæval city seldom visited. On Sunday we clambered up the mountains above the town to the hermitage of Pietro Murrone, afterwards Cœlestine V., and then, as the snow was too deep to make it possible to cross the mountain, returned by night to Aquila. On Tuesday our journey of a whole day was through perfectly Lapland scenery, the road a mere track in the deep snow, which covered hedges and fields alike. Fortunately the weather was lovely, but it was a relief to come down again to even partial civilisation at Avezzano, on the borders of what was once the Lago Fucino, now dried up and spoilt by Prince Torlonia. Here I had an introduction to Count and Countess Restà, to whom I paid a most curious visit. On Wednesday we drew at S. Maria di Luco, a picturesque church on the site of a temple above the lake, and in the evening came on here, arriving at 2 A.M.—glorious moonlight and grand scenery, but the diligence unspeakably wretched. We have just been spending a charming day, partly at Arpino, the birthplace of Cicero, where there are wonderful Pelasgic remains, and a gateway which is the oldest architectural monument in Europe, and partly at Cicero’s island home on the Liris, a lovely place, all primroses and violets as in England, but with a background of snow mountains.”

“Easter Sunday, 1874.—The Count and Countess de Lützow, the two Miss Seymours, and Miss Ellis [87] met me at S. Germano, and we have been spending to-day in the monastery of Monte Cassino, gloriously beautiful always, with its palatial buildings on a mountain-top, and all around billows of purple hill tipped with snow. An introduction from the Duke of Sermoneta caused the gentle-looking Abbot to receive us, and then the great bent figure of the great Tosti came forward, his deep-set eyes excessively striking. After the service in the church they entertained us to an excellent dinner, finishing with delicious Aleatico wine. They were ‘spogliati,’ they said, but ‘La Providenza’ still watched over them.”

“April 7.—In the second-class carriage of the train on our way to Velletri sat a venerable and beautiful old man, to whom we talked of Aquino, the birthplace of St. Thomas Aquinas, where we spent yesterday. Gradually we found out that he was the Abbot of Monte Vergine, and he told us much that was interesting about that wonderful place—of the intense love and veneration of the Neapolitan people for the sanctuary, which is connected with the different events of their domestic life; that no betrothal or marriage or birth was considered entirely consecrated without receiving a benediction at the sanctuary; that peasant women had it entered in their marriage contracts that they should be allowed to make the pilgrimage from time to time, and after the birth of each child; that because, on account of the suppression, two miles of the road to the sanctuary still remained unfinished, the peasants voluntarily undertook to finish it themselves, 30,000 persons subscribing one soldo apiece; that when, at the same time, he, the Abbot, was obliged to give up keeping a carriage, five Neapolitan families insisted upon undertaking to keep one for him, one paying the horses, another the coachman, &c. The Abbot gave us his benediction on taking leave, and invited us to Monte Vergine.”[88]

“April 14.—I met Mademoiselle von Raasloff at Mrs. Terry’s. She narrated to me some facts which had been told to her by the well-known Dr. Pereira.

“An acquaintance of his, a lady, was travelling with some friends in an out-of-the-way part of Poland. Suddenly, late at night, their carriage broke down and they were obliged to get out, and as they knew of no shelter near, they were in great difficulties. At this juncture a gentleman appeared, who said to the lady that if she would take the trouble to walk a few steps farther, she would come to the gate of his house; that he was unable to accompany her, but that if she would mention his name she would be received, and would find all she required. She thanked him and followed his directions. The servant to whom she spoke at the house seemed very much surprised, but seeing her plight, brought her in, left her in a library, and went to get some refreshment. When she was alone, a door in the panelling opened and the unknown master of the house came in and sat down by her. As he said nothing, she felt rather awkward, and more so when the servant, coming in with a tray, seemed to brush up close to him in a very odd way as he set it down. When the servant left the room, the unknown said, ‘Ne vous étonnez pas, Mademoiselle, c’est que je suis mort;’ and he proceeded to say that he was most thankful she had come, and that he wished her to make him a solemn promise; that the people who were now in possession of the property were not the rightful heirs, but that he had left a will, deposited with a certain lawyer in a certain place, the name of which he made her write down. She listened as in a trance, but did as she was bid. The servant, coming in again about this time, walked straight through the unknown. Presently the carriage, being mended, was announced to be at the door, upon which the unknown walked with her to the porch, bowed, and disappeared.

“When the lady got to Warsaw, she had an attaque des nerfs, was very ill, and sent for Dr. Pereira. She told him all she had seen, and also gave him the paper with the directions she had written down. Dr. Pereira, finding that the person and place mentioned really existed, inquired into the matter, and the result was that the will was found, the wrongful possessors ejected, and the rightful owners set up in their place.”

“One evening at the Palazzo Odescalchi, when everybody had been telling stories, and nothing very interesting, Mademoiselle von Raasloff suddenly astonished us by saying, ‘Now I will tell you something.’ Then she said—

“There was a young lady in Denmark, whose family, from circumstances, had lived very much before the Danish world, and with whom, in so small a society as that of Copenhagen, almost every one was acquainted. Consequently it was a subject of interest, almost of universal interest, at Copenhagen, when it became known that this young lady, with the full approval of her parents and joyful consent of every one concerned, had become engaged to a young Danish officer of good family and position.

“‘Now in Danish society a betrothal is considered to be almost the same thing as a marriage: new relationships date from that time, and if either the affianced bride or bridegroom die, the family of the other side mourn as for a son or brother, as if the marriage had actually taken place.

“‘While this young lady of whom I have spoken was only engaged, her betrothed husband was summoned to join his regiment in a war which was going on; and very soon to the house of his betrothed came the terrible news that he was dead, that he was killed in battle. And the way in which the news came was this. A soldier of his regiment was wounded and was taken prisoner; and as he was lying in his cot in the hospital, he said to his companion who was in the next bed, “I saw the young Colonel—I saw the young Colonel on his white horse, and he rode into the ranks of the enemy and he never came back again.” And the man who said that died, but the man to whom he said it recovered, and, in process of time, he was ransomed, and came back to Copenhagen and told his story with additions. “My comrade, who is dead, said that he saw the young Colonel on his white horse, and that he saw him ride into the ranks of the enemy and the soldiers of the enemy drag him from his horse and kill him, so that he never came back again.” This was the form in which the story reached the family of the affianced wife of the young Colonel, and they mourned him most truly; for they loved him much, and they put on all the outward signs of deepest grief. There was only one person who would not put on the outward signs of mourning, and that was his affianced bride herself. She said, and persisted in saying, that she could not believe that, where two persons had been as entirely united as she and her betrothed had been, one could pass entirely out of life without the other knowing it. That her lover was sick, in prison, in trouble, she could believe, but that he was dead—never, without her having an inner conviction of it; and she would not put on the outward signs of mourning, which to her sense implied an impression of ill omen. Her parents urged her greatly, not only because their own reality of grief was very great, but because, according to the feeling of things in Copenhagen, it cast a very great slur upon their daughter that she should appear without the usual signs of grief. They urged her ceaselessly, and the tension of mind in which she lived, and the perpetual struggle with her own family, added to her own deep grief, had a very serious effect upon her.

“‘It was while things were in this state that one day she dreamt—she dreamt that she received a letter from her betrothed, and in her dream she felt that it was of the most vital importance that she should see the date of that letter; and she struggled and laboured to see it, but she could not make it out; and she laboured on with the utmost intensity of effort, but she could not decipher it; and it seemed to her the most wearisome night she had ever spent, so incessant was her effort, but she could not read it: still she would not give it up, and at last, just as the dawn was breaking, she saw the date of the letter, and it was May the 10th. The effort was so great that she woke; but the date remained with her still—it was May the 10th.

“‘Now she knew that if such a letter had been really written on the 10th of May, by the 1st of June she must receive that letter.

“‘The next morning, when her father came in to see her before she was up, as he had always done since their great sorrow, he was surprised to find her not only calm and serene, but almost radiant. She said, “You have often blamed me for not wearing the outward signs of mourning for my betrothed: grant me now only till the 1st of June, and then, if I receive no letter from him, I will promise to resign myself to believe the worst, and I will do as you desire.” Three weeks of terrible tension ensued, and the 1st of June arrived. She said then that she felt as if her whole future life hung upon the postman’s knock. It came—and there was the letter! Her lover had been taken prisoner, communication with him had been cut off—in fact, till then it was impossible she should hear. Soon afterwards he was exchanged, came home, and they were married.

“‘Now,’ said Mademoiselle von Raasloff, as she finished her narrative, ‘that is no story which I have heard. The young lady was my dear mother; she is here to testify to it: the young officer was my dear father, General von Raasloff; he is here to confirm it.’ And they were both present.”

“April 15.—There is a pretty young American lady at the table-d’hôte—most amusing. Here are some snatches from her lips:—

“‘I wonder if the old masters who painted such absurd figures of saints and angels meant to be funny, or if they were only funny by mistake.’

“‘Pity is like eating mustard without beef, and you wouldn’t like that, would you?’

“‘I was at a pension at Castellamare—Miss Baker’s. Avoid it. There were places for fifty at dinner, and forty-nine of them were old maids. No gentleman stayed—of course he couldn’t: they would have gobbled him up alive.’

“‘I went to the Trinità to hear the nuns sing. The nun who opened the door said, “You’re too late!”—“Well,” I said, “you declared I was too early yesterday. When am I to come?”—“Well, I don’t know,” she said; “we’re always changing.”—“Well, you are a civil old party, you are,” I said—and the old tigress actually slammed the door in my face.’

“‘Somebody said to me about a nigger I was abusing that I shouldn’t, because he was a man and a brother. “Well, sir, he may be your brother,” I said, “but most certainly he is not mine.” I should think not indeed, with a leg that comes down in the middle of his foot.’

“‘I shall be burnt, I hope, when I die. I feel like the old lady I heard of the other day who knew she was getting immensely old and could not live long, so paid down three thousand dollars to have a good big stove made right off at once.’

“‘I hope when I’m dying my people won’t be able to go on pegging away at their dinner just as if nothing was happening: I should not like that at all.’”

“Assisi, April 26.—I had a proposal from the Miss Seymours and Miss Ellis that if I would wait at Rome till Saturday the 18th, they would set off with me in search of the lost monastery of Farfa, which was, of all places, the one I wanted most to see, and from which fear of brigands had previously caused all my companions to fail at the last moment. If you have read any old histories of Italy, you will remember how all-important Farfa was in the Middle Ages, and will wonder that no one, not even the best Roman antiquarians, knew anything about its present state, or even where it is. We could only judge by old maps and chronicles. However, the excursion completely answered, and, after divers little adventures, which ‘Days near Rome’ will narrate, we not only arrived at Farfa, but found the Father-General of the Benedictines accidentally there to receive us. Greatly astonished he was at our arrival, but said that one enterprising stranger had reached the place three years before—I need hardly add, an English lady. Really Farfa is one of the most radiant spots in Italy, and the sheets of wild-flowers, and the songs of nightingales and cuckoos enhanced its charms. My companions were so delighted that they consented, if I would stay till Wednesday, to set off again on a long, wild, and very rough tourette to the monasteries of the Hernican mountains. So on the 22nd we went by rail to Frosinone, and thence drove to Casamari, going on by a grand mountain road to sleep at Alatri. The next day we rode up a jagged rock path for many hours to the Carthusian Trisulti, a huge monastery in a mountain forest, amid Alpine flowers and close under the snows. Then we saw the famous Grottoes of Collepardo—a sort of underground Staffa, very grand indeed, and returned at night to Frosinone, and next day to Rome.”

“May 4, Florence.—General von Raasloff is here, and says that a friend of his going to China received endless commissions for things he was to bring home, but that only one of the people who gave them sent money for the things they wanted. On his return, this commission was the only one he had fulfilled. His disappointed friends upbraided him, and he said, ‘You see it was very unfortunate, but when we were nearing China, I spread out all my different commissions on the deck that I might examine them, and I put the money for each on the paper to which it belonged: and—it was very unfortunate, but my attention was called away for an instant, and behold a great gust of wind had come, and all those commissions which were not weighted by money had been blown far out to sea, and I never saw them again.’

“Count Piper, an ancestor of the present Count Piper, was a very determined gambler. Being once at one of his desolate country estates, he was in perfect despair for some one to play with him, but he was alone. At last, in a fit of desperation, he said, ‘If the devil himself were to come to play with me, I should be grateful.’ Soon a tremendous storm began to rage, during which a servant came in and said that a gentleman overtaken by night was travelling past, and implored shelter. Count Piper was quite enchanted, and a very gentlemanlike man was shown in. Supper was served, and then Count Piper proposed a game of cards, in which the stranger at once acquiesced. Count Piper won so enormously, that he felt quite ashamed, and at last he proposed their retiring. As they were leaving the room, the stranger said, ‘I am very much concerned that I have not sufficient money with me to pay all my debt now; however, I shall beg you to take my ring as a guarantee, which is really of greater value than the money, and which has very peculiar properties, one of which is that as long as you wear it, all you possess is safe from fire.’ The Count took the ring, and escorting the stranger to his room, wished him good-night. The next morning he sent to inquire after him: he was not there, his bed had not been slept in, and he never was heard of again. Count Piper wore the ring, but after some time, as it was very heavy and old-fashioned, he took it off and put it away. The next morning came the news that one of his finest farm-houses had been burnt down. And so it always is in that family. The descendants of Count Piper always have to wear the ring, and if ever they leave it off for a single day, one of their houses on one of their great estates is burnt.”

“Florence, May 10.—Ten days here in the radiant spring-tide have been very delightful. I have seen a great deal of Mrs. Ross, Lady Duff Gordon’s beautiful daughter, who is now writing the story of her mother’s life. She has a noble head, which is almost more full of expression than that of any one I know, and I am sure that her character is noble too, with all the smallnesses of life, which make a thoroughly anglicised character ignoble, washed out, and its higher qualities remaining to be mingled with the Italian frankness and kindly simplicity which English-English do not possess, and consequently cannot understand. Her singing to a guitar is capital—chiefly of Italian stornelli, rendered with all the verve which a contadina herself could give them. It is no wonder that Italians adore her. Each summer she and her husband spend at Castagnuolo with the Marchese Lotteria della Stufa, the great friend of her father, who died in his arms. This is ‘Il Marchese’ par excellence with the Florentines, to whom he is public property. When a child accidentally shot him with a pistol through the crown of his hat, thousands of people thronged the street before his house to inquire, and in all the villages round his native valley of Signa the price of wax went up for a fortnight, so many candles were burnt to the Madonna as thank-offerings for his escape. The next day, as he was crossing one of the bridges, he met Giacomo, a flyman he knew, driving a carriage full of very respectable old Scotch ladies. Giacomo flung his reins on the box, and rushing up to the Marchese, threw himself sobbing on his breast.

“I have been out with Mrs. Ross to the Stufa villa of Castagnuolo, seven miles off, near the Badia di’ Settimo, in a tiny baroccino, drawn by Tocco, the smallest of spirited ponies, and with Picco, the weest terrier ever seen, upon our knees. As we turned up from the highroad to the villa on the hills through the rich luxuriant vineyards, the warmest welcome met us from all the peasants, and Mrs. Ross received them with ‘Ah, caro Maso, e come va la moglie,’—‘Addio, caro Guido mio.’ In a house in the grounds—a ‘podere’—the whole family of inmates thronged round her with ‘Vi pigliero un consiglio, Signora,’ about a sick child. We wandered up the woods, gathering lovely wild orchids, and then went to the farm, where the creatures, like the people, seemed to regard Mrs. Ross as one of themselves: the cows came and licked her, the sheep came and rubbed against her, the pigeons perched, and even the wild boars were gentleness itself. She was first able to make her way at Castagnuolo by nursing day and night an old contadino who died in her arms. She described comically, though pathetically, the frantic grief which ensued: how the son, Antonio, tried to drown himself, and was pulled out of the water by his breeches: how the whole family insisted upon being bled: how a married daughter, a niece, and a cousin came and had strong convulsions; and how, when she ventured to leave them for a little to go to her dinner, the fattore rushed after her with—‘Ma Signora, tutte le donne son svenute;’[92] how eventually she locked up each separately for the night with a basin of soup, having made them a little speech, &c. Whenever any of the contadini have burns, they are cured by poultices of arum-leaves.

“Venice, May.—I feel that I am now learning much about masters I never knew before. One is introduced to them at one place and continues the acquaintance at another, till one becomes really intimate. Marco Basaiti is the best of these new friends, with his sad shadowy figures always painted against an afterglow. One learns how, as Savonarola says, ‘every painter paints himself. However varied his subjects, his works bear the sign-manual of his thought.’[93]

“At Milan, on the Eve of S. Ambrogio, an American next me at the table-d’hôte said to his neighbour opposite, ‘I have been, Marm, to see St. Ambrose; and I say, Marm, do you know that to-morrow they are going to tootle the old gentleman all round the town?’”

In returning from Italy this year I made the excursion to the curious shrine of Paray le Monial which I have described in an article in Evening Hours. All the time I had been abroad, as during my tour in Spain, I had sent monthly articles to Good Words, for which I was paid at the rate of five guineas a page—a sum, I believe, given besides only to Dean Alford and Arthur Stanley. But those were the palmy days of the magazine. I was paid much less afterwards, till it came down to a fifth of that sum. I spent the rest of the summer in London. It was during this year that I became a member of the Athenæum Club—an incalculable advantage. Twelve years before, old Dr. Hawtrey, the Provost of Eton, had said to me, “You ought to be a member of the Athenæum,” and I had answered “Then I wish you would propose me.” But I had quite forgotten about this, and had never known that the kind old man, long since dead, had really done it; so the news that my name was just coming up for ballot was a joyful surprise. I have since spent every London morning in steady work at the Athenæum, less disturbed there than even at Holmhurst. The difficulties which the club rules throw in the way of receiving visitors are a great advantage to students, and my life at the Athenæum has been as regular as clockwork. At breakfast I have always occupied the same table,—behind the door leading to the kitchen, the one which, I believe, was always formerly used by Wilberforce. In the afternoons, when all the old gentlemen arrive, to poke up huge fires in winter and close all the windows in summer, I have never returned to the club.

“London, June (in the Park).—Fine Lady.—‘How strange it is to see all these smart carriages driving about and nobody in them.’

“My simple self.—‘Nobody in them! why, they are quite full of people.’

“Fine Lady.—‘Ah, ye-es—people, but nobody all the same. We never drive in the Park now. It was only to show you this mob that I came. We are obliged to retreat, though, before their advancing battalions. They pursue us everywhere. There is no humiliation and suffering they won’t undergo in the chase. They drove us out of the Row long ago, and this year we took a row of chairs on Sunday afternoons on a little rising ground between Albert Gate and Stanhope Gate;[96] but the enemy pursued us, and as they always get the better of us, we shall be obliged to yield that position too. There is never any safety from them but in flight, for they are certainly our superiors in—numbers.’”

“June 22.—Went to see Madame du Quaire,[97] whom I found in her low French-looking room in Wilton Street, perfectly covered with pictures and oggetti. She talked of spiritualism—how she had been to a meeting at Mrs. Gregory’s—‘a truthful woman, who would not stand imposture if she knew it.’ She ‘cottoned’ up the medium, ‘parcequ’il faut mieux s’adresser à Dieu qu’à ses saints.’ They sat in the dark, which was depressing. Soon after she felt a shock ‘like a torpedo,’ and something like the leg of a chair came and scratched her head. A voice called her and said, ‘I am John King, and I want you, Madame du Quaire; I have got something for you.’ ‘Then,’ said Madame du Q., ‘he gave me a sort of chain of sharks’ teeth; the kind of thing of which, when it was given to some one at Honolulu, the recipient inquired, “C’est un collier?”—“Mais pardon,” said the donor, “c’est une robe.”’

“June 24.—I dined with Lord Ravensworth at Percy’s Cross, and he told me—

“When I was a young man, I was staying at Balnagowan with Lady Mary Ross. She had a son and daughter. The daughter was a very handsome, charming girl. One day I was walking with her, and she told me that when her brother was ill of the measles, at their other place, Bonnington, where the Falls of the Clyde are, an old nurse who lived at the lodge some way off used to come up and sit by him in the day, returning home at night. One morning when she arrived, she was most dreadfully depressed, and being questioned as to the cause, said, ‘I am na lang for this warld; and not only me, but a greater than I is na lang for this warld—and that is the head o’ this hoose.’ And she said that as she was walking home, two lights came out of the larches and flitted before her: one was a feeble light, close to the ground; the other a large bright light higher up. They passed before her to the park gates and then disappeared. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I know that the feeble light is myself, and the greater light is the head o’ this hoose.’

“A few days afterwards the old woman took a cold and died, and within a fortnight Sir C. Ross died too,[98] while the little boy recovered and is alive still.”

Captain Fisher, who is engaged to be married to Victoria Liddell, told me that—

‘When Mr. Macpherson of Glen Truim was dying, his wife had gone to rest in a room looking out over the park, and sat near the window. Suddenly she saw lights as of a carriage coming in at the distant lodge-gate, and calling to one of the servants, said, ‘Do go down; some one is coming who does not know of all this grief.’ But the servant remained near her at the window, and as the carriage came near the house, they saw it was a hearse drawn by four horses and covered with figures. As it stopped at the porch door, the figures looked up at her, and their eyes glared with light; then they scrambled down and seemed to disappear into the house. Soon they reappeared and seemed to lift some heavy weight into the hearse, which then drove off at full speed, causing all the stones and gravel to fly up at the windows. Mrs. Macpherson and the butler had not rallied from their horror and astonishment, when the nurse watching in the next room came in to tell her that the Colonel was dead.

“I was surprised to hear that Mrs. Hungerford was in London, and asked why she had left Ireland so unexpectedly. I was told she had had a great fright—then I heard what it was.

“She was in her room in the evening in her beautiful house, which looks out upon a lake, beyond which rise hills wooded with fir-trees. Suddenly, on the opposite side of the lake, she saw a form which seemed—with sweeping garments—to move forward upon the water. It was gigantic. Mrs. Hungerford screamed, and her sister, Miss Cropper (who afterwards married Mr. Jerome), and the nurse came to her from the inner nursery. The three remained at the window for some time, but retreated as the figure advanced, and at length—being then so tall that it reached to the second floor—looked in at the window, and disclosed the most awful face of a hideous old woman.

Captain Fisher also told us this really extraordinary story connected with his own family:—

“Fisher may sound a very plebeian name, but this family is of very ancient lineage, and for many hundreds of years they have possessed a very curious old place in Cumberland, which bears the weird name of Croglin Grange. The great characteristic of the house is that never at any period of its very long existence has it been more than one story high, but it has a terrace from which large grounds sweep away towards the church in the hollow, and a fine distant view.

“When, in lapse of years, the Fishers outgrew Croglin Grange in family and fortune, they were wise enough not to destroy the long-standing characteristic of the place by adding another story to the house, but they went away to the south, to reside at Thorncombe near Guildford, and they let Croglin Grange.

“They were extremely fortunate in their tenants, two brothers and a sister. They heard their praises from all quarters. To their poorer neighbours they were all that is most kind and beneficent, and their neighbours of a higher class spoke of them as a most welcome addition to the little society of the neighbourhood. On their part the tenants were greatly delighted with their new residence. The arrangement of the house, which would have been a trial to many, was not so to them. In every respect Croglin Grange was exactly suited to them.

“The winter was spent most happily by the new inmates of Croglin Grange, who shared in all the little social pleasures of the district, and made themselves very popular. In the following summer, there was one day which was dreadfully, annihilatingly hot. The brothers lay under the trees with their books, for it was too hot for any active occupation. The sister sat in the verandah and worked, or tried to work, for, in the intense sultriness of that summer day, work was next to impossible. They dined early, and after dinner they still sat out in the verandah, enjoying the cool air which came with evening, and they watched the sun set, and the moon rise over the belt of trees which separated the grounds from the churchyard, seeing it mount the heavens till the whole lawn was bathed in silver light, across which the long shadows from the shrubbery fell as if embossed, so vivid and distinct were they.

“When they separated for the night, all retiring to their rooms on the ground-floor (for, as I said, there was no upstairs in that house), the sister felt that the heat was still so great that she could not sleep, and having fastened her window, she did not close the shutters—in that very quiet place it was not necessary—and, propped against the pillows, she still watched the wonderful, the marvellous beauty of that summer night. Gradually she became aware of two lights, two lights which flickered in and out in the belt of trees which separated the lawn from the churchyard, and as her gaze became fixed upon them, she saw them emerge, fixed in a dark substance, a definite ghastly something, which seemed every moment to become nearer, increasing in size and substance as it approached. Every now and then it was lost for a moment in the long shadows which stretched across the lawn from the trees, and then it emerged larger than ever, and still coming on—on. As she watched it, the most uncontrollable horror seized her. She longed to get away, but the door was close to the window and the door was locked on the inside, and while she was unlocking it, she must be for an instant nearer to it. She longed to scream, but her voice seemed paralysed, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth.

“Suddenly, she never could explain why afterwards, the terrible object seemed to turn to one side, seemed to be going round the house, not to be coming to her at all, and immediately she jumped out of bed and rushed to the door, but as she was unlocking it, she heard scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and saw a hideous brown face with flaming eyes glaring in at her. She rushed back to the bed, but the creature continued to scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window. She felt a sort of mental comfort in the knowledge that the window was securely fastened on the inside. Suddenly the scratching sound ceased, and a kind of pecking sound took its place. Then, in her agony, she became aware that the creature was unpicking the lead! The noise continued, and a diamond pane of glass fell into the room. Then a long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened, and the creature came in; and it came across the room, and her terror was so great that she could not scream, and it came up to the bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and it dragged her head over the side of the bed, and—it bit her violently in the throat.

“As it bit her, her voice was released, and she screamed with all her might and main. Her brothers rushed out of their rooms, but the door was locked on the inside. A moment was lost while they got a poker and broke it open. Then the creature had already escaped through the window, and the sister, bleeding violently from a wound in the throat, was lying unconscious over the side of the bed. One brother pursued the creature, which fled before him through the moonlight with gigantic strides, and eventually seemed to disappear over the wall into the churchyard. Then he rejoined his brother by the sister’s bedside. She was dreadfully hurt and her wound was a very definite one, but she was of strong disposition, not given either to romance or superstition, and when she came to herself she said, ‘What has happened is most extraordinary and I am very much hurt. It seems inexplicable, but of course there is an explanation, and we must wait for it. It will turn out that a lunatic has escaped from some asylum and found his way here.’ The wound healed and she appeared to get well, but the doctor who was sent for to her would not believe that she could bear so terrible a shock so easily, and insisted that she must have change, mental and physical; so her brothers took her to Switzerland.

“Being a sensible girl, when she went abroad, she threw herself at once into the interests of the country she was in. She dried plants, she made sketches, she went up mountains, and, as autumn came on, she was the person who urged that they should return to Croglin Grange. ‘We have taken it,’ she said, ‘for seven years, and we have only been there one; and we shall always find it difficult to let a house which is only one story high, so we had better return there; lunatics do not escape every day.’ As she urged it, her brothers wished nothing better, and the family returned to Cumberland. From there being no upstairs in the house, it was impossible to make any great change in their arrangements. The sister occupied the same room, but it is unnecessary to say she always closed her shutters, which, however, as in many old houses, always left one top pane of the window uncovered. The brothers moved, and occupied a room together exactly opposite that of their sister, and they always kept loaded pistols in their room.

“The winter passed most peacefully and happily. In the following March the sister was suddenly awakened by a sound she remembered only too well—scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and looking up, she saw, climbed up to the topmost pane of the window, the same hideous brown shrivelled face, with glaring eyes, looking in at her. This time she screamed as loud as she could. Her brothers rushed out of their room with pistols, and out of the front door. The creature was already scudding away across the lawn. One of the brothers fired and hit it in the leg, but still with the other leg it continued to make way, scrambled over the wall into the churchyard, and seemed to disappear into a vault which belonged to a family long extinct.

“The next day the brothers summoned all the tenants of Croglin Grange, and in their presence the vault was opened. A horrible scene revealed itself. The vault was full of coffins; they had been broken open, and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, were scattered over the floor. One coffin alone remained intact. Of that the lid had been lifted, but still lay loose upon the coffin. They raised it, and there, brown, withered, shrivelled, mummified, but quite entire, was the same hideous figure which had looked in at the windows of Croglin Grange, with the marks of a recent pistol-shot in the leg; and they did—the only thing that can lay a vampire—they burnt it.”

“Highcliffe, June 30, 1874.—It is delightful to be here again. I came on Friday with Everard Primrose,[99] a friend who always especially interests me, in spite of the intense melancholy which always makes him say that he longs for an early death.

“This place, so spiritually near the gates of heaven, is a great rest—quite a halt in life—after London, which, though I thought it filled with all great and beautiful things, packs in too much, so that one loses breath mentally. Here all is still, and the touching past and earnestly hopeful future lend a wonderful charm to the quiet life of the present. ‘Les beaux jours sont là; on ne les voit pas, on les sent.’[100]

“The dear lady of the castle is not looking well. I believe it is owing to her conversion to Lady Jane Ellice’s teetotalism; but she says it is not that. Lady Jane herself is a perpetual sunshine, which radiates on all around her and is quite enchanting. Miss Lindsay is the only other guest. In the evening Lady Jane sings and Miss Lindsay recites—most wonderfully—out of Shakspeare, with great power and pathos.

“It has not been fine weather, but we have had delightful walks on the sand, by the still sad-looking sea, with the Isle of Wight and its Needles rising in the faint distance, or in the thick woods of wind-blown ilex and arbutus. One day we went to ‘the Haven House,’ which is a place that often comes back to my recollection—picturesquely, gauntly standing on a tongue of land at the meeting of river and bay, at the end of a weird pine-wood, where the gnarled roots of the trees all writhe seawards out of the sand. Here groups of children were at play on the little jetties of sea-weedy stones and timber, while a row of herons were catching fish—solitarily—at great intervals, in the bay.

“Lady Mary Lambart came last night—a simple, self-composed girl, with a pale face and golden hair. She lives exclusively with her aunt, Lady Alicia Blackwood.

“Yesterday, in the ‘Lady Chapel’ of the great church at Christ-Church, I suddenly came upon the tomb of Mary Morgan, who died in 1796. She was companion to my great-aunt, the unhappy Countess of Strathmore, and this monument was dedicated ‘to the most rare of all connections, a perfect and disinterested friend, by the Countess of Strathmore, who, conscious of the treasure, valued its possession and mourned its loss.... To her heroic qualities, her cool deliberate courage, and her matchless persevering friendship, the tears of blood shed by one who despises weakness, the records of law and justice, and perhaps even the historic page, will bear witness to an astonished and admiring posterity.’

“On the whole, Christ-Church is dull inside: it is so vast, and chiefly perpendicular. The old tombs are used as pedestals for modern monuments, and the old gravestones, stripped of their brasses, have modern epitaphs inserted between the ancient gothic inscriptions. Outside, the position is beautiful, on a little height above the river, near which are some old ruins, and which winds away to the sea through flat reedy meadow-lands, still marked by sails of boats where its outline is lost in distance.”

“June 30.—Mrs. Hamilton Hamilton came last night. She was a daughter of Sir G. Robinson. Her father’s aide-de-camp, Captain Campbell, a poor man, wanted to marry her, and she was attached to him; but it was not allowed, and they were separated. She was married to Mr. Hamilton Hamilton, but Captain Campbell never ceased to think of her, and he was ambitious for her sake, and became Sir Colin Campbell and Lord Clyde. Afterwards, when she was free, it was thought he would marry her. He sent her an Indian shawl, and he wrote to her, and he came to see her, but he never proposed; and she waited and expected, and at last she heard he had said, ‘No, it could not be; people would say it was absurd.’ But it would not have been absurd at all, and she would have liked it very much.

“One always feels here as if one did not half appreciate the perfection of each day as it goes by. It needs time to recognise and realise the warmth and colour which a noble mind, a true heart, and an ever heaven-aspiring soul can throw into even the commonest things of life. I often wonder how these walks, how these rooms with their old boisserie would appear with another inhabitant; quite unimpressive perhaps—but now they are simply illuminated. Beautiful pictures remain with one from everything at Highcliffe, but most of all that of the noble figure, seated in her high tapestried chair, painting at her little table by the light of the green lamp, and behind her a great vase filled with colossal branches of green chestnut, mingled with tall white lilies, such as Gabriel bore before the Virgin. As Lady Jane sings, she is roused to call for more songs, for ‘something pathetic, full of passion—love cannot be passionate enough.’—‘What! another?’ says Lady Jane. ‘Another, two nothers, three nothers: I cannot have enough.’

“‘In the perfect Christian, the principal virtues which produce an upright life and beauty of form are fervent faith and the love of our crucified Redeemer. As faith and love deepen, so external grace and beauty increase, until they become able to convert the hearts of men.... The soul that is beloved of God becomes beautiful in proportion as it receives more of the Divine grace.’ These words are from Savonarola’s Sermons, and do they not apply to our Lady?

“Lady Caroline Charteris [103] came to luncheon—plain in features, but in mind indescribably beautiful and interesting. She brought with her a most touching letter she had received from Dr. Brown [104] after his wife’s death. He spoke of the wells of salvation which men came to when they were truly thirsty, otherwise most people either passed them altogether, or stayed an instant, gazed into them admiringly, and still passed on. With Lady Caroline came Mrs. David Ricardo in a beautiful pink hat, like a Gainsborough in flesh and blood.”

“July 1.—A delightful morning in the library, fitful sunlight gleaming through the stained windows and upon the orange datura flowers in the conservatory, Lady Waterford painting at her table, Lady Jane and Miss Lindsay and Lady Mary Lambart [105] (a noble-looking girl like a picture by Bronzino) working around. Lady Waterford talked of the odd mistakes of words—how an old lady always said ‘facetious’ for ‘officious’—that when she came by the railway the porters had been so very ‘facetious,’ &c. Miss Mary Boyle condoled with an old woman at the Ashridge almshouses on the loss of her old husband. ‘Oh, yes, ma’am, it’s a great loss; but still, ma’am, I’m quite happy, for I know that he’s gone to Beelzebub’s bosom.’—‘I think you must mean Abraham.’—‘Well, yes, ma’am, since you mention it, I think that was the gentleman’s name.’

“In the afternoon we had a delightful walk to Hoborne, across a common on which a very rare kind of ophrys grows. Lady Waterford talked of a visit she had had at Ford from Mr. Wayte, the new Rector of Norham, who told her that a few nights before, his curate, Mr. Simon, had been obliged to go to fetch some papers out of the vestry at night. When he opened the church door, the moonlight was streaming in at the west window, and the middle of the nave was in bright light, but the side aisles were dark. He walked briskly down the middle of the church to the vestry, and, as he went, was aware that a figure dressed in white was sitting motionless in the corner of one of the pews in the aisle. He did not stay, but went into the vestry to get his papers, and, as he returned, he saw that the figure was still in the same place. Much agitated, he did not go up to it, but hurried home, and waited for daylight, when he returned at once to the church. The figure was still there, and did not move as he approached. When he uncovered its face, he saw that it was a dead body. The body had been found in the Tweed the day before, and the finders had not known what to do with it, so they had wrapped it in a sheet, and set it up in the church.”

“July 3.—We drove to Ashley Clinton—a charming place. Lady Waterford talked of the origin of words—of weeds as applied to dress. Mrs. Hamilton said how the Queen of the Sandwich Islands always spoke of flowers as weeds. ‘What pretty weeds there are in the cottage gardens.’

“Lady Waterford spoke of the picture of Miss Jane Warburton near her bedroom door; how she was appointed maid of honour to Queen Caroline at a time when maids of honour were rather fast, and how, at dinner, when the maids proposed toasts, and one gave the Archbishop of Canterbury, another the Dean of St. Paul’s, or some other old man, she alone had the courage to give the smartest and handsomest man of the day, the Duke of Argyll.[108] She was so laughed at by her companions that it made her cry, and at the drawing-room somebody said to the Duke of Argyll, ‘That is a young lady who has been crying for you,’ and told him the story. He was much touched, but unfortunately he was married. Afterwards, however, when his Duchess died, he married Miss Warburton, and, though she was very ugly, he thought her absolute perfection. In the midst of the most interesting conversation he would break off to ‘listen to his Jane;’ and he had the most absolute faith in her, till once he discovered that she had deceived him in something about a marriage for one of her daughters with an Earl of Dalkeith, which was not quite straightforward; and it broke his heart, and he died.”

“July 5.—I came up to London with Lady Waterford on Friday, and as usual I find what Carlyle calls ‘the immeasurable, soul-confusing uproar of a London life’ rather delightful than otherwise. To-day I have been with Mary Lefevre to Marylebone, to hear Mr. Haweis [109] preach. He is like a Dominican preacher in Italy, begins without a text, acts, crouches, springs, walks about in the pulpit—which is fortunately large enough, and every now and then spreads out vast black wings like a bat, and looks as if he was about to descend upon his appalled congregation. Part of his sermon was very solemn, but in part preacher and audience alike giggled. ‘He was converted last Sunday week: he was converted exactly at half-past four P.M., but since then they say that he has been seen at a theatre, at a ball, and at a racecourse, and that therefore his conversion is doubtful. Now you know my opinion is that none of these things are wrong in themselves. The question is not what the places are, but with what purpose and in what spirit people go to them. Our Saviour would not have thought it wrong to go to any of these places. John the Baptist certainly acted altogether on a lower level and went out as an ascetic into the wilderness. But our Saviour was both charitable and large-hearted. When He was asked to a feast, he went. He never sacrificed Himself unnecessarily, and so the ‘religious people’ of that day abused him for eating with publicans and sinners. It is just what ‘religious people,’ the Pharisees of our own day, say now.... Oh, let us leave these perpetual judgments of others.’

“I went afterwards to luncheon at Lady Castletown’s; she was not come in from church, but I went up into the drawing-room. A good-looking very smart young lady was sitting there, with her back to the window, evidently waiting also. After a pause, I made some stupid remark to her about heat or cold, &c. She looked at me, and said, ‘That is a very commonplace remark. I’ll make a remark. If a woman does not marry, she is nobody at all, nothing at all in the world; but if a man ever marries at all, he is an absolute fool.’ I said, ‘I know who you are; no one but Miss Rhoda Broughton would have said that.’ And it was she.

“Mr. Browning came and sat on the other side of her at luncheon. She said something of novels without love: I said something of black dose as a cure for love. Mr. Browning said that Aristophanes spoke of ‘the black-dose-loving Egyptians.’ Miss Broughton said, ‘How do you know the word means black dose?’—‘Because there is a similar passage in Herodotus which throws light upon the subject, with details on which it would not be delicate to dwell.’”

“July 6.—Dined with Madame du Quaire, meeting Mr. and Mrs. Wigan and Mr. and Mrs. Preston. Mrs. Wigan talked of children’s odd sayings: of one who, being told that God could see everywhere, asked if He could see the top of His own head; of another, at a school-feast, who being asked to have another bun, said, ‘Oh no, want to go home.’—‘Nonsense! have another bun.’—‘No, want to go home;’ upon which the giver of the feast took him up, and the child exclaimed, ‘Oh don’t, don’t bend me.’”

“July 8.—A drawing-party at Lambeth. Madeleine Lefevre and I went afterwards to show our drawings to Mrs. Tait, and had luncheon in the large cool pleasant rooms. In the afternoon I went with the Lefevres to the camp at Wimbledon. It is an immense enclosure, with streets of tents, lines of flags. In front of the officers’ tents are masses of flowers in pots sunk in a substratum of tan, as by law the turf may not be broken. Lady Ducie’s tent, whither we went, was most luxurious. We went on afterwards to Lady Leven’s garden, which was a beautiful sight, with brilliant groups of people. At the end, children were watching the manœuvres of some cats, who sat quiet with garlands of mice and birds upon their heads.”

“July 10.—Drew in the Tower of London, and dined at Lord Castletown’s to meet Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Pearse (she Mario’s daughter), Madame du Quaire, and the truly extraordinary M. Vivier.

“He talked incessantly, but expected what Lady Castletown called ‘a gallery,’ and perfect silence and attention. ‘Je suis intéressant, moi! La petite de C. elle n’a rien: elle chante, elle fait les oiseaux, voilà tout. Pour entendre les oiseaux, vous ferez mieux d’aller dans vos squares: vous les entendrez, et vous payerez rien. Mais la petite de C. elle est moralement malsaine: moi je ne le suis pas, et je suis—intéressant.’

“He was so surprised at the number of servants: ‘And does all that sleep in the house?’ he said.

“In the evening he sang ‘Nellie,’ and his ‘Drame’—of a blind Spanish musician with a violin, watching windows for money, a perfect passion of avarice and expectation.”

“July 11.—Luncheon with Lady Morley, meeting Miss Flora Macdonald, who has still a reminiscence of the great beauty which brought such a surprise to the old Duchess of Gloucester when she asked Victor Emmanuel what he admired most in England, and he answered so promptly, ‘Miss Flora Macdonald.’ Lady Katherine Parker described—‘because, alas! it was discovered that we date just a little farther back than the Leicesters,’ having to sit near ——, the most airified man in London. She was congratulated afterwards upon his having condescended to speak to her, but said he wouldn’t, only his neighbour on the other side was even more insignificant than herself, and to her he did not speak at all. He said, apropos of a dinner at Dorchester House, ‘Pray who are these Holfords?’—‘Oh,’ said Lady Katherine, ‘I believe they are people who have got a little shake-down somewhere in Park Lane.’

“I was at the ‘shake-down’ in the evening—something quite beautiful. The staircase is that of an old Genoese palace, and was one blaze of colour, and the broad landings behind the alabaster balustrades were filled with people, sitting or leaning over, as in old Venetian pictures. The dress of the time entirely lends itself to these effects. I sat in one of the arcades with Lady Sarah Lindsay and her daughters, then with Lady Carnarvon. We watched the amusing contrasts of the people coming upstairs—the shrinking of some, the dégagée manner of others, the dignity of a very few—in this, no one to be compared with Princess Mary. The Prince and Princess of Wales were close by (he very merry, talking with much action, like a foreigner), also the Prince and Princess of Prussia. Lady Somers looked glorious in a black dress thickly sprinkled with green beetles’ wings and a head-dress of the same.

“With Lady Carnarvon I had a long talk, and could not help feeling how truly one might apply to her Edgar Poe’s lines:—

“July 12.—Yesterday there was a great party at Hatfield. I drove with the Woods to King’s Cross for the special train at 4 P.M., but was separated from them at the station, and joined Lady Darnley and Raglan Somerset. A tremendous storm was brewing over London, but we left it behind at first. Quantities of carriages from the house were in waiting at the Hatfield station. The street was lined with wreaths and flowers, and a succession of triumphal arches made the steep hill look like a long flowery bower. In the park, the grand old limes were in full blossom in front of the stately brick house. On the terrace on the other side the mass of guests was assembling. I went off with Lady Braybrooke to the labyrinth, then with Lady Darnley and the E. de Bunsens over the house. The storm now broke with tremendous lightning and loud peals of thunder, and in the Golden Gallery it was almost dark. Just as it began, the royal party drove up, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Prince and Princess of Prussia, Prince Arthur, the Tecks, the Duchess of Manchester, and a great quantity of suite—a very pretty procession, vehemently cheered by the people. When the storm cleared, we went out upon the terraces; the royal party went to the labyrinth. As it returned, I was standing with the Leghs of Lyme at the head of the steps, when Prince Arthur came up to me, was very cordial, and talked for some time about Rome, &c. I asked him if the Queen drew still. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘she is quite devoted to it: and I am very fond of it too, but then I have so little time.’

“Owing to the rain, the dinner for eight hundred had to be moved into the Armoury. The royal guests and a few others dined in the Marble Hall; the Princess of Prussia was forgotten as they were going in, and had to be hunted for. We all dined at little tables; I was at one with Mrs. Stuart Wortley, Mrs. W. Lowther, and Lord Sydney. Afterwards the terraces and house were beautifully illuminated with coloured lights, in which, through what looked like a sea of fire and blood, the cascades of white roses frothed up. Every one walked out. The royalties seemed to spring up everywhere; one was always running against them by mistake. There was a pretty procession as they went away, and immediately afterwards I returned with Miss Thackeray, her sister, and the Master of Napier.

“An excursion of this kind from London is delightful. C’est l’entr’acte!”

“July 13.—Yesterday (Sunday) I had luncheon with Lady Castletown; young Mr. Astley was there, and Miss Trollope. Lady Castletown talked of Vivier, of the marvellous versatility of his genius, of his absolute refusal to go any way but his own; that except for love he never sang a single song under three thousand francs; that when he gave a concert at Nice he asked ‘cent francs chaque,’ and the rooms were crowded; that at Compiègne he did some things, but he only allowed three persons to be present—the Emperor and two others. He excluded the Empress, because, in his Spanish scene, she had dared, Spanish-wise, to throw a bracelet into his hat, which so offended him that he told the Emperor he should never let her see him again. The Emperor quite delighted in him, and could not bear him to go away. He persuaded Vivier to go with him to Vichy, and there some of the great men of the court called to him from a window, as he was walking in the garden, and begged him to come to them. He was furious, and complained to the Emperor. ‘Sire, ce n’est pas comme cela qu’il faut appeler Vivier.’ On one occasion he stopped and threw up his whole comedy in the middle before a large audience because Lord Houghton sneezed. It was therefore necessary carefully to select his audience, otherwise he might take offence and never return. He has discovered powers in a French horn which no one had any idea of before, and he can sit close by you and play it with a degree of delicacy which perfectly transports you—the most sublime philosophy of music.

“We went afterwards to Holland House. I sat in the carriage at first under the shadow of the grand old red pile, but Lady Holland sent Mr. Hayward out to fetch me in, which he did with a bad grace.[113] Lady Holland is a very little woman, simply dressed, with a white cap. She has sparkling eyes, which give her face a wonderful animation; which is almost beauty in itself, and which, in the setting of that house and its historic memories, makes her quite a person to remember. Mrs. Locke was there, and Lord Tankerville, whom I was very glad to see again. Outside, on a comfortable bench, we sat some time with the old Duc de Richelieu. Mrs. Wingfield and I wandered about in the gardens, which were glorious!—such blazes of flowers between the trees, such splashing fountains, such armies of scarlet lilies looking over the clipped yew hedges; and the house itself so rich in colour and in shadow. Then there is a glade—a grass walk of immense length, completely shut in by trees and forest-like tangle, so that you might think yourself in the deep recesses of Sherwood instead of close to London.

“Everard Primrose called to us out of a window, and we went up to him in the old library. He was in a melancholy mood, and would not come down with us; but Mrs. Wingfield went back to him alone, and, with that wonderful sympathy which is natural to her, she soon tamed him, and he came to us and was as pleasant as possible.

“The picture of Marie, Princess Lichtenstein, hung, pale and sad, looking down on us from a corner, and seemed to say, ‘Hence I am now banished; even my portrait is put away.’”

“July 14.—Dined at Lady Carnarvon’s to meet Lord Stanhope. Only the two mothers of the house, Lady Chesterfield and Lady Carnarvon—a charming good-humoured old lady, and a Mr. Townshend were there. Lord Carnarvon talked much of the interests of regular work and the unutterable weariness of interruptions. Lord Stanhope was very agreeable at dinner, but fell asleep afterwards. The younger Lady Carnarvon, with her hair sprinkled with diamonds, looked unspeakably lovely.”

“Holmhurst, July 19, 1874.—I know half my friends wonder how I can like the change from the intellectual interests and luxurious life of London to the society of the bumble-bees and butterflies in this little hermitage; but I am sure the absolute quietude is very good for one, and I rush into my work at once, and get through no end of it. I came away from London, however, rather pining to stay for the party at Holland House, because I thought it was a duty to Lea and Miss Leycester, and I experienced the bathos, which so often comes when one is rather conceited about a little piece of self-sacrifice, of finding they would both much rather I had gone to the party, that they might have heard all about it!

“Miss Leycester is very cheerful, and greatly enjoys her summer retreat here—sitting out amid the scent of the lime-flowers: being wheeled about in her chair amongst the baskets of geraniums: having tea upon the terrace, &c. Another sweet old lady cousin, Miss Tatton, who cannot walk at all, is just arriving for a fortnight, and the Hospice is quite full of dear feeble beings.

“As to the little troubles about which you ask me, I can only reply in the words of Delatouche to George Sand, ‘Patientez avec le temps et l’expérience, et soyez tranquille: ces deux tristes conseilleurs viendront assez vite.’

“I shall be very anxious to hear about your German travels.... To me, if one is not in a fever about going on, the lingering in the wonderful old towns by the way, so full of a past deeply written still on their remains, is far more interesting than that part of the tour which all the world takes, and the little glimpses of people and life which one gets in them give one far more to think about afterwards. Würtzburg and Ratisbon I forbid you to pass unseen: they used to be reached, toiled after with such labour and fatigue; and now, in these railway days, they are generally—passed.”

“July 29.—I have been in London again for two days. On Tuesday Sir Howard Elphinstone, the Lefevres, and I went to Holland House, where Lady Castletown and Mrs. Wingfield joined us. We drew in the Arcade, and then Miss Coventry came out in her Spanish hat and called us in to Lady Holland. She was in the west room, sitting in the wide window, and, like a queen, she sat on, moving for nobody. She was, however, very kind, and pleased with our drawings. She talked of the royal ball, and said that the two little Princes were so delighted with Puss in Boots that they pulled his tail incessantly, till at last Puss said, ‘Remember I have got teeth and claws as well as a tail,’ and then they were frightened and left off.

“Wednesday was Victoria Liddell’s wedding-day.[116] All Fulham turned out, and Walham Green was a succession of triumphal arches, garlands, and mottoes. I went with Victor Williamson, and they mistook us for the bridegroom and best man. They told us to go up and wait near the altar, and the Wedding March struck up, but stopped abruptly as we went into a pew.”

“July 30.—Yesterday I dined at Lord Castletown’s, and met, as usual, an interesting party. Lord Castletown [117] talked of his youth at Holland House, when he was brought up there as the ward of Lord Holland. ‘Lord H. was most indulgent, and was always finding amusements for me. One day, two days before the end of the Eton holidays, he asked me to go somewhere. “No, sir,” I said, “I cannot do that, because I have got my holiday task to finish.”—“And what is your task?” said Lord Holland. “Latin verses on St. Paul preaching at Athens, seventy lines.”—” Oh, what a grand subject,” said Lord Holland; “leave it for me. I will do your task for you, and do you go out and amuse yourself.” And he did it all but four lines, and then some important business called him away, and he gave them back to me, saying I must finish them as well as I could. It was a most grand set of verses, and when I gave them up to Keats, he would read them aloud before the whole school. In the middle he said, “Who wrote these, sir?”—“I, sir.”—“You lie, sir,” said Keats. At last he came to the last four lines. “You wrote these, sir,” he said. I heard no more of it, but I never got back my copy of verses.

“‘Once I escaped from Eton, and Lord Holland caught me—found me in the streets of London. He made me get into his carriage at once, and told the man to drive to the White Horse Cellar, whence the coach started for Eton. Unfortunately for me, there was one starting at once, and he made me get in. I remonstrated, saying that I had not got my things. “They shall be sent after you,” he said. “But I shall be flogged, sir.”—“Serve you right, too; I hope you will be flogged,” he said. I looked very piteous, and as I got into the coach he said, “Well, good-bye, John; I hope you’ll be flogged,” and he shook hands with me, and in my hand I found a five-pound note. He was always doing those kind things.

“‘At Holland House I saw everybody most worth seeing in Europe. All that was best flowed in to Lord Holland, and he was equally hospitable to all. The Whigs, not only of England, but of all the world, came to him.’

“Lady Castletown told a story of a Russian Princess who had a very hideous maid. One morning her maid came to her looking very much agitated—perfectly défaite. The Princess asked her what was the matter, when she said, ‘Oh, I have had the most extraordinary night. As I was going to bed, I saw a man’s foot under the bed. I was going to ring the bell when he stopped me by saying, “Oh, don’t ring; I have been brought into this predicament by my hopeless passion for you. I felt that there was no other chance of seeing you, so I ran this risk.” Seeing that he was serious, and never having had a proposal before, I could not but talk to him; and we talked all night, and now it is all settled, and we are to be married.’—‘Well,’ said the Princess, ‘that is very strange; and now I am going to court, so where are my diamonds?’—‘Oh, of course where they always are,’ said the maid; but, when she looked, they were gone: the lover had taken them. ‘Of course that is what he came for,’ said the Princess; ‘do you think he would have come for you?’ And the diamonds were never recovered.”

“August 8.—Came to Chevening. The house strikes one by its overwhelming impression of sadness. The sunshine is all blotted out since last year by the death of its beloved mistress last winter;[119] but I am glad I came, as it gives pleasure, and I am glad I was asked so soon, as it shows their liking to have me. Walking with Lady Mahon [120] between the same beds of tall flowers amongst which I walked with Lady Stanhope last year, she spoke of her very touchingly, how, though there might be many pleasures and interests left in life, there was always the feeling that there never could be what had been—the warm interest in others, the cheerful sunny nature which radiated on all it came in contact with. The illness was very sudden, and little alarm felt till just the end. Her last words to her poor broken-hearted husband were, ‘Do not fret, love; I shall soon be quite well now.’ Lady Mahon said that Lord Stanhope’s heroic determination to bear up for all their sakes enabled them to follow his example.”

“August 10, Sunday.—This afternoon I drove with Lord Stanhope in the long grassy glades of the park, the highest and prettiest of which gave a name to the place—Chevening, ‘the Nook in the Hill.’ We drove afterwards from one fine young Wellingtonia which he had planted to another, examining them all, and came back by the Spottiswoodes’. It is a fine old place, intended as an imitation of the Villa Doria at Rome, and though in nowise like Villa Doria, it has a look of Italy in its groves of ilexes and its cypresses. Lady Frederick Campbell [121] lived here. Her first husband was the Lord Ferrers who was hanged, and some evidence which she gave was instrumental in bringing about his condemnation. Lord Ferrers cursed her, saying that her death would be even more painful than his; and so in fact it was, for in 1807 she was burnt in one of the towers of the house, from spontaneous combustion it is said. Nothing was found of her but her thumb, she was so completely consumed, and ever since it is said that the ghost of Lady Frederick Campbell wanders in the grounds at night, brandishing her thumbless hand, and looking for her lost thumb. The place lends itself to this from its wonderful green glades lined with cedars and guarded by huge grey stone vases.

“Coomb Bank was afterwards bought by the Claytons, who spent all they had in the purchase and had nothing left for keeping it up, so eventually they sold it to Mr. Spottiswoode, the King’s Printer, to whom the monopoly of printing Bibles and Prayer-books has been the source of a large fortune. Mr. Spottiswoode himself is a most remarkable man, who, for hours before his daily walk to the City, is occupied with the highest mathematical speculations, and returns to spend his evenings in studies of the most abstract nature. It is said that the present generation is more indebted to him than to any other person for its improved powers of analysis. He has made no important discoveries yet, but he probably will make them, if he lives long enough. His character seems to be a wonderful combination of profound knowledge and power and profound humility.”

“August 11.—A semi-wet day, spent chiefly in the library, which is attached to the house by a corridor full of portraits. In the afternoon, though it poured, we had a long drive on the Chart. The Spottiswoodes dined, and Mrs. Spottiswoode sang very old music.”

“August 12.—Came to Cobham. It has a beautiful approach across the broken ground of a very wild park with grand old trees. In the hollow is the old house, which is immense, of red brick with projecting oriels and towers. Lady Darnley [122] received me in the library; she has an unintentionally haughty manner, but when you are accustomed to her, you find that she is charming—

and soon it seemed as if one had known her all one’s life. The children came dropping in—two grown-up daughters, two little girls, Lord Clifton, and two fine frank younger boys—Ivo and Arthur. There are many guests.”

“August 13.—A most pleasant morning sitting with Lady Darnley under the fine old trees drawing the house, and seeing the rooms and the pictures, which are mostly dull—chiefly nymphs and satyrs with very few clothes on—two very fine Titians being the redeeming part of the gallery. The pictures are wisely devoted to the public; they are too uncomfortable to live with, and the Chatham people adore them.

“I find this house, where no one is too clever, but every one is pleasant nevertheless, a great rest after Chevening, where I always felt struggling up to an intellectual level which I have no right to and which I cannot attain. Apropos, the last morning Lord Stanhope talked much of the origin of words, and said ‘Beldam’ came from ‘Belle dame’ used satirically.”

“August 15.—Returned to Holmhurst. Mr. Thomas, the landscape gardener, travelled with me. He spoke of an obnoxious American coming into a great hotel at Liverpool and boasting of how much finer American hotels were—‘a hundred times the size,’ &c. The man he addressed listened quietly and then said, ‘But you have not yet seen our great hotel at Southampton, sir; it is a mile long, will accommodate 5000 people, and all the waiters wait on horseback.’—‘I guess that’s a lie, sir,’ said the American. ‘Yes, it is,’ replied the Englishman, ‘but then I thought you were telling lies.’”

“Sept. 28.—A very pleasant visit of two days to the Shaw-Lefevres. They are certainly one of the happiest and most united of families. We made a delightful excursion of sixteen miles to Sutton Court, where they lived formerly. It must be very seldom that, after a lapse of ten years, a father and mother can return to such a place in old age with their family of the original seven unbroken, only many others added. Sutton, the beautiful old house of the Westons, inlaid with terra-cotta, is just the place for a story, with the closed wing where the ivy forces its way through the walls and wreaths round the frames of the old family portraits, which, rent and forlorn, flap in the gusts of wind whenever a distant door opens. Then there is the still-used Roman Catholic chapel, with its priest and its country congregation.”

“Powderham Castle, Oct. 4.—A week here has been most delightful. I had not felt certain how much I might like it, how much my dear friend of old days might be changed by lapse of time and new relations. I can only say that, if he is changed, it is in being more entirely and perfectly delightful than ever, more indescribably thoughtful for others, more filled with plans for the good of every one, and withal so simple, so free from cant, that all else seems unchristian and mundane by comparison. Lady Agnes is the one person I have seen who is quite entirely worthy of him, and it does seem as if a reward of such perfectly beautiful lives was given even in this life, that they should have been thrown together.

“I arrived about half-past five. Powderham has a low park, rising into high ground as it approaches the castle, which has a gateway and courtyard. Here Charlie was walking about amongst orange-trees in large boxes like those at the Tuileries. The bedrooms are dilapidated and falling into decay: Lord Devon will not restore them, nor will he set any of his estates free by selling the rest, but he goes on planting quantities of Wellingtonias in his park and making expensive fences round them. In himself he is charming, with a perfect and entirely courteous manner. Colonel and Mrs. Heygarth have been here, he still lame with shot in the leg from the battle of the Alma, where he was wounded again while lying on the ground, having been noticed because he tried to save Lord Chewton, who was lying near him, and whom a Russian soldier was about to murder.

“With Charlie and Lady Agnes I have been completely at home and perfectly happy. One day we went to the sands, and walked along them to Dawlish. But yesterday was quite charming; I had much wished to go to Lady Morley at Whiteway, and after luncheon we set off—Charlie, Lady Agnes, and I. When the narrow lanes grew too steep for the pony-carriage, we left it under a hedge, and putting a saddle on Jack the pony, rode and walked by turns up the hill and across the wild heath of the open moor: Charlie rode pick-a-back behind Lady Agnes. In the woods we met Morley, greatly surprised to see us arrive thus. The others were out, but Morley showed all the curiosities of the house, which were many in a small way. Just as we were setting off, Lady Morley and Lady Katherine returned, and, after many pro’s and con’s, we stayed to a most amusing dinner, and only set off again at 10 P.M. with lanthorns in pitch darkness. Morley and Lady Katherine walked with us the first three miles over the wild moor with their lanthorn, and then we dived down into the eerie lanes closely overhung with green and fringed with ferns, and most lovely were the effects as the lanthorn revealed one gleam of glistening foliage after another out of the darkness. When we reached home at 11 P.M., we found the servants alarmed and a horseman sent out to search for us; and no wonder.

“I was ill all night from having eaten junket at Whiteway. Charlie says this Devonshire dainty is so called from the Neapolitan joncetta—cream on rushes. In Devon they pretend it is a relic of the Roman invasion!

“We have just been to church at Kenton. An immense funeral party (from last week) walked in, two and two, with great importance and occupied three pews. They sat through the whole service, as if too overwhelmed by their late grief to rise, and the women held handkerchiefs to their faces, and rocked, and shook the crape bows upon their bonnets, while waiting for the expected ‘funeral discourse.’ The people here are delightfully primitive. The other day, at a dinner Lord Devon gave, a man of the place rose to propose his health, and comprised all that needed to be said in—‘I don’t know what Lord Devon du, but all I du know is that if more would du as Lord Devon du du, there wouldn’t be so many as would du as they du du.’

“The wife of a neighbouring clergyman was very seriously ill of a strange and mysterious complaint. It was observed that her worst attacks always came on after her husband had administered the Sacrament to her. Mr. O., who was attending her, studied her case very much, and came to the conclusion that, if the peculiar symptoms she exhibited came from unnatural causes, they could only be produced by a single and very rare drug. Forthwith he set himself to find out if there was any place in the neighbourhood where that drug was sold, and at last he did find it. He asked at the place if they had sold any of it. ‘Oh, yes; to the parson at ——; he bought some yesterday.’ As Mr. O. was going home he met the clergyman himself. He stopped him and said, ‘I have just found out that yesterday you bought some drugs at M.: now if Mrs. X. is worse to-morrow, I shall know what has caused it.’ That afternoon the clergyman went down to the shore to bathe, and he never returned. He was known to be a splendid swimmer, and he was seen to swim far, far out to sea.

“To-night Lady Agnes talked of her grandmother, who, at sixteen, was sent down to speak to the housekeeper at Audley End. The woman, who was raving mad, shut the door and said, ‘Now you must say your prayers at once, for I have a commission from heaven to kill you.’—‘Oh, you cannot dare to do that,’ said the girl without hesitation, taking up a white napkin which lay upon the table and giving it to her with an air of the utmost conviction, ‘for here is a reprieve.’ And the woman gave in at once.”

“Anthony, Plymouth, Oct. 7.—On Monday I went to Exeter to my Aunt FitzGerald,[124] who was greatly pleased to see me. Her house is charming, full of relics, and, as she says, certainly ‘shows that she is somebody.’ Over the dining-room chimney-piece hangs a magnificent Mignet of the Duchess of Portsmouth. There are interesting pictures of Lord Edward FitzGerald, and beautiful china given by Frederick the Great to the Duchess of York, and by her to Pamela. Most of the drawing-room furniture is from Malmaison.

“Yesterday I came here to Anthony (the Pole-Carews). It is a strange drive from Plymouth, through endless courts, dockyards, &c., and then crossing an arm of the sea by a ferry, which was very rough when I came, and worse at night, when the family crossed to a ball; but, as Mr. Carew says, it is very well to have the sea between him and such a population as that of Plymouth.

“This house is perfectly charming—the old hall and its pictures, the oak staircase, the warm tapestried sitting-room—all, as it were, typical of the broad christian kindness and warm-hearted cordiality of its inmates. It is a house in which no ill is ever spoken, and where scandal sits dumb; where, with the utmost merriment, there is the most sincere religious feeling, and yet an entire freedom from cant and what is called ‘religious talking.’ There is here a mutual spirit of forbearance, and an absence of all egotism and self-seeking, which is more instructive than a thousand sermons; and it almost seems as if it were arranged that what might be the asperities of any one member of the family should be softened and smoothed out by the qualities of another. Mrs. Carew is the picture of a warm-hearted, most loving English mother, who enters into and shares all the interests, all the amusements, of her children; and between the father and his sons there is none of the shadow which so often exists, but the truest confidence and friendship.”[125]

“Oct. 11.—It is only by a long stay that one learns all that the Carews really are—the perfect charm of this most united and beautiful family life. Just now their goodness has been especially drawn out by the parting of Captain Ernest Rice and his wife in this house, he going to India for three years. The Carews especially wished it to be here, that they might soften it to both, and wonderfully have they helped them through—cheering, enlivening, nerving, where it was possible, but never intruding comfort when the natural burst of grief must come.

“It has been very pleasant seeing the different guests come and go. The Dean of St. Paul’s and Mrs. Church have been here. He is an excellent person, but very nervous and twitchy.[126] She has a repose of goodness which sets you at rest with her, and imparts a confidence in her at once.

“Sir John and Lady Duckworth were here for two days. His father was military governor of Portsmouth. One day his mother was crossing the green at Mount Wyse when the sentry stopped her. ‘Do you know who you are speaking to?’ she said. ‘No, I don’t,’ he replied, ‘but I know you are not the governor’s cow, and that is the only thing which has any business here.’

“Lord Eliot [127] was also here. I found great grace in his sight, and was most pressingly invited to Port Eliot. I went on Saturday. He met me at the station, and I was almost walked off my feet for four hours, being shown every picture in the house, every plant in the garden, and every walk in the woods. There is a limit in what ought to be shown, and Lord Eliot has never found it out.

“Still Port Eliot is a beautiful place. The house and the grand old church of St. German’s Priory—chiefly Norman—stand close together, on shaven green lawns, radiant with masses of flowers and backed by luxuriant woods, amid which walks open here and there upon glimpses of rock and terraces near one of the salt fiords which are so common in this country.

“Lord St. Germans,[128] who is paralysed, is a beautiful and venerable old figure, with white hair and beard, wheeling himself about in a chair. Lord Eliot returned with me to Devonport, and introduced me to the frightful sights of that most hideous place.

“Some of the pictures at Port Eliot are beautiful, the most so that of Lady Cornwallis—so simple and stately in its lines. It is engraved, but without the figure of a child, probably not born at that time, but introduced afterwards in the picture.

“On Friday I had a charming drive with Mrs. Carew to ‘the Hut,’ through the narrowest lanes imaginable. An old clergyman near this, Mr. Wood, was driving there, who told things in a most slow and solemn manner. He said, ‘Mrs. Wood was dreadfully frightened as we were driving, and said we should be upset. I said, “ My dear, it is imposs”——“ible,” I could not say, for we were over.’

“Last night (Sunday) the family sang hymns beautifully in the hall. ‘No horrid Gregorians,’ said Miss Julia, ‘for the old monks only sang those by way of penance, so why should we sing them?’”

“Stone Hall, Plymouth, Oct. 13.—Another pleasant family home! I came on Monday to the George Edgcumbes. I had known Mrs. Edgcumbe well before at Rome, but had never seen her ‘dear old man,’ her ‘bird,’ &c., as she calls her kind old husband.[129] They do not dislike having married their three daughters at all. It is less embarras in their old age, and they enjoy having a constantly open house full of kindly hospitalities to their neighbours. Young Alwyn Greville has been here twice since I came, and I like him increasingly. It is a charming old house, close to the town, but its tall trees and disordered garden give it a quaint look, which one would be sorry to see rectified. There is a view across the still reaches of the harbour, with masses of timber floating close by and great ships lying far off, nearer the beautiful woods of Mount Edgcumbe. Close by are many delightful walks amongst the rocks, and varied views. We went to ‘the Winter Villa,’ a luxurious sun-palace with a great conservatory, backed by natural rock. The late Lord Mount Edgcumbe lived here for many years, quite helpless from rheumatic gout. It was his mother [130] who was buried alive and lived for many years afterwards. It was known that she had been put into her coffin with a very valuable ring upon her finger, and the sexton went in after the funeral, when the coffin was put into the vault, to get it off. He opened the coffin, but the ring was hard to move, and he had to rub the dead finger up and down. This brought Lady Mount Edgcumbe to life, and she sat up. The sexton fled, leaving the doors of the vault and church open. Lady Mount Edgcumbe walked home in her shroud, and appeared in front of the windows. Those within thought it was a ghost. Then she walked in at the front door. When she saw her husband, she fainted away in his arms. This gave her family time to decide what should be done, and they settled to persuade her it had been a terrible delirium. When she recovered from her faint, she was in her own bed, and she ever believed it had been a dream.

“On Monday we went in the Admiral’s steam-pinnace to Cotehele; Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Freemantle, and Charlie Williamson with us. I sat outside the little cabin, and it was charming—gliding up the quiet river past the richly wooded banks. Up steep woods we walked to Cotehele, an unaltered old house, with gate-tower, courtyard, chapel, armour-hung hall, and dark tapestried bedrooms. Within the entrance are ever-fresh stains like blood, which you can mop up with blotting paper. Sir Richard Edgcumbe went out, bidding the porter, on peril of his life, to let no one in without a password. To prove his obedience, he came back himself and demanded entrance. The porter, recognising his master’s voice, let him in, upon which Sir Richard cleft open his skull with his battle-axe as he entered. The so-called blood forms a dark pool, and looks as if it had been spilt yesterday. Some say it is really a fungus which only grows where blood has been shed, and that the same existed on the site of the scaffold on Tower Hill.

“In the wood of Cotehele is a little chapel standing on a rock above the river. It was built by one of the Edgcumbes in the Wars of the Roses, who, closely pursued, vowed it if he escaped in safety. In desperation he threw his cap and coat into the river from hence, and concealed himself in a hollow tree: his enemies thought he was drowned.”

“Rockwood, Oct. 16.—I came from Plymouth here to the John Boyles’. Mr. Boyle is failing rapidly, tenderly cared for by his son Edmund and his daughter Mrs. Quin. The house is delightful and most comfortable. We have been a charming drive by Babbicombe and Watcombe. At St. Mary Church we saw the two great churches—Roman Catholic and High Church. In the churchyard of the latter Bishop Phillpotts and his wife are buried under simple crosses of grey Cornish granite. Watcombe is a curiously tumbled valley, full of grassy knolls interrupted by red rocks.”

“Abbots Kerswell, Oct. 26.—I have been very glad to see this place—my cousin Marcus Hare’s home. We have been several excursions—to Berry Pomeroy, an old castle too much overgrown by woods, named from the Cotentin family of Pommeraye: to Sharpham, a pretty place on the Dart with lovely grounds: and to Darlington, a fine old place of the Champerownes. Two more days at Powderham have given another most happy sight of Charlie and Lady Agnes. Quite a large party were there—the Dowager Lady Fortescue and her pleasant Irish sister Miss Gale; Lord Fortescue with his three daughters and a pleasant and very good-looking midshipman son, Seymour; Sir Edward, Lady, and Miss Hulse, and Miss A. Grosvenor, &c.

“Lord Fortescue [131] talked much of Mr. Beresford Hope, his oddities and his wisdom—how at Oxford he puzzled all the Dons and frightened them very considerably by his questions from the Fathers and obscure Churchmen: how some friend of his, seeing in one of Mr. Hope’s books the family motto, ‘At Spes non fracta,’ wrote beneath, ‘So Hope is not cracked.’

“‘In these days of Homeopathy and Romanism,’ said Lord Fortescue, ‘one never knows where one is. I never knew what peace or comfort was till I took to leaving out the prefix to the word “vert.” Neither party can be offended by your speaking of “a vert to Homeopathy” or “a vert to Romanism.”’

“He talked much of different public men—of the accuracy of Disraeli’s name for Mr. Cardwell—an inferior imitation of Peel—‘Peel and water:’ of Lord Russell, the ‘abruptness and deadness’ of most of his remarks, and yet how some of them had passed into a proverb; for instance, his definition of a proverb, ‘One man’s wit and every man’s wisdom:’ of Peel’s personal shyness and his awkward way of walking up the House, on which occasions O’Connor used to say, ‘Oh, there goes Peel with his two left legs.’”

“Ford Castle, Oct. 29.—I came here yesterday after a weary journey from Devonshire to Northumberland. Only Lady Sarah Lindsay, her two daughters, and Alick Yorke are here. This morning we had most interesting visitors. Two women were seen coming in under the gateway, one in a red cloak, the other carrying a bundle. It was Her Majesty Queen Esther Faa and the Princess Ellin of the Gipsies!

“When she had had her breakfast, the Queen came up into the library. She has a grand and beautiful old face, and she was full of natural refinement and eloquence. She said how she would not change places with any one, ‘not even with the Queen upon the throne,’ for ‘God was so good to her;’ that she ‘loved to wander,’ and that she wanted nothing since she ‘always drove her own pair,’ meaning her legs.

“She spoke very simply of her accession—that she was the last of the Faas; that she succeeded her uncle King William; that before him came her great-uncle, of whom we ‘must have read in history, Jocky Faa;’ that as for her subjects, she ‘couldna allude to them,’ for they were such a set that she kept herself clear of them; that she had had fourteen children, but they were none of them Faas. She spoke of her daughter as ‘the Princess that I have left downstairs,’ but all she said was quite simple and without any assumption. She sang to us a sort of paraphrase of Old Testament history. Lady Waterford asked her if there was anything she would like to have. She said she cared for nothing but rings—all her family liked them; that her daughter, Princess Ellin, had wished to have the ring Lady Waterford gave her when she last came to Ford, but that she had told her she ‘never meant to take off her petticoats till she went to bed;’ that next to rings, she liked ‘a good nate pair of shoes,’ for she ‘didna like to gang confused about the feet.’

“When she went away she blessed us. She said to Alick, ‘You are a bonnie lad, and one can see that you belong to the Board of Health.’ She said to me that she loved Lady Waterford, so that, ‘if it wouldna be too bould,’ she should ‘like to take her in her arms and kiss her and cuddle her to her old bosom.’”[132]

“Oct. 30.—It has been very pleasant having Alick Yorke here. He is most amusing. His impersonations are wonderful, and his singing very good. Owing to his being here, Lady Waterford has talked much of her childhood at Wimpole,[133] the delights of visits to the dairy, and receiving great hunches of brown bread and little cups of cream there, and how, with her ‘mind’s nose,’ she still smelt the smell of a particular little cupboard near her nursery, &c.

“Yesterday we walked to Crookham, as Lady Waterford wished to visit a man dying there of consumption. Lady Sarah Lindsay went in the donkey-chair. She talked of Stichill, the old Pringle place on the other side of the Tweed. It is now inhabited by a coal-master named Baird, who has amassed an immense fortune, but retains all the old simplicity of his character. He bought a quantity of books, from the idea of their being proper furniture for the house, but when there was a discussion as to whether they should be bound in Russia or Morocco, said, ‘Na, but I will just ha’ them bound i’ Glasgow, my ain native place.’ In the evening Lady Waterford sang to us—her voice like a silver clarion and most touching—‘Far away, far away,’ till with the melting words dying into such indescribable sweetness, one’s whole soul seemed borne upwards.”

“Oct. 31.—Lady Waterford said, ‘Now I must tell you a story. Somers [134] came to Highcliffe this year. I like having Somers for a cousin, he is always so kind and pleasant, and tells me so many things that are interesting. I felt it particularly this year, for he was suffering so much from a piece of the railroad that had got into his eye and he was in great pain, but he was just as pleasant as ever. “Oh, love has sore eyes,” he said, but he would talk. The next day he insisted on going off to Lymington to see Lord Warwick,[135] who was there, and who had been ill; and it was an immense drive, and when he came back, he did not come down, and Pattinson said, “Lord Somers is come back, but he is suffering so much pain from his eye that he will not be able to have any dinner.” So I went up to sit with him. He was suffering great pain, and I wanted him not to talk, but he said, “Oh, no; I have got a story quite on my mind, and I really must tell it you.” And he said that when he got to Lymington, he found Lord Warwick ill in bed, and he said, “I am so glad to see you, for I want to tell you such an odd thing that has happened to me. Last night I was in bed and the room was quite dark (this old-fashioned room of the inn at Lymington which you now see). Suddenly at the foot of the bed there appeared a great light, and in the midst of the light the figure of Death just as it is seen in the Dance of Death and other old pictures—a ghastly skeleton with a scythe and a dart: and Death balanced the dart, and it flew past me, just above my shoulder, close to my head, and it seemed to go into the wall; and then the light went out and the figure vanished. I was as wide awake then as I am now, for I pinched myself hard to see, and I lay awake for a long time, but at last I fell asleep. When my servant came to call me in the morning, he had a very scared expression of face, and he said, ‘A dreadful thing has happened in the night, and the whole household of the inn is in the greatest confusion and grief, for the landlady’s daughter, who slept in the next room, and the head of whose bed is against the wall against which your head now rests, has been found dead in her bed.’”[136]

“Nov. 1, Sunday.—Lady Waterford has talked much of how few people in the world each person has to whom their deaths would make a real void; that she had scarcely any one—General Stuart perhaps, and Lady Jane; that others would be sorry at the time, but that it would to them make no blank; that somehow it would be pleasant to leave more of a void, but that even with brothers and sisters it was seldom so. I spoke of her own sister and of the great grief her death had been. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a great grief, but still it is wonderful how little we had been together—scarcely three years, putting all the weeks together, out of the fourteen years we had been married. Of all my relations, Mama is certainly the greatest loss to me, we had been so much together latterly, and were so much to each other.’

“Lady Waterford talked much of her mother’s life in Paris as ambassadress, and of her own birth there at the Embassy. ‘I went many years after with Mama to Spa, and there was a very agreeable old gentleman there, to whom we talked at the table-d’hôte. He found out that we knew Paris and the people there, and then he talked, not knowing who we were, of the different ambassadresses. “Celle que j’ai preféré de toutes les ambassadrices,” he said, “c’était Lady Granville.” He saw somehow that he had not said quite the right thing, and next day he wanted to make the amende, and he talked of the Embassy again before all the people, of this room and that room, and then he said, “Est ce que c’était dans cette chambre, Miladi, que vous êtes accouchée de Miladi Waterford!” He was a M. de Langy, and was a very interesting person. His family belonged to the petite noblesse, and at the time of the flight to Varennes, after the royal family was captured, theirs was one of the houses to which they were brought to rest and refresh on the way,—for it was the custom then, when there were so few inns. M. de Langy’s mother was a staunch royalist, and when she knew that the King and Queen were coming, she prepared a beautiful little supper, everything as nice as she could, and waited upon them herself. When they were going away, the Queen, who had found it all most comfortable, said, “Où est donc la maîtresse de la maison? j’ai ête si bien ici, je voudrais la remercier avant de partir.” Madame de Langy, who was waiting, said simply, “J’étais la maîtresse de la maison avant que votre majesté y est entrée.”’

“We went to church at Etal in the afternoon. Both there and at Ford, it being All Saints’ Day, the sermons were wholly in exaltation of the saints, church services, and salvation by works. Lady Waterford was pained by it: coming back she spoke of a simple rule of doctrine:—

In the evening she talked much of her first visit to Italy, her only visit to Rome. ‘Char. was just married then, and I was just come out: we went pour un passe-temps. We travelled in our own carriage, and the floods had carried away the bridges, and it was very difficult to get on. It was the year of the cholera, and we had to pass quarantine. My father knew a great many of the people in authority, and we hoped to get leave to pass it in one of the larger towns. Mantua was decided upon, but was eventually given up because of the unhealthiness, and we had to pass ten days at Rovigo. We arrived at last at Bologna. The people were greatly astonished at the inn when we asked if the Cardinal Legate was at home: it was as if we had asked for the Pope: and they were more astonished still the next day when he came to call upon us. We went to a party at his palace. He was Cardinal Macchi. I shall never forget that party or the very odd people we met—I see them now. The Cardinal was in despair because the theatres were closed—“Je vous aurais preté ma loge, et je vous aurais donné des glaces!” The next day Rossini came to see us—“Je suis un volcan éteint,” he said. Afterwards we went to Rome and stayed four months there. I liked the society part best—the balls at the Borgheses’ and those at the Austrian Embassy: they were great fun.’

“On Saturday we went to Norham—the Lindsays and I. Even coming from Devonshire, the interest of this country strikes one excessively. It is bare, it is even ugly, but it is strangely interesting. There is such breadth and space in the long lines and sweeping distances, amidst which an occasional peel-tower stands like a milestone of history, and there is such a character in the strange, jagged, wind-tossed, storm-stricken trees. But it became really beautiful when we descended into the lovely valley of the Tweed with all its radiant autumnal tints, and sat under the grand mass of ruin, with great flights of birds ever circling round it and crying in the still air.”

“Nov. 4.—Yesterday we went quite a round of visits, seeing different phases of Border family life. We lunched at the Hirsel (Lord Home’s)—a great Scotchy-looking house in a rather featureless park. There were two tables and an immense party at luncheon—Mr. and Lady Gertrude Rolle, Lord Romney, and others. I did not think it an interesting place, though it contains a fine portrait of Sir Walter Scott by Raeburn; but Lady Waterford delighted in the happy family life, and says whenever she sees Lord Home she is reminded of the Frenchman who said, ‘Oh, mon Dieu! pourquoi est ce qu’il n’est pas mon père?’

“We went next to Sir John Marjoribanks of Lees. He was just come in from hunting, and his wife was fishing in the Tweed. We went to her there: she was standing up at the end of a boat which a man was rowing, and the whole picture was reflected in a river so smooth that it looked as if they were floating on a mirror.

“Then we went to the Baillie Hamiltons at Lenels, another and prettier place on the Tweed near Coldstream Bridge. The house contained much that was interesting, especially two enormous Chelsea vases representing ‘Air’ and ‘Water.’ Mrs. Baillie Hamilton was a daughter of Lord Polwarth—very pleasing, and her sister came in with the most perfect manners of good-breeding, &c. Then we went to the Askews.

“Lady Waterford stopped to take our luncheon—prepared but not eaten—to a poor man in a consumption. She beguiled the way by describing her visit to Windsor, and the Queen showing her the Mausoleum.

“She talked also of the passion for jewels: that she could understand it in the case of such persons as Madame Mère, who, when remonstrated with on buying so many diamonds, said, ‘J’accumule, j’accumule,’ for it had been very useful to her. Apropos of not despising dress, she gave me the quotation from Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey [139]—

“Last Monday, having a great deal of natural talent for singing, reciting, &c., in the castle, Lady Waterford would not keep it to herself, and asked all the village people to the school, and took her guests there to sing, &c., to them. At the end, just before ‘God save the Queen,’ she was surprised by Miss Lindsay’s ode:—

“Nov. 7.—Lord and Lady Warwick have been here for some days. She is so simple and genial, that the Italian word simpatica is the only one to describe her.[140]

“Yesterday, Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I had a delightful long walk across the moor and through charming relics of forest. It was a succession of pictures—long extents of moss backed by ferny hills, downy uplands breaking into red rocks, lighted here and there by the white stem of an old birch-tree, and overlooking the softest expanses of faint blue distance. We found several curious fungi. Lady Waterford said that at Balmoral the Duchess of Edinburgh shocked the royal household by eating almost all she found. They thought she would be poisoned; but in Russia they are accustomed to eat fungi, and they make little patties of them which they eat in Lent when meat is forbidden—‘and they taste so like meat that there is almost the pleasure of doing something which is not quite right.’

“The objects of the walk were two. One was the fall of the Rowling Lynn in a chaos of red and grey rocks overhung by old birch-trees, a spot which seems photographed in Coleridge’s lines—

The other was the sacrificial stone covered with the mysterious rings which have given rise to boundless discussion among Northumbrian archæologists. When we reached home, we found the Bloomfields arrived.[141] In the evening Lady Bloomfield told a curious story.

“‘I was very intimate at Vienna with the Princess Reuss, whose first husband was Prince of Anhalt. She was a niece of Queen Teresa of Bavaria. She told me that her aunt was at Aschaffenberg with the intention of going next day to Munich. In the evening the lady-in-waiting came in and asked the Queen if she was intending to give an audience. The Queen said, “Certainly not,” and that “she could not see any one.” The lady then said that there was a lady sitting in the ante-chamber who would not go away. Queen Teresa then desired her brother to go out and find out who it was. He came back much agitated, and said it was sehr unheimlich (very uncanny), for it was the Black Lady, and that when he came up to her she disappeared; for the Bavarian royal family have a Black Lady who appears to them before a death, just as the White Lady appears to the Prussian royal family. The next day the Queen left Aschaffenberg, but being a very kind-hearted woman, she sent back her secretary to fetch some petitions which had been presented, but which she had not attended to, and when the secretary came into her room, he found the Black Lady standing by the table where the papers were, but she vanished on his approach. That night, when the old castellan of Aschaffenberg and his wife were in bed, the great bell of the castle began to toll, and they remembered that it could toll by no human agency, as they had the key of the bell-tower.

“At that moment Queen Teresa died at Munich. She arrived at three: at five she was seized with cholera: at eleven she was dead.’”

“Nov. 8.—The two Miss Lindsays and I have been for a most wild excursion into the Cheviot valleys to the Heathpool Lynn—a ravine full of ancient alders and birch, and a mountain torrent tossing through grey rocks. The carriage met us at a farmhouse—a most desolate place, cut off by snow all through the winter months, and almost always cold and bleak.”

“Nov. 9.—Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I walked to distant plantations to see some strange grass, which, from being surrounded by water at times, had been matted together so that it formed a thick trunk, and branched out at the top like a palm-tree, with the oddest effect. Lady Waterford talked of an old woman she knew, whose husband was very ill, dying in fact. One day when she went to see him, she found his wife busy baking cakes, and she—the old woman—said that as he was dying she was getting them ready for his funeral. Going again some days later, Lady Waterford found the man still alive, and she could not resist saying to the woman that she thought her cakes must be getting rather stale. ‘Yes, that they are,’ said the wife; ‘some folks are so inconsiderate.’

“When we returned to the castle, we found that old Mr. Fyler, the Vicar of Cornhill, had arrived, and he was very amusing all evening. He talked much of Sir Horace St. Paul (a neighbour here), who had become a teetotaler, and had thrown away all the wine in his cellar. His mother was a daughter of Lord Ward, who had challenged and run through with his sword a brother officer, who, when he was engaged to his wife, had snatched away a brooch he had given her and exhibited it at mess as her present. It was the Lord Ward who was brother of Lady St. Paul, who was made the prominent figure in the picture by Copley of the death of the Earl of Chatham. It is a grand portrait in a fine picture, and Copley gave the life-size sketch which he made for it to the Ward family.

“When Sir Horace St. Paul was at college, he found a man lying drunk in the quadrangle and tried to make him get up. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said; ‘you don’t even know who I am.’—‘Yes, I know very well who you are,’ said the man; ‘you’re the fellow that wrote an epistle to Timothy and never got an answer.’ I have heard this quoted as one of the naturally clever retorts of drunken men.

“Lady Waterford told Lord Grey’s story of the death—in a court in Edinburgh—of a naval captain who had been noted for his cruelties at sea, but especially in the slave trade. Mental terror made his death-bed most appalling. According to Scottish custom, the family opened the door for the spirit to pass more easily, when, to their horror, the bloody head of a black man suddenly rolled into the room.

“The dying man gave the most fearful scream, and his relations rushed to his bedside. When they looked round, the head was gone, but there was fresh blood upon the floor. To them it seemed inexplicable, but the fact was that Professor Owen had been attending an anatomical séance at which the body of a black man had been dissected, and there was something so curious in the way in which the head had been attached to the body, that he had obtained leave to carry it home in a cloth, that he might examine it more carefully. It was a very slippery, wet day, and as he was passing the open door of the dying man, the Professor had stumbled, and the head, slipping out of the cloth, had rolled into the house; then, in the moment when they were all occupied with the dying man, he had pursued it and whipped it up into the cloth again, and hoped it had not been observed.”[143]

“Nov. 10.—Last night Mr. Fyler told his famous story of ‘the nun.’ It is briefly this:—

“A son of Sir J. Stuart of Allanbank, on the Blackadder, where Lady Boswell lives now, was in Rome, where he fell in love with a novice in one of the convents. When his father heard of it, he was furious, and summoned him home. Young Stuart told the nun he must leave Rome, and she implored him to marry her first; but he would do nothing of the kind, and, as he left, she flung herself under his carriage; the wheels went over her, and she was killed. The first thing the faithless lover saw on his return to Scotland was the nun, who met him in the bridal attire she was to have worn, and she has often appeared since, and has become known in the neighbourhood as ‘Pearlin Jean.’ On one occasion seven ministers were called in to lay her, but with no effect.

“Mr. Fyler says that when people on the Border are not quite right in their heads, they are said to ‘want twopence in the shilling.’ A poor cooper at Cornhill was one of these, and one day he disappeared. The greatest search was made for the missing man, for he was a Johnson, and almost all the village at Cornhill are Johnsons—fishermen. So every one went out to look, and though nothing was found, they came to the conclusion that he had been drowned in the Tweed.

“That evening Mr. Fyler observed that his church windows had not been opened as he desired, and going up to them and looking in, he saw a white figure wrapped in a sheet walking up and down the aisle and flapping its arms. He went back and said, ‘I’ve found the lost man. He is in the church, and two of the strongest men in the place must go with me and get him out.’ But if any one else had looked into the church, they would have thought it was a ghost. As it was, one of the men who came to get him out fainted dead away.”

“Winton Castle, Nov. 14.—Dear Lady Ruthven is stone deaf, almost blind, and her voice like waggon-wheels, but—in her eighty-sixth year—she is as kind and good and as truly witty as ever.

“On Friday we went to Gosford—five in the carriage. It is a dull flat park, redeemed by being so near the sea, and contains two great houses close to each other, of which one—the modern one—has never been inhabited, as sea-sand was mixed with its mortar. We found old Lady Wemyss [144] sitting behind a screen, much like a lady-abbess in appearance. I was most warmly received by two child-friends—little Lady Eva Greville and her brother Sidney—a charming boy with dark eyes and light flowing hair. Then Lady Warwick came in with Lady Jane Dundas, and, with one hand-candle, showed us the pictures, just as Lady Elcho did many years ago.

“Yesterday we went to Ormistoun, an attractive place, to see the Dempsters, the uncle and aunt who brought up the authoress of ‘Vera’—charming old people. He talked much of former times in Scotland, and said that much the most agreeable women in the country were considered to be Lady Ruthven and Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie. He described the attachment of one of Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie’s sisters—a certain very untidy Frances Mackenzie—to Thorwaldsen, but they were not allowed to marry. The last word Thorwaldsen spoke was ‘Francesca.’

“In the garden of Ormistoun is a yew six hundred years old, but with every appearance of being still quite in its prime, growing hard, and likely to do so for another six hundred years. John Knox is said to have preached under it.

“I sat by Lady Ruthven at dinner. She talked of the quaintnesses of her village people. The schoolmaster was very particular about pronunciation. When his wife died, some one came in and said, ‘What a very lamēntable,’ &c.—‘Oh, do say lamentable,’ interrupted the schoolmaster. When the minister was marrying a couple he said, ‘Art thou willing to take this woman,’ &c.?—‘Yes, I am willing,’ replied the bridegroom, ‘but I had rather it had been her sister.’

“To-day Lady Ruthven walked with me to the kirk. She had neither her ‘speaking tubes’ nor her slate, so I could not answer her, but she told me the whole story of Lady Belhaven’s death, how it was ‘all arranged as was best for her, just a gentle passing away, almost unconscious, but perfectly happy;’ yet how, though one glibly said, ‘God’s will be done,’ it was so hard to feel it. In returning, she talked of the trees, how the forester wished her to cut one down where there were two close together, but how she was ‘unwilling to separate friends who had lived together so long.’

“One day Lady Ruthven had a letter asking for the character of her footman, John Smith, who was leaving her—if he was ‘clever, honest, sober, a Christian, a recipient of the Holy Communion,’ &c. She answered, ‘If John Smith could answer to half your demands, I should have married him long ago.’”

“Raby Castle, Nov. 20.—A week here with a large party, which I began to think delightful as soon as I could cure myself of the uncomfortable sensation of being so much behind my kind, all the other people knowing each other better, and being more in possession of their tongues and faculties than myself. ‘Be insignificant, and you will make no enemies,’ is, however, a very good piece of advice I once received. Interesting members of the circle have been the Fitzwilliams from Wentworth, and the Quaker family of Pease, of whom the mother is one of the sweetest, most charming people I ever saw, like a lovely picture by Gainsborough, and with the expression of one of Perugino’s angels. But the great feature of the visit has been the Butes, and I have been absorbed by them. I never expected to make much acquaintance, but from the first Lord Bute [145] annexed himself to me, perhaps because he thought I was shy, and because of other people he felt very shy himself. He has great sweetness and gentleness of manner, and a good-looking, refined face.

“Lady Bute [146] says the happiest time in her life was the winter they spent in Majorca, because then she got away, not only from all the fine people, but from all the people who wanted to know what they thought must be the fine people; but that it was such a bore even there bearing a name for which the natives would raise their prices. Next winter they mean to spend at Nazareth, where they will hire the Bishop’s house; ‘no one can get at us there.’ They are supposed to long very anxiously for the birth of a son, for now—

“I walked with Lord Bute each day. It was like reading ‘Lothair’ in the original, and most interesting at first, but became somewhat monotonous, as he talks incessantly—winding into his subject like a serpent, as Johnson said of Burke—of altars, ritual, liturgical differences; and he often almost loses himself, and certainly quite lost me, in sentences about ‘the Unity of the Kosmos,’ &c.

“He spoke much of Antichrist—the mark 666, the question if it had been Nero, or if Nero was only a type, and the real Antichrist still to come; and of the other theory, that the reason why no ten thousand were sealed of Dan was that Antichrist was to come from that tribe, the dying words of Jacob tending to this belief.

“He talked much of fasting; that he had often fasted for twenty-four hours, and that he preferred fasting as the practice existed ‘before the folly of collations.’ I asked if it did not make him ill. He said ‘no,’ for if the hunger became too great he took a cigar, which allayed it, and that he went out and ‘ate the air’ while taking plenty of exercise; that poor people seldom became thin in Lent, because what they did eat was bread and potatoes. I said I thought it must make him dreadfully ill-tempered to be so hungry, and thus conduce rather to vice than virtue. He said he did not think it made him vicious; but he agreed with me that persons naturally inclined to be ill-tempered had better fast alone.

“From what he said it was evident that he would like to give up all his goods to the poor, and that the Island of Bute stands a chance of becoming a vast monastery. He talked much of the Troitska in Russia, where he had been; that the monks there were too lax, and that the really desirable monastic life was that of those who lived in the cells established some miles off by Philaret, which were subterranean, with a stove, and no other furniture. When mass was celebrated in their chapel, these anchorite monks could faintly discern, down a channel hollowed in the rock, the glitter of the candles on the altar, and occasionally, mingled with this, appeared a ray or two of bluish light, and this was daylight. It was the only time they ever saw it.

“Amongst the young men here is a young Ashburnham, third son of Lord Ashburnham, who reads Greek in his room for his amusement, and is a lawyer, but says he has not yet been able to realise the hymn, ‘Brief life is here our portion.’ He told me that the expression of minding your p’s and q’s came from toupets and queues.”

“Whitburn Hall, Nov. 24.—I returned here from Raby with my Williamson cousins,[148] who are always so kind that they make one feel at Whitburn ‘où peut’on être mieux qu’au sein de sa famille?’ The place has much interest of its own kind. There is something even fine in the vast black cloud of Sunderland smoke, obliterating the horizon and giving such an idea of limitless and mysterious space with the long lines of white breakers foaming up through the gloom; while at night the ghastly shriek of the fog-horn and the tolling of the bell, and the occasional boom of a cannon through the storm, give such dramatic effect that one forgets the waste inland landscape, the blackened hedges and wind-stricken coalfields.”

“Ravensworth, Nov. 29.—I was one night with poor Cousin Susan (Davidson), much aged and altered. She lay chiefly on a sofa in her own sitting-room, with her two favourite white dogs—the ‘boy and girl’—Fritz and Lulu, by her side, and half the birds in the neighbourhood pecking bread and potatoes outside the windows. It seemed a dreary life to leave her to, but she does not feel it so; hers is one of the cases in which only the body, and not the mind, seems to require nourishment. Thursday, when I came away, was her rent-day, and she wished me to go and see her tenants and speak to them at dinner, and said to the agent, ‘I wish that all my tenants should see my cousin;’ but fortunately the train came at the right moment to save me from this alarming encounter, which would have given a (probably) wrong impression—at least to the tenants.

“Lord Ravensworth [149] welcomed me with such cordial kindness, and has been so genial and good to me ever since, that I quite feel as if in him I had found the ideal uncle I have always longed for, but never before enjoyed. He is certainly the essence of an agreeable and accomplished scholar, with a faultless memory and apt classical quotations for every possible variety of subject. He told me, and made me write down, the following curious story:—

“It is going back a long time ago—to the time of Marie Antoinette. It will be remembered that the most faithful, the most entirely devoted of all the gallant adherents of Marie Antoinette was the Comte de Fersen. The Comte de Fersen was ready to lay down his life for the Queen, to go through fire and water for her sake; and, on her side, if Marie Antoinette had a corner in her heart for any one except the King, it was for the Comte de Fersen.[150] When the royal family escaped to Varennes, it was the Comte de Fersen who dressed up as coachman and drove the carriage; and when the flight to Varennes failed, and when, one after another, he had seen all his dearest friends perish upon the scaffold, the Comte de Fersen felt as if the whole world was cut away from under his feet, as if life had nothing whatever left to offer, and he sunk into a state of apathy, mental and physical, from which nothing whatever seemed to rouse him; there was nothing whatever left which could be of any interest to him.

“The physicians who were called in said that the Comte de Fersen must have absolute change; that he must travel for an unlimited time; that he must leave France; at any rate, that he must never see again that Paris which was so terrible to him, which was stained for ever with the blood of the Queen and Madame Elizabeth. And he was quite willing; all places were the same to him now that his life was left desolate: he did not care where he went.

“He went to Italy, and one afternoon in November he drove up to what was then, as it is still, the most desolate, weird, ghastly inn in Italy—the wind-stricken, storm-beaten, lava-seated inn of Radicofani. And he came there not to stay; he only wanted post-horses to go on as fast as he could, for he was always restless to be moving—to go farther on. But the landlord said, ‘No, it was too late at night; there was going to be a storm; he could not let his horses cross the pass of Radicofani till the next morning.’—‘But you are not aware,’ said the traveller, ‘that I am the Comte de Fersen.’—‘I do not care in the least who you are,’ said the landlord; ‘I make my rules, and my rules hold good for one as well as for another.’—‘But you do not understand probably that money is no object to me, and that time is a very great object indeed. I am quite willing to pay whatever you demand, but I must have the horses at once, for I must arrive at Rome on a particular day.’—‘Well, you will not have the horses,’ said the landlord; ‘at least to-morrow you may have them, but to-night you will not; and if you are too fine a gentleman to come into my poor hotel, you may sleep in the carriage, but to-night you will certainly not have the horses.’

“Then the Comte de Fersen made the best of what he saw was the inevitable. He had the carriage put into the coach-house, and he himself came into the hotel, and he found it, as many hundreds of travellers have done since, not half so bad as he expected. It is a bare, dismal, whitewashed barracky place, but the rooms are large and tolerably clean. So he got some eggs or something that there was for supper, and he had a fire made up in the best of the rooms, and he went to bed. But he took two precautions; he drew a little round table that was there to the head of the bed and he put two loaded pistols upon it; and, according to the custom of that time, he made the courier sleep across the door on the outside.

“He went to bed, and he fell asleep, and in the middle of the night he awoke with the indescribable sensation that people have, that he was not alone in the room, and he raised himself against the pillow and looked out. From a small latticed window high in the opposite whitewashed wall the moonlight was pouring into the room, and making a white silvery pool in the middle of the rough boarded oak floor. In the middle of this pool of light, dressed in a white cap and jacket and trousers, such as masons wear, stood the figure of a man looking at him. The Comte de Fersen stretched out his hand over the side of the bed to take one of his pistols, and the man said, ‘Don’t fire: you could do no harm to me, you could do a great deal of harm to yourself: I am come to tell you something.’ And the Comte de Fersen looked at him: he did not come any nearer; he remained just where he was, standing in the pool of white moonlight, half way between the bed and the wall; and he said, ‘Say on: tell me what you have come for.’ And the figure said, ‘I am dead, and my body is underneath your bed. I was a mason of Radicofani, and, as a mason, I wore the white dress in which you now see me. My wife wished to marry somebody else; she wished to marry the landlord of this hotel, and they beguiled me into the inn, and they made me drunk, and they murdered me, and my body is buried beneath where your bed now stands. Now I died with the word vendetta upon my lips, and the longing, the thirst that I have for revenge will not let me rest, and I never shall rest, I never can have any rest, till I have had my revenge. Now I know that you are going to Rome; when you get to Rome, go to the Cardinal Commissary of Police, and tell him what you have seen, and he will send men down here to examine the place, and my body will be found, and I shall have my revenge.’ And the Comte de Fersen said, ‘I will.’ But the spirit laughed and said, ‘You don’t suppose that I’m going to believe that? You don’t imagine that you are the only person I’ve come to like this? I have come to dozens, and they have all said, “I will,” and afterwards what they have seen has seemed like a hallucination, a dream, a chimæra, and before they have reached Rome the impression has vanished altogether, and nothing has been done. Give me your hand.’ The Comte de Fersen was a little staggered at this; however, he was a brave man, and he stretched out his hand over the foot of the bed, and he felt something or other happen to one of his fingers; and he looked, and there was no figure, only the moonlight streaming in through the little latticed window, and the old cracked looking-glass on the wall and the old rickety furniture just distinguishable in the half light; there was no mason there, but the loud regular sound of the snoring of the courier was heard outside the bedroom door. And the Comte de Fersen could not sleep; he watched the white moonlight fade into dawn, and the pale dawn brighten into day, and it seemed to him as if the objects in that room would be branded into his brain, so familiar did they become—the old cracked looking-glass, and the shabby washing-stand, and the rush-bottomed chairs, and he also began to think that what had passed in the earlier part of the night was a hallucination—a mere dream. Then he got up, and he began to wash his hands; and on one of his fingers he found a very curious old iron ring, which was certainly not there before—and then he knew.

“And the Comte de Fersen went to Rome, and when he arrived at Rome he went to the Swedish Minister that then was, a certain Count Löwenjelm,[151] and the Count Löwenjelm was very much impressed with the story, but a person who was much more impressed was the Minister’s younger brother, the Count Carl Löwenjelm, for he had a very curious and valuable collection of peasants’ jewelry, and when he saw the ring he said, ‘That is a very remarkable ring, for it is a kind of ring which is only made and worn in one place, and that place is in the mountains near Radicofani.’

“And the two Counts Löwenjelm went with the Comte de Fersen to the Cardinal Commissary of Police, and the Cardinal also was very much struck, and he said, ‘It is a very extraordinary story, a very extraordinary story indeed, and I am quite inclined to believe that it means something. But, as you know, I am in a great position of trust under Government, and I could not send a body of military down to Radicofani upon the faith of what may prove to have been a dream. At any rate (he said) I could not do it unless the Comte de Fersen proved his sense of the importance of such an action by being willing to return to Radicofani himself.’ And not only was the Comte de Fersen willing to return, but the Count Carl Löwenjelm went with him. The landlord and landlady were excessively agitated when they saw them return with the soldiers who came from Rome. They moved the bed, and found that the flags beneath had been recently upturned. They took up the flags, and there—not sufficiently corrupted to be irrecognisable—was the body of the mason, dressed in the white cap and jacket and trousers, as he had appeared to the Comte de Fersen. Then the landlord and landlady, in true Italian fashion, felt that Providence was against them, and they confessed everything. They were taken to Rome, where they were tried and condemned to death, and they were beheaded at the Bocca della Verità.

“The Count Carl Löwenjelm was present at the execution of that man and woman, and he was the person who told the Marquis de Lavalette, who told Lord Ravensworth, who told me. The by-play of the story is also curious. Those two Counts Löwenjelm were the natural sons of the Duke of Sudomania, who was one of the aspirants for the crown of Sweden in the political crisis which preceded the election of Bernadotte. He was, in fact, elected, but he had many enemies, and on the night on which he arrived to take possession of the throne he was poisoned. The Comte de Fersen himself came to a tragical end in those days. He was very unpopular in Stockholm, and during the public procession in which he took part at the funeral of Charles Augustus (1810) he was murdered, being (though it is terrible to say so of the gallant adherent of Marie Antoinette) beaten to death with umbrellas. And that it was with no view to robbery and from purely political feeling is proved by the fact that though he was en grande tenue, nothing was taken away.”

“Hutton, Yorkshire, Nov. 30.—I came here yesterday, arriving in the dark. It was a great surprise, as I expected to find the place amid the Middlesborough smoke, to see from the window on awaking a beautiful view of high moorland fells beyond the terraced gardens. I laugh when I think how the Duchess of Cleveland rejoiced in giving Mrs. Pease such a pleasant change to Raby, to see this intensely luxurious house by Waterhouse, filled with delightful collections of books, pictures, and carved furniture, and its almost Arabian-Night-like conservatories.

“We have been through bitter wind to Guisborough Abbey—only a grand church front standing lonely near a fine avenue of trees in the grounds of Colonel Challoner.

“Mr. and Mrs. Pease are excellent. He is member for Darlington, son and nephew of the famous Pease Brothers. She, formerly a Fox of Falmouth, is one of the most charming people I ever saw, full of the sweetest and simplest natural dignity. She lives in and for her children, and though the mother of six girls and two boys, looks about six-and-twenty herself.[152]

“There is a Mr. Stover here who is amusing. An uncle of his lives in the haunted house at Biddick. One day when he came in from shooting, he hung his hat on a pole-screen, and sat down by the fire to read his newspaper. Presently, looking over his paper, he saw, to his amazement, his hat on the top of the screen nodding at him. He thought he must be dreaming, but watched, and it certainly nodded again. He got up and walked round it, when it seemed still. Then he sat down again and watched it, and it nodded again, and not only that, but the screen itself seemed to be moving bodily towards him. He watched it, and it certainly crossed part of the pattern of the carpet: of this there could be no doubt. Then he could bear it no longer, and he rushed at the screen and knocked it over. Underneath was his tame tortoise.”

“Wentworth Wodehouse, Dec. 3.—This house has a very stately effect as you approach it, with a truly majestic portico. On the first floor is an immense hall like those in the great Roman houses, and on either side diverge the reception rooms, hung with pictures. Amongst the portraits are several of the great Lord Strafford, with his parents, his son, and his two daughters—Anne and Arabella. Of these, the elder married the Marquis of Rockingham, from whom the present owners are descended. The picture by Vandyke of Lord Strafford and his secretary is glorious. The rooms themselves want colour and effect. Sixty guests can stay in the house, and a hundred and twenty can dine without any crowd, but the place needs great parties of this kind, for smaller ones are lost in these vast suites of too lofty rooms. Lord Fitzwilliam [153] is the very type of a high-bred nobleman, and Lady Fitzwilliam [154] has a sweet and gentle manner; but Lady F. is calm and placid, her two daughters calmer and placider, and Lord F. calmest and placidest.

“To-day we were taken by Lord Fitzwilliam to the two churches. One by Pearson is new and most magnificent; the other is old and very ugly, but has interesting monuments. That of Lord Strafford is mural, with his figure kneeling near the altar. The epitaph does not allude to the manner of his death, but, after setting forth his virtues, simply says ‘he died May 8th, 1641.’ The ghost of Lord Strafford is still said to walk down the oak staircase at Wentworth every Friday night, carrying his head. An old gateway with several fragments of the house of his time remain, and many of his books are preserved in the library. My bedroom is hung with white worked with red by his daughter Lady Rockingham.”

“Dec. 4.—Lady Fitzwilliam has been showing us the house. It contains much of interest, especially in the pictures, and they are repeated so often that one learns to know the family faces—Lord Strafford and his three wives, his son and his two daughters by his second wife, and the second Lord Strafford with his wife, who was the daughter of James, Earl of Derby, and Charlotte de la Tremouille. His inscriptions in the Bibles of her father and mother, which are here, and the many memorials he raised to her, are so touching that it is quite a shock to find he married again after her death; but in his will he always speaks of the second as only his “wife,” the first as his “deare wife.” He restored the old church in her memory, and enjoined upon his descendants always to keep it up for her sake.

“Lady Albreda drove us about the park and to the ‘Mausoleum,’ a commemorative monument raised to the Minister Lord Rockingham by his son. It is copied from the Roman monument at S. Remy near Aries, and contains, in a kind of Pantheon, a statue by Nollekens of Lord Rockingham surrounded by his friends. The face is from a mask taken after death, and the figure is full of power and expression, with a deprecatory ‘Oh, pray don’t say such a thing as that.’”

“Temple Newsam, Dec. 6.—This great house is four miles from Leeds, by a road passing through a squalid suburb of grimy houses and muddy lanes, with rotten palings and broken paving-stones, making blackened pools of stagnant water; then black fields succeed, with withered hedges, stag-headed trees, and here and there a mountain of coal refuse breaking the dismal distances. It was almost dark as I drove up the steep park to the house.

“In an immense gallery, hung with red and covered with pictures, like the gallery at Chesney Wold in Bleak House, I found Mrs. Meynell Ingram and Freddie Wood [155] sitting. It was like arriving at a bivouac in the desert; the light from the fire and the lamps gleamed on a little tea-table and a few chairs round it, all beyond was lost in the dark immensity.... Soon other guests arrived—Judge Denman, come for the assizes at Leeds, and his marshal, young Ottaway, the cricketer; Admiral Duncombe, the High Sheriff; Mr. Glyn, Vicar of Beverley, the chaplain; and Sir Frederick Grey and his wife ‘Barberina.’ Some of the pictures are very fine—a portrait by Titian, several Vandykes, Reynolds’ ‘Shepherd Boy,” and some fine Reynolds portraits of Lord and Lady Irvine, the former possessors of this place—the Templar’s Stow of ‘Ivanhoe.’ They left it to their five daughters in turn. The eldest was Lady Hertford, and, if she had two sons, it was to go to the second, but she had only one; the second daughter was Lady Alexander Gordon, who was childless; the third was Mrs. Meynell, mother-in-law of the present possessor.”

“Dec, 7.—Deep snow all to-day and a furious wind. But yesterday we reached Leeds for the assize sermon from the Sheriff’s chaplain, Mr. Glyn,[156] a really magnificent sermon on ‘What is thy life?’ The music also was very fine, and the great church filled with people.

“This house, where Lord Darnley was born, and whence Lord Strafford issued his summons to the Cavaliers to meet in defence of the King, is very curious. In point of amusement, the Judge is the principal feature of the present party, and how he does trample on his High Sheriff! He coolly said to him yesterday that he considered a High Sheriff as ‘dust under his feet;’ and he narrated before him a story of one of his brother judges, who, when his High Sheriff had left his hat in court, not only would not let him go to fetch it, but would not wait while his servants fetched it, and ordered him instantly to take him back to his lodgings without his hat! In court, Judge Denman was annoyed by some stone-breakers outside the window, and was told it would cost a matter of £40 to have them stopped. ‘Stop the noise instantly,’ he said; and the Mayor had to pay for it out of his own pocket. Yesterday, when the snow was so deep, the High Sheriff timidly suggested that they might be snowed up. ‘That is impossible,’ said the Judge; ‘whatever the difficulties, Mr. High Sheriff, you are bound to see me conveyed to Leeds by the opening of the court, if the whole of Leeds is summoned out to cut a way for me.’

“Lord Strafford was here because he borrowed the house of Sir Arthur Ingram as the largest to which to summon the Cavaliers. Sir Arthur was rewarded by Charles II. for his devotion to the Stuarts by being made Viscount Irvine.”

“Ripley Castle, Dec. 12.—In this pleasant hospitable house I greatly miss the gentle presence of the beloved Lady Ingilby, who was so long a kind and warm-hearted friend; but it is pleasant to find her cordial welcome still living in that of her son, Sir Henry, and her pretty graceful daughter-in-law, who is a daughter of Lord Marjoribanks of Ladykirk.

“I found here Count and Countess Bathyany, people I was very glad to see. They retain their old castle in Hungary, where they are magnates of the first rank, but for some years they have lived chiefly in England, at Eaglehurst on the Solent, and receive there during the yachting season. The Countess has remains of great beauty and is wonderfully agreeable. As I sat by her at dinner, she talked much of Lady William Russell,[157] and told me the story of Lord Moira’s appearance, which she had heard from her own lips. “Lady William was at Brighton, where her friend Lady Betty —— was also staying. One day when Lady Betty went to her, she found her excessively upset and discomposed, and she said it was on account of a dream that she had had of her uncle, who, as Lord Moira, had brought her up, and who was then Governor of Malta. She said that she had seen a very long hall, and at the end of the hall a couch with a number of female figures in different attitudes of grief and despair bending over it, as if they were holding up or attending to some sick person. On the couch she saw no one, but immediately afterwards she seemed to meet her Uncle Moira and embraced him, but said, with a start, ‘Uncle, how terribly cold you are!’ He replied, ‘Bessie, did you not know that I am dead?’ She recollected herself instantly and said, ‘Oh, Uncle, how does it look on the other side?’—‘Quite different from what we have imagined, and far, far more beautiful,’ he replied with a radiant smile, and she awoke. Her dream occurred just when Lord Hastings [158] (formerly Lord Moira) died on a couch in a hall at Malta; but she told the circumstances to Lady Betty long before the news came.[159]

“Another story which Countess Bathyany told from personal knowledge was that of Sir Samuel Romilly.

“Lord Grey [160] and his son-in-law, Sir Charles Wood, were walking on the ramparts of Carlisle. The rampart is there still. It is very narrow, and there is only one exit; so if you walk there, you must return as you came. While they were walking, a man passed them, returned, passed them again, and then disappeared in front of them over the parapet, where there was really no means of exit. There was a red scarf round his throat. ‘How very extraordinary! and how exactly like Sir Samuel Romilly!’ they both exclaimed. At that moment Sir Samuel Romilly had cut his throat in a distant part of England.

“We have tea in the evening in the oak room in the tower, where Miss Ingilby has often had much to say that is interesting, especially this story.[161]

“A regiment was lately passing through Derbyshire on its way to fresh quarters in the North. The Colonel, as they stayed for the night in one of the country towns, was invited to dine at a country-house in the neighbourhood, and to bring any one he liked with him. Consequently he took with him a young ensign for whom he had taken a great fancy. They arrived, and it was a large party, but the lady of the house did not appear till just as they were going in to dinner, and, when she appeared, was so strangely distraite and preoccupied that she scarcely attended to anything that was said to her. At dinner, the Colonel observed that his young companion scarcely ever took his eyes off the lady of the house, staring at her in a way which seemed at once rude and unaccountable. It made him observe the lady herself, and he saw that she scarcely seemed to attend to anything said by her neighbours on either side of her, but rather seemed, in a manner quite unaccountable, to be listening to some one or something behind her. As soon as dinner was over, the young ensign came to the Colonel and said, ‘Oh, do take me away: I entreat you to take me away from this place.’ The Colonel said, ‘Indeed your conduct is so very extraordinary and unpleasant, that I quite agree with you that the best thing we can do is to go away;’ and he made the excuse of his young friend being ill, and ordered their carriage. When they had driven some distance the Colonel asked the ensign for an explanation of his conduct. He said that he could not help it: during the whole of dinner he had seen a terrible black shadowy figure standing behind the chair of the lady of the house, and it had seemed to whisper to her, and she to listen to it. He had scarcely told this, when a man on horseback rode rapidly past the carriage, and the Colonel, recognising one of the servants of the house they had just left, called out to know if anything was the matter. ‘Oh, don’t stop me, sir,’ he shouted; ‘I am going for the doctor: my lady has just cut her throat.’

“I may mention here a very odd adventure which the other day befell my cousin Eliot Yorke. He had been dining with the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, in company with Captain Fane, commander of H.M.S. Bellerophon on the Australian Station, who had been well known to the Duke and Eliot when the former was in the South Pacific in command of the Galatea. At a late hour Eliot and Captain Fane left the Palace to go to their club. The night was cold and wet, and, at a crossing in Pall-Mall, their attention was attracted by a miserable-looking little boy, ragged and shoeless, who, even in the middle of the night, was still plying his broom and imploring a trifle from the passers-by. Eliot, according to his usual custom, stopped to talk to the boy before relieving him. The child told him he was a stranger in London, that he had walked there to seek his fortune from some place on the south-west coast, that he was friendless, homeless, and penniless. The proprietor of the crossing had lent it to him, with his broom, for that day only: he had earned very little, but Eliot’s gift would secure him a lodging for that night, and then—he supposed there was nothing for him but starvation or the workhouse. ‘And have you really no friends or relations in the world?’ said Eliot. ‘Well, sir, it’s the same as if I had none; I’ve one brother, but I shall never see him again: I don’t even know if he is alive.’—‘What is your brother’s name?’—‘He is—— a signalman on board the Bellerophon, and he’s been away so long, he must have forgotten me.’—‘It’s perfectly true,’ said Captain Fane; ‘that is the name of my signalman, and a very smart fellow he is, and I see a strong likeness between him and the boy.’ The end of the story was, that the two gentlemen secured a lodging for the boy, bought him some clothes, and, through Captain Fane’s influence, he has been placed on board one of the training vessels, the Dreadnought, for the merchant service, to become a good sailor like his brother. But the combination of coincidences is most striking and providential. The boy only had the crossing for that one night. Captain Fane, almost the only person in the world who could testify to the truth of the story, was only in London for two nights; and he chanced to be walking with Eliot, probably the only person who would have thought of stopping to talk to a crossing-sweeper.”

“Hickledon, Dec. 12.—I came here yesterday, cordially welcomed by Lord and Lady Halifax, and was glad to find the John Greys here. In the evening my dear Charlie and Lady Agnes came, but our meeting was sadly clouded by the terrible news of poor George Grey’s [162] death at Sandringham. Charlie had brought back many stories from Bedgebury. Mr. Beresford Hope told him that:—

“His uncle Lord Decies, who had lived very much in Paris, met, somewhere abroad, young Lionel Ashley, a brother of Lord Shaftesbury, then about twenty-two, and living abroad, as he was, very much out at elbows. Lord Decies remarked upon a very curious iron ring which he wore, with a death’s-head and cross-bones upon it. ‘Oh,” said young Ashley, ‘about that ring there is a very curious story. It was given to me by a famous conjuring woman, Madame le Norman, to whom I went with two friends of mine. She prophesied that we should all three die before we were twenty-three. My two friends are already dead, and next year I shall be twenty-three: but if you like I will give you the ring;’ and he gave it to Lord Decies. When Lord Decies returned to Paris, Lionel Ashley came there too, and he frequently dined with him. A short time before the expiration of the year, at the end of which Ashley was again engaged to dine with him, Lord Decies was sitting in his room, when the door opened, and Lionel Ashley came in. As to what was said, Mr. Hope was not quite clear, but the circumstances were so singular, that when he was gone, Lord Decies rang the bell, and asked the servant who had let Mr. Ashley into the house. ‘Mais, Milord, M. Ashley est mort hier,’ said the servant.’[163]

“Lord Waterford (the third Marquis) was one day standing talking to the landlord of the little inn in the village close to his place of Curraghmore, when some one rushed up looking very much agitated, and said that there had been a most dreadful murder in the neighbouring hills. ‘Then it must be the little one,’ exclaimed the landlord. ‘What can you possibly mean?’ said Lord Waterford, feeling that the landlord’s knowing anything about it was at the least very suspicious. ‘Well, my lord,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you will never believe me, but I must tell you that last night I dreamt that two men came to my inn, a tall man and a little, and in my dream I saw the tall man murder the little man with a very curious knife, the like of which I never saw before. I told my wife when I woke, but she only laughed at me. To my horror, in the course of the morning, those very two men came to my inn, and I was so possessed by my dream, that I refused them admittance; but coming back some time after, I found that my wife had let them in when my back was turned. I could not turn them out of my house when they were once in it, but going in, some time after, with some refreshments, my horror was increased by seeing on the table between them the very knife I had seen in my dream. Then they paid for their refreshments and went away.’

“The dream of the landlord and the coincidences were considered so extraordinary, that as the bridge at Carrick-on-Suir was the only bridge in that part, and so in a sort of sense divided the country, a watch was put there, and in course of time a man exactly answering to the landlord’s description crossed the bridge and was arrested. In prison, he confessed that he had been in the cod-fishery trade with his companion, who had boasted to him of his great earnings. He forthwith attached himself to him, travelled with him, and watched for the opportunity of murdering him. His weapon was a knife used in the cod-fishery, quite unknown in those parts.”[164]

“Hickledon, Dec. 15.—I have been indescribably happy here with Charlie Wood, and every hour spent with him makes one more entirely feel that there is no one like him—no one.

To be with him is like breathing a pure mountain air of which one cannot imbibe enough, and which strengthens one for weary months of other people. One cannot give greater praise to Lady Agnes than by saying that she is quite worthy of him. Charlie’s relation to his parents is perfect. They often cannot agree with his High Church opinions, but he never obtrudes his views or annoys them, and while his whole life is what it is, could they grudge or regret what is so much to him?”

“Dec. 27.—I have been staying at Brighton with old Mrs. Aïdé, who looks like Cinderella’s godmother or some other good old fairy. It amused me exceedingly to see at Brighton an entirely new phase of society—two pleasant old ladies, daughters of Horace Smith, being its best and leading elements. Every one was full of the ‘Rink,’ where all the young gentlemen and all the young ladies skate all morning on dry land, come home to luncheon, and skate again all afternoon. No balls or picnics can promote the same degree of intimacy which is thus engendered, young men walking about (on wheels) all day long, holding up and assisting their partners. I heard this curious story:—

“The Princess Dolgorouki had been a great heiress and was a person of great wealth and importance. One day she was driving through a village near S. Petersburg, when she heard the clear glorious voice of a young girl ringing through the upper air from a high window of one of the poor houses by the wayside. So exquisitely beautiful was the voice, that the Princess stopped her carriage to listen to it. The voice rang on and on for some time, and, when it ceased, the Princess sent into the house to inquire who the singer had been. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘it is one of your own serfs: it is the girl Anita;’ and they brought the singer out, a sweet, simple, modest-looking girl of sixteen, and at the bidding of the Princess she sang again, quite simply, without any shyness, in the road by the side of the carriage. The Princess was greatly captivated by her, and finding that she was educated beyond most of those in her condition of life, and being at that time in want of a reader in her palace at S. Petersburg, she took her to live with her, and Anita occupied in her house a sort of intermediate position, arranging the flowers, and reading when she was wanted. Gradually the Princess became very fond of her, and gave her masters, under whom she made such astonishing progress, that she became quite a well-educated young lady, while her glorious voice formed the great attraction to all parties at the Dolgorouki Palace.

“The Princess Dolgorouki never foresaw, what actually happened, that when her son returned from ‘the grand tour,’ which young men made then, and found a very beautiful, interesting girl domesticated with his mother, he would fall in love with her. When she saw that it was so, she said to her son that she had a great regard for the girl and could not have her affections tampered with, so that he had better go away again. The young prince answered that he had no idea whatever of tampering with the girl’s affections, that he loved her and believed that she loved him, and that he meant to marry her.

“On hearing this the fury of the Princess knew no bounds. She tried to reason with her son, and when she found him perfectly impracticable, she expelled him from her house and got him sent to France. She also sent for the parents of Anita, and told them that they must look out at once for a suitable person for her to marry, for that she must be married before Prince Dolgorouki returned. She said that she had no complaint to make of the girl, and that she would help her to make a good marriage by giving her a very handsome dowry; all that she required was that she should be married at once. Before leaving, however, Prince Dolgorouki had found means to be alone for a few minutes with Anita, and had said to her, ‘I know my mother well, and I know that as soon as I am gone she will try to insist upon your marriage. She will not consider you, and will sacrifice you to the fulfilment of her own will. Have faith, however, in me, hold out, and believe that, however impossible it may seem, I shall be able at the last moment to save you.’

“The bridegroom whom Anita’s father found was a certain Alexis Alexandrovitch, a farmer near their village and a person in a considerably higher position than their own. He was rich, he was much esteemed, he was greatly in love with Anita, but he was vulgar, he was hideous, he was almost always drunk, and Anita hated him. He came to her father’s house and proposed. She refused him, but he persisted in persecuting her with his attentions, and her own family tried to force her consent by ill-treatment, half-starved her, cut her off from all communication with others and from all her usual employments, and shut her up in a room at the top of the house.

“At last, when the girl’s position was becoming quite untenable and her courage was beginning to give way, Prince Dolgorouki contrived to get a note conveyed to her. He said, ‘I know all you are suffering; it is impossible that you can go on like this. Pretend to accede to their wishes. Accept Alexis Alexandrovitch, but believe that I will save you at the last moment.’

“So Anita said to her father and mother that she gave in to their wishes, that she would marry Alexis Alexandrovitch. And the wedding-day was fixed and the wedding-feast was prepared. And the old Princess Dolgorouki gave not only a very handsome dowry, but a very splendid set of peasant’s jewellery to the bride. She did not intend to be present at the ceremony herself, but she would send her major-domo to represent her.

“The wedding-day arrived, and the bride went with her family to the church, which was darkened, with candles burning everywhere. And Alexis Alexandrovitch also arrived, rather more drunk than usual. The church was thronged with people from end to end, for the place was within a drive of S. Petersburg, and it was fine weather, and hundreds of persons who remembered Anita and had admired her wonderful voice at the Dolgorouki palace drove out to see her married. According to the custom of the Greek Church, the register was brought to be signed before the ceremony. He signed his name ‘Alexis Alexandrovitch,’ and she signed her name ‘Anita.’ And the service began, and the crowd pressed thicker and thicker round the altar, and there was a constant struggle to see. And the service went on, and the crowd pressed more closely still, and somehow in the press the person who stood next to Anita was not Alexis Alexandrovitch, and the service went on, and Anita was married, and then the crowd opened to let the bridal pair pass through, and Anita walked rapidly down the church on the arm of her bridegroom, and it was not Alexis Alexandrovitch, and it was Prince Dolgorouki. And a carriage and four was waiting at the church door, and the bridal pair leapt into it and were whirled rapidly away.

“The old Princess Dolgorouki sent at once to stop them at the frontier, but the flight had been so well arranged, that she was too late. Then she swore (having everything in her own power) that she would cut off her son without a penny, and that she would never see him again. Happy in each other’s love, however, the young Prince and Princess Dolgorouki lived at Paris, where, though they were poor, Anita’s wonderful voice could always keep them from want. There, their two children were born. Four years elapsed, and they heard nothing from their Russian home. Then the family lawyer in S. Petersburg wrote to say that the old Princess Dolgorouki was dead. Whether she had repented of disinheriting her son and had destroyed her will before her death, or whether she had put off making her unjust will till it was too late, no one ever knew. The will of disinheritance was never found, and her son was the heir of all his mother’s vast estates.

“The young couple set out with their children for Russia to take possession, but it was in the depth of winter, the Prince was very delicate, and the change to the fierce cold of the north made him very ill, and at some place on the frontier—Wilna, I think—he died. The unhappy widow continued her journey with her children to S. Petersburg, but when she arrived, the heir-at-law had taken possession of everything. ‘But I am here; I am the Princess Dolgorouki,’ she said. ‘No,’ was the answer; ‘you have been residing for four years with Prince Dolgorouki, but the person you married was Alexis Alexandrovitch, and the register in which you both signed your names before your marriage exists to prove it.’ A great lawsuit ensued, in which the young widow lost almost all the money she had, and eventually she lost her lawsuit too, and retired in great penury to Warsaw, where she maintained herself and her children by singing and giving music lessons.

“But at Warsaw, as at Paris, her beauty and gentleness, and the patience with which she bore her misfortunes, made her a general favourite. Amongst those who became devoted to her was a young lawyer, who examined into the evidence of the trial which had taken place, and then, going to her, urged her to try again. She resisted, saying that the case was hopelessly lost, and besides, that she was too poor to reopen it. The lawyer said, ‘If you regain the vast Dolgorouki inheritance, you can pay me something: it will be a drop in the ocean to you; but if the lawsuit fails I shall expect no payment.’ So she let him try.

“Now the lawyer knew that there was no use in contending against the register, but he also felt that as—according to his view—in the eyes of God his client had been Princess Dolgorouki, there was no harm in tampering with that register if it was possible. It was no use, however, to alter it, as hundreds of witnesses existed who had seen the register as it was, and who knew that it contained the name of Alexis Alexandrovitch as the husband of Anita, for the trial had drawn attention to it from all quarters. It was also most difficult to see the register at all, because it was now most carefully guarded. But at last there came a time when the young lawyer was not only able to see the register, but when for three minutes he was left alone with it. And he took advantage of those three minutes to do what?

“He scratched out the name, or part of the name of Alexis Alexandrovitch, and he wrote the name of Alexis Alexandrovitch over again.

“Then when people came and said, ‘But here is the register—here is the name of Alexis Alexandrovitch,’ he said, ‘Yes, there is certainly the name of Alexis Alexandrovitch, but if you examine, you will find that it is written over something else which has been scratched out.’

“And the case was tried again, and the young widow was reinstated in the Dolgorouki property, and she was the grandmother of the present Prince Dolgorouki.”

“Holmhurst, Dec. 28.—Lea says, ‘You may put ought to ought (0 to 0) and ought to ought till it reaches to London, and it will all come to nothing at last if you don’t put another figure to it’—apropos of Mr. G. P. neglecting to do his duty.”

“Battle Abbey, Jan. 26, 1875.—The news of dear Lady Carnarvon’s death came yesterday as a shadow over everything. Surely never was there a more open, lovable, unselfish, charming, and truly noble character. She was the one person in England capable ‘tenir salon,’ to succeed—in a far more charming way—to Lady Palmerston’s celebrity in that respect.

Apparently radiant with happiness, and shedding happiness on all around her, she yet had often said latterly that she ‘did not feel that the compensations made up for the anxieties of life,’ and that she longed to be at rest.

“In the agreeable party at Battle it has been a great pleasure to find the French Ambassador and the Comtesse de Jarnac. Lord Stanhope is here, and has talked pleasantly as usual. Apropos of the custom of the living always closing the eyes of the dead, he reminded us of the admirable inscription over the door of the library at Murcia, ‘Here the dead open the eyes of the living.’

“He said how the Pineta at Ravenna was really a change in gender from the original name Pinetum in the singular: first it had become the plural of that; then Pineta itself had become a singular word.

“He described a dreary Sunday spent in Sabbatarian Glasgow, and how, everything else being shut up and forbidden, he had betaken himself for hours to examining the epitaphs in the churchyard, and at length found a single verse which atoned for the badness of all the rest:—

“Jan. 27.—Count Nesselrode has come. He has been describing to the Duchess how parents are always proposing to him for their beautiful young girls of fifteen or sixteen. He says that he answers, ‘Est que à mon âge je puis songer à me marier?’ and that they reply, ‘Avec le nom que vous portez, M. le Comte, on est toujours jeune.’ ... ‘et ça me donne le chair de poule.’

“On the Duchess asking Count Nesselrode after his sons, he said they were at a tutor’s, ‘pour former le cœur et l’esprit.’

“There used to be a ghost at Battle Abbey. Old Lady Webster told Mr. Hussey of Scotney Castle how she saw it soon after her marriage, an old woman of most terrible aspect, who drew the curtains of her bed and looked in. Immediately after, Sir Godfrey came into the room. ‘Who was that old woman?’ she said. ‘There could have been no old woman.’ ‘Oh, yes, there was, and you must have met her in the passage, for she has only just gone out of the room.’ In her old age Lady Webster would describe the pattern on the old woman’s dress, and say that she should recognise it anywhere.”

“Holmhurst, Feb. 1.—A long visit to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in Lady Jocelyn’s singular house at St. Leonards, which you enter from the top story. Lord Stratford is a grand old man with high forehead and flowing white hair. He can no longer walk, and sits in his dressing-gown, but his artistic daughters make him very picturesque, hanging his chair with a shade of purple which matches the lining and cuffs of his dressing-gown, &c. He talked of many different people he had seen, of Goethe, ‘who had a very high forehead’ (but ‘the highest forehead known was that of the immortal Shakspeare, who had every great quality that could exist phrenologically’), and then he spoke of Mezzofanti, whom he had known personally in Italy, and who had told him the story of his life. He had been a carpenter’s apprentice, and had one day been at his work outside the open window of a school where a master was teaching. Having a smattering of Greek, which he had taught himself, he felt sure that he detected the master in giving a wrong explanation. This worried him so much that he could not get it out of his head, and, after the school and his own work were both over, he rang the bell and begged to see the master. ‘I was at work, sir, and I heard you speaking, and I think you gave such and such an explanation in Greek.’—‘Well, and what do you know about Greek?’—‘Not much, sir; but, if you will forgive my saying so, I am sure you will find, if you examine, that the explanation was not the correct one.’ The master found that the young carpenter was right, and it led to his obtaining friends and being educated. Lord Stratford said that Mezzofanti spoke English perfectly to him, and excellent modern Greek to his servant, and yet that, apart from his wonderful versatility in languages, he seemed to be rather a dull man than otherwise, utterly wanting in originality.

“Lord Stratford described going to dine one day with his agent, and meeting there a lady whose name he did not catch, but whom he was told to take down to dinner. In the course of dinner the conversation turned upon some subject of mathematics, ‘And then,’ said Lord Stratford, ‘I did what I have never done at any other time on a mathematical question. I tried to explain it and make it easy for my companion, who listened with polite attention. When I went upstairs I inquired her name, and it was ... Mrs. Somerville! I knew her intimately afterwards, and she told me something of her early life, which I regret should not have appeared in her memoirs. Her childhood was passed in Burntisland, whither her brother returned for his holidays, having some school-work to do whilst at home. One day, when he was called out, she took up the Euclid he had been studying. ‘Ah! what curious little designs! let me see if I can understand what it is about.’ And she found that she could, and devoured Euclid with avidity. Afterwards she got hold of her brother’s Æschylus and taught herself Greek in order to read it.

“Lord Stratford talked much of the extraordinary change, not only in politics, but in ‘the way of carrying on politics,’ since he was young.”

“69 Onslow Square, Feb. 4.—Aunt Sophy [166] had a pleasant party yesterday of Theodore Martins, Lady Barker, &c. Mrs. Theodore Martin’s is a fine illuminative face, like that of Madame Goldschmidt. As Helen Faucit she was celebrated as an actress and as having done her utmost to elevate the stage; but I do not admire her reading of Shakspeare, in which I think there is too much manner. He is evidently most excellent. He talked perfectly simply, but only when asked, of his intercourse with the Queen, with whom he must be on happy terms of mutual confidence.

“Feb. 7, 1875.—Yesterday, when I was with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, at Kent House, which is being beautifully arranged, Lady Bloomfield came in and then Mr. Carlyle—weird and grim, with his long coat and tall wizard-befitting hat. He talked in volumes, with fathomless depths of adjectives, into which it was quite impossible to follow him, and in which he himself often got out of his depth. A great deal was about Garibaldi, who was the ‘most absolute incarnation of zero, but the inexplicable perversity and wilfulness of the human race had taken him up, poor creature, and set him on a pedestal.’ Then he went on about ‘the poor old Pope, so filled with all the most horrible and detestable lies that ever were conceived or thought of.’ He was like the man who asked his friends to dinner and said, ‘I am going to give you a piece of the most delicious beef—the most exquisite beef that ever was eaten,’ and all the while it was only a piece of stale brown bread; but the host said to his guests, ‘May God damn your souls for ever and ever, if you don’t believe it’s beef,’ so they ate it and said nothing.

“Then he talked of the books of Mazzini, which were ‘well worth reading,’ and of Saffi, ‘made professor of something at Oxford, where he used to give lectures in a moth-eaten voice.’”

“Feb. 11.—Sir Garnet and Lady Wolseley, Miss Thackeray, and others dined. I was not prepared to like Sir Garnet much, a hero is usually so dull, but he is charming, so frank and candid, and most natural as well as good-looking. He has a very young face, though his hair is grey, almost white. Lady Wolseley is remarkably pretty and attractive; Sir Garnet was quite devoted to drawing, and had a great collection of sketches, the work of his life. In the Crimea he drew everything, and it was a most precious collection; but in returning it was all lost at sea. The rest of his drawings he put into the Pantechnicon, where they were every one of them burnt. Miss Thackeray has a sweet voice, which is music in every tone.

“I have frequently seen lately, at the Lefevres’, old Lord Redesdale, with whom we have some distant cousinship through my Mitford great-grandmother. He is very kind, clever, old-fashioned, and always wears a tail-coat. He took us into the far-away by telling us of having heard his father, Speaker Mitford, describe having known a man in Swaledale named Rievely, whose earliest recollection was of being carried across the Swale by Henry Jenkyns (who lived to 160), who recollected having gone as a boy, with a sheaf of arrows and his elder brother on a pony, from Ellerton in Swaledale to Northallerton, to join the army before the battle of Flodden. He would tell all about the battle in a familiar way—‘the King was not there; but the Duke of Suffolk was there,’ &c.

“Much of the conversation in certain houses is now about Moody and Sankey, the American ‘revivalists,’ who are supposed to ‘produce great effects.’ Moody preaches and Sankey sings. They are adored by some, others (including most Americans) think them ‘mere religious charlatans’—and altogether they offer a famous opportunity for all the barking and biting which ‘truly religious people’ often delight in.”

“Feb. 20.—Dined with the Rafe Leycesters in Cheyne Walk, where they have a charming old manor-house with a stone gateway, flagged walk, ancient bay-trees, a wide staircase, and panelled rooms. Mrs. Leycester was picturesquely dressed like a picture by Millais. The company were Mr. and Mrs. Haweis, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Taylor, and the Augustus Tollemaches. It was an agreeable party, and a pleasant dinner in a room redolent of violets.”

“Feb. 21.—Dined with Lady Margaret Beaumont, who talked of dress and the distinction of a gown by Worth, which ‘not only looked well, but walked well.’”

“Thorncombe, Feb. 27.—This place is a dell in the undulating hills about five miles from Guildford, very pretty and pleasant; and our new cousin, Edward Fisher, to whom it belongs, is one of the kindest, cheeriest, pleasantest fellows who ever entered a family.

“We have been to see Loseley, which belongs to my old college acquaintance Molyneux—a grand old house, gabled and grey, with a great hall, and richly carved chimney-pieces of white chalk, which looks like marble. It has three ghosts, a green-coated hunter, a sallow lady, and a warrior in plate-armour. The last appeared to the kitchen-maid as she was drawing some beer in the cellar, and almost frightened her out of her wits.”

“London, March 7, Sunday.—Breakfast at Lord Houghton’s, who has adopted Rogers’ custom of social breakfasts. It was a very amusing party—Joaquin Miller [167] the American writer, Henry Cowper, Lord Arthur Russell, &c. There was a young man there whom I did not notice much at first, but I soon found that he was very remarkable, and then that he was very charming indeed. It was Lord Rosebery. He has a most sweet gravity almost always, but when his expression does light up, it is more than an illumination—it is a conflagration, at which all around him take light. Joaquin Miller would have been thought insufferably vulgar if he had not been a notoriety: as it was, every one paid court to him. However, I ought not to abuse him, as he suddenly turned round to me and said, ‘Do you know, I’m glad to meet you, for you write books that I can read.’ Quantities of good stories were told—one of a party given by George IV. as Prince Regent to the Irish peer Lord Coleraine. Smoking was allowed. After supper, when Lady Jersey drank, the Regent kissed the spot upon the cup where her lips had rested: upon which the Princess took a pipe from Lord Coleraine’s mouth, blew two or three whiffs, and handed it back to him. The Prince was quite furious, but it was a lesson.”

“Holmhurst, March 14.—Went to see Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who talked incessantly and most agreeably for an hour. He said how surprised he had been to read in the ‘Greville Memoirs’ of himself as ill-tempered; he always thought he was ‘rather a good-tempered sort of fellow.’ It was Madame de Lieven who said that, and she had always hated him. She prevented him having an embassy once, but they made peace afterwards through a compliment he paid her at Paris. He talked of Madame de Lieven’s extraordinary influence, arising chiefly from our inherent national passion for foreigners.

“I asked Lord Stratford which he thought the most interesting of the many places in which he had lived. He said, ‘Oh, England is the most interesting by far.’ He described his first going out to Constantinople, before he had taken his degree, only going for four months, and staying for four or five years in a position equal to a Minister. He took his degree afterwards, and by literary merit, though there was a way then of giving degrees to those who were employed in the public service, and since then they had made him a doctor of both Universities. Now, in his helplessness, he amused himself by writing Greek verses. Once, walking about his room, he thought, ‘Well, I have often written Latin verses; let me see if I can write Greek.’ And his Greek has all come back to him.”

The enormous circulation of the “Memorials of a Quiet Life” in the two years which had elapsed since its publication astonished those who were opposed to it; and in America the sale had been even greater than in England. Numbers of Americans had come to England entirely from the desire to visit the different scenes of my mother’s quiet life, and had gone in turn to Toft, Stoke, Alton, Hurstmonceaux, Holmhurst, and some even to the distant grave of Lucy Hare at Abbots Kerswell. At Holmhurst there were frequently many sets of visitors in a day—“pilgrims” we used to call them,—and even if I was at home I could never bear to refuse them admittance, while to my dear old Lea, who was in very poor health at this time, they were a positive benefit, in rousing her from dwelling upon sad recollections. It was in answer to a constantly expressed desire that, in the autumn of 1874, I occupied myself with the third volume of the Memorials, containing more of my mother’s thoughts upon especial subjects, and photographs from family portraits and of the places described in the first two volumes. The book was, as it were, a gift to the public. It had a large circulation, but no remuneration whatever was ever looked for or obtained. Soon after the publication of the volume, a review appeared in the Spectator (July 8, 1876), speaking of “the veiled self-conceit” with which Mr. Hare had placed himself “upon the voluminous records of his family as upon a pedestal;” that Mrs. Hare was far from being honoured by “the capital” her adopted son had made of her, though, “if his public likes and is willing to pay for the contents of the family album, there is nothing more to be said.... Here, however, let us be thankful, is, so far as anything can be predicated safely on such a subject, the last of the ‘Memorials,’ and that is so grateful a thought as to justify tolerance of what already is.” It seemed a singular review to have been admitted by the Spectator, which, four years before (December 11, 1872), had written of the “Memorials” as containing “passage after passage worthy of comment or quotation,” and as “an interesting record of spiritual conflicts and spiritual joy, free from narrowness and fanaticism, and marked throughout by the most guileless sincerity.” I suppose that editors of reviews, when biassed by intense personal feeling, often trust to the public having forgotten what has appeared before in their pages.

Annually, I had tried to make my dearest mother’s home as useful as possible to all those in whom she was most nearly interested, as well as to keep up her charities, especially at Alton. It had also been a great pleasure, with what my books produced, to fit up a cottage close to Holmhurst as a Hospice for needy persons of a better class. These I have always invited to come for a month at a time, their travelling expenses being fully paid, and firing, linen, farm and garden produce, with an outfit of grocery, being supplied to them. Many are the interesting and pleasant persons whom I have thus become acquainted with, many the touching cases of sorrow and suffering with which I have come in contact. In the month of October the Deaconesses of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, for several years occupied the Hospice, and they generally remained over All Saints’ Day, when they sang the Te Deum in the field round the twisted tree where the dear mother used to sit—“the Te Deum tree.”

In the spring of 1875 I was obliged to go to Italy again, to continue collecting materials for my “Cities of Northern and Central Italy.”

“Rimini, April 4, 1875.—I made my first long lonely expedition from Turin, going for an hour by rail to the town of S. Ambrogio, and then walking up through the forests to the top of the high mountain of S. Michele, where there is a famous monastery in which the sovereigns of the country—Dukes of Savoy—used to be buried many hundreds of years ago. It is a wonderful place, quite on the highest peak, looking into the great gorges of snow. As I was sketching, the old Abbot was led by on his mule, and stopped to speak to me. I found he was a famous missionary preacher—Carlo Caccia—and had been in England, where he knew Lord Bute well, and was very glad to hear of him. So we made great friends, and as he was going to Turin for Easter, we travelled back together.

“From Turin I went to Parma, where I had a great deal of work to finish. The cold there was ferocious, but I made the great excursion I went for—to Canossa, where the Emperor Henry IV. performed his famous penance, though it is a most dreadfully fatiguing walk, either in snow above the knees, or in the furrows of streams from the melted snow. At Bologna I never saw anything like the snow—as high as the top of the omnibus, and darkening the lower windows, with a way cut through it down the middle of the street. I had the same room at the Hotel S. Marco which you and the dear Mother had for those anxious days in 1870, and of course I seemed to see her there, and it was a very sad visit. The Librarian told me that hundreds of people had been to look at the portrait of Clotilda Tambroni since reading the ‘Memorials.’

“We slept here once in 1857, but did not appreciate Rimini properly then, I think, for it is a charming place, with a delightful seashore and interesting old town; but the country is strange and wild, and there is not a sign of vegetation on the hedges; so that when I remember the buds on the deutzia opposite your window at Holmhurst, it seems most dismal in Italy.”

“Citta di Castello, April 12, 1875.—It is very cold in Italy, but glorious weather now—ceaseless sunshine and the pellucid skies of Perugino. I have been many great excursions already; to the Sagro di S. Michele, to desolate Canossa, and to S. Marino and the extraordinary S. Leo near Rimini. Then from Forli I paid an interesting visit to Count Saffi, one of the Roman triumvirate, whom I had known well at Oxford, and who lives, with his wife (Miss Craufurd of Portincross) and many children, in a farmhouse-like villa near the town. At Ancona, Charlie Dalison came to meet me, a pleasant change after much silence and solitude. We went together to Loreto, and next day a dreary journey to Urbino, which is more curious than beautiful, though there is a noble old palace of its Dukes. It was a thirteen hours’ drive thence through hideous country to Gubbio, where the inns are wretched, but the town full of interest. Charlie left me at Perugia, and I came on here into the Piero della Francesca country, which is more instructive than captivating.”

“Forli, April 2.—In one of the old churches here is the tomb of Barbara Ordelaffi, wife of the Lord of Forli, who was one of the most intensely wicked women of her own or any other age. But her tomb is indescribably lovely, her figure, that of quite a young girl, lying upon its marble sarcophagus with a look of innocence and simplicity which can scarcely be equalled.

“The tomb is in a side-chapel, separated by a heavy railing from the church. Inside this railing, in an arm-chair, with his eyes constantly fixed upon the marble figure, sat this morning a very old gentleman, paralysed and unable to move, wrapped in a fur cloak. As I looked in at the rails, he said, ‘And you also are come to see Barbara; how beautiful she is, is not she?’ I acquiesced, and he said, ‘For sixty years I have come constantly to see her. It is everything to me to be here. It is the love and the story of my life. No one I have ever known is half so beautiful as Barbara Ordelaffi. You have not looked at her yet long enough, but gradually you will learn this. Every one must love Barbara. I am carried here now; I cannot walk, but I cannot live without seeing her. My servants bring me; they put me here; I can gaze at her figure, then I am happy. At eleven o’clock my servants will come, and I shall be taken home, but they will bring me again to see Barbara in the afternoon.’

“I remained in the church. At eleven o’clock the servants came. They took up the old gentleman and carried him up to the monument to bid it farewell, and then out to his carriage; but in the afternoon, said the Sacristan, they would come again, for he always spent most of the day with Barbara Ordelaffi; when he was alone with the marble figure, he was quite quiet and happy, and as they always locked him into the chapel, he could never come to any harm.”

“Florence, April 28.—On Monday I went to the excellent inn at Lucca, and on Tuesday to the Bagni. Never was a place less altered—only one new house, I think, and very pretty and rural it all looked. I went up to the dear old Casa Bertini, and into the little garden looking down on the valleys, quite as pretty as my recollection of it. Quintilia (our maid) was enchanted to see me, but has grown into a very old woman, though only sixty-three.

“I liked Lucca better than all the other places. It was the festival of S. Zita when I was there, who was made a saint because she had been such a good servant for forty years. I thought, if my dear Lea had lived in those days, how she would have had a chance of being canonised.”

“Florence, May 2, 1875.—No words can express the fatigue or discomfort of my Tuscan tour. The food, in the mountain convents especially, was disgusting—little but coarse bread with oil and garlic; the inns were filthy and the beds damp; and the travelling, in carts or on horseback, most fatiguing, often sixteen hours a day. And yet—and yet how thrilling is the interest of Monte Oliveto, S. Gemignano, Volterra, La Vernia, Camaldoli!”

“Castagnuolo, May 3.—I am writing from the old country palace of the Marchese Lotteria Lotharingo della Stufa. It is reached by driving from Florence through the low envineyarded country for five miles. Then, on the left, under the hills, one sees what looks like a great old barrack, grimy, mossy, and deserted. This is the villa. All outside is decay, but when you enter, there are charming old halls and chambers, connected by open arches, and filled with pictures, china, books, and beautiful old carved furniture. A terrace, lined with immense vases of lilies and tulips, opens on a garden with vine-shaded pergolas and huge orange-trees in tubs; and beyond are the wooded hills.

“The Marchese is charming, living in the hearts of his people, sharing all their interests, working with them—taking off his coat and tucking up his sleeves to join in the sheep-shearing, gathering the grapes in the vintage, &c. But the presiding genius of the place is Mrs. Ross (Janet Duff Gordon), who has redeemed lands, planted vineyards, introduced new plans for pressing the grapes—whose whole heart and soul are in the work here.”

“Vicenza, May 20, 1875.—I have been to Genoa and Pegli, and to Piacenza again for a tremendous excursion of sixty-eight miles, eighteen riding on a white mule, to the grave of S. Columbano in the high Apennines. After this, the Italian lakes were comparative rest. I thought the Lago d’Iseo far the most beautiful of them all. To-day I have been on a family pilgrimage to Valdagno, where my grandmother lived so happily, and where my uncle Julius Hare was born. There is much also here in Vicenza to remind me of a later past, for opposite the window of this room are the trees in the Marchese Salvi’s garden, where my dearest Mother took her last walks.”

“Herrenalb, in the Black Forest, June 14.—A week at Venice was a great refreshment. Then I crossed the S. Gothard to Lucerne and came on here. The semi-mountain air of this lovely place is as refreshing to the body as the pure high-minded Bunsen character is to the soul. A little branch railway brought me from the main line to Gernsbach, a pretty clean German village with picturesque gabled houses girding a lovely river. Hence it is a charming drive of two hours through forest into the highlands, where the wood-clad hills break occasionally into fine crags. Herrenalb itself takes its name from the abbey on the little river Alb, while a monastery for women on the same stream a few miles off gives its name to ‘Frauenalb.’ The former is Protestant now, the latter is still Catholic, but in the valley of Herrenalb are the immense buildings of the abbey, its great granaries with wooden pillars, and the ruins of its Norman church.

“Frances de Bunsen and one of her Sternberg nieces met me in the valley, and we were soon joined by the dear old Frau von Bunsen in her donkey-chair. At eighty-six her wonderful power of mind and charm of intellect and conversation are quite unimpaired. She has still the rare art, described by Boileau, ‘passer du grave au doux, du plaisant au sévère.’ The whole family breakfast at seven, and for an hour before that the dear Grandmother is in the little terraced garden, examining and tending her flowers. The house is full of souvenirs: in the Baroness’s own room is a large frame with photographs of all her numerous descendants, sent by the Grand Duchess of Baden to greet her first arrival in this her new country home.”

To this happy visit at Herrenalb, and to the long conversations I used to have with my dear old friend, walking beside her donkey-chair in the forest, I owe the power of having been able to write her Memoirs two years afterwards. It was my last sight of this old friend of my childhood. I returned from Herrenalb to England.

“London, June 23, 1875.—Called on Mrs. Leslie in her glorious old house in Stratford Place, which is beautiful because all the colour is subdued, no new gilding or smartness. She herself sat in the window embroidering, with the bright sunlight just glinting on her rippled hair and sweet face, at once a picture and a poem.”

“June 26.—A great party at Lambeth Palace, the lawn and its many groups of people very charming. Going in to tea with Miss Elliot down a narrow passage, I came suddenly upon Arthur Stanley. In that moment I am sure we both tried hard to recollect what had so entirely separated us for five years, but we could not, and shook hands. The Spanish Lady Stanley seeing this, threw up her hands—‘Gratias a Deo! O gratias a Deo! una reconciliatiōn!’

“In the evening there was an immense party at Lady Salisbury’s to meet the Sultan of Zanzibar.[177] He had a cold, so sent to say he could not have the windows opened; the consequence of which was, that with thousands of wax-lights and crowds of people, the heat was awful, positively his native climate. The Sultan has a good, sensible, clever, amused face, but cannot speak a word of any language except Arabic, of which Lady Salisbury said that she had learnt some sentences by the end of the evening, from hearing them repeated so often through the interpreter, and at last ventured to air her new acquirements herself. When the Sultan went away, the suite followed two and two—a picturesque procession. Lord Salisbury walked first, leading the Sultan, or rather holding his right hand in his own left, which it seems is the right thing to do. The Sultan was immensely struck by Lady Caithness, and no wonder, for her crown of three gigantic rows of diamonds, and then huge diamonds and emeralds, had the effect of a sunlit wave in the Mediterranean.”

“June 27, Sunday.—To Holland House. Lady Holland sat at the end window, looking on the garden, with a group round her. I went out with Lord Halifax, then with Everard Primrose, who appeared as usual from the library, and a third time with Lord Stanhope, who took me afterwards in his carriage to Airlie Lodge. There the garden was in great beauty, and we met Lady Airlie sauntering through its green walks with the Duke of Teck. We went to sit in a tent, where we found Mr. Doyle, Mr. Cheney, and a young lady who greeted me with, ‘Now, Mr. Hare, may I ask if you never can remember me, or if you always intend to cut me on purpose?’ It was Miss Rhoda Broughton.

“Lady Airlie talked of the death of Madame Rossetti. Her husband [178] felt so completely that all his living interests were buried with his wife, that he laid his unpublished poems under her dead head, and they were buried with her. But, after a year had passed, his feeling about his wife was calmed, while the longing for his poems grew daily, and people urged him that he was forcing a loss upon the world. And the coffin of the poor lady was taken up and opened to get at the poems, and behold her beautiful golden hair had grown and grown till the whole coffin was filled with it—filled with it and rippling over.[179] Lady Airlie had the account from an eye-witness. For one moment Madame Rossetti was visible in all her radiant loveliness, as if she were asleep, then she sank into dust. She was buried with her Testament under her pillow on one side and her husband’s poems on the other.

“The Duke of Teck looked very handsome and was most pleasant and amiable. He said that an old lady in Germany, an ancestress of his, had the most glorious pearl necklace in the world, and when she died, she desired that the pearl necklace might be buried with her. And the family were very sorry to part with their aged relative, but they were still more sorry to part with the family jewels; and in time their grief for the old lady was assuaged, but their grief for the pearl necklace was never assuaged at all, and at last there came a moment when they dug up the coffin, and took the pearl necklace from the aged neck. But behold the pearls were quite spoilt and had lost all their lustre and beauty. Then pearl-doctors were summoned, men who were learned in such things, and they said that the only thing which would restore the beauty of the pearls would be if three beautiful young ladies would wear them constantly, and let the pearls drink in all their youth and beauty. So the eldest daughter of the house took them and wore them constantly, and all the beauty and brilliancy of her loveliness flowed into the pearls, which grew brighter and better every day. And as her beauty faded, another daughter of the house took them, and so three beautiful young ladies took them and wore them in three generations, till, when sixty years were passed, the pearls were so beautiful and glorious, so filled with youth and radiancy, that there is no such pearl necklace in the whole world.”

“June 28.—Luncheon with dear old Lady Grey. Then to Lady Wharncliffe, who looked very lovely seated beneath a great blue-green vase filled with lilies.

“The way young men now weary their friends to ask for invitations for them is almost as contemptible as the conduct of the ladies who ask others to invite their guests for them that they may ‘get into society.’ ‘Que ne fait-on pour trouver un faux bonheur!’ says Fénélon; ‘quels rebuts, quelles traverses n’endure t’on point pour un fantôme de gloire mondaine! quelles peines pour de misérables plaisirs dont il ne reste que des remords.’”

“June 29.—With the Archbishop of Dublin, Miss Trench, and Lady Charles Clinton to Strawberry Hill, the ‘little plaything house’ of Horace Walpole. It had been so wet that one had almost to wade from the station to the house, and the beautiful breakfast was sopping in a tent on the mossy lawn, so little being left in the house that the Princess of Wales had to drink her tea out of a tumbler in a corner. Still the interior of the house was full of interest—the historic pictures, especially those of the three beautiful Waldegrave sisters, and of Maria, Duchess of Gloucester; and then in the gallery are, by Sant and Bucknor, all the especial friends of the house—all the beautiful persons who have stayed there.

“Lady Waldegrave [180] (assisted by art) looked twenty-five years younger than she did twenty-five years ago. The Princess of Wales, in a pink dress under black lace and a little hat to match, copied as a whole from pictures of Anne Boleyn, looked lovely.

“In the evening I went to Lady Salisbury’s reception. At the latter was the Sultan of Zanzibar. Suddenly, in the midst of the party, he said to Lady Salisbury, ‘Now, please, it is my time to say my prayers: I should like to go into your room, and to be alone for ten minutes.’ And he did, and he does it four times a day, and never allows anything whatever to interfere with it. The Archbishop of Dublin, when presented, said, ‘I am glad to have the honour of being presented to a man who has made a promise and kept it.’ The Sultan answered, ‘It can only be your goodness which makes you say that.’”

“How glad I am that we do not agree about Sunday. I think your view of ‘the Sabbath’ so entirely derogatory to all the dignity and beauty of Christianity, and I cannot understand any one not becoming an infidel, if they think God so mean as to suppose that He would consider ‘His day’ (though Sunday is only the Church’s day, all days are God’s days) dishonoured by walking with one’s intimate friends in a garden, or having tea in another garden with several persons, all infinitely better and wiser than oneself. ‘I am amazed,’ says Professor Amiel, ‘at the vast amount of Judaism, of formalism, that still exists, eighteen centuries after the Redeemer’s declaration that the letter killeth.... Christian liberty has yet to be won.’”

“June 30.—A very pleasant party in the Duke of Argyll’s garden, in spite of a wet afternoon; all the little golden-haired daughters of the house very kind in entertaining the guests. I returned with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, to her beautiful Kent House. The rooms, hung with yellow, with black doors and picture-frames, are very effective. There are some semi-ruined cartoons of Paul Veronese upon the staircase.

“In the evening I went to Lady Margaret Beaumont’s to meet the Queen of the Netherlands, ‘La Reine Rouge,’ as she is often called from her revolutionary tendencies. She sat at the end of the room, a pleasant natural woman, with fuzzy hair done very wide in curls, and a quaint little diamond crown as an ornament at the back. She was most agreeable in conversation, and, as Prosper Merimée says in one of his letters to Panizzi, ‘would have been quite perfection, if she had not wished to appear a Frenchwoman, having had the misfortune to be born in Würtemburg.’”

“July 1.—Luncheon at Lord Stanhope’s to meet Miss Rhoda Broughton. Lord Stanhope aired one of his pet hobbies—the virtues of the novel ‘Anastasius.’ Mrs. Hussey says that his father used to say of him, ‘My son is often very prosy, but then he has been vaccinated;’ for the fourth Earl Stanhope had a familiar of whom he always spoke as ‘Tesco,’ and Tesco had inveighed against vaccination to him, and had told him that to be vaccinated had always the effect of making the recipient prosy.

“Mrs. Hussey mentioned this at a dinner to Mr. John Abel Smith, who exclaimed, ‘Oh, that accounts for what has always hitherto been a mystery to me. I went with that Lord Stanhope to hear a man named Belloni lecture on “the Tuscan Language,” and we sat behind him on the platform. He was most terribly lengthy. Suddenly, Lord Stanhope caught him by the coat, and, arresting the whole performance, said, “Pray, sir, have you ever been vaccinated?”—“Certainly, my Lord,” said the astonished lecturer. “Oh, that is quite enough; pray continue,” said Lord Stanhope, and the lecture proceeded, and Lord Stanhope composed himself to sleep.’”

“July 2.—A large sketching party at Holland House. We sat for three hours in the Lily Garden, with birds singing, fountains playing, and flowers blooming, as if we had been a hundred miles from London. Our sketches were all sent in afterwards to Lady Holland, who sent them out in the order of merit—Mrs. Lowther’s first, mine second.

“I dined with the Ralph Duttons and sat by Lady Barker, who was full of Moody and Sankey, to whom she has been often with the Duchess of Sutherland, who insists upon going every day. She says the mixture of religious fervour with the most intense toadyism of the Duchess was horribly disgusting; that the very gift of fluency in the preachers contaminated and spoilt their work. Sometimes they would use the most excellent and powerful simile, and then spoil it by something quite blasphemous. Speaking of the abounding grace of God, Moody compared Him to a banker who scolded the man who only drew for a penny, when he might draw for a pound and come again as often as he liked. So far the sermon was admirable, and all understood it; but then he went on to call it the ‘Great I Am Bank,’ and to cut all sorts of jokes, whilst the audience roared with laughter; that when a man presented his cheque, however large—‘Here ye are, says I Am,’ &c.

“Went on to the ball at Dorchester House, which was beautiful; the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Tecks were there. The great charm of the house is in the immensely broad galleries, which are so effective when filled with beautiful women, relieved, like Greek pictures, against a gold background. Miss Violet Lindsay, in a long white dress embroidered with gold and a wreath of gold oak-leaves, was quite exquisitely lovely.”

“July 3.—Breakfast with Sir James Lacaita to meet Mr. Gladstone, Lord Napier and Ettrick, and the Marchese Vitelleschi. The great topic was Manning. About him and Roman Catholicism in general, Gladstone seems to have lost all temperance, but told much that was curious. He described the deathbed of Count Streletski and Manning’s attempts to get in. Lacaita said that there was a lady still living to whom Manning had been engaged—‘fatto l’impégno’—and that he had jilted her to marry one of two heiress sisters: now, whenever she hears of any especial act of his, she says, ‘As ever, fickle and false.’

“Lacaita described the illness, the apparently hopeless illness, of Panizzi, when he and Mr. Winter kept guard. The Padre Mela came and tried to insist upon seeing the patient. He told the Padre it was quite impossible, but, upon his insisting, he assured him that if Panizzi rallied, he would at once mention the Padre’s wish. At that time it was ‘impossible, as Panizzi was quite unconscious.’ When the Padre heard that Panizzi was insensible, he implored and besought an entrance ‘basta anche un’istante,’ but was positively and sternly refused.

“The next day Panizzi rallied, upon which both Lacaita and Mr. Winter thought it necessary to mention the strong wish of the Padre Mela to see him. ‘Oh, il birbone!’ said Panizzi, ‘vuol dunque convertirmi,’ and he was so excited, that in order to content him they were obliged to engage a policeman to stand constantly at the door to keep the priests out.

“Gladstone said he knew that the Pope (Pius IX.) had determined against declaring the doctrine of personal infallibility, till Manning had fallen at his feet, and so urged and implored him to do so, that at length he had consented. He (Gladstone) upheld that there was no going back from this, and that even in case of the Pope’s death, the condition of the Roman Church was absolutely hopeless. Vitelleschi agreed so far, that if a foreign Pope were chosen, for which an effort would be made, there was no chance for the Church; but if an Italian were elected—for instance, Patrizi or Bilio, who had especially opposed the doctrine of personal infallibility—the sense of the doctrine would be so far modified that it would practically fade into nothingness, and that every advantage would be taken of the Council not being yet closed to make every possible modification.

“Vitelleschi lamented the utter want of religious education in modern Italy—that he had been in schools where, when asked who Jesus Christ was, all the boys differed, one saying that he was a prophet, another something else; that when the question was put to Parliament how morality was to be taught without religion, the answer was, ‘Faremmo un trattato morale.”

“Lord Napier every now and then insisted on attention, and delivered himself of some ponderous paragraph, on which occasions Gladstone persistently and defiantly ate strawberries.”

“July 4.—Tea at the Duchess of Cleveland’s. Lord John Manners was there. They were full of the dog Minos and his extraordinary tricks. In invitation cards to parties, ‘To meet the dog Minos’ is now constantly put in the corner. When told to take something to the most beautiful woman in the room, however, he made a mistake, and took it to the Queen, who flicked him with her pocket-handkerchief; and then he took it to the Princess of Wales. Being left alone in the room with a plate on which there were three sandwiches, he could not resist eating them, but found three visiting cards and deposited them in their place!”

“July 7.—A party at Holland House. The old cedars, the brilliant flowers, and more brilliant groups of people, made a most beautiful scene.”

“July 8.—A party at Lady Airlie’s for the Queen of Holland—very pleasant.”

“July 9.—Luncheon at Mrs. Harvey of Ickwellbury’s. The whole family were full of Nigger stories:—of a man who, being pursued by an Indian for the sake of his scalp, and finding escape hopeless, pulled off his wig and presented it with a bow, upon which the Indian fell down and worshipped him as a god!—Of a negro who, on being told that the strait path to heaven was full of thorns and difficulties, said, ‘Den dis ere nigger take to the woods!’”

“July 11.—To hear Mr. Stopford Brooke preach. It was most interesting—upon the love of God. He began by saying that he would not undertake to prove the existence of God, for ‘God is, and those who love Him know it.’

“He said, ‘Think in everything which you are about to do, whether it will be for the good of the human race; if not, if it is only good for yourself, your family, your society, don’t do it: that is the love of God.

“‘Fight against all power which in the name of religion seeks to narrow it. Fight against all, whether of caste or family, which seeks to elevate one power to the exclusion of another; for the perfection of the whole human nature, that is God’s will. This is the service we must give to Him, which separates worship from selfishness, and makes it more praise than prayer: thus, with our sails filled with the winds of God, may we drive over the storms of the human race to the harbour of unity.’”

“July 12.—To luncheon at Lord Northampton’s, but, except Lady Marion Alford, I do not much like the Comptons. Lady Alwyn, who is charming, was very amusing about them. ‘Lord Alwyn pretends not to hear; that is because he is displeased, for he thinks I am abusing the Comptons. He cannot bear me to find fault with any of his ancestors, however remote they may be, for he thinks that the Comptons are quite perfect, and always have been. When I first married, I hoped to have made a compromise, and I told Lord Alwyn that if he would give up to me his great-grandfather, I would spare all the rest; but he wouldn’t.... After all, the Comptons were quite ruined, and we owe everything to old Sir John Spencer who lived at Crosby Hall in the City, and he had so poor an opinion of the Comptons, that he wouldn’t let the Lord Northampton of that day marry his daughter on any account. But Lord Northampton dressed up as the baker’s boy and carried his bride off on his head in a basket. He met Sir J. Spencer on the stairs, who gave him a sixpence for his punctuality, and afterwards, when he found out that his daughter was in that basket, swore it was the only sixpence of his money Lord Northampton should ever see. But the next year Queen Elizabeth asked him to come and be ‘gossip’ with her to a newly-born baby, whom she hoped he would adopt instead of his disinherited daughter, and he could not refuse; and you may imagine whose that baby was.’

“Five-o’clock tea at Ashburnham House. The pictures there are beautiful, a Mantegna and several Ghirlandajos, and it is a charming old house in itself. In the evening to a party at the Duchess of Cleveland’s given to the blind Duke of Mecklenburg and his Duchess.”

“Highcliffe, July 18.—The usual party are here.... Lady Jane Ellice is full of a theory that she is an Israelite, that we are all members of the lost tribes of Israel, that our royal family are the direct descendants of Tepha, the beautiful daughter of Zedekiah, who was brought to Ireland by Jeremiah, and married to its king.

“Mrs. Hamilton Hamilton has much that is interesting to tell of her old embassy life in France. She was at S. Leu the day before the Duc de Bourbon’s death. She would not go in, though urged to do so, because ‘that woman, Madame de Feuchères,’ was there, but heard how well the Duke was, preparing for the chase, ‘never better in his life.’ The next day, in returning to Paris, their carriage was passed and repassed by quantities of royal servants riding to and fro. At last they asked why it was. The Duc de Bourbon was dead, found hung up to the blind of the window.

“A few days before, the Duke had declared his intention of altering his will in favour of the Comte de Chambord. Previously Chantilly had been settled upon the Duc d’Aumale. Madame de Feuchères had said long before to Louis Philippe, ‘Leave it all to me.’

“Madame de Feuchères (once an orange-girl at Southampton) was left enormously rich. She promised to settle all her property on the Duc d’Aumale if the Duchess of Orleans would receive her. Mrs. Hamilton Hamilton was seated at the end of the room between the Duchesse Decazes and another great lady of the old régime. Suddenly the Duchess of Orleans got up and crossed the whole room to receive some one at the door. Generally she remained in her place, making only one step even for a duchess. It was Madame de Feuchères who entered.

“At the Court of Charles X. it was the Dauphine who received. She was very severe in her manner and had a very harsh voice: it was as if the shadow of the Temple always rested upon her. The Duchesse de Berri was of gentler manners, but less wise. When the family of Charles X. fled after the revolution of four days, the deputation going to offer the crown to Louis Philippe found he was out; they found only the Duchess of Orleans. She was horrified at the very idea and refused point-blank, saying that her husband would never do such a wrong to his cousin—‘Grace à Dieu! mon mari ne sera pas usurpateur.’ Going through the garden at Neuilly, however, the deputation met Madame Adelaïde, who asked what their business was, and being told what the Duchess had answered, said, ‘Oh, mais mon frère accepte, certainement il accepte;’ and her view was definitive. She never separated from her brother afterwards, and he always deferred to her opinion; indeed, as Napoleon used to say, she was ‘the only man of the family.’ The whole family paid her great attention. She was enormously rich, and made the Prince de Joinville her heir. Louis Philippe chose her epitaph in the vaults at Dreux. It is from Gen. xii. 13: ‘Thou art my sister, and it has been well with me for thy sake.’

“Mrs. Hamilton Hamilton was the first person Queen Marie Amelie sent for after her accession. She went in the evening, and found the Queen sitting at a table with Madame Adelaïde and one other lady, the wife of the Swedish Minister. A place was given to her between the Queen and Madame Adelaïde. The first words of the Queen seemed ominous—‘Nous avons laissé notre bonheur à Neuilly, Madame Hamilton.’ But Madame Adelaïde instantly took up the conversation, and talked of a bullet which she had found in her mirror, saying that she should never have the mirror mended, but should preserve it as ‘un souvenir historique.’

“Lady Waterford says how much brighter and happier people are for having something young about them,—a young lady, a child, a young dog even. She says, ‘I want to make a picture of Hope painting the future in the brightest colours. It will be such a beautiful subject. A rainbow will pour into the room and all its colours be reflected on her palette.’”

“July 20.—Lady Waterford and the Ellices went to Broadlands, and returned in the evening radiant, and full of the Conference, with which they were delighted. I was very sorry indeed to be too ill to go, these Broadland ‘Conferences’ being quite a type of the times.

“They had a delightful drive through the forest and halted at Lyndhurst, visiting the ‘King’s House’ and seeing the stirrup which is said to have belonged to William Rufus. It is of gigantic size, and was probably really intended, when dogs were forbidden in the forest, as a sort of standard of measurement, only dogs which could pass through that stirrup being allowed.

“At Broadlands, after luncheon, they went out on the lawn, where the Conference was proceeding under some fine beech-trees. ‘It was like a Claude,’ said Lady Waterford, the view being over the water, with a temple on one side and a cypress cutting the sky.’ Mr. Cowper Temple opened the afternoon meeting with a little speech; a Nonconformist minister followed, and then the High Church Mr. Wilkinson gave an address. The most remarkable thing he told was a story of a young lady who went to a meeting and returned resolved to dedicate herself to God. She wrote down her dedication, and then said, ‘It shall be from to-day.’ Then she considered that there was so much to be done, &c.—‘It shall be in three years.’ Again she hesitated and altered what she had written—‘I may not live: it shall be to-night.” But finally she thought again how much there was she wanted to do first, and finally wrote—‘In three weeks I will dedicate myself to God.’ In the morning the paper was found with all the different erasures and alterations, but the young lady was dead.... Several other speakers followed, and then Mr. Cowper Temple knelt on the gravel and prayed: all was most simple and earnest.

“Here at Highcliffe we have sat in the library in the morning, the great Brugmantia bursting into its bloom of scarlet bells in the conservatory beyond, Lady Waterford painting at her table, the rest working beneath the stained window.”

“Heckfield Place, August 13.—This is a beautiful open country with lovely woods and purple heaths studded with groups of fine old firs. The grounds of Heckfield itself are delightful, and the house, of red brick, stands upon a high bastioned terrace filled with brilliant flower-beds and overlooking undulating green lawns and an artificial sheet of water.

“Lord Eversley and his daughter Emma received me with most cordial kindness and a real family welcome, and it was pleasant to see so many interesting pictures of our common ancestors,—on the staircase a full-length of my great-grandmother Mrs. Hare, as a young girl tripping along with her apron full of flowers. There are fine portraits of her father and mother; and her sister, Helena Lefevre, is represented again and again, from youth to age.

“Lord and Lady Selborne have been here. He has a stiff manner, but warms into much pleasantness, and she is very genial: their daughter, Sophy, is a union of both. I went with Lord Selborne and Miss Palmer to Strathfieldsaye. The Duke (of Wellington), dressed like a poor pensioner, received us in his uncomfortable room, where Lord Selborne, who has a numismatical mania, was glad to stay for two hours examining coins. Meanwhile the Duke, finding we were really interested, took Miss Palmer and me upstairs, and showed us all his relics. It was touching to see the old man, who for the greater part of his lifetime existed in unloving awe of a father he had always feared and been little noticed by, now, in the evening of life, treasuring up every reminiscence of him and considering every memorial as sacred. In his close stuffy little room were the last pheasants the great Duke had shot, the miniatures of his mother and aunt and of himself and his brother as children, his grandfather’s portrait, a good one of Marshal Saxe, and the picture of the horse Copenhagen. Most of the bedrooms were completely covered with prints pasted on the walls. It was the great Duke’s fancy. Some of them are amusing, but the general effect is poor and bad, and the medley curious, especially in some rooms where they were framed in crowds—Lord Eldon, Melancthon, and views of the Alhambra together. In the hall hung a fine beginning of a picture of the great Duke, painted by Goya at Madrid. Before it was finished the army had moved on to Salamanca. The Duke had then been made Captain-General of the forces, and upon the Spanish commander saying in a huff, ‘I will not serve under a foreigner,’ Goya rejoined, ‘And I will not finish his portrait.’ And he never did.

“Strathfieldsaye is an unprepossessing house—as the Duke himself said, ‘like a great cottage.’

“Lord Eversley gave, as a curious instance of the awe in which the great Duke kept his Duchess, that Mrs. Lefevre, going one day to visit her, found her dissolved in tears. When she asked the reason, the Duchess said, sobbing, ‘Look there,’ and from the window Mrs. Lefevre saw workmen cutting down all the ivy which made the whole beauty of the trees before the house; and when Mrs. Lefevre asked the Duchess why she did not remonstrate, she showed her a written paper which the head man had just brought in, having received it from the Duke—‘Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington desires that the ivy may immediately be cut down from every tree on his estate.’ They had begun with those nearest home; the Duke had evidently forgotten to except those, but his order could not be trifled with.

“One day the great Duke was much surprised by receiving a letter which he read as follows:—‘Being in the neighbourhood, I venture to ask permission to see some of your Grace’s best breeches. C. London.’ He answered to the Bishop of London that he had great pleasure in assenting to his request, though he must confess it had given him very considerable surprise. London House was thrown into confusion. The note was from Loudon, the great gardener, and ‘breeches’ should have been read ‘beeches.’[185]

“We went on to Silchester, which is one of the three walled Roman towns of England, Wroxeter and Risborough being the others. The walls, three miles in circumference, are nearly perfect. In the centre is the forum, an immense square, 315 feet by 276, surrounded by shops, amongst which those of the oyster-monger, game-seller, butcher, and jeweller have been identified. One house retains its curious apparatus for warming very perfect.”

“Heckfield, August 14.—Yesterday Colonel Townley came to dine, celebrated for his ride of eight hundred miles without stopping. It was of great importance that certain despatches from our Government should reach Constantinople before the Austrian messenger could deliver his, and Colonel Townley accomplished it. When within a few hours of Constantinople, an old wound opened from his exertion, and he felt almost dying; but just then he caught sight of the Austrian envoy coming over the brow of a distant hill, and it nerved him, and he rode on and arrived first. It gained him his colonelcy. He is a pleasant, handsome, unaffected man.”

“Deanery, Salisbury, August 15.—I came here yesterday morning to the Venerable Dean Hamilton of eighty-two, and his wife of seventy-two. He was a Cambridge friend of my uncle Julius Hare, and lived in the same circle, of Thirlwall, Whewell, Sedgwick, and the Malcolms, &c. His mind has all its old power, and he has much that is most interesting to tell of all the people he has seen. He gave a curious account of breakfasts at the house of Ugo Foscolo, where everything was served by the most beautiful maidens in picturesque dresses. He described the eccentric Mr. Peate, who lived in Trinity, but never came out of his rooms except to dinner or supper, when he always appeared to the moment. When Dr. Parr dined, Mr. Peate drew him out in Combination Room, but retired at the usual hour; only on going away, he walked up to Dr. Parr and said, ‘I will take leave of you, sir, in words which may possibly not be unfamiliar to you,’ and made a long set complimentary speech in honour of learning; it was all taken word for word from an essay Dr. Parr had published many years before; Peate’s memory was so very extraordinary. It was not, however, always very convenient, for if a neighbour at dinner affirmed an opinion, Peate would sometimes say, ‘On such a day or such a year you expressed such and such an opinion, which was exactly the reverse of this,’ for he never forgot anything, even the very terms of an expression.

“There is here in Salisbury the usual familiar society of a cathedral close—the Canon in residence and the other inhabitants meeting and going in and out of each others’ houses at all hours. With Canon Douglas Gordon I have been to the Palace, where we found the Bishop in his garden, which is quite lovely, the rich green and brilliant flowers sweeping up into and mingling with the grey arcades and rich chapels of the cathedral; and from all points the tall heaven-soaring spire is sublime, especially in the purple shadows of evening, with birds circling ceaselessly round it.

“The Palace has a grand dull room full of portraits of deceased bishops, where we had tea. Bishop Moberly, who is still rather schoolmasterish, has no end of daughters, all so excellent that it has been observed that whenever a colonist sends home for a commendable wife, you may, with the most perfect confidence, despatch a Miss Moberly.”

“August 16.—To Breamore, the fine old Elizabethan house of Sir Edward Hulse, almost gutted by fire some years ago. I was taken up to the housetop to survey several surrounding counties, and sat the rest of the afternoon with the family in the shade of the old red gables. Two very handsome boys, Edward and Westrow, asked for a story.”

“Stanmer Park, August 18.—I came here yesterday to Lord Chichester’s. It is a moderate house in a dullish park, with fine trees and a bright flower-garden. We pray a great deal, and Lord Chichester—who is intensely good—makes little sermons at prayers.... Lord Pelham is very amusing under a quiet manner. ‘I thought I heard your dulcet tones, my love, so I am coming out to you,’ he is just saying, as he steps through the open window to his wife upon the verandah.”

“Oct. 4.—A most charming visit to Lady Mary Egerton at Mountfield Court. Mr. Charles Newton [186] of the British Museum is here, who is always charming, with ripple of pleasantest anecdote and kindly, genial manners. He says:—

“General Skenk had a monkey and a parrot, which hated each other. One day he imprudently went out, leaving them alone together in a room. When he came back, the monkey was sitting in his arm-chair, bleeding profusely, and looking very sheepish and ashamed of himself, while the floor was covered with feathers. The parrot had disappeared, but while General Skenk was looking for any further remains of it, out from under a sofa walked a perfectly naked bird, and said, ‘What a hell of a time we’ve had!’

“Mr. Newton was at a spiritual séance. An old man of the party was told that the spirit manifested was his wife, upon which he said:—

“Mr. Newton says that the cry of the wood-pigeon is ‘Sow peas, do, do.’ There is a bird in Turkey of which the male seems to say a string of words meaning ‘Have you seen my sheep?’ when the female replies, ‘No, I have not seen them.’ They are said to be a shepherd and shepherdess who lost all their sheep and died of a broken heart, when they were turned into birds. But the interesting point is that the story is found in an old Greek novel—‘Longus.’

“‘The origin of the Torlonia family,’ said Mr. Newton, ‘is very curious. When Pius VII. wished to excommunicate Napoleon I., he could not find any one who was bold enough to affix the scomunica to the doors of the Lateran. At length an old man who sold matches was found who ran the risk and did it. On the return of the Pope in triumph, the old man was offered any favour he liked, and he chose the monopoly of tobacco. From that time every speculation that the Torlonias entered upon was sure to answer.’

“The late Prince Torlonia, being at Naples, went into the room where the public appointments were sold by auction. He left his umbrella there, and went back to get it while the sale was going on. The bidders, chiefly Neapolitan nobles, were aghast to see the great Torlonia reappear, and at last, after some consultation, one of them came up to him and said they would give him 60,000 francs if he would leave. Instead of showing the intense astonishment he felt at this most unexpected proposal, Torlonia only shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘È póco,’ and they gave him 100,000.

“The only other guests at Mountfield are a Mr. Baker, a Gloucestershire squire, and his wife. He is an excellent man, and was the first who instituted a Reformatory. This he did first at his own expense, but the Government bought it from him. He speaks with the most dreary voice. Mr. Newton says it is ‘just the sort of utterance he should be grateful for if he was making his last speech upon the scaffold.’”

“Sonning, Dec. 30.—My ever-kind friend Lord Stanhope died on Christmas Eve. It was only two years from the time of dear Lady Stanhope’s death, on New Year’s Eve, 1873. She left a paper for her husband—what she called her ‘Last Words’—imploring him, for her sake, to go back to his literary interests, not to give up what had been his work, to try to fill up the blank in his life.

“When Lord Stanhope was dying, he said touchingly to Lady Mohun, ‘You know what my dearest Emily asked of me in her last words. I have tried to do as she wished, and you, my dear, have been such a good and kind daughter to me, you have almost made me wish to live.’

“I have been spending charming days with Hugh Pearson. He says, ‘What will become of a country in which the upper classes are content to be fed upon Farrar’s ‘Life of Christ’ and the middle classes upon Moody and Sankey?’ He told me of Justice Knight Bruce’s capital lines—

XVIII

LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY

“It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and to be of no character or significancy in it.”—Steele.

MY three thick volumes of the “Cities of Northern and Central Italy” appeared in the autumn of 1875, a very large edition (3000 copies) being printed at once. They were immediately the object of a most violent attack from Mr. Murray, who saw in them rivals to his well-known red handbooks. A most virulent and abusive article appeared upon my work in the Athenæum, accusing me, amongst other things, of having copied from Murray’s Handbooks without acknowledgment, and quoting, as proof, passages relating to Verona in both books, which have the same singular mistake. It was certainly a curious accident which made me receive the proof-sheets of Verona when away from home on a visit at Tunbridge Wells, where the only book of reference accessible was Murray’s “Handbook of Northern Italy,” which I found in the house, so that the mistakes in my account of Verona were actually copied from Murray’s Handbook, to which I was indebted for nothing else whatever, as (though much delighted with them when they first appeared) I had for years found Murray’s Handbooks so inefficient, that I had never bought or made any use of them, preferring the accurate and intelligent Handbooks of the German Gsel-fels. Mr. Murray further took legal proceedings against me, because in one of my volumes I had mentioned that the Italian Lakes were included in his Swiss rather than his Italian Handbooks: this having been altered in recent years, but having been the case in the only volumes of his Handbooks I had ever possessed. On all occasions, any little literary success I met with excited bitter animosity from Mr. Murray.

Another curious attack was made upon me by the eccentric Mr. Freeman, the historian of the Norman Conquest. He had published in the Saturday Review a series of short articles on the Italian cities, which I always felt had never received the attention they deserved, their real interest having been overlooked owing to the unpopularity of the dogmatic and verbose style in which they were written. Therefore, really with the idea of doing Mr. Freeman a good turn, I had rather gone out of my way to introduce extracts from his articles where I could, that notice might thus be attracted to them—an attention for which I had already been thanked by other little-read authors, as, whatever may be the many faults of my books, they have always had a large circulation. But in the case of Mr. Freeman, knowing the singular character of the man, I begged a common friend to write to his daughter and amanuensis to mention my intention, and ask her, if her father had no objection to my quoting from his articles, to send me a list of them (as they were unsigned), in order that I might not confuse them with those of any other person. By return of post I received, without comment, from Miss Freeman, a list of her father’s articles, and I naturally considered this as equivalent to his full permission to quote from them. I was therefore greatly surprised, when Mr. Freeman’s articles appeared soon afterwards in a small volume, to find it introduced with a preface, the whole object of which was, in the most violent manner, to accuse me of theft. I immediately published a full statement of the circumstances under which I had quoted from Mr. Freeman in sixteen different newspapers. Mr. Freeman answered in the Times by repeating his accusation, and in the Guardian he added, “Though Mr. Hare’s conduct was barefaced and wholesale robbery, I shall take no further notice of him till he has stolen something else.”[187]

Mr. Freeman made himself many enemies, but he did not make me one; he was too odd. His neighbour, the Dean of Wells, Johnson, could not bear him. When there was an Archæological Meeting at Wells, it was thought that peace might be made if the Dean could be persuaded to propose the historian’s health at the dinner. The Dean was quite willing, but he began his speech unfortunately with—“I rise with great pleasure to propose the health of our eminent neighbour, Mr. Freeman the historian, a man who—in his own personal characteristics—has so often depicted for us the savage character of our first forefathers.”

But in spite of these little catastrophes attending its publication, I am certain that “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” which cost me far more pains and labour, and which is more entirely original, than all my earlier books put together, was by far the best of my writings, up to that time.

Before the book was out, I was already devoted to a new work, suggested by the great delight I had long found in London, and by the desire of awakening others to an enjoyment of its little-known treasures. A set of lectures delivered at Sir John Shaw-Lefevre’s house in Seymour Street, and a series of articles in Good Words, laid the foundation for my “Walks in London.” When employed in this work, as in all my others, I felt all those portions of life to be the most interesting which were spent in following out any one single purpose.

“Jan. 18, 1876.—I went to Cobham for three days last week. Deep snow was on the ground, but the visit was delightful. I was delighted to find Lady Pelham there, always so radiant and cordial, and so perfectly simple. Of the other guests, the most interesting were Lord and Lady Harris. There were also a great many Kentish men, hunting clergy, who dressed in top-boots, &c., during their visit, but departed in ecclesiastical attire.”

“Jan. 19.—Yesterday I went to Lady Taunton. She has a beautiful portrait of her daughter by young Richmond—a sort of play upon every possible tone of yellow—a yellow gown, a yellow background, a great cushion worked with yellow sunflowers, yellow hair looped up with pearls, only a great white living lily to throw it all back. It is a most poetical picture.

“In the evening I went to a supper at the house of young F. P. to meet a whole society of young actors, artists, &c. Eden was there, known in the stage world as Herbert, a name he took to save the feelings of his episcopal uncle, Lord Auckland. His is a fine and a charming face, but rather sad.... There were about fourteen men present, very good singing, and then supper, much kindness and cordiality, and not a word which all their mothers and sisters might not have heard. It would not have been so at college or in a mess-room: so much for maligned actors.”

“Jan. 21.—To see Frederick Walker’s pictures. It is an interesting collection, as being the written mind of one man. You see the same picture over and over again, from its first sketch of an idea—merely a floating idea—to its entire completion, and it is interesting to know how slow a growth of thought was required to lead up to something, which, after all, was not so very wonderful in the end. The pictures are not beautiful, but the man who did them must have been charming, such a simple lover of farmhouse life, apple-orchards, and old-fashioned gardens, with a glory of flowers—all the right kinds of flowers blooming together.

“It poured, so I sat some time with R. on one of the seats. He talked long and openly of all the temptations of his life, and endlessly about himself. I urged that the best way of ennobling his own nature must be through others, that self-introspection would never do, and could only lead to egotism and selfishness, but that in trying to help others he would unconsciously help himself. I find it most difficult to say anything of this kind without making illustrations out of my own life, which I have certainly no right to think exemplary.

“As we were going away, a lady who had stared long and hard at us, and whom I thought to be some waif turned up from my Roman lectures, came up to me. ‘I think, sir, that you were standing close to my sister just now, and she has lost her purse.’—‘I am very sorry your sister has lost her purse; it is very unfortunate.’—‘Yes, but my sister has lost her purse, and you, you were standing by her when she lost it.’—‘I think after what you have said I had better give you my card.’—‘Oh, no, no, no.’—’ Oh, yes, yes, yes: after what you have said I must insist upon giving you my card.’ What an odd experience, to be taken for a pickpocket! R. thought the lady had really picked my pocket, but she had not.”

“Jan. 22.—An anonymous letter of apology from the lady of the picked pocket; only she said that if I had been as flurried as she was, and had been placed in the same circumstances as she was, I should have acted exactly as she did; in which I do not quite agree with her.”

“Monk’s Orchard, Jan. 23.—This is a fine big house, be-pictured, be-statued, with a terraced garden, a lake, and a great flat park. A Mr. and Mrs. Rodd are here with their son Rennell, a pleasant-looking boy, wonderfully precocious and clever, though, as every one listens to him, he has—not unnaturally—a very good opinion of himself: still one feels at once that he is the sort of boy who will be heard of again some day.

“Our host, Mr. Lewis Loyd, is in some ways one of the most absent men in the world. One day, meeting a friend, he said, ‘Hallo! what a long time it is since I’ve seen you! How’s your father?’—‘Oh, my father’s dead.’—‘God bless me! I’m very sorry,’ &c. The next year he met the same man again, and had forgotten all about it, so began with, ‘Hallo! what a long time since I’ve seen you! How’s your father?’-‘Oh, my father’s dead still!’

“We have been to church at Shirley—one of Scott’s new country churches. In the churchyard is a cross to poor Sir John Anson, and beside it a granite altar-tomb with an inscription saying that it is to Ruskin’s father—‘a perfectly honest merchant,’ and that ‘his son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak the truth, says this.’

“69 Onslow Square, Jan. 28.—A long visit to F. and S. It is quite a new phase of life to me. They are perfect gentlemen, at least in heart, and one cannot be with them long without seeing a kindly, chivalrous nature, which comes to the surface in a thousand little nothings. Yet they are what the world frowns upon—beginning to seek fortune on the stage, neglected or rejected by unsympathetic relations, living from hand to mouth, furnishing their rooms by pawning their rings and watches, &c. S. in terrible illness, totally penniless, ignored by every one, is taken in, nursed, doctored, and paid for by F., upon whom he has no claim whatever. F., abused, snubbed, and without any natural charm in himself, is henceforth loved, defended, regarded with the most loyal devotion, by his more popular companion.

“I dined on the 26th with Lady E. Adeane. Mr. Percy Doyle was very amusing. Talking of the anxiety of ministers in America to change their posts, he said, ‘If my father had bequeathed to me Hell and Texas, I should have lived in Hell and let Texas.’

“Yesterday I went to luncheon with the Vaughans at the Temple, and met there Miss Rye, who has a home for homeless children at Clapham, and takes them off by batches to America, to establish them there as servants, &c. She produced from her pocket about a hundred cartes-de-visite of the children, wild, unkempt, and wicked-looking, and of the same children after they had been under cultivation. Certainly the change was marvellous, but then she had employed a good photographer for the redeemed children and a very bad one for the little ruffians.”

“Feb. 5.—Dined at Lady Sarah Lindsay’s. Sir Robert Phillimore was there, whom I had not seen since I was a child. He is most agreeable and has a noble nature. There was a young man there, a Bridgeman, just entering the law, and I thought the picture quite beautiful which Sir Robert drew without effort for his encouragement, of all that the profession of the law might become and be made by any one who really took to it,—of all the great aims to be fulfilled, of all the ways of making it useful to others and ennobling to one’s own nature. I felt so much all that I should have felt that sort of encouragement, drawn from practical experience, would have been to myself.”

“Feb. 8.—The opening of Parliament. I went to Lord Overstone’s. At a quarter to two the procession passed beneath—the fine old carriages and gorgeous footmen, one stream of gold and red, pouring through the black crowd and leafless trees. We all counted the carriages differently—eight, twelve, fifteen; and there were only six! All one saw of royalty was the waving of a white cap-string, as the Queen, sitting well back in the carriage, bowed to the people.”

“Feb. 13.—Dined at the Dowager Lady Barrington’s—the great topic being dinner past, present, and prospective. George, Lord Barrington, said that he had dined at the Brazilian Minister’s, and he was sure the cookery was good and also the wine, for he had eaten of every dish and drunk fourteen kinds of wine, and had passed a perfectly good night and been quite well the next morning. He also dined with Mr. Brand the Speaker, and complimented Mrs. Brand upon the dinner. She told her cook. He said, ‘We are three, Lord Granville’s, Mr. Russell Sturgis’s, and myself; there are only three cooks in London.’ When Lord Harrington afterwards saw Mrs. Brand, she told him the cook had asked who had praised him, and ‘when he heard,’ continued Mrs. Brand, ‘he also gave you his little meed of praise.’ ‘Ah, M. Barrington,’ he said, ‘c’est une bonne fourchette.’ He had been at Kinmel, but said he had ‘dismissed Mr. Hughes.’”

“Feb. 14.—Dined at Lord Halifax’s to meet Lord and Lady Cardwell. They are most pleasant, interesting, interested company, and it was altogether one of the happiest dinners I remember. The conversation was chiefly about the changes in spelling and their connection with changes in English history and customs.

“Lord Cardwell was in the habit of using the Church prayers at family prayers. One day his valet came to him and said, ‘I must leave your lordship’s service at once.’—‘Why, what have you to complain of?’—‘Nothing personally, but your lordship will repeat every morning—“We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and have left undone those things which we ought to have done:”—now I freely admit that I have often done things I ought not, but that I have left undone things that I ought to have done, I utterly deny: and I will not stay here to hear it said.’”

“Feb. 19.—A charming walk with Charlie Wood to St. Paul’s, along the Embankment and then a labyrinth of quaint City streets. He called it his half-holiday, and I am sure it was so to me to mount into his pure unworldly atmosphere even for two hours. He is really the only young man I know who at once thinks no evil, believes no evil, and does no evil.”

“Sunday, Feb. 20.—Luncheon with Mrs. Harvey of Ickwellbury, meeting Colonel Taylor, the Whip of the House of Commons—a very amusing man. He talked a great deal about Ireland. He said that when he congratulated Whyte-Melville upon the engagement of his daughter to Lord Massereene, he said, ‘Yes, I have every reason to be satisfied: first, my future son-in-law is an Irishman, and then he speaks his native tongue in all its purity.’

“He spoke of landing in former days at Kingstown, how the car-drivers fought for you, and, having obtained you, possessed you, and made all out of you that they could. Passing a mile-post with G. P. O. upon it, the ‘fare’ asked its meaning. ‘Why, your honour,’ said the driver, ‘it’s aizy to see that your honour has never been in ould Ireland before—why, that’s just God preserve O’Connell, your honour, and it’s on ivery mile-post all through the country.’ It was of course ‘General Post Office.’

“Coming to a river, the ‘fare’ asked, ‘What do you call this river?’—‘It’s not a river at all, your honour; it’s only a strame.’—‘Well, but what do you call it?’—‘Oh, we don’t call it at all, your honour; it just comes of itself.’”

“Feb. 24.—Dined at Lord Strathmore’s, and went on with Hedworth and Lizzie Williamson to Lady Bloomfield’s, where sixty-eight cousins assembled to take leave of Lord and Lady Lytton on their departure for India.”

If any one has ever the patience to read this memoir through, they will have been struck by the way in which, for many years before the time I am writing of, the persons with whom I lived were quite different from those amongst whom my childhood was spent. Arthur Stanley had never got over the publication of the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” though he was always at a loss to say what he objected to in it, and Mary Stanley I never saw at all. From Lady Augusta alone I continued to receive frequent and affectionate messages.

In 1874 Lady Augusta represented the Queen at the marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh, and she never really recovered the effects of the cold which she then endured in Russia. In the summer of 1875 she was alarmingly ill in Paris, was brought home with difficulty, and from that time there was little hope of her recovery. She expired early in March 1876. I had not seen her for long, but had always a most affectionate recollection of her, and the last letter she was able to dictate was addressed to me.

“Holmhurst, March 12.—I have been again up to London for dear Augusta Stanley’s funeral on the 9th. It was a beautiful day. All the approaches to Westminster were filled with people in mourning.

“It seemed most strange thus to go to the Deanery again—that the doors closed for six years were opened wide by death, by the death of one who had always remained my friend, and whom no efforts of others could alienate. Red cloth showed that royalty was coming, and I went at once to the library, where an immense crowd of cousins were assembled. As I went down the little staircase with Kate Vaughan, four ladies in deep mourning passed to the dining-room, carrying immense wreaths of lovely white flowers: they were the Queen and three of her daughters. The Queen seemed in a perfect anguish of grief. She remained for a short time alone with the coffin, I believe knelt by it, and was then taken to the gallery overhanging the Abbey.

“Soon the immense procession set out by the cloisters, and on entering the church, turned so as to pass beneath the Queen and then up the nave from the west end. The church was full of people: I felt as if I only saw the wind lifting the long garlands of white flowers as the coffin moved slowly on, and Arthur’s pathetic face of childlike bewilderment. The music was lovely, but in that vast choir one longed for a village service. It was not so in the second part, when we moved through one long sob from the poor of Westminster who lined the way, to the little chapel behind the tomb of Henry VII., where the service was indescribably simple and touching.

“The procession of mourners went round the Abbey from the choir by a longer way to the chapel on account of the people. As it passed the corner of the transept, the strange little figure of Mr. Carlyle slipped out. He had been very fond of Augusta, was full of feeling for Arthur, and seemed quite unconscious of who and where he was. He ran along, before the chief mourners, by the side of the coffin, and in the chapel itself he stood at the head of the grave, making the strangest ejaculations at intervals through the service.”

Arthur stood at the head of the grave with his hands on the heads of Thomas Bruce’s two children. When the last flowers fell into the grave, a single voice sang gloriously, “Write, saith the Spirit.” Then we moved back again to the nave, and, standing at the end, in a voice of most majestic pathos, quivering, yet audible through all that vast space, Arthur himself gave the blessing. “The Queen was waiting for him upon the threshold as he went into the house, and led him herself into his desolate home.”

“March 25.—A ‘Spelling Bee’ at Mrs. Dundas’s. I was plucked as I entered the room over the word Camelopard.

“Dined at the Tower of London with Everard Primrose; only young Lord Mayo there. At 11 P.M. the old ceremony of relieving guard took place. I stood with Everard and a file of soldiers on a little raised terrace. A figure with a lanthorn emerged from a dark hole.

“Upon which the figure, advancing into the broad moonlight, said ‘God bless Queen Victoria!’ and all the soldiers shouted ‘Amen’ and dispersed.”

“March 28.—My lecture on ‘The Strand and the Inns of Court’ took place in 41 Seymour Street. I felt at Tyburn till I began, and then got on pretty well. There was a very large attendance. I was very much alarmed at the whole party, but had an individual dread of Lord Houghton, though I was soon relieved by seeing that he was fast asleep, and remained so all the time.”

“April 4.—My lecture on Aldersgate, &c. Dinner at the Miss Duff Gordons, meeting the Tom Taylors.[190] He talks incessantly.”

“April 6.—Dined with Lady Sarah Lindsay, where I was delighted at last to meet Mrs. Greville.[191] She recited in the evening, sitting down very quietly on the sofa with her feet on a stool. Her voice is absorbing, and in her ‘Queen of the May’ each line seems to catch up a fresh echo of pathos from the last.”

“April 7.—Dined at Sir Stafford Northcote’s.[192] Mrs. Dudley Ryder was there, who told me she had paralysis of the throat, yet sang splendidly. Sir Stafford told a capital story in French in the evening, something like that which I tell in Italian about the Duke of Torlonia.”

“April 14.—Dined at the Shaw-Lefevres’. Dear Sir John talked much, when we were alone, of the great mercies and blessings of his life—how entirely he could now say with Horne Tooke, ‘I am both content and thankful.’ He described his life—his frequent qualms at having sacrificed a certain position at the bar to an uncertain post under Government: then how the Governorship of Ceylon was offered to him, and how he longed to take it, but did not, though it was of all things what he would have liked, because an instant answer was demanded, and he could not at once find any means of providing for the children he could not take with him: how through all the year afterwards he was very miserable and could apply to nothing, it was such a very severe disappointment; and then how he was persuaded to stand for Cambridge, and how, though he did not get in, the effort served its purpose in diverting his thoughts. Eventually the place in the House of Lords was offered, in which he worked for so many years.

“Sir John spoke most touchingly of his boy’s death. ‘We had another little boy once, you did not know perhaps. It died. It was the dearest, most engaging child. When it died it took the shine out of life.’ Then he dwelt on the law of compensations, how the anxiety for his eldest girl Rachel, so very ill, ‘brought in on a cushion, and suffering so much, poor thing,’ diverted his thoughts from the great loss. In his old age he said, ‘And now at eighty all is blessing—all ... but it is difficult to remember how old one is. The chief sign of age I feel is the inability to apply regularly to work, the having no desire to begin anything new.’ One could not but feel as if it was Sir Thomas More who was speaking, so beautiful his spirit of blessed contentment, so perfect the trust and repose of his gentle waiting for what the future might bring.”

“Holmhurst, April 30.—Lea has been in saying, ‘It’s May Day to-morrow, the day to turn the cows out to grass. The poor things must have a bit of a treat then, you know; they always have done. But there’s not the good clover now-a-days there used to be. Eh! what a fuss there used to be, to be sure, putting the cows out in the clover; and we used to watch that they did not eat too much, and to see that they did not swell; if they did, they had to be pricked, or they’d have burst. And then next day there was the making of the first May cheese.... Old John Pearce at Lime used to take wonderful care of Mr. Taylor’s oxen, and proud enough he used to be of them. “Well, you give them plenty to eat, John,” I used to say. “Yes, that’s just about it, Miss Lea,” he said; “I do put it into them right down spitefully, that I do.”’

“‘Here’s a pretty how-d’ye-do! It’s the master finding fault!—it’s one day one thing and one another. Old bachelors and old maids are all alike. They don’t know what they want, they don’t; but I know: the old maids want husbands, and the old bachelors want wives, that’s what they want.’

“‘It’s the mischief of the farming now-a-days that the farmers always say ‘Go.’ ... My father used to say a farmer never ought to say ‘Go;’ if he did, the work was sure to be neglected: a farmer should always say ‘Come, lads,’ and then the work would be done.’

“‘Why, girl, the moon’s waning. I would never kill a pig when the moon’s on the wane. Why, it would not break out; it would shrivel up. No, you must kill a pig with the new moon. I daresay folks laugh at me, but I know what’s what.’

“‘Well, and there’s nothing does him so much good. He’d mope, mope, mope, and that’s nothing. It makes him fat, like babies. Boys must laugh, or they won’t get fat. Girls may cry: it always does them good: it stretches their muscles and such like: but boys mustn’t cry; it’s bad for them: that’s how the old saying goes.’

“‘Eh! how do I know? We must summer ’em and winter ’em afore we can tell, must’na we, wench: aye, and a good many summers and winters it must be too, and then they may deceive ye. I have’na lived more than twenty years over half a century, but I’ve found that out.’

“I have’na heard the cuckoo this spring. I don’t know what’s come over the things. Heathfield fair is over ever so long, and “The old woman lets the cuckoo out of her basket at Heathfield fair,” that’s the old saying.’”

“May 6.—In London again, which is full of interest as ever, and now especially beautiful from its trees just bursting into leaf with indescribable wealth of lovely young green. It is certainly a most delightful time. People think I ought to feel dreadfully depressed by a most spiteful paragraph upon ‘Cities of Italy’ in the Saturday, and a more spiteful review in the Athenæum, but I do not a bit: they are most disagreeable doses to take, but I believe they are most wholesome medicine for one’s morals and capital teachers of humility.”

“May 7.—An amusing tea at the Duchess of Cleveland’s—young Lord Stanhope and Mr. Bourke there. The Duchess talked of Pimlico, the bought property of Lord Grosvenor, formerly called ‘The Five Fields.’ The Court wished to buy it because it was so close to Buckingham Palace, but thought the sum asked was too much. Lord Grosvenor gave £30,000 for it. Lord Cowper had wished to buy it, and sent his agent for the purpose, but he came back without having done so, and when Lord Cowper upbraided him, said, ‘Really, my lord, I could not find it in my heart to give £200 more for it than it was worth.’ Cubitt afterwards offered a ground-rent of £60,000.”

“May 8.—Dined with Mrs. Thellusson to meet Lady Waterford. Whistler the artist was there. He has a milk-white tuft growing out of his black hair, a peculiarity which he declares to be hereditary in his family, as in that of the Caëtani.”

“May 10.—I was ‘at home’ in the morning to a sketching-party in Bunhill Fields Cemetery. It was very sunny there and very quiet, till the Militia and a troop of attendant boys found us out. One of the latter stole my umbrella, but I pursued him and captured it again as he passed through the gate.

“A very pleasant gathering in the afternoon in the beautiful new room of Lowther Lodge, where the great characteristics are the white Queen Anne chimney-pieces, and the vast space of floors, not parquetted, but of closely fitted oak boards. Dined at the Peases’ to meet Woolner the sculptor, &c.”

“May 11.—A lovely day. My ‘Excursion’ to the Tower. Forty-six people met me there. All the curious chambers and vaults were open to us in turn. In the White Tower we saw the prisons of Little Ease. I had given my little explanation and returned into the sunshine with the greater number of the party, when Mrs. Maxwell Lyte, who had arrived late, went in. Being told that the cell of Sir Thomas More was to be seen, and seeing a railing by the flickering torchlight, she thought that marked the place, and went underneath it, and stepped out into—nothing! With a piercing shriek she fell into a black abyss by a precipice of fourteen feet. Every one thought she was killed, but after a minute her voice came out of the depths—‘I am not seriously hurt.’ It was a tremendous relief.

“We went on to the Queen’s Head Restaurant, Emily Lefevre and I running before to order luncheon. When we arrived, we found volleys of smoke issuing from the house and the kitchen-chimney on fire. However, we waited, the party bore the smell, and eventually we had our luncheon. Tom Brassey wanted to order wine, &c., but Emily stopped him with, ‘Remember, Mr. Brassey, we are limited to fourpence a head.’

“The Prince of Wales arrived (from India) at 7 P.M. I waited two hours at the Spottiswoodes’ house in Grosvenor Place to see him, and saw nothing but the flash of light on his bald head. It was a pleasant party, but how seldom in London society does one hear anything one can carry away. Most people are like those Mme. du Deffand describes—‘des machines à ressort qui vont, viennent, parlent, vivent, sans penser, sans réfléchir, sans sentir, chacun jouant son rôle par habitude.’”

“May 12.—Trouble with Murray the publisher, who insists on believing that because some points in my ‘Cities of Italy’ resemble his Handbooks, they must be taken from them, which they most assuredly are not. I had no Handbooks with me when I was writing, but where there is only one thing to say about places, two people sometimes say it.”

“May 15.—Drawing-party in dirty, picturesque St. Bartholomew’s. For the first time this year no one asked me to dinner, and I was most profoundly bored.”

“May 16.—Dined at Sir Charles Trevelyan’s. Old Lord Hatherley was very interesting. He said much that was curious about the Milton houses in the City, and how as a boy he used to go to study at the Williams Library in Redcross Street: how Lady Hatherley had property in the City, in an ancient conveyance of which there was a signature of Shakspeare. I never saw people whose every word breathed more of old-fashioned goodness than Lord and Lady Hatherley.”

“May 17.—A sketching-party in the City. The going thither down the river, with its varieties of huge barges with their sails, quite as striking as many things abroad. In the great Church of St. Mary Overy we drew the wonderful figures of the ‘Sisters’—sleeping deeply with their rakes and prongs over their shoulders while waiting for the great final harvest.”

“May 26.—Dined at Lord Ducie’s. Lord Henry Scott talked of his place on the Solent, and his different rights to flotsam, jetsam, and lagam; that it never arrived at the third: that the second had only brought him two dead sailors to bury.”

“May 27.—Dined at Lord Egerton of Tatton’s, Old General Doyle was very amusing with his stories of duels in which he had a personal share. He also told of his visit to Ireland as a young man with the present Lord Enniskillen as Lord Cole. At the first house they went to, his friend escaped after dinner, but he had not time. The host locked the door, and they began to drink at seven, and went on to eleven. At eleven his host fell under the table, and he then picked his pocket of the key and got out. The next day his host seriously consulted Lord Cole as to whether it was not his duty to call him out, because he would not stay for another drinking bout.

“He told the story of a man in France, condemned to death for the murder of his father and mother, who, when asked if he could give any reason why he should not undergo the extreme penalty of the law, clasped his hands, and said, ‘Ayez pitié d’un pauvre orphelin.’”

“May 31.—An evening party at Lord Houghton’s, an omnium-gatherum, but very amusing. It recalled Carlyle’s speech, who, when some ecclesiastic gloomily inquired in his presence ‘What would happen if Jesus Christ returned to earth now?’ retorted—‘Happen! why Dickie Milnes would ask him to dinner, to be sure, and would ask Pontius Pilate to meet him.’

“It took half-an-hour to get up the staircase. Miss Rhoda Broughton was there, beautifully dressed, pressed upon by bishops and clergy: Salvini and Irving were affectionately greeting: Lady Stanley of Alderley, under a perfect stack of diamonds, was declaiming very loud in her unknown tongue to an astonished and bewildered audience; and through all the groups upstairs the young King of the Belgians was smiling and bowing a retreat to his escape by a back-staircase.”

“June 6.—Left London for Devonshire, struck more than usual with the interest of the Great Western Railway, which has no exceptional beauty, but most characteristic changes of scenery, even the botany along the banks showing in its different plants the varied conformations of the soil.

“First, close to London, the endless brick-kilns, and the last streets stretching out into the blackened fields like fingers of a skeleton hand. Then across the green meadows, all intersected by elms, branchless and tufted like great brooms, the grey coronal of Windsor. Then the red houses and pretentious prison of Reading and the glassy reaches of the Thames, with its vigorous growth of sturdy water-plants at Pangbourne and Maple Durham.

“Next we enter Berkshire, bare and featureless except near the river and where the White Horse appears, a scraggy creature rudely scratched in the turf above a soft hollow in the downs. Chippenham is a little town in a wooded hollow, with a grey spire and stone bridge over the Avon. Then one reaches a stony country. The houses are no longer of brick, but all of stone. The Box tunnel is a result of the hills. The villas near Bath, of grey stone, cling to the sides of the heights from whose quarries they were taken. In the valley are Hampton church and ferry.

“Bath, an entirely stone city, has a consequent greyness of its own. The streets have a desolate stateliness, and are still the abode of old maids and card-playing dowagers as when described by Miss Austen; so Bath-chairs are still the popular mode of conveyance to the frequent tea-parties. Beechen Cliff is a fine feature. In the centre of the town the Abbey tower shows the poverty of perpendicular architecture.

“By Kelsey Oaks we rush on to smoky Bristol, all energy and ugliness: then a great strange rift in the hills shows where the Avon winds beneath the rocks and hanging bridge of Clifton.

“Now there is a change to softer scenery at Clevedon, Woodspring Priory, the odd hill of Weston. The houses grow warmer as well as the country—no longer of grey, but of red sandstone: the Somersetshire churches, proverbially fine, have pink-grey towers, their projections gilded with lichen. Now we pass through apple-orchards, and the thorns, snow-drifted with bloom, stand knee-deep in the long mowing grass. In the flats rises Bridgewater, then Taunton with its beautiful and picturesque towers standing out against the low grey hills; Exeter, capped by the stumpy towers of its cathedral; and then the salt estuary of the Teign laps the bank of the railway and we enter the woods of Powderham.”

“Powderham, June 9.—I found the door open last night and walked straight into the hall. Charlie Wood and Lady Agnes were there at tea, and people kept dropping in—a very pleasant party.... Lord Devon [200] is the kindest of hosts, full of small courtesies; but he is a great deal away, flying up to London after dinner and returning next day: they say he performs the circumference of the globe every year, and chiefly on his own lines of railway.

“Lord Devon’s only son, Lord Courtenay, is seldom here, but when he is, amuses every one. One evening ‘Mademoiselle Bekker’ arrived late at Powderham, coming in the hope to obtain a chairman for a meeting which was going to be held at Exeter in favour of the Rights of Women. There was a very distinguished party in the house—the Bishop of Winchester, Lord Halifax, the American Minister (Motley), &c., and they each, while refusing, made a speech in answer to hers, which was most eloquent. Eventually Mademoiselle Bekker declared herself so indignant as to be led to unsex herself: she was Lord Courtenay.”

“June 12.—On Saturday we were called at daybreak, and went to Totness by rail, and thence in waggonettes eighteen miles through deep bosky lanes, and then over breezy uplands to the Moult, Lord Devon’s enchanting little place near Salcombe. Here the blue-green transparent sea glances through the thick foliage deep below the windings of the road, and the quiet bay is encircled by rocky hills tufted with wood, which in parts feathers down into the water. We rested at North Sands Cottage, a lovely wee place of Lord Devon’s, and then walked through the grounds of his larger place of the Moult. Aloes grow and flourish here to an immense size. Beyond this a path—‘Lord Courtenay’s Walk’—runs half-way up the steep precipices above the sea.

“It was an enchanting day, white wreaths of cloud drifting above in the blue, deep below the sea gloriously transparent, with all its weed-covered rocks visible through the waters, great white gulls swooping around with their wild outcries, and the pathlet winding up and down the cliff, bordered by cistus and thrift in masses of pink luxuriance. On the steep descent to a cove, we were met by a welcome luncheon, and ate it high above some rock caverns which are very curious at that point.

“One of the principal farmers belonging to an agricultural club near this lost his wife lately, and in his kind way Lord Devon alluded to her at the annual club dinner,—speaking of her as an admirable, kind, and industrious woman, and saying how he could feel with such a loss, having had himself a bereavement which was ever present to him. But at last the farmer interrupted him—‘I doan’t know what his Lordship be a talking about; but I du know that she was an awful cranky, tiresome old woman, and God Almighty’s very welcome to she.’

“Yesterday was Sunday. I went to the service at Powderham with Lord Devon and Lady Mary Fortescue in a chapel opposite the white recumbent marble figure of Lady Devon. The afternoon was spent in the ‘plantation garden,’ where an Australian gum-tree was in full flower. In the evening there were prayers—‘Compline,’ they called it—a very living, earnest service in the chapel.... Truly I felt, as I took leave of Charlie, that above the door of every house that is his home might be inscribed the words of S. Bernard engraved over the threshold of many Cistercian houses—‘Bonum est nos hic esse, quia homo vivit purius, cadit rarius, surgit velocius, incedit cautius, quiescit securius, moritur felicius, purgatur citius, praemiatur copiosius.’”

“Abbots Kerswell, June 15.—Yesterday Sir Samuel and Lady Baker dined here. He is most agreeable, and possesses ‘l’art de narrer’ to perfection. He told a ghost-story in the evening, without either names, dates, or any definite material, and yet it was quite admirable, and kept the company breathless for three-quarters of an hour.”

“June 16.—Yesterday we paid a long visit to Sir Samuel Baker. He has bought and made his place with the money he received from the Khedive for his African discoveries.[201] The house is full of skeleton heads, horns, &c. Many others were destroyed in the African depot by an insect which forces out the bone as with a gimlet, but fortunately it will not live in England.”

“Charlton Hall, June 17.—I spent several hours in Bath on my way here. It was an exquisite day, and everything was in great beauty. Bath seems a town exclusively intended for the rich. Everything being built of stone gives it a foreign character, and the height of the surrounding hills causes you to see green down every street. I felt age in the way in which everything looked so small in proportion to my recollection.

“At Chippenham a dogcart from Lord Suffolk’s was waiting for me, and we rolled away down the dull lanes to Malmesbury. It was curious in one day to revisit, as it were, six years out of my former life. At Bath I had walked up the hill to where I could look down upon Lyncombe, and what memories it awakened of miserable longings after a fuller, more interesting life, which lasted through the whole of two years and a half of wasted, monotonous, objectless time. Now in my full life, looking down upon that richly wooded glen, it seemed quite beautiful; but in the wretched bondage of those weary years, how hideous it all was!

“At Chippenham, as I passed the park at Harnish, I went back farther still to three years and a half of private school imprisonment and the pettiest of petty miseries. They do not matter much now certainly, but one does grudge six years of youth denuded of all that makes life pleasant and beautiful.

“Charlton is a magnificent old house of yellow-grey stone, Jacobean, open on all sides, a perfect quadrangle. Inside, there was once a courtyard, but a former Lord Suffolk closed it in. It remained for many years a mere gravelled space: lately Lady Suffolk has had it paved, and to a certain extent furnished. The rooms are handsome in stucco ornaments, but not picturesque. The pictures are glorious. There is one of the noblest known works of Leonardo da Vinci—‘La Vierge aux Rochers,’ the figures all with the peculiar Leonardo type of face, grouped in a rocky valley—strange, wild, and fantastic.[202] The picture which to me is most charming is ‘Le Raboteur,’ attributed to Annibale Carracci. The Virgin, a sweet-looking peasant woman, yet with an expression of ‘pondering these things in her heart,’ is sitting outside her cottage door with her work-basket by her side. The boy Jesus, in a simple blue tunic, is standing at the end of the carpenter’s table—‘subject to his parents’—doing some measuring for old Joseph, who is at work there. It is a quiet village group such as one has often seen, only elevated by expression.

“There is a glorious old gallery with a noble ceiling, full of portraits and of old and interesting books. In the ‘rose parlour’ are more pictures, and a ceiling the design of which is repeated in the flower-garden. Many of the pictures belonged to James II. When he fled, he sent them to be taken care of by Colonel Graham, who had married the Earl of Berkshire’s daughter, and William III. afterwards allowed them to remain.”

“June 18.—Yesterday it rained at intervals all day. I drew the gallery, and enjoyed talking to Lady Suffolk,[203] who sat by me, with a charm of face and manner and mind which recalls Donne’s lines—

She lives so far more in the heavenly than the earthly horizons, that one feels raised above earth whilst one is with her. She spoke of the impossibility of believing in eternity of punishment, yet of the mass of difficulties besetting all explanations. She talked of a woman in the village in failing health and unhappy. Being asked if she was not troubled in her mind, she confessed that she was, but said, ‘It is not for want of light; I have had plenty of light.’ She said her father had said to her, ‘Now if you go to hell, Hannah, it will not be for want of light.’

“Some one had urged Lady Suffolk to go and hear Moody and Sankey, because their sermons on heaven were such a refreshment and rest: she had gone, and the sermon had all been about hell.

“Lady Victoria drove me to Malmesbury. The town cross is beautiful. The Abbey is a gigantic remnant of a colossal whole; the existing church being about two-thirds of the nave of the original abbey-church, entered by a magnificent Norman door. By the altar is a tomb to King Athelstan, erected some centuries after his death, and there is a gallery like Prior Bolton’s in Smithfield.”

“June 18.—I sleep at Charlton in the ‘king’s room,’ so called from James II. It is hung with tapestry and old pictures. As we were going to bed, Andover said, ‘You sleep in the haunted room.’ Consequently every noise, which I had never observed before, troubled me through the night. One ought never to be told that a room is haunted.

“Conversation has been much about Mrs. Wagstaff, a homœopathic clairvoyant, wife of an allopathic doctor at Leighton Buzzard. She comes up to London if desired, and works wonderful cures. In her trances her conversation is most remarkable, but out of them she is a very ordinary person. She never remembers when awake having seen any one (with her eyes half-open) in a trance, but meets as a perfect stranger the person she has just been talking to for half-an-hour.

“It was odd on Sunday having no service in church till six in the evening, but certainly very pleasant. We walked in the park beforehand to Sans Souci, a pretty wood in which a clear stream has its source, throwing up the sand in the oddest way in a large round basin. Numbers of trees were lying about, cut down, as Andover said, ‘to meet the annual demand for the needy.’”

“June 19.—The Andovers’ little girl is most amusing. At six, if she catches a new word, she uses it without the slightest idea as to its meaning. Her maid Sabina went to her to-day and said, ‘Now, Miss Howard, I must put on your things, for you must go out.’—‘No, Sabina, you must not,’ promptly said ‘Tiny-Wee.’—‘But I really must, Miss Howard,’ said Sabina.—‘No, Sabina, you must not,’ persisted Tiny-Wee.—‘And why, Miss Howard?’ said Sabina.—‘Because, Sabina, it is co-eternal,’ said Tiny-Wee very solemnly; and Sabina was utterly quelled and gave way at once. It is needless to say that Tiny had been to church and heard the Athanasian Creed.

“Andover has been describing a clergyman who preached on the fatted calf, and sought his words as well as his ideas as he proceeded extempore, and said, ‘He came home, my brethren, he came home to his father, to his dear father, and his father killed for him the fatted calf, which he had been saving up for years, my brethren—saving up for years for some festive occasion.’

“He told of an American who never was in time for anything in his life, was unpunctual for everything systematically. One day, in a very out-of-the-way place, he fell into a cataleptic state, and was supposed to be dead. According to the rapidity of American movement, instead of bringing the undertaker to him, they took him to the undertaker, who fitted him with a coffin and left him, only laying the coffin lid loosely on the outside of it. In the middle of the night he awoke from his trance, pushed off the lid, and finding himself in a place alone surrounded by a quantity of coffins, he jumped up and pushed off the lid of the coffin nearest to him. He found nothing. He tried another: nothing. ‘Good God!’ he cried, ‘I’ve been late all my life, and now I’m late for the resurrection!’”

“June 20.—Yesterday we had a delightful drive to see Lady Cowley at Draycot, a most charming place of happy medium size, in a park full of fern and old oaks. Lord Mornington, who left it to the Cowleys, was quite a distant cousin, and they expected nothing. He came to dine with them occasionally at Paris, he mounted Lady Feodore for the Bois de Boulogne, and one day they suddenly found themselves the heirs of Draycot, perfectly fitted up with everything they could possibly wish for. It was like a fairy story, and Lady Cowley has never attempted to conceal her enchantment at it.

“To-day we went to a different place—Mr. Holford’s new house of Westonbirt. It is an immense building in a flat, ugly situation. The hall goes up the whole height of the house, with open galleries to the bedrooms, so that every one sees who goes in and out of them. The dining-room has a fine Jacobean chimney-piece and modern Corinthian pillars. There is a great chimney-piece in another room, which was an altar in a church at Rome. All is huge, and seemed very comfortless.

“It has been a most happy visit to the Suffolks, with whom one is completely at home. As Lady Suffolk says, though they have often wished to be rich, they have been much happier for being poor, for they have all been obliged to do their part in the house and place, and all that has to be carried on there, and so it is to them not only the scene of their life, but of their work.”

“June 22.—Yesterday I went to Oxford, and came in, without intending it, for Commemoration. I will never go there again if I can help it. It is like visiting a grave of happy past years.”

“June 28.—Went to Holland House. The deep shade of its lofty avenue is enchanting as one turns in from the baking street of Kensington. Lady Holland sat in the inner room, with her sweet face encircled by the prettiest of old-fashioned caps. Beau Atkinson was with her, with a lovely little Skye dog in his arms, and Lady Lilford with her two fine boys. After talking some time, we wandered into the gardens under the old cedars. When we came in, old Mr. Cheney was leaning over Lady Holland’s chair, chuckling to himself over the dogmatic self-assertion of Mr. Hayward,[204] who was talking to her of books, the value of which he considered to be quite decided by his opinion of them. Especially he talked of Ticknor’s Memoirs, so remarkable because, though he was an American of the most lowly origin, it is evident that when he came to Europe he not only saw the best society of every country he visited, but saw it intimately—which could only have been due to his own personal charm.

“Dined at Lady Barrington’s. She said I must be presented, and George Barrington said he should present me.

“L. was full of a dinner she had been at at Count Beust’s. The Prince Imperial was there, who had always hitherto been regarded as only a pleasant boy, but who electrified them on this occasion by a remarkable flash of wit. It had been impossible to avoid asking the French Ambassador, but Count Beust had taken especial pains to make it as little offensive as possible. He took in the Princess of Wales to supper and placed her at the same table with the Prince Imperial. The Comte and Comtesse d’Harcourt were at another table with the Prince of Wales. Suddenly an offensive pushing man, first secretary to the French embassy, brought Mademoiselle d’Harcourt to the Prince Imperial’s table and sat down. The Prince was very much annoyed. Looking up at a picture of the Emperor of Austria, he asked if it resembled him—‘I do not remember him, I was so very young when I saw him,’ and then in a louder tone, ‘I wonder how the French Ambassador represents the Republic of France on the walls of his rooms.’”

“June 29.—Yesterday I went down into Kent for Miss Virginia Smith’s wedding with young Francis Villiers,[205] toiling in a cab with Lady Craven over the hot chalky hills. The breakfast was at Selsden Park, a lovely place belonging to a child-heiress, Erroll Smith’s daughter.

“Dined with Lady Head, and we went on together to Baroness Burdett Coutts’, where Irving read Macbeth to an immense company, chiefly bishops and archbishops and their belongings. The reading was stilted and quite ineffective.”

“June 30.—A most pleasant party at Lord Ducie’s—Mr. and Miss Froude, Sir James Lacaita, Miss Grant the sculptress, Lord Aberdeen and Lady Katherine, Lord Northbrook and Lady Emma Baring, Lord Camperdown, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Gladstone, Lord Vernon, George and Lady Constance Shaw-Lefevre, &c.

“There was very agreeable conversation, chiefly about Macaulay’s Life—of his wonderful memory and the great power it gave him. Gladstone said the most astonishing thing about him was that he could remember not only the things worth knowing, but the most extraordinary amount of trash. He described another man he knew who, after once reading over the advertisement sheet of the Times, could repeat it straight through.

“In the evening I was asked to tell a story, and did, feeling that if Irving amused people for about three hundred nights of the year, it was rather hard if I declined to amuse him on one of the remaining sixty-five. He enjoyed it more than any one else, and lingering behind, when all were gone but Mrs. Gladstone and one or two others, said, ‘Now that we are such a very small party, do tell us another.’”

“July 6.—Went by rail with Mr. Ralph Dutton and ‘Beauty Stephens’ to Syon. It is a great house in a low-lying park, on the edge of which the Thames is marked by its great lines of tall sedges and the barges going up and down with music through the flat meadow-lands. On the parapet of the house is the poor old lion from Northumberland House. The lime-trees were in flower, scenting the whole air.

“Lady Percy received in the gallery, and about two thousand guests were collected on the lawn. I took courage and went and talked to the Japanese ambassadress, who was very smiling, but did not say much beyond ‘Me speak leetle English and no moosh French.’”

“July 7.—Went by water with Mrs. Mostyn, Miss Monk, and Miss Milnes to Fulham. The steamer was actually two hours and a half on the way. There was an interest in recognising a whole gallery of De Wint’s sketches in the tall bosky trees, the weirs, the great water-plants, and still more on the causeway leading from Fulham Church to the palace. It was a gloriously hot day, and very pleasant sitting under the old gateway looking into the sunlit court, with full light on the rich decorations of the brickwork and the massy creepers.

“Afterwards, I was at a beautiful and charming party at Holland House. A number of grown-up royalties and a whole bevy of royal children sat under the trees watching Punch and Judy. The Prince Imperial, with charming natural manners, walked about and talked to every one he knew. I was happy in finding Lady Andover and many other friends. Towards the end, Lady Wynford said the Princess Amelie of Schleswig [206] desired that I might be presented to her, as she had read my books, &c. She is elderly, but enjoys life and dances at all the balls she is asked to, especially at Pau, of which she talked with animation.”

“July 8.—At luncheon at Lady Alwyn Compton’s I met Lady Marion Alford. There was much talk of the wills of old London citizens—how Mr. Bancroft had desired in his that for a hundred years a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine should be placed in his vault every year on the anniversary of his death, because he was convinced that before that time he should awake from his death-sleep and require it, and the hundred years had only just expired;—of how Jeremy Bentham’s body, in accordance with his will, was produced a year after his death at the feast of a club he had founded, and how all the company fled from it.

“I was afterwards at a breakfast at Lord Bute’s. There were few people I knew there, and the grass was very wet, so I sat under the verandah with the Egertons. Presently an old lady was led out there, very old, and evidently unable to walk, but with a dear beautiful face, dressed in widow’s weeds. She seemed to know no one, so gradually—I do not know how it came about—I gave her a rose, and sat down at her feet on the mat and she talked of many beautiful things. She was evidently sitting in the most peaceful waiting upon the very threshold of the heavenly kingdom. When I was going away she said, ‘I should like to know whom I have been talking to.’ I said, ‘My name is Augustus Hare.’ She said, ‘I divined that when you gave me the flower.’ I have not a notion who she was.[208]

“I dined at Sir John Lefevre’s, and was pained to see how weak and failing he looks. The Rianos were there and Sir James Lacaita, and in the evening Lady Ducie came in, radiant with goodness and beauty.”

“July 11.—A very pleasant dinner at Lord Ebury’s. He overflows with kindness. He said, ‘If this hot weather is trying for you and me, it is very good for the corn: that hardens, while we melt.’”

“July 13.—Luncheon with Sir C. Trevelyan, who showed me Macaulay’s library, and then drove me to see the remnant of the house of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in Villiers Street. Peter the Great lived there when in London, and David Copperfield is made to lodge there by Dickens.

“Dined at Lord Cardwell’s, where I sat by George Otto Trevelyan, the author of Lord Macaulay’s Life. At Lord Sherborne’s in the evening I found Irving, with all the three hundred nights of his Hamlet written on his face. I was introduced to Dr. Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, a little dapper man in a violet coat.”

“July 14.—Luncheon at Mrs. Lowe’s. She was most amusing about her pets. ‘Mr. Lowe, you know, is always going out and bringing home a new animal: he does like pets so. He went and he bought a dog, and then he went and bought a parrot, and then he bought a cockatoo and a cat, and I said, “Mr. Lowe, if you go and buy any more pets, I will go out of the house, because I will not bear it,” and then Mr. Lowe went and bought Bow-wow, the little white dog, and it had not cut its teeth, and it was so dreadfully ill, and we had to nurse it, and it gave us more trouble than all the other pets put together; and I like Bow-wow the best of them all, and Mrs. Scutt (that’s the housekeeper) is just the same.

“‘I said to Mr. Lowe, “If you will go downstairs with that cockatoo on your shoulder, it will fly away out of the window, and you’ll lose him,” but Mr. Lowe would do it, you know, he’s so obstinate; and it was just as I said, and the cockatoo flew out of the staircase window, and Mr. Lowe was in a fine way about him. There are a lot of boys watching for him now, and he’ll come back some day, for every one knows Mr. Lowe’s cockatoo: but he won’t come back yet. And finely he’s enjoying himself, that bird is; he’s never had such a fine time in his life; he’s finished all the cherries in Eldon Grove, and he’s just beginning upon the gooseberries.

“‘When we drive down to Caterham, Bow-wow and Elfin, the two dogs, sit upon the back-seat, and the cat sits in the middle. They look out of the windows and amuse themselves wonderfully, and finely the people stare.

“‘When I first married Mr. Lowe we lived at Oxford. It was quite delightful: we had all the interesting society of the University, and Mr. Lowe was a tutor and taught all the clever young men. When we went up to London, we hired a coach, and had six first-class men inside, all Mr. Lowe’s pupils. Then Mr. Lowe’s eyes failed, and we threw it all up and went to Australia, and were away six years; but it answered to us, for I had some money left to me at that time, and Mr. Lowe had some money left to him, and we invested it there in houses, and they pay us 60 per cent., and we made our fortunes.

“‘How sad the Duchess of —— going away is! She cried so dreadfully when she went, that I am sure it’s for ever. Don’t you think, if I had had a dreadful quarrel with Mr. Lowe, and we had parted for ever, that I should cry too? It is a very different thing when it is not for ever. I go off to Wiesbaden for six weeks, and I wish Mr. Lowe good-bye, and I say, “Well, good-bye, Mr. Lowe; in six weeks you’ll have me back again,” and if we have quarrelled, it does not signify; but it would be very different if it was for ever. Why, I should cry my eyes out.’

“One day, however, when Mrs. Lowe was inveighing against the absurdity of the marriage service—of the bridegroom’s statement, ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow,’ even when he possessed nothing and it was just the other way, and when she was saying, ‘Now when I married Mr. Lowe, he had nothing whatever but his brains’—a deep voice from the end of the room growled out, ‘Well, my love, I certainly did not endow you with those.’

“‘Why contend against your natural advantages?’ said Mr. Lowe one day to a deaf friend who was holding up an ear-trumpet to listen to a bore.

“In the afternoon I drove down with Lady Sherborne, Miss Dutton, and Miss Elliot to see Lord Russell at Pembroke Lodge. It is a beautiful place; not merely a bit of Richmond Park, but a bit of old forest enclosed, with grand old oaks and fern. The Queen gives it to Lord Russell, who, at eighty-four,[209] was seated in a Bath-chair in the garden, on a sort of bowling-green, watching his grandsons play at tennis. Though he no longer comprehends present events, he is said to be perfectly clear about a far-away past, and will converse at any length about Napoleon, the escape from Elba, &c. When I was presented to him, by way of something to say, I spoke of having seen the historical mound in his garden, and asked what it was that Henry VIII. watched for from thence as a death-signal, ‘was it a rocket or a black flag?’

“‘Then that would imply that the execution was at night, for he would hardly have seen a rocket by day.’

“‘No, it was not at night; it was very early in the morning. She was a very much maligned woman was that Anne Boleyn.’

“We all sat by a fountain under the oak-trees, and then went into the house to a sort of five-o’clock tea on a large scale.”

“Holmhurst, July 15.—Returned to the dear little home, where I found Charlotte Leycester sitting on the terrace surrounded by the dogs, looking on the lovely view from our greenery. The intense freshness of the air, the glory of the flowers, the deep blue sea beyond our upland hayfields, and the tame doves cooing in the copper beech-tree, are certainly a refreshing contrast to London, though I should never have been able to leave it unless Duty had pulled at me.”

“Highcliffe, July 24.—In this most unearthly Paradise all looks like last year going on still—the huge stems of chestnut, and the white lilies and bulrushes in the great vase relieved against the old boiserie of the saloon; the wide window-porch open to the fountain and orange-trees and sunlit terraces and sea; Lady Waterford coming in her hat and long sweeping dress through the narrow wind-blown arbutus avenue; old Mrs. Hamilton-Hamilton in her pleasant sitting-room, with Miss Lindsay hovering about and waiting on her like a maid-of-honour; the Ellices, so cordial and pleasant, so beaming with kindness and goodness, their largeness of heart quite preventing their being able to indulge in the sectarian part of their own religious ideas.... I have felt, as I always do very shy at first, and then entirely at home.”

“July 25.—We have all, I think, basked as much in the mental sunshine of this beautiful life as in the external sunshine which illumines the brilliant flowers and glancing sea.

“We walked on the shore this afternoon. ‘See what festival the sea has been making, and what beautiful coloured weeds she has been scattering,’ said Lady Waterford. We found two little boots projecting from the sand, and as we dug them out and found them filled and stiff, we really expected a drowned child to follow; but it was only sand that filled them, and the little Payne child of Chewton Bunny had lost them when bathing. As we sat on the shore while Lady Waterford looked for fossils, a staith came down from the Bunny and flooded the little stream into a river, cutting off our return. We, the male part, crossed much higher up: Lady Waterford plunged in and walked: Lady Jane took off shoes and stockings and waded.

“Lady Waterford has talked much of marriages—how even indifferent marriages tone down into a degree of comfort which is better for most women than desolation.”

“July 26.—We walked in the evening to the Haven House. The old pine-wood, with its roots writhing out of the sand, and its lovely views, over still reaches of water to the great grey church, and the herons fishing, are more picturesque than ever. Afterwards Lady Herbert of Lea arrived with her beautiful daughter Gladys.[210] Lady Herbert is suffering still from the bite of a scorpion when she was drawing in the ruins of Karnac.”

“July 29.—In the afternoon I went with Lady Waterford to General Maberly, who talked, as it seemed to me, very sensibly about the exaggerations of teetotalism. He thought that every one should do as they pleased, and that it was wrong of a great landowner to prevent the existence of a public-house on his estate: that it was following the teaching of the Baptist rather than that of our Saviour, for ‘was not our Saviour a wine-bibber?’

“Lady Waterford has been speaking of sympathy for others; that there is nothing more distressing than to see another person mortified.

“‘Mama could never bear to see any one mortified. Once at Paris, at a ball they had, there was a poor lady, and not only her chignon, but the whole edifice of hair she had, fell off in the dance. And Mama was so sorry for her, and, when all the ladies tittered, as she was Madame l’Ambassadrice and a person of some influence, I don’t think it was wrong of her to apply the verse, and she said, “Let the woman among us who has no false hair be the first to throw a stone at her.”’

“July 30.—Hamilton Aïdé says he went to visit two or three times at a lunatic asylum. The matron, a very nice person, said, ‘There is here a very extraordinary example of a person who has become quite mad, and only from vanity.’ He went to see her. It was a very old lady, with great traces of beauty and dignity of manner, but she wore the most extraordinary bonnet, very large, and from the fringe hung a pair of scissors, a thimble, and a needle-book. He made a civil speech to her about being glad to see her looking so well, or something of that kind. In reply she only just looked up and said, ‘For further information refer to the 25th chapter of the second Book of Kings,’ and took no more notice whatever.”

“July 31.—Lady Jane Ellice says that there are three shades of people one likes—those whom one must see in heaven, for it would not be heaven without them: those whom one hopes to see in heaven and to meet there: and those whom one hopes will be in heaven but that one will not see them there. Her singing this evening of ‘Zurich’s Blue Waters,’ ‘Three Blue Bottles,’ &c., has been perfectly charming.

“Lady Waterford has been telling of Ruskin ‘like a little wizened rat.’ ‘He likes to be adored, but then Somers and I did adore him, and he likes to lash his disciples with rods of iron. I do not mind that: it is his jokes I cannot bear; they make me so sorry and miserable for him.’”

“August 3.—Lady Waterford said that Lady Stuart, when a Frenchman tried to talk to her in very bad English, told him she preferred talking French. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘vous aimez mieux, Madame, écorcher les oreilles des autres, qu’on vous écorche vos oreilles.’”

“August 5.—I have left Highcliffe, and the gates of Paradise seem closed for a year. There has been the usual perfect confidence about everything through the whole party: the pleasant going backwards and forwards to ‘Hamilton Place,’ and the waiting upon old Mrs. Hamilton of her ‘equerry’ and her ‘maid-of-honour:’ the many friendly snubs and contradictions which rail at all the smallnesses and ennoble all the higher aims of life. After luncheon we all sat in the porch surrounded by the great lilies and geraniums in flower and we had coffee there, looking upon the Isle of Wight with the Needles looming through the mist: then we parted.

“It was a long drive in pouring rain from Southampton to Sydney Lodge, where I found a warm welcome from dear old Lady Hardwicke.[211] It is a moderate house, with large gardens, into which bits of old forest are interwoven. This morning we drove to Eliot Yorke’s house at Netley Fort, an old tower of the monks, in front of which the Mayflower set sail. The situation is lovely, close to the sea, with a hilly garden in miniature and a machicolated tower rising out of ivy walls like a scene in a play. But the great charm is in Eliot himself, so handsome, with such a pleasant smile and melodious voice. His Jewess wife, Agneta Montagu, and Hinchinbroke were there. From the garden we went to the Abbey, where I drew while Hinchinbroke amused himself by pretending to make love to an old lady (‘Jemima Anne’) who was peering about in spectacles amongst the arches. When we went back, boats were arriving from Cowes at the little wharf—the Prince Imperial with the Duke and Duchess of St. Albans and a crowd of others. The Prince has the most pleasant, frank, simple manners, and makes himself agreeable to every one. He was much amused with the quantities of Yorkes who seemed to crop up from every house round, and said he ‘thought he must have landed by mistake on the coast of Yorkshire.’ His arm was in a sling, and he looked pale and fagged, for somehow, in playing at leap-frog with his ‘camarades,’ he had tumbled into a camp-fire, and, to save his face, had instinctively put out his hands, and burnt the whole skin off one of them. It must have been terrible agony, but he never complained.”

“August 6.—The Yorkes are absolutely devoted to each other. There is such family loyalty that every peccadillo is consecrated. I certainly do not wonder at their love for Eliot; he has such a sweet though frank manner, and is so genial and kind to every one.[212] L. has been talking of the advantages of even an unhappy married life over a single one, as exemplified by the poor Empress, who herself said, ‘C’est mieux d’être mal à deux que d’être seule.’

“L. was at a party at Mrs. Brand’s, sitting by Lady Cork, when Lady Francis Gordon came up to her. ‘Come, Lady Cork, can you spell in five letters the three scourges of society?’ (drink, rink, ink). ‘No,’ said Lady Cork instantly, ‘that I cannot do, but I can spell in two letters the two blessings of society—U and I.’

“Mrs. Eliot Yorke is exceedingly pleasing and much beloved in her husband’s family. Amongst the few Jews I have known, I have always found the women infinitely superior to the men, and this is especially the case with the Rothschilds. Some one once made an observation of this kind to Rogers the poet. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the men crucified Him, but the women—wept.’”

“August 12.—Last Monday I went to Cobham for a few days, arriving just as the setting sun was illuminating the grand old red brick house deeply set in its massy woods. A large party was assembled, its most interesting element being Fanny, Lady Winchilsea, who is always delightful. Archdeacon Cust told me a curious story of a Mr. Phipps, a clergyman at Slough. He asked him if he was related to Lord Normanby’s family, and he said they were related, but that they had never known one another, and that the reason was a strange one. His father had been residing at Caen, where they had become very intimate with a French family called Beaurepaire. After his father left Caen, the great Revolution occurred, and all the Beaurepaire family perished on the scaffold except the youngest daughter, who, for some unknown reason, was spared. Having no relation left alive, she was utterly desolate, and felt that no one in the world cared for her but young Phipps, the son of her former neighbour, who had evinced an attachment for her. So to the Phipps family she somehow made her way; but they, disapproving the attachment, were all excessively unkind to her, except one sister, who received her, and went out with her to India, where her brother was then supposed to be. But when they reached India, they found, with despair, that Phipps had left and gone to Egypt. Thither, however, they pursued him, and there Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire was married to him. Young Phipps would never forgive the unkindness which had been shown to his wife by his family, and the two branches of the Phipps family were never afterwards friends.

“A schoolmaster near Cobham, named King, for some reason best known to himself, has abolished the game of football—a most unpopular move. The boys were furious, and one day, when the master entered the schoolroom, he found ‘King is a donkey’ chalked up in large letters on a board. For an instant he was perplexed; but it would never do to take no notice. He left the inscription, but added the single word—‘driver.’ The boys quite saw the joke, and the master’s prestige was restored.”

“Ampthill Park, August 29, 1876.—I came here on Monday, stopping some hours in London on the way, and finding out ancient treasures in the purlieus of Soho and St. Giles’s, which, black and filthy as they are, are still full of reminiscences.

“At St. Pancras Station I saw a very ancient lady in a yellow wig step into a railway carriage by herself, and her footman guard the door till the train started, and I felt sure it was the Dowager Duchess of Cleveland. At Ampthill Station the Lowther carriage was waiting for both of us, and we drove off together. She talked the whole way, but the carriage rumbled so that I could hardly hear a word she said, except that when I remarked ‘What a fine tree!’ as we entered the park, she answered rather sharply ‘That was a fine tree.’ She spoke too of the Lowther boys—‘They are having their vacancies. I like that word vacancies,’ she said.

“It is a fine wild park, with most unexpected ups and downs and a great deal of grand old timber, on a ridge rising high above the blue Bedfordshire plain, in the midst of which a spire rising out of a little drift of smoke indicates the town of Bedford. On one of the highest points of the ridge a cross raised on steps marks the site of the royal residence where Katherine of Arragon lived for most of her semi-widowhood, and where Anne Boleyn shot stags in a green velvet train. The later house, approached on the garden side by a narrow downhill avenue half a mile long, is in the old French style, with posts and chains, broad steps widening at the top, and a perron.... The Duchess, at eighty-four, talked most pleasantly and interestingly all evening. Lady Wensleydale, in her high cap and large chair, with her sweet face and expression, sat by like an old picture. There is a picture of her thus, by Pointer, surrounded by great white azaleas, but it does not do her justice.

“Yesterday I drove with James, Mildred, and Cecil Lowther to Wrest. It is a most stately place, one of the stateliest I have ever seen. The gardens were all laid out by Le Nôtre, and the house was of that period. Lord De Grey pulled down the house, and found it rested on no foundations whatever, but on the bare ground. It was so thin, that when the still-room maid complained that her room was rather dark, the footman took out his penknife and cut her a square hole for a window in the plaster wall. Capability Brown was employed to rearrange the gardens, which were thought hideous at one time; but though he spoilt so many other places, he had sense to admire the work of Le Notre so much here, that he made no alterations, except throwing a number of round and oblong tanks into one long canal, which, on the whole, is rather an improvement. The modern house is magnificent, and like what Chantilly must have been.

“On the vast flagged terrace in front of the windows we found Lady Cowper [214] sitting in an old-fashioned black silk dress and tight white bonnet. She has a most sweet face, and was very kind and charming in her manner. I walked with her for a long time on the terrace, looking down on the brilliant gardens, and beyond them upon equally brilliant groups of people, for it was the annual meeting of the great Bedfordshire tennis club, for which she always gives a breakfast. She told the whole story of the place, and took me to see all the finest points of view and the great collection of fine orange-trees brought from Versailles. She greatly lamented the prudishness of her great-aunt (Lady De Grey), through whom her grandmother had derived the place, who thought most of the old French statues—which, according to the custom of that day, were made of lead—to be insufficiently dressed, and so sold them for the value of the metal, at the same time that she sold an incomparable collection of old plate, for the same reason, for its weight in silver. She showed one of the statues, backed by a yew hedge some centuries old. ‘That poor lady, you see, was saved when all the others were sent away, because she had got a few clothes on.’ Lord De Grey had replaced some of the statues, and Lady Cowper herself had added a most beautiful fountain from Carrara, with a very flat basin.

“Lady Cowper talked much of my mother and the ‘Memorials’ and of ‘my sister Lady Jocelyn.’ She spoke of the extreme quietude of her own life. ‘A day like this (pointing out the crowd below) shows me that what this place wants is—people, and I never have any. I think I must hire some puppets to walk about and represent them.’ There are a number of inscriptions in the grounds to different past-members of the family and their friends. Lady Cowper said that Lady Palmerston, who was very matter-of-fact, thought that of course they were buried there, and said, ‘How I do pity Anne, living alone at Wrest, surrounded by all those graves of her family.’ Graves, however, there are, but of deceased dogs, a regular burial-ground, with headstones like those in a churchyard, surrounded by a wall of clipped yew.

“I was very glad to find Henry Cowper, who showed me the rooms, which were full of people for the ‘breakfast,’ but I saw the two great Sir Joshuas, which are magnificent, especially that of Lady Lucas and Lady Grantham, as very young girls, with a bird.

“In the evening at Ampthill I told the story of Mary-Eleanor, Lady Strathmore, to which Lady Wensleydale added her reminiscence of having been told, at four years old, of Stoney Bowes having ‘nailed his wife’s tongue to a table.’”

“August 30.—Yesterday I drew with Miss Lowther at the ruins of Houghton Hall, the old home of the Russells, where Philip Sidney wrote verses under the trees. It is a very stately though not a large house, and beautiful in colour, from the mixture of red brick and yellow-lichened stone. A great avenue, now utterly ruined, leads away from it direct to Bedford, which lies six miles away in the elm-lined plain. It was deserted because Lord Tavistock, returning from hunting, was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot in the presence of his wife, who was waiting for him on the doorstep: the family could never bear to live there again.[215]

“After luncheon, I walked with the old Duchess in the avenue. She described being couched. ‘Did you take chloroform?’—‘Oh, certainly not: no such thing: I should not have thought of it. Don’t you know that couching is a very dangerous operation? the very slightest movement might be fatal to it. I did not know what might happen under chloroform, but I knew that I should never flinch if I had my senses, and I never did: and in three weeks, though I was still bandaged up, I was out walking.’

“‘What was worse than becoming blind in my case,’ said the Duchess, ‘was breaking my knee-pan, for then, you know, one bone goes up and the other goes down, and you never really have the use of your knee again.’

“‘Yes, certainly I am. Prescott Hewitt said I never should walk again, and I said “Yes, I should,”—and he answered, “Ah! well, with you perhaps it is different; you belong to a family that have got a will;” and I walk, but I walk by the sheer force of will.’

“The Duchess said she remembered old Lady Penrhyn and her pugs, and their being dressed like children, and keeping a footman, and having a key of Grosvenor Square.

“In the evening I drove with Mr. Lowther to Haynes, till lately written Hawnes, the fine old place of Lord John Thynne (Sub-Dean of Westminster), which he inherited from his uncle, Lord Carteret. We met the old man riding in his park, and so much taken up with a sick cow that he almost ignored us. But when we had walked round by the charming old-fashioned gardens, we found him waiting for us on the garden doorstep, all courtesy and kindness. Several sons and daughters-in-law dropped in to tea in a kind of passage-room, but Lord John took me to see all the curiosities of the house himself, and warmed up over them greatly. There is a most noble staircase and a very fine collection of family portraits. In the drawing-room is that of Lady Ann Carteret in a white satin dress, which she always wore, and is always remembered still as ‘The White Lady.’ Her husband was Jack Spencer, of whom there is also a fine picture. His grandmother, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, one day said to him suddenly, ‘Jack, you must marry, and I will give you a list of the ladies you may propose to.’—‘Very well, grannie,’ he said, and he proposed to the first on the list. When he came back with his wife from their wedding tour they went to pay their respects to the old lady. ‘Well, now,’ she said, ‘I am the root and you are only the branches, and therefore you must always pay me a great deal of deference.’—‘That is all very well,’ said Jack impertinently, ‘but I think the branches would flourish a great deal better if the root was under ground.’

“There is a great collection of small treasures at Haynes—snuff-boxes of royal persons, of Lord Chesterfield, &c., and one with a portrait of a lady ancestress,—‘not a good woman, she had nothing but her beauty,’—which takes off and puts on a mask. But the great relic of all is, in its own old shagreen case, the famous Essex ring—a gem beautifully set. With it is a most interesting letter from Weigall, the famous jeweller, explaining a great number of reasons why it must be the ring. There is also the pedigree of the ring, which came through the hands of a great number of females—heiresses.

“To-day the Duchess (Dowager of Cleveland) has been talking much of the wicked Duchess of Gordon, her ancestress. She married all her daughters to drunken Dukes. One of them had been intended to marry Lord Brome, but his father, Lord Cornwallis, objected on account of the insanity in the Gordon family. The Duchess sent for him. ‘I understand that you object to my daughter marrying your son on account of the insanity in the Gordon family: now I can solemnly assure you that there is not a single drop of Gordon blood in her veins.’

“The Duchess of Cleveland went out walking this morning in beating rain and bitter wind—blind, broken-kneed, and eighty-four as she is. ‘Well, you are a brave woman, Duchess,’ some one said as she came in. ‘You need not take the trouble to tell me that: I know that I am a brave woman,’ she answered.

“Old Miss Thornton called—Lady Leven’s sister. She talked much of the misuse of charitable funds in dinners to directors, payment of matrons, ex-matrons, &c., and said, ‘There really ought to be a society formed for the demolition of charitable institutions.’

“At dinner the Duchess vehemently inveighed against the deterioration of the times. ‘Was there ever anything so ridiculous and uncalled-for as a school-feast?’—‘But it is such a pleasure to the children.’—‘Pleasure to them! In my days people were not always thinking how children were to be amused. Children were able to amuse themselves in my day. It is not only with the lower classes: all classes are the same—the same utterly demoralising system of indulgence everywhere. Why are not the children kept at home to learn to wash and sew and do their duty?’—‘But the school-feast is only one day in the year.’—‘One day in the year! Fiddlesticks! don’t tell me. I tell you it’s utterly demoralising. Why, if the feast is only one day, it unhinges them for ten days before and ten days after.

“‘Formerly, too, people knew how to live like gentlemen and ladies. When they built houses, they built houses fit to live in, not things in which the walls were too thin to allow of the windows having any shutters.... Why, now people do not even know how to keep a great house. Look at ——, do you think she knows it, with her alternate weeks for receiving visitors. That is not what ought to be; that is not hospitality. A great house ought to be open always. The master and mistress never ought to feel it a burthen, and if it was properly managed, they never would. There should always be a foundation of guests in the house, a few relations or intimate friends, who would be quite at home there, and who would be civil and go out to walk or drive, or do whatever might be necessary to amuse the others. There ought to be no gêne of any kind, and there ought to be plenty of equipages—that should be quite indispensable.’

“The conversation fell upon Rogers the poet. ‘Mr. Rogers came here once,’ said Lady Wensleydale, ‘and I did not like him; I thought him so ill-bred. He came with the Duchess of Bedford of that time, who was the most good-natured woman in the world, and when he went out into the park and came in quite late for luncheon, she said he must have some, and went into the dining-room herself to see that he had it properly, and while he was eating cold beef, mixed him herself a kind of salad of oil and vinegar, which she brought to him. He waited a moment, then took up a piece of the beef in his fingers, rolled it in the sauce, and, walking round the table, popped it into the Duchess’s mouth. She went into the drawing-room afterwards and complained to his friend Luttrell about it, “What can I have done that Mr. Rogers should treat me so?” Luttrell said, “I have known Rogers for sixty years, and have never yet been able to account for any one of his vagaries.”

“‘Rogers and Luttrell were great friends, though they always quarrelled. When they walked out together, they never walked side by side, but always one behind the other.

“‘Rogers met Lord Dudley at one of the foreign watering-places, and began in his vain way, “What a terrible thing it is how one’s fame pursues one, and that one can never get away from one’s own identity! Now I sat by a lady the other night, and she began, ‘I feel sure you must be Mr. Rogers.’”—“And were you?” said Lord Dudley, looking up into his face quite innocently. It was the greatest snub the poet ever had.

“‘Rogers hated Monckton Milnes. He was too much of a rival. If Milnes began to talk, Rogers would look at him sourly, and say, “Oh, you want to hold forth, do you?” and then, turning to the rest of the party, “I am looking for my hat; Mr. Milnes is going to entertain the company.”’

“Holmhurst, Sept. 1.—I had rather dreaded the tête-à-tête journey with the Duchess to-day, and truly it was a long one, for we had an hour to wait at Ampthill Station, and then missed the express at Bletchley. When we first got into the carriage the Duchess said, ‘Well, now, I am going to be quiet and rest my eyes,’ which I thought was a hint that I was to take my book; but very soon she got bored and said, ‘I can’t see, and am obliged to go on asking the names of the stations for want of being amused;’ so then I was obliged to talk to her all the rest of the way.

“At Ampthill she told me how she was going to London to meet Admiral Inglefield, who was going to help her to ‘pick a child out of the gutter.’ ‘That child,’ she said, ‘will some day be Earl Powlett. Lord Powlett took a wager that he would run away with the lady-love of one of his brother-officers, and he did run away with her; but she made it a condition that he should marry her before a Registrar, which he believed was illegal, but it was not, and they were really married. Her only child, a boy, was brought up in the gutter. His name is Hinton, and he is presentable,[216] which his wife is not, for she is a figurante at the opera; but she gets more than the other danseuses, because she has the courage to stand unsupported upon a tight-rope, which the others have not. Powlett offered his son £400 if he would go away from England and never come back again, but he refused, so then he would only give him £100. He lives by acting at small theatres, but sometimes he does not live, but starves. He had four children, but one is dead. It is the eldest I mean to take away and place with a clergyman and his wife, that he may learn something of being a gentleman. I shall undertake him for three years, then I shall see what he is likely to be fit for. If I live so long, I can settle it; if not, I must leave the means for it. Facts are stranger than fiction.’

“At the stations, the Duchess was perfectly furious at the bonnets she saw. ‘If any respectable persons had gone to sleep twenty years ago and woke up now, they would think it was Bedlam let loose.’ She said how Count Streletski, who had travelled everywhere, said there was no country in which people were satisfied with nature: if tall, they wished to make themselves short; if short, tall: if they were light, they wished to be dark, and vice versâ. She talked of the peculiarities of vanity in different people—how the first Lady Westmoreland made the coiffeur wait and touch her up when she was in the carriage.

“The Duchess parted from me at Euston Station, with a cordial invitation to Osterley.”

“Sept. 27.—I have had a constant succession of visitors at my little Holmhurst.

“A singular subject of interest has been Mr. Freeman’s virulent letters against and about me. He seems insane on the subject of creating imaginary injuries.[217] Certainly it is a little annoying to be called a thief in the public papers, though it may be useful for one’s morals. However, ‘Experience is the best teacher, only the school fees are heavy.’”

“Conington Castle, Sept. 29.—I came here yesterday to old Mr. Heathcote’s. It is a low-lying place in the Fens, close to what was once Whitlesea Mere, but is now drained, only patches of reeds and marshy ground remaining here and there. The house is near the site of an old castle, but its only claim to be called a castle itself arises from its having been partly built out of the ruins of Fotheringhay, from which a row of arches remain. To ordinary eyes the country is frightful, but Mr. Heathcote, as an artist, sees much beauty—which really does exist—in the long unbroken lines where the mere once was, and the faint blue shadows in the soft distances. And he has preserved very interesting memorials of all that the district has been, within his memory, in an immense series of sketches of the mere in summer, and in winter, when covered with people skating; and of the mere life—its fisheries, wild birds, and its curious draining mills, now all of the past.

“We have been to draw at Peterborough, a wonderfully foreign-looking town, more so, I think, than any other in England. I saw Bishop Jeune’s grave: it almost looks old now, and it really is many years since we lost him; yet, on looking back, the time seems nothing, so quickly does life pass, and living become out-living.”

“Sept. 30.—We have been to Hinchinbroke. Lord and Lady Sandwich were alone. She was the Lady Blanche Egerton [218] of my long ago Chillingham days. Lord Sandwich took me all over the pictures. The best is that of Lady Castlemaine, afterwards Duchess of Cleveland, very young and lovely, with all her hair down. There is also a fine full-length of Charles II., and a curious picture of Charles II. of Spain by Herrera. By Gainsborough there is a beautiful portrait of Miss Martha Ray. Mr. Hackman, who saw her with Lord Sandwich, fell in love with her, and took orders in order to be able to marry her. Afterwards, when he saw her in Covent Garden receiving the attentions of somebody else, he shot her in a fit of jealousy, and suffered for it at Tyburn. In the ‘Ship Room’ is an interesting picture by Vanderwelt of the naval action in which the first Lord Sandwich died. His ship was fired by a fireship and blown up, and he was drowned. Ten days afterwards his body was recovered, and the garter and medal found upon it are preserved in a glass case near the picture.

“The rooms at Hinchinbroke are very pleasant and livable, but the oldest parts of the house are burnt and the oak staircase is painted. Near the foot of it, the skeletons of two prioresses (for the house was once a monastery) were found in their stone coffins, and were buried again in the same place! Lord Sandwich showed us the MSS. of the great Lord Sandwich—journals and letters in many volumes; also many letters of George III., showing his great interest in very minute public matters. He has also a splendid collection of Elzevirs.

“When Lady Sandwich was going to visit a school the next day, Miss Mary Boyle heard the mistress say, ‘Now, girls, to-morrow my Lady is coming, and so, recollect, pocket-handkerchiefs must be the order of the day: there must be no sniffling.’”

“Conington, Oct. 1.—This is one of the clockwork houses, with a monotonous routine of life suited to the flat featureless country. To-day, after church, the male part of the family set off to walk a certain six miles, which they always walk after church, and, when we reached a certain bridge, the female part said, ‘Here we turn back; this is the place where we turn every Sunday through the year: we always go as far as this, and we never go any farther.’”

“Sarsden House, Chipping Norton, Oct. 4.—I came here on Monday. At Paddington Station I met Lady Darnley and Lady Kathleen Bligh, and a procession of carriages in waiting showed that a large party was expected by the same train. It came dropping in round the five-o’clock tea-table—Lord and Lady Denbigh; Lord and Lady Aberdare and a daughter; Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Symonds; two young Plunketts; George, Lady Constance, and Madeleine Shaw-Lefevre; Lord Morton.... I like Lord Denbigh very much, and feel sure that no Roman Catholic plotter would induce him to do what he did not believe to be right, or say what he did not believe to be true.

“On Tuesday afternoon I drove to Heythorp with Lady Darnley, Lady Denbigh, and Lady Aberdare. A long unfinished avenue leads up to the very stately house, which has been well restored by Albert Brassey.

“‘Dr. Playfair, physician at Florence, went to the garden of a villa to see some friends of his. Sitting on a seat in the garden, he saw two ladies he knew; between them was a third lady dressed in grey, of very peculiar appearance. Walking round the seat, Dr. Playfair found it very difficult to see her features. In a farther part of the garden he met another man he knew. He stayed behind the seat and asked his friend to walk round and see if he could make out who the odd-looking lady was. When he came back he said, “Of course I could not make her out, because when I came in front of her, her face was turned towards you.” Dr. Playfair then walked up to the ladies, and as he did so, the central figure disappeared. The others expressed surprise that Dr. Playfair, having seen them, had not joined them sooner. He asked who the lady was who had been sitting between them. They assured him that there had never been any such person.

“‘The next morning, Dr. Playfair went early to see the old gardener of the villa, and asked him if there was any tradition about the place. He said, “Yes, there is a story of a lady dressed in grey, who appears once in every twenty-five years, and the singular part is that she has no face.” Dr. Playfair asked when she had appeared last. “Well, I remember perfectly; it was twenty-five years ago, and the time is about coming round for her to appear again.”’

“Lord Aberdare said that when Edward Lear was drawing in Albania, he was in perfect despair over the troops of little ruffians who mobbed him and would not go away. Suddenly his india-rubber tumbled down and bobbed down some steps—bob-bob-bob. The boys all ran away as hard as they could, screaming, ‘Thaitan! Thaitan!’ and never came back again.

“A delightful old Mrs. Stewart has arrived from Scotland. I sat by her at dinner. She talked much of Mrs. Grote. She described an interview Mrs. Grote had with Madame George Sand. She said to Madame Sand that it was a pity she did not employ her great powers for the leavening and mellowing of mankind, as Miss Austen had done. ‘Madame,’ said Madame Sand, ‘je ne suis pas philosophe, je ne suis pas moraliste, et je suis romancière.’”

“Oct. 4.—While Madeleine has been drawing my portrait, Mrs. Stewart has talked delightfully, contradicting the theory of De Tocqueville that ‘the charming art of conversation—to touch and set in motion a thousand thoughts without dwelling tiresomely on any one—is amongst the lost arts, and can only be sought for in History Hut.’[219] She described her visit to Ober Ammergau. Her anxiety to go was intense, but all the means seemed to fail. The Princess Mary of Hanover and the Grand Duchess Elizabeth (to whom she had intended to annex herself) walked. But, to be in waiting upon them, went Baron Klenck, her Hanoverian son-in-law, and he came back greatly impressed, and said to his wife when he came in, ‘If thy mother still wishes to go, in God’s name let her set forth;’ and she went. She described the life at the village—the simplicity, the cheapness; then, in the play, the awful agony of the twenty minutes of the Crucifixion, the sublimity of the Ascension. ‘I have seen hundreds of “ascensions” on the stage and elsewhere, but I have never seen anything like that simple re-presentation.’

“At luncheon Mrs. Stewart described a sitting with Mrs. Guppy the spiritualist. Count Bathyany, her daughter, and others were present. They were asked what sort of manifestation they would have. They declared they would be satisfied with nothing less than a ghost. There was a round hole in the table with a lid upon it. Presently the lid began to quiver, gradually it was thrown on one side, and a hand came up violently agitating itself. ‘Mrs. Guppy said, “Dear spirit” (we are always very affectionate you know), “would you like the glass?” and a great tall fern-glass was put over the place: otherwise, I should have touched that hand. Then, inside the glass (but we could not touch it, you know) came up something wrapped in muslin: Mrs. Guppy said it was a head. Afterwards we were asked to go down to supper: there was quite a handsome collation. A young American who was with us was so disgusted with what he had seen that he would touch nothing—would take neither bread nor salt in that house. I was weak: I did not quite like to refuse, and I ate a few strawberries. Of course, as far as the moral protest went, I might as well have eaten a whole plateful. Bathyany made a very good supper. He took a rose away with him for his Countess, for at the end of our séance quantities of flowers appeared, we knew not whence, quite fresh, dewy, beautiful flowers: they appeared on the table close to Count Bathyany.

“‘The spirits are very indulgent. They think we are in better humour if our spirits are kept up. After I have been sitting there for some time they generally say, “Harriet is exhausted; let her have a glass of wine.” Then sometimes they give us nicknames—beautiful nicknames; my daughter they called “Mutability,” and me they named “Distrust.”’

“We have been a long drive to a charming old house, Chastleton, belonging to Miss Whitmore Jones, who lives there alone, ‘le dernier rejeton de sa famille.’ It is in a hollow with fine old trees around it, manor-house, church, arched gateway, and dovecot on arches grouped close together, all of a delicate pink-yellow-grey. Inside is a banqueting hall with very fine old panelling and curious furniture, and upstairs a long gallery and nobly panelled drawing-room.”

“Sarsden, Oct. 5.—Last night Mrs. Stewart talked much of Hanover and her life there. Her daughter was lady-in-waiting to the Queen. She described how all the royal family might have their property back at once, but the King would make no concession—‘God has given me my crown; I will only give it back to Him.’

“Mrs. Stewart was with the Queen and Princess for five months at Herrenhausen after the King left for Langensalza, when ‘like a knight, he desired to be placed in the front of his army, where all his soldiers could see him, and where he was not satisfied till he felt the bullets all whizzing around him.’ The people in Hanover said he had run away. When the Queen heard that, she and Princess Marie went down to the place and walked about there, and, when the people pressed round her, said, ‘The King is gone with his army to fight for his people; but I am here to stay with you—to stay with you till he comes back.’ But alas! she did not know!

“All that time in Herrenhausen they were alone: only Mrs. Stewart and her daughter went out occasionally to bring in the news; the others never went out. At last the confinement became most irksome to the Princesses. They entreated Mrs. Stewart to persuade mama to let them go out. Mrs. Stewart urged it to the Queen, who said, ‘But the Princesses have all that they need here; they ought to be satisfied.’—‘Pardon me, your Majesty,’ said Mrs. Stewart; ‘the Princesses have not all they need; it is necessary for young people to have some change.’ ‘So,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘at last the Queen saw that it was well, and she consented. She said, “We will not take one of our own carriages, that would attract too much attention, but we will take Harty’s—that is, my daughter’s—carriage, and we will drive in that;” for the Queen had given Harty a little low carriage and a pony. So they set off—the Queen, Princess Marie, and only the coachman besides. And when they had gone some way up the hills, the pony fretted under the new traces and broke them, and, before they knew where they were, it was away over the hedges and fields, and they were left in the lane with the broken carriage. Two Prussian officers rode up—for the Prussians were already in Hanover—and seeing two ladies, beautiful ladies too (for the Queen is still very handsome), in that forlorn state, they dismounted, and, like gentlemen as they were, they came up hat in hand, and offered their assistance. The Queen said, “Oh, thank you; you see what has happened to us: our coachman has gone after the pony, which has run away, and no doubt he will soon come back, so we will just wait his return.” But the coachman did not come back, and the gentlemen were so polite, they would not go away, so at last the Queen and Princess had to set out to return home; and the officers walked with them, never having an idea who they were, and never left them till they reached the gates of Herrenhausen. So the Queen came in and said, “You see what has happened, my dear; you see what a dreadful thing has befallen us: we will none of us ever try going out again,” and we never did.

“‘We used to go and walk at night in those great gardens of Herrenhausen, in which the Electress Sophia died. The Queen talked then, God bless her, of all her sorrows. We often did not come in till the morning, for the Queen could not sleep. But, even in our great sorrow and misery, Nature would assert herself, and when we came in, we ate up everything there was. Generally I had something in my room, and the Queen had generally something in hers, though that was only bread and strawberries, and it was not enough for us, for we were so very hungry.

“‘One night the Queen made an aide-de-camp take the key, and we went to the mausoleum in the grounds. I shall never forget that awful walk, Harty carrying a single lanthorn before us, or the stillness when we reached the mausoleum, or the white light shining upon it and the clanging of the door as it opened. And we all went in, and we knelt and prayed by each of the coffins in turn. The Queen and Princess Marie knelt in front, and my daughter and I knelt behind; and we prayed—oh! so earnestly—out of the deep anguish of our sorrow-stricken hearts. And then we went up to the upper floor where the statues are. And there lay the beautiful Queen, the Princess of Solms, in her still loveliness, and there lay the old King, the Duke of Cumberland, with the moonlight shining on him, wrapped in his military cloak. And when the Queen saw him, she, who had been so calm before, sobbed violently and hid herself against me—for she knows that I also have suffered—and said in a voice of pathos which I can never forget, “Oh, he was so cruel to me, so very, very cruel to me.” And after that we walked or lingered on the garden-seats till daylight broke.

“‘The Queen was always longing to go away to her own house at Marienberg, and at last she went. She never came back; for, as soon as she was gone, the Prussians, who had left her alone whilst she was there, stepped in and took possession of everything.

“‘The Queen is a noble, loving woman, but she is more admirable as a woman than a queen. I have known her queenly, however. When Count von Walchenstein, the Prussian commandant, arrived, he desired an interview with her Majesty. He behaved very properly, but as he was going away—it was partly from gaucherie, I suppose—he said, “I shall take care that your Majesty is not interfered with in any way.” Then our Queen rose, and in queenly simplicity she said, “I never expected it.” He looked so abashed, but she never flinched; only, when he was gone out of the room, she fainted dead away upon the floor.

“‘The mistake of our Queen has been with regard to the Crown Prince. She has had too great motherly anxiety, and has never sent out her son, as the Empress Eugenie did, to learn his world by acting in it and by suffering in it.”

“To-day Mrs. Stewart has been talking much of the pain of age, of the distress of being now able to do so little for others, of being ‘just a creature crawling between heaven and earth.’ She also spoke much of ‘the comfort of experience,’ of scarcely anything being quite utterly irrevocable; that ‘in most things, most crimes even, one can trail, trail oneself in the dust before God and man.’

“In the morning Mrs. Stewart sat for her portrait to Madeleine, in her picturesque square head-dress. She was pleased at being asked to sit. ‘Il faut vieillir pour être heureuse,’ she said. She talked much whilst she was sitting—much of Lady H.’s insolent and often unfeeling sayings. She spoke of a doctor who had the same inclination, and said to her, ‘Ça ne me repugne pas de dire les vérités cruelles.’ Talking of self-respect, she quoted the maxim of Madame George Sand—

And added, ‘But who should one be well with if not with oneself, with whom one has to live so very much.’

“This morning Lady Ducie’s pet housemaid gave warning, because, she said, Lady Ducie was not so sympathetic to her as she was six weeks ago. She said that as Lady Ducie was now not nearly so nice to her as she had been, she should be obliged to marry a greengrocer who had proposed to her.

“In the afternoon we drove to Daylesford—Warren Hastings’ so beloved home. It is a very pretty place, picturesque modern cottages amid tufted trees, and a very beautiful small modern church on a green. This church was built by Mr. Grisewood, and supplants a so-called Saxon church, restored after a thousand years of use by Warren Hastings. The inscription commemorating his restoration still remains, and ends with the text—‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.’ The tomb of Warren Hastings, a yellow urn on a pedestal, stands in the churchyard just under the east window. He left the place to his wife’s son by her first husband, Count Imhoff. Lady Ducie remembers Countess Imhoff coming to visit her mother, always with a great deal of state, and always dressed in white satin and swansdown, like one of Romney’s pictures. Mr. Grisewood succeeded the Imhoffs, and, when his son became a Roman Catholic, sold the place to Mr. Bias. We drove to the house, which stands well—a comfortable yellow stone house in pretty grounds, with a clear running stream. Its reminiscences and the power of calling them up made Mrs. Stewart speak with great admiration of those who ‘could find the least bit of bone and create a mastodon.’

“In returning, Mrs. Stewart told the story of Miss Geneviève Ward, the actress. In early life she was travelling with her mother, when they fell in with a handsome young Russian, Count Constant Guerra. He proposed to her, and as the mother urged it, thinking it a good match, she married him then and there in her mother’s presence, without witnesses, he solemnly promising to make her his wife publicly as soon as he could. When he could, he refused to fulfil his promise; but the mother was an energetic woman, and she appealed to the Czar, who forced Guerra to keep his word. He said he would do what the Czar bade him, but that his wife should suffer for it all her life. To his amazement, when the day for the marriage arrived, the bride appeared with her mother, led to the altar in a long crape veil as to a funeral. Her brothers stood by her with loaded pistols, and at the door of the church was a carriage into which she stepped as soon as the ceremony was over, and he never saw her again. She is Madame Constant Guerra, and has acted as ‘Guerrabella.’

“When we came home, I told a story in Lady Ducie’s sitting-room. Then Lord Denbigh told how—

“‘Sir John Acton (whose son was Lady Granville’s first husband) was a great friend of Lord Nelson, who was at that time occupied in a vain and hopeless search for the French fleet.[220] One day Sir John was in his wife’s dressing-room while she was preparing for dinner. As her French maid was dressing her, a letter was put into her hand, at which she gave such a start that she ran a pin she was holding into Lady Acton. This caused Lady Acton to inquire what ailed her. She said the letter was from her brother, a French sailor, from whom she had not heard for a long time, and about whom she had been anxious. Sir John Acton, with great presence of mind, offered to read her the letter while she went on doing her mistress’s hair. As soon as he had read it he went off to Lord Nelson. The letter gave all the information so long sought in vain, and the battle of the Nile was the result of the prick of a pin.’”

“Prestbury, Oct. 6.—It poured so hard this morning that I put off leaving Sarsden till late. Mrs. Stewart again talked much of the Hanoverian Court, of the Guelph love of doubtful stories; how she saved up any story she heard for the blind King. One day she was telling him a story ‘about Margaret Bremer’s father’ as they were driving. Suddenly the horses started, and the carriage was evidently going to be upset. ‘Why don’t you go on?’ said the King. ‘Because, sir, we are just going to upset.’—‘That is the coachman’s affair,’ said the King; ‘do you go on with your story.’

“With the Greatheeds, in whose cottage I am staying, I went a long excursion yesterday up the Cotswold Hills, which have a noble view of the great rich plain of Gloucestershire. Winchcombe, on the other side, is a charming old town of quaint irregular houses. We passed through it to Hailes Abbey, a small low ruin now, of cloisters in a rich meadow, but once most important as containing the great relic of the Precious Blood, which was brought thither by Edmund, son of the founder, Richard, King of the Romans. Thirteen bishops said mass at different altars at the consecration, and three of the Plantagenets—the founder, his wife, and his son Edmund—are buried in the church. It is now a peaceful solitude, with a few ancient thatched cottages standing round the wooded pastures.

“In returning, we turned aside to Sudeley Castle, the old Seymour house, where Katherine Parr is buried. It is a picturesque and grand old house, partially restored, partly now a green courtyard surrounded by ruined walls and arches. The Queen’s (modern) tomb has a touching sleeping figure [221] guarded by two angels. As we were coming out of the chapel, Mrs. Dent [222] pursued us—a picturesque figure in a Marie Antoinette hat—and brought us in to tea. The Dents made their fortunes as glovers, and, in their present magnificence, a parcel of their gloves, as from the shop, is always left in a conspicuous place in the hall, to ‘keep them humble.’”

“Tettenhall Wood, Oct. 12.—Whilst with the Corbets at Cheltenham, I visited Thirlstone, a curious house which belonged to Lord Northbrook. It was afterwards bought by Sir J. Philipps, the bibliomaniac, and contains the most enormous and extraordinary collection of books and pictures imaginable; a few gems, but imbedded in masses of rubbish, which the present possessor, Mrs. Fenwick, daughter of the collector, is forbidden to sell or destroy.

“I have been working hard for Mrs. Moore at the Memoir of her husband the Archdeacon (the object of my visit), and have read through all his speeches, &c. I see, however, how impracticable it is to help in work of this kind. Mrs. Moore implores me to cut out what should be omitted. I select what seems to me utterly trivial and commonplace, and she is annoyed, saying it comprises the only matters of real importance. She implores me to correct her diction and grammar: I do so, and she weeps because her pleasure is destroyed in a work which is no longer her own.”

“Donington Rectory, Oct. 13.—This is a pleasant place in itself, and any place would be pleasant within view of the beloved Wrekin.[223] On arriving, I went on at once to Boscobel, and saw the oak which grew from an acorn of the tree that sheltered Charles II., and in the ancient half-timbered house, the hiding-place under the floor at the top of the turret-stairs, where the Prince is said to have crouched for forty-eight hours, with his trap-door concealed by cheeses. Well smothered he must have been, if Staffordshire cheeses smelt then as they do now. There is a good portrait of Charles, which he presented to the house after the Restoration. I went on with Henry de Bunsen to White Ladies, now a low ruin of red walls in a meadow, but entered still by a fine Norman archway. Inside is a quiet burial-ground for Roman Catholics, amongst whose lichen-tinted headstones is that of ‘Mistress Joan, who was called friend by Charles II.’—being one of those who assisted in his escape. Beyond, in Hubble Lane, is the ruin of the Pendrill house. The Pendrills [224] were seven brothers, common labourers, but went up to London and had a pension after the Restoration.

“We went on to Tong—a glorious church, quite a church of the dead, so full of noble tombs of Stanleys and Vernons. Near it, in low-lying lands with water, is Tong Castle, the old house of the Durants. The last Mr. Durant brought in another lady to live with his wife, which she resented, and she left him. There was a long divorce suit, which they both attended every day in coaches and six. Owing to some legal quibble, he gained his suit, though the facts against him were well known, and he was so delighted at the triumph over his wife that he erected a monument in honour of his victory on the hill above the castle. The sons all took part with their mother, and when Mr. Durant was lying in his last illness, they set barrels of gunpowder surreptitiously under the monument, and had a match and train ready. They bribed a groom at the house to ride post-haste with the news as soon as the breath was out of their father’s body; and the news of his death first became known to the county by the monument being blown into shivers. The Durants sold Tong to Lord Bradford.”

“Bretton, Yorkshire, Oct. 30.—I have been here for a very pleasant week with a large party of what Lady Margaret (Beaumont) calls her ‘young men and maidens.’ ... There has been nothing especial to narrate, though our hostess has entertained the whole party with her never-failing charm of conversation and wit.

“One day I went with Henry Strutt,[225] whom I like much, to Wakefield, to draw the old chapel on the bridge. What an awful place Wakefield is—always an inky sky and an inky landscape, and the river literally so inky that the Mayor went out in a boat, dipped his pen, and wrote a letter with it to the Commissioners of Nuisances.”

“Raby Castle, Nov. 1.—I came here on Monday, meeting the delicately humorous Mr. Dicky Doyle at Darlington, yet with much fear that there were few other guests; but I was relieved to find ‘Eleanor the Good,’ Duchess of Northumberland, seated at the five-o’clock tea-table, and have had much pleasant talk with her. She spoke of her absorbing attachment to Alnwick and the pain it was to leave it; that the things which make the greatest blanks in life are not the greatest griefs, but the losses which most affect daily life and habits.... Frederick Stanley and Lady Constance [226] came in the evening, he very pleasant, and she almost more full of laughs than any one I ever saw. Other guests are Colonel and Mrs. Duncombe, young Gage, who will be Lord Gage,[227] and just before dinner a good-looking youth came in, who turned out to be Peddie Bennet.[228]

“Yesterday Lord and Lady Pollington came, and old Lord Strathnairn, looking thinner and more of an old dandy than ever.”

“Nov. 3.—Yesterday, while I was walking with the Pollingtons through the beech-woods deep in rustling leaves, the castle bell announced the advent of guests, and returning, we found the Warwicks and Brooke arrived.”

“Whitburn Hall, Nov. 7.—There is a great pleasure not only in the affection, but in the demonstration of affection which one receives here. Dear old Lady Williamson, in her beautiful tender old age, wins all hearts by the patience with which she bears her blindness, and the sweetness with which she sometimes imagines she sees; and Lady Barrington’s lovely and lovable old face brings sunshine to all around it.... In the younger generation, all is hospitality and kindness.”

“Brancepeth Castle, Nov. 8.—Yesterday I went with Augusta Harrington to visit Edward [229] and Tunie Liddell in their new home at Jarrow. It is startling to see how the spirit that animated the early martyrs has induced them to exchange competence for penury, and to give up the elms and flowers and pleasant sunny rooms of the Rectory at Wimpole. Now they are amidst a teeming population of blackened, foul-mouthed, drunken roughs, living in miserable rows of dismal houses, in a country where every vestige of vegetation is killed by noxious chemical vapours, on the edge of a slimy marsh, with a distance of inky sky, and furnaces vomiting forth volumes of blackest smoke. All nature seems parched and writhing under the pollution. Their days are perfectly full of work, and they have scarcely ever an evening to themselves.... They said our visit did them good, and I shall go again.

“Edward had been perplexed by an old woman, one of his parishioners, always declaring herself to be at least ten years younger than he felt certain she must be, yet he did not think she was of the kind who would tell a lie. At last he found that she dated her age from her baptism. ‘The clergy were not so quick upon us then,’ she said, ‘as they are now; so my father he just waited till we were all born to have us baptized, and then had us all done together: there were eleven of us.’

“I reached this great castle in pitch darkness. It is a magnificent place—a huge courtyard and enormous fabric girdled in by tremendous towers of Henry III. The staircase is modern, but most of the rooms have still the vaulted ceilings of Henry III.’s time, though the arms of the Nevilles, with which they were once painted, are gone now. The beer and wine cellars, with some cells called dungeons, are very curious. The butler pointed out with pride the black cobwebs which hung in festoons and cover much of the wine, a great deal of which was in the huge bottles called ‘cocks’ and ‘hens.’ The white cobwebs he had less opinion of: they are less healthy.

“Pleasant Lady Haddington [230] and her daughter are here. Lady Boyne [231] is a most pretty and winning hostess, and her children are thoroughly well brought up, and take a pleasant easy part in everything. In the evenings the whole party dance ‘Durham reels’ in the great hall.

“It was disappointing to have snow to-day, but there is much to interest in the house and in the old church of St. Brandon close by, where some grand figures of the Nevilles sleep before the altar. The very curious pews and reading-desk of the time of Bishop Cosin were destroyed in a mutilation of the church under the garb of ‘restoration’ sixteen years ago.

“There are several curious pictures by Hogarth here, in which the Lord Boyne of that day is introduced; but the most remarkable is one of Sir Francis Dashwood as a monk of Medmenham worshipping a naked woman and all the good things of life.”

“Kirklands, Nov. 14.—On Friday I was again at Jarrow, and was warmly welcomed by the Edward Liddells. Next morning I went with Edward to the wonderful old church of the seventh century, where Bede’s chair still stands under the Saxon arches. All around vegetation is blasted; dead trees rear their naked boughs into the black sky, and grimy rushes vainly endeavour to grow in the poisonous marshes. The very horror of ugliness gives a weird and ghastly interest to the place. Edward finds endless work, and enjoys the struggle he lives in. As Montalembert says, ‘Ce n’est pas la victoire qui fait le bonheur des nobles cœurs—c’est le combat.’ His is literally a Christian warfare. If he has spare time, he employs it in looking about the streets for drunken men. As he sees them come reeling along, he offers to help them, and walks home with them clinging to his arm. On the way he draws them out, and having thus found out where they live, returns next day, armed with the silly things they have let fall, to make them ashamed with. While I was making a little sketch of the church, a wedding party came in, the bridegroom being tipsy. Edward accused him of it, and he confessed at once, saying that he had been in such a fright at the ceremony, he had been obliged to take some spirits to keep his courage up. Edward said he wondered he could care for that sort of courage, that was only Dutch courage, real English courage was the only right sort; and as he supposed he wished to make his wife happy, that was the sort of courage he must look for; but being drunk on the day he married was a bad omen for her happiness. And yet, in the midst of his little scolding, Edward was so charming to them all that the whole wedding party were captivated, and an acquaintance, if not a friendship, was founded. It all showed a power of work in the real way to win souls. And—

“I came here by a bitterly cold journey of ten hours through the snow. The train went off the line, and we were delayed so late that I had to drive all the way from Kelso—a dark bitter drive. Har Elliot [233] received me most warmly, with her little Admiral, and dear old George Liddell. The place was built by old Mr. Richardson, the Writer to the Signet, and now belongs to his daughter Joanna. On Sunday afternoon we went to Ancrum, the burnt house of Sir William Scott, now being rebuilt in the old Scotch style; its situation is lovely.”

“Edinburgh, Nov. 19.—I have been four days at Winton with dear old Lady Ruthven. She is now blind as well as deaf, and very helpless, but she is still a loving centre of beautiful and unstinted beneficence. She says, ‘It is a great trial, a very great trial, neither to see nor hear, but it is astonishing the amount of time it gives one for good thoughts. I just know fifty chapters of the Bible by heart, and when I say them to myself in the night, it soothes and quiets me, however great the pain and restlessness. It is often a little trial to me—the unsatisfied longing I have to know just a little more, just something of the beyond. If I could only find out if my husband and my sister knew about me. There is a little poem I often think of—

Perhaps it will be so with me; but soon I shall know all, and meantime God is very good. Since my last great illness I have not been able for it, but till then I just always went on reading prayers to my servants, that is, I could not really read, you know, but I just said a chapter out of my own remembrance, and then I prayed as I felt we needed.’

“Lady Ruthven can repeat whole cantos of Milton and other poets, and her peculiar voice does not spoil them; rather, when one remembers her great age and goodness, it adds an indescribable pathos. She likes to be read to down her trumpet, which is not easy; and the person she hears best thus is George the under-footman; but, as she says, she ‘has formidable rivals in lamps.’

“One of her occupations is feeding her pheasants with bread and milk at the castle door. ‘Ah! I see you are early accustoming them to bread sauce,’ said Mr. Reeve of the Edinburgh Review, when he saw her thus employed.

“One day we drove to Yester (Lord Tweeddale’s), only remarkable for its pretty wooded approach. In leaving Lady Ruthven, one could not but feel one left her for the last time, and what for her the change—which at ninety must be so near—will be, from blindness, deafness, helplessness, after her entirely noble and holy life—to light, and hearing, and power.”

“Edinburgh, Nov. 20.—A visit to the Robert Shaw Stewarts has given me a pleasant glimpse of Edinburgh society.

“Certainly Edinburgh is gloriously beautiful, but never was there a city so richly endowed by Nature contaminated by such abject and ludicrous public monuments!—the enormous monument of Walter Scott, a ludicrous copy in stone of the Bishop’s throne at Exeter: the sort of lighthouse which closes Princes Street (a monument to Lord Nelson, I was told): the statue of the Duke of Wellington, who has lost his hat in a perfectly futile struggle with his restive horse, which is standing on its tail:—worst of all, the figure of the Prince Consort (in Charlotte Square), being adorned by specimens of each class of society, the most ridiculous of all being a peer and peeress in their robes.

“This morning I drew in the Grassmarket. The crowd was most tiresome till it took the idea that I was Sir Noel Paton, the popular Edinburgh artist. I tacitly encouraged the idea, when I found the result was--‘Dinna ye see it’s Sir Noel Paton hissel drawing the cassel? then let Sir Noel see, mon.’

“In the afternoon I went with Mrs. Stewart to the exhibition of Raeburn’s pictures—nothing but Raeburns, though many vast rooms are filled with them; and deeply interesting it is thus not only to follow one great, too little appreciated, painter through life, but to be introduced to the whole world of his illustrious contemporaries. Raeburn’s pictures may be slight, and may have faults of colouring, and even of drawing, but his men never fail to be gentlemen and his women are always ladies—very pleasant people too generally, and people it is delightful to live with. ‘A great portrait should be liker than the original,’ wrote Coleridge. The noblest portrait here seemed to me to be that of Alexander Adam, Rector of the High School, a serious and holy, but engaging old man. Lady Mackenzie of Coul is a sweet, refined, and beautiful woman. As a rule, the old men’s portraits are the best—their shaggy eyebrows, their vigorous old age, the sharp shadows of their chins, so vividly and carefully drawn, and all the delicacies of expression centred in the eyes. There were numbers of such old men’s portraits, in which the dead grandfather must still often seem to share the inner family life of many a quiet country-house. It shows the extraordinary change in the value popular feeling places upon art when one recollects that the works of Watts and Millais cost from £2000 to £3000, while these pictures—far more pleasing, far more like those they represent, and, though more sketchy, cleverer and more original—used to cost only £10.”

“Nov. 21.—We have been out to New Hailes, the old Dalrymple house, now inhabited by Lord Shand. The characteristic of the house is its library, which, however, is rather useless, as the bookcases are seventeen feet high, and there is no ladder to reach the upper shelves by.”

“Nov. 22.—Excursion to Pinkie, the fine old house of the Hopes, near Musselburgh—crenellated, machicolated, picturesque as possible. Charles Edward slept there when triumphant from Prestonpans. There is a noble gallery upstairs with a painted ceiling, and a secret passage and staircase. Lady Hope was very kind.[235]

“In Edinburgh I have been, for the first time, received as a sort of mild literary lion, and have found it very amusing. A quantity of people came to call—professors, the bishop, and others.”

“Ravensworth Castle, Nov. 26.—I have been much enjoying a visit here, and the cordial affection which abounds in my dear Liddell cousins. Old General Stanhope [236] is here, and told us—

“‘A gentleman was riding over the Yorkshire Wolds late in the gloaming, when his horse started at something. With the perseverance of a good rider, he forced the horse to return to the spot where he had started, when he saw with horror that he had been frightened by a dead body, evidently of a murdered man, lying by the side of the road. A dog was sitting by the body, and as he rode up it ran away.

“‘Without losing his presence of mind for an instant, without thought of lingering to hunt up police, &c., the rider set spurs to his horse and pursued the dog. He pursued it a great distance, and eventually saw it enter a low solitary public-house.

“‘He then put his horse into the wretched stable of the place and entered the house. In the brick kitchen three men were drinking, one man by himself, two men together; curled up by the fire was the dog.

“‘The rider called for beer or whisky and sat down. Meanwhile he observed his companions. The two men talked together of quite indifferent subjects; the solitary man said nothing. At last the gentleman got up and gave the dog a great kick. It ran to the lonely man, who said in a fury, “What do you mean, sir, by kicking my dog?”—“I mean that I chose to do it,” he replied; “and furthermore, I mean that I arrest you for murder, and I call upon you (turning to the other two men) to assist me in arresting this murderer.”

“General Stanhope also gave an interesting account of how old Lord Braybrooke, going to a farm to see some cows, was struck by something in one of the farming men. At last, suddenly slapping him on the shoulder, he exclaimed, ‘Good God! you are De Bruhl!’ and it was a man who had been well known in the world, son of the Bruhl of the famous Terrace at Dresden, the friend of Augustus of Saxony, who had been ruined by the Prince Regent, and had sunk lower and lower, till he came to be a farm labourer, unrecognised and unnoticed for years.

“‘Lady Andover, who was the daughter of Lord Leicester, was with her husband [237] at Holkham, and when one day all the other men were going out shooting, she piteously implored him not to go, saying that she had dreamt vividly that he would be shot if he went out. She was so terribly eager about it, that he acceded to her wishes, and remained with her in her painting-room, for she painted beautifully in oils, and was copying a picture of the “Misers” which was at Holkham. But the afternoon was excessively beautiful, and Lady Andover’s strong impression, which had been so vivid in the morning, then seemed to wear off, till at last she said, “Well, really, perhaps I have been selfish in keeping you from what you like so much because of my own impressions; so now, if you care about going out, don’t let me keep you in any longer.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t mind, I should certainly like to go,” and he went.

“‘He had not been gone long before Lady Andover’s impression returned just as vividly as ever, and she rushed upstairs and put on her bonnet and pursued him. But, as she crossed the park, she met her husband’s own servant riding furiously without his coat. “Don’t tell me,” she said at once; “I know what has happened,” and she went back, and locked herself into her room. His servant was handing him a gun through a hedge, it went off, and he was killed upon the spot.’

“‘The same Lady Andover had a dream of a minor kind which came curiously true. She said to her sister that she had dreamt most vividly that she was standing with her under the portico at Holkham; that they were both dressed in deep mourning—thick black bombazine; and that they were watching a great funeral leave the house, but that it was not going in the natural direction of the churchyard, but the other way, up the avenue.

“‘A month after, the two sisters were standing under the portico, dressed in deep mourning for old Queen Charlotte, and the funeral of Lady Albemarle, who had died in the house, was going away up the avenue. Lady Andover said to her sister, “Don’t you remember?”’

“‘Did you ever hear of a man they used to call Houghy White? When I was young, I went with him down to Richmond on a water-party, which was given by Sir George Warrender. Houghy was then engaged to be married to a niece of Beau Brummel, as he was called, and when we returned from Richmond, we went to spend the evening at her mother’s house, and there Houghy told this story.

“‘He was aide-de-camp to the old Duke of Cambridge when he was in Hanover, and was required by the Duke to go with him on a shooting-party into the Hartz Mountains. He, and indeed two of the Duke’s other aides-de-camp, were then, I am sorry to say, very much in love with the wife of a fourth—a very beautiful young lady—and they were all much occupied by thoughts of her. At the place in the Hartz to which they went, there was not much accommodation, but there was one good room with an alcove in it and four beds. The two German equerries slept in the alcove, and the two English aides-de-camp in two beds outside it. In the night White distinctly saw the lady they all so much admired come into the room. She came up to both of the beds outside the alcove and looked into them; then she passed into the alcove. He immediately heard the equerry on the right cry out “Was haben sie gesehn?” and the other—the husband—say, “Ach Gott! Ich habe meine Frau gesehn?”

“‘White was terribly impressed, and the next day entreated to excuse himself from going out shooting with the Duke. The Duke insisted on knowing his reason, upon which he told what he had seen, and expressed his conviction that his friend was dead. The Duke was very much annoyed, and said, “You are really, as a matter of fact, so much occupied with this lady that you neglect your duties to me: I brought you here to shoot with me, and now, on account of whimsical fancies, you refuse to go: but I insist upon your going.” However, White continued to say, “I must most humbly beg your Royal Highness to excuse me, but I cannot and will not go out shooting to-day,” and at last he was left at home. That evening, the mail came in while they were at dinner, and the letters were handed to the Duke. He opened them, and beckoned White to him. “You were quite right,” he said; “the lady died last night.”’

“‘I remember quite well how a very charming young surgeon came into this neighbourhood, a Mr. Stirling; he was beloved by everybody, and though he was as poor as a church-mouse, he had not an enemy in the world. After his medical rounds, he was in the habit of riding home through a lovely wooded lane which there is near Gibside, with trees on each side and the river below. One day—one Friday—as he was riding home this way, he was shot by some men concealed amongst the bushes. His body was dragged into the wood and was searched and rifled; but he was very poor, dear man; he had nothing but his watch, and the brutes took that: and that is all I have to say about him.

“‘On the night before, the wife of Mr. Bowes’s agent, who was in the habit of going every week to receive money at the lead-mines, some miles distant from Gibside, awoke dreadfully agitated. She told her husband that she had had a most terrible dream, and conjured him, as he loved her, to stay at home that day, and not to go to the mines. She said she did not know the place herself, but she saw a wooded lane above a river and some men hiding in bushes, and she saw him come riding along, and the men shoot at him from behind, and drag him into the bushes. He laughed at her, and said of course he could not neglect his duty to his master for such an idle fancy as that, and that he must go to the mines.

“‘She fell asleep again, and she dreamt the same thing, and she urgently entreated and implored him not to go. He said, “I must; the men will be expecting me; they are to meet me there, and I have really no excuse to give.”

“‘She fell asleep the third time, and she dreamt the same thing, and awoke with agonised entreaties that her husband would accede to her wishes. Then he really began to be frightened himself, and at last he said he would make a concession; he would go to the mines, but he would not go by the wooded lane at all (for he was obliged to allow there was such a place), but would both go and return by the high moorland way on the other side the river.

“‘So the agent was saved and the poor young surgeon was murdered in his place.

“‘The watch which had been taken was found afterwards in a pawnbroker’s at Durham, and the men who pawned it were traced and taken: Cain and Rain were their odd names. In the hand of the murdered man was found a button of pink glass, imitation amethyst, which exactly matched those on Cain’s waistcoat, with a bit of the stuff hanging to it, as if the dead man’s hand had clenched it in a struggle. But Cain’s friends got hold of the discovery, and sowed the wood with similar pink buttons, which were found; so that evidence went for nothing and Cain got off, but every one believed that he and Rain did it.

“‘Years afterwards, Cain was ill and sent for Harry,[238] and confided a secret to him under strict vows of secrecy, and no one knows what that secret was.’”

“Kinmel, Nov. 30.—I left Ravensworth early on Monday to go to Ridley Hall. In a few minutes after arriving, White the butler came to say that Cousin Susan would see me. She was in her little sitting-room, half sitting up on her sofa before an immense fire. At above eighty, her face and figure have still the look of youth which they had at thirty-five, and that quite unaided by art, though not by dress. She has now quite lost the use of her feet, and is cut off from all her usual employments, her garden, her walks, her china, and, if it were not that she is so long inured to solitary habits, her life would be indeed most desolate. She talked all afternoon and evening, chiefly about Tyneside politics or family reminiscences. She asked me whom I thought she had better leave her fortune to. I said, ‘After Mr. Bowes, to one of the Strathmore boys.’ She would not take leave of me at night, pretending she should see me next day, but I knew then that she did not mean to do it. She said, as I went out, ‘You may think that you have given me one happy day.’

“I slept at Chester on Tuesday, and walked round the walls by moonlight, most picturesque and desolate, with only the tramp of an occasional wanderer making the night more silent by its echoes.

“Yesterday I came here. A beautiful ascent through woods leads from the seaboard to this house, magnificent in the style of a Louis XIV. château externally, with Morris paper and colour inside. There is a man party here—Lord Colville, Sir Dudley Marjoribanks, Lord de Lisle, Hedworth Williamson, Lord Delamere. Hedworth is most amusing, and Lord de Lisle not without a quaint humour.”

“Dec. 1.—To-day being a hunting day, most of the men breakfasted in pink in the hall. We drove with the Harringtons to the old Shipley house of Bodryddan,[239] where young Mrs. Conwy received us. The fine old house has been altered by Nesfield—‘restored’ they call it—but, though well done in its way, the quaint old peculiar character is gone. This generation, too, has sent its predecessors into absolute oblivion. Only the pictures keep the past alive at all, and they very little. There was a lovely portrait of a little girl with a dog in Mrs. Conwy’s sitting-room. ‘Who was it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, somebody, some sort of great-aunt,’ she supposed, ‘the dog was rather nice.’ It was Amelia Sloper,[240] Dean Shipley’s most cherished niece, the idol of that house and of all that lived in it in a past generation. One could not help remembering how that child’s little footsteps were once the sweetest music that house ever knew, and now her very existence is forgotten there, but her picture is preserved because ‘she had rather a nice little dog.’”

“Tatton Park, Dec. 2.—This is a very pleasant, roomy country-house in an ugly park. The great feature is the conservatories, in one of which a gravel walk winds between banks of rock and moss and groves of tree-fern like a scene in Tasmania.

“Lady Egerton [241] shows to great advantage in her own house. On small subjects her conversation is frivolous, but on deeper subjects she has acute observation and a capital manner of hitting the right nail on the head, and she certainly gives her opinion without respect of persons. Yesterday, Wilbraham Egerton and Lady Mary [242] dined, the latter most attractive. Lady Egerton was very amusing, especially about old Lady Shaftesbury and her having ‘established a lying-in hospital for cats.’”

“Dec. 4.—Yesterday we went to church at Rostherne. Going through the park gates, Mrs. Mitford (Emily Egerton) told the story of Dick Turpin—whose propensities were not known to his neighbours, and who constantly dined with her grandfather—having been terrified at that gate one night as he rode away, by thinking that he saw the ghost of one of his victims, and that it was believed to be haunted ever since.

“Rostherne Church stands on a terrace above the mere, into which one of its bells is said to have slipped down, and a mermaid is supposed to come up and ring it whenever one of the family at Tatton is going to die. It is the most poetical legend in Cheshire. Old Mrs. Egerton [243] told it one day at dinner. A short time after, the butler rushed into the drawing-room, and begged the gentlemen of the house to come and interfere, for two of the under-servants were murdering one another. Mrs. Egerton’s special footman had told the story of the mermaid in the servants’ hall, and another servant denied it. The footman declared that it was impossible it should not be true, for his mistress had said it, and a desperate fight ensued.

“Miss Wilbraham [244] is here from Blyth—a most pleasant, easy, natural person, who draws beautifully, and makes herself most agreeable.

“To-day we have been to luncheon at Arley. It is a noble house, raised by the present Mr. Warburton [245] on the site of an old moated building, which was, however, spoilt before his time. In front is a leaden statue of a Moor, like those at Knowsley and Clement’s Inn. The blind Mr. Warburton wrote the well-known hunting songs. He lived through his eyes, but bears the loss of them with a noble cheerfulness. All around are devoted to him, not only his own family, but tenants and workmen, and it is a touching proof of this, that, when anything new is to be constructed, the workmen always make a ‘blind plan’ of it, that he may feel and know it—a bit of wood representing one kind of wall, a ridge of sealing wax another: and so he is still the adviser and soul of it all.

“Mr. Gladstone is an old friend of his, and, with silence as to politics, was come to cheer and amuse him.

“Lady Egerton was most comical with Mr. Gladstone. ‘I told you you would never rest,’ she said; ‘how could you be so stupid as to think it? A man with brains cannot rest. Now how can you have come to do such a number of foolish things? However, if I was you, I would quiet down: indeed I do not despair of you yet.’ At luncheon Mr. Gladstone said she did a good deal of work in a very short time, for she totally demolished the Board of Education and the Church of England, and eventually established the Pope as the head of Christianity throughout the world.

“Before luncheon, Mr. Warburton took me away to see some prints in the library. We found there a Mr. Yates, a clergyman, and there was a most animated and interesting conversation between him and Mr. Gladstone on the logical difference between ‘Obedience’ and ‘Submission,’ which Mr. Yates considered to be the same and I thought so too, but quite see from Mr. Gladstone’s explanation that it is not so. He illustrated it by Strossmeyer, who was quite willing to submit to the doctrine of Papal infallibility, but turned restive at obedience, which involved subscription, and prevented any power of antagonistic action on his own faith any more. They spoke much of obedience to the decrees of a judge in Church matters. Mr. Gladstone said that while clergy were bound to submit to a judge’s decree, and while they had no right to inquire his reasons (two judges often arriving at the same decision from perfectly different reasons), he did not see why they might not state that the views they maintained, according to their own conscience, were at variance with the decision, though, as members of the Church of England, they were bound to submit to it.

“Altogether, it was a very interesting visit, and I was glad Mr. Gladstone said he wished it had not been such a short one. He and Mrs. Gladstone were both most cordial.

“Here, at Tatton, is a number of pictures set into panels round the staircase, full-lengths of Cheshire gentlemen, moved hither from Astbury Hall, where the originals met to decide whether they should rise for Prince Charlie, and finally elected not to risk their estates. In the dining-room is a picture of a hand shaking out an empty purse by Rubens, signed; it was sent to Charles V. when he had forgotten to pay the painter for his work, to remind him. Lord Egerton has many charming miniatures in his room, and—a gift to one of his ancestors—Queen Elizabeth’s ‘horn-book,’ being the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer set in a frame of silver filagree and covered with talc (horn). He told us of some one who, wishing effectually to protect his land from poachers, put up—‘Aspleniums and Polypodiums always on these premises.’”

“Dec. 6.—Yesterday we drove to Wythenshawe.[246] It is a most engaging old house, very well restored, all the historical points retained—the low narrow door inside the other, through which the defenders forced the conquerors to pass as their condition of surrender after their siege by the Commonwealth, when the family was heavily fined: the ghost-room, where a soldier shot in the siege still appears: the difference in the panelling of the oak drawing-room, where the panels were smashed in by a cannon-ball. There is another ghost—a ghastly face of a lady, who draws the curtains and looks in upon a bride on the first night she sleeps in the house after her marriage: the late Mrs. Tatton saw it.”[247]

“Betton House, Dec. 9.—Wednesday morning was lovely. We drove to Rostherne Manor, Lady Mary Egerton’s charming modern house, with a lovely view over the wide shining mere to the Derbyshire hills; on the right, the church tower on a wooded hill, and in the foreground the terraced garden with an old leaden figure of Mercury.

“I came away to Hodnet, where the great new house perfectly swarmed with Heber Percy cousins, and next morning I went with Ethel Hood to Stoke. There is nothing but the ghost of our memories there now—even the church pulled down, all that made the place touching or beautiful to us swept away.”

“Betton, Dec. 10.—It has been a great pleasure to go to church with the Tayleurs at dear old Market Drayton, and to sit in the great green baize room in the family gallery, with a large fire burning in an open hearth—a pleasant contrast to the wretched open seats which are the fashion now, though it might recall the exclamation of a Frenchman on seeing a similar pew—‘Pardi! on sert Dieu bien à son aise ici.’ Yet even at Drayton the respectable red-cloaked singers have given place to bawling choristers.

“I always feel, in the neighbourhood of the winding Terne, as if I were carried back into my child-life with my dear adopted grandparents, the one happy part of my boyhood, so different from the many bitter days at Hurstmonceaux.”

“Sherborne Park, Dec. 12.—At Bourton-on-the-Water were many people waiting. In the dark I recognised Lord and Lady Denbigh, and then a young lady came up with her husband and spoke to me. ‘I cannot see in the least who you are.’—‘Oh, then I shall leave you to guess, and you will find out by-and-by.’ It was Sir Garnet and Lady Wolseley. With him and Lord Powerscourt, and a fat old gentleman much muffled up, whom I took for Sir Hastings Doyle, and who turned out to be Mr. Alfred Denison, I travelled in a carriage to Sherborne. It is a very fine house of Inigo Jones, of rich yellow stone, with short fluted columns between the windows; but in effect it is overwhelmed by the church, which is close upon it, and crushes it with its spire. The living rooms are delightfully large, airy, and filled with books, flowers, and pictures.

“I had a pleasant dinner, seated by Mr. Denison, who told me much about his curious collection of books on angling, of which he has some of the early part of the fifteenth century, and about 500 editions of Izaak Walton. He has even a Latin treatise on the Devil’s fishery for souls. He was just come from Chatsworth, and had seen there a volume for which £12,000 had been refused, the original of Claude’s ‘Liber Veritatis.’

“Lord Sherborne is both very fond and very proud of his wife, but her music he pretends to detest, though her singing is quite lovely—not much voice, but intense pathos and expression.

“This afternoon I have been with Miss Dutton and charming Miss Ruth Bouverie to the old chase and the deer-park, in which there is a beautiful deserted hunting-lodge by Inigo Jones. Lady Sherborne wanted to make a garden in front of it, but was only allowed by her lord to have grass instead of potatoes. We also went into the church adjoining the house, which contains many family monuments. The most remarkable is that of John Dutton, who was ‘possessed of large estate and of mind æquall to his fortune;’ yet he lost a great part of his estates by gambling, and staked Sherborne too, and would have lost it if he had not been carried off to bed by his butler.

“Speaking of concealment of the whole truth, Miss Dutton related a story her uncle, John Dutton, used to tell of the French governess sliding on the ice, when one of the children said to her, ‘Mr. Lentil said, Mademoiselle, that he hoped the boys would trip you up upon the ice, and I really could not tell you what Mr. Davis said.’ Mr. Davis had said nothing, but the intended impression was conveyed.

“I forget how, apropos of Bible ignorance, Miss Dutton told of an American, who, entering a coffee-house at New York, saw a Jew there, and seized him violently by the throat. ‘What, wh—at do you do that for!’ exclaimed the nigh strangled Jew.—‘Because you crucified my Lord.’—‘But all that happened more than 1800 years ago.’—‘That does not matter; I have only just heard of it.’”

“Dec. 14.—Yesterday we went to Biberry, a beautiful old house of Lord Sherborne’s. Mr. and Lady Augusta Noel joined the party in the evening, she a Keppel,[248] the authoress of ‘Wandering Willie,’ and very pleasant. Several neighbours came to dinner. The astronomical conversation of Mr. Noel was very engaging. I deduced from it that the flames in the sun were 96,000 miles long, and that we were all liable to meet our end in three ways—i.e., by going fizz if a particle of the sun (‘as big as this room’) broke off and struck the earth in any direction: by being slowly consumed, the pools drying and the trees shrivelling up: or by being gradually frozen under an ice-wave. The earth has already perished once by the last-named contingency, and there are geological features, especially at Lord Lansdowne’s place in Ireland, which prove it.”

“Osterley, Dec. 16.—I came here about tea-time to what Horace Walpole calls ‘the Palace of Palaces.’ It is a magnificent house. Sir Thomas Gresham was the original builder, and entertained Queen Elizabeth here. Then it passed through various hands till it fell to the Childs, for whom it was partially rebuilt and splendidly fitted up by the brothers Adam. An immense flight of steps leads through an open portico to a three-sided court, beneath which is the basement storey, and from which open the hall and the principal rooms. There is a gallery like that at Temple Newsam, but much longer and finer, and in this case it is broken and partitioned by bookcases into pleasant corners—almost separate rooms. The walls and ceilings are ornamented with paintings (let in) by Zucchi and Angelica Kauffmann, but the great charm lies in the marvellous variety, delicacy, and simplicity of the wood carvings, each shutter and cornice a different design, but a single piece. In one room are exquisite pink Gobelins, the chairs quite lovely; one of them represents a little girl crying over the empty cage of her lost bird; on its companion a little boy has caught the bird and is rushing to restore it to her. There is a fine picture of Lady Westmoreland, Robert Child’s daughter. When Lord Westmoreland, whom he considered a hopeless ne’er-do-weel, asked for her hand, he had firmly refused it; but when Lord Westmoreland some time after took him unawares with the question, ‘Now, if you were in love with a beautiful girl, and her father would not consent to your marrying her, what would you do?’ answered, ‘Run away with her, to be sure.’ Lord Westmoreland took him at his word, and eloped with Miss Child in a coach-and-four from Berkeley Square; and when, near Gretna Green, he saw that the horses of his father-in-law, in hot pursuit, were gaining upon him, he stood up in the carriage and shot the leader dead, and so gained his bride.

“The Duchess Caroline (of Cleveland) was often here with Lady Jersey, and, when she sold her own place of Downham, determined to rent Osterley. Since then, though only a tenant, she has cared for it far more than its owner, Lord Jersey, and has done much to beautify and keep it up. Only Miss Newton and Mr. Spencer Lyttelton [249] are here, the latter with tremendous spirits, which carry him he knows not where. The Duchess is very amusing. Ordering a very good fire to be made up in church, she added drily to the servant, ‘Just such a fire as you make up on a very hot day, you know.’ She mentioned a clever mot of Count Nesselrode. Speaking of Sir William Wallace’s marriage he said, ‘Il avait une mauvaise habitude, et depuis il a épousé cette habitude.’”

“Dec. 17.—The Duchess is a most interesting remnant of bygone times. She is so easily put out by any one doing too much, that every one at luncheon was afraid to get up and ring the bell for her, till she was close to the bell herself, when a nervous young man jumped up and rang it before she could reach it. ‘Sir, officiousness is not politeness,’ she said very slowly and forcibly.

“To young ladies she frequently says, ‘My dear, never marry for love: you will repent it if you do; I did:’ and yet she was fond of her Lord William.

“Mr. Spencer Lyttelton rails at everything supernatural, so we spoke of the story in his own family, and he told us the facts of the Lyttelton ghost, declaring that everything added to them about altering the clock, &c., was absolutely fictitious.

“‘Thomas, Lord Lyttelton, my father’s first cousin, was at Peel House, near Epsom, when a woman with whom he had lived seemed to appear to him. He spoke of it to some friends—the Misses Amphlett—and said that the spirit had said he should die in three days, and that he believed that he should certainly do so. Nevertheless, on the following day—he went up to London, and made one of his most brilliant speeches, for he was a really great speaker—in the House of Lords. He was not well at the time. On the third evening, his servant, after the custom of that time, was in his room assisting him to undress. When the clock struck twelve, Lord Lyttelton counted the strokes, and when it came to the last, exclaimed, “I have cheated the ghost,” and fell down dead: he must have had something the matter with his heart.’”

“Hinchinbroke, Dec. 26.—Lord Sandwich is a charmingly courteous host, and Lady Sandwich a warm, pleasant friend. The three sons, Hinchinbroke, Victor, and Oliver, are all cheery, kindly, and amusing. ‘You see what a set you’ve landed amongst,’ said Lord Sandwich; ‘it will take you some time to know them.’ Agneta Montagu is here with her charming children; Lady Honoria Cadogan; Miss Corry, a handsome, natural, lively lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Edinburgh; and the kind old Duchess Caroline, with relays of walking-sticks, which she changes with her caps for the different hours of the day.

“Yesterday I went with Miss Corry and Hinchinbroke to Huntingdon, a picturesque old town on the sleepy Ouse. In the market-place, opposite the principal church, is the old grammar-school where Oliver Cromwell was educated. Mr. Dion Boucicault, of theatrical fame, is going to restore it in memory of his son, killed hard by in the Abbots Repton railway accident, and is going to destroy the one characteristic feature of the place—the high gable front of twisted and moulded brick, which recalls Holland and records the Flemish settlers in the Fen country.”

“Christmas Day.—The damp, sleepy weather is far from an ideal Christmas, but I have liked being here in spite of a miserable cold, and being accepted as a sort of relation by this warm-hearted family.”[250]

“Ascot Wood, Jan. 22, 1877.—I have been working quietly at home for nearly three weeks—a halt in life as far as the outer world is concerned; and how good these silences are, when, from the turmoil of the living present, one can retire into the companionship of a dead past—past associations, past interests, passed-away friends, who, though dead, are living for ever in the innermost shrines of one’s heart, of which the general world knows nothing, at which very few care to knock; which, even to those who knock, are so seldom opened.

“I have almost a pang when one of these breaks comes to an end, and the outside world rushes in. ‘On ne se détache jamais sans douleur.’[251] But it was a great pleasure to come here again to the companionship of this perfectly congenial cousinhood. Sir John Lefevre, as usual, is full of interesting conversation—not general, but with the one person next him, and that one is generally myself! He described a visit in Sussex at Sir Peckam Micklethwait’s (‘a man with other and more wonderful names’).[252] When the Princess Victoria was at Hastings with the Duchess of Kent, their horses ran away. They were in the greatest peril, when Mr. Micklethwait, who was a huge and powerful man, stood in the way, and seized and grappled with the horses with his tremendous strength, and they were saved. One of the first things the Queen did when she came to the throne was to make him a baronet.

“Sir John said how few people there were now who remembered the origin of the word ‘fly’ as applied to a carriage. In the last century people almost always went out to parties in sedan-chairs—a great fatigue and trouble to their bearers. Gradually the sedans had wheels, and were drawn. Then it began to dawn upon people to substitute a horse for a man. At that time the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was being acted and very popular, and, in allusion to a line in it, the new carriages were called ‘Fly-by-Night.’ Then the sobriquet was abridged—‘by night’ was omitted, but ‘fly’ remained. Sir John remembered, when flys were first invented, meeting a man who said he had just ‘encountered’ a fly with a wasp inside and a bee (B) outside. It was Lord Brougham’s carriage.

“We went this afternoon to Lady Julia Lockwood’s.[253] Her odd little house is quite full of relics of her sister, the Duchess of Inverness—the Queen’s ‘Aunt Buggin,’ wife of the Duke of Sussex.

“To-night, talking of my little diaries, Sir John said that he had a name for them—‘Seniority’—adapted from Nassau Senior’s journals. When Senior went about, however, people knew that what they said would be taken down, so acted accordingly, and produced their sentiments and opinions as they wished them to be permanently represented. The Khedive was told what Mr. Senior would do before he was admitted to his interview. ‘Oh, yes, I quite understand,’ said the Khedive; ‘Mr. Senior is the trumpet, and I am to blow down it.’

“Sir John described how in the Upper House of Convocation the members amused their leisure moments by suiting each of the bishops with texts. That for the Archbishop of York [254] was, ‘And she was a Greek;’ for Bishop Wilberforce, ‘She brought him butter in a lordly dish.’”

“Jan. 24.—When I arrived at the Ascot station, a little lady was there, with glistening silver hair, waiting to go up to the house. It was Mrs. William Grey. She was here two days and very pleasant—a bright, active, simple mind, which finds its vent in excitement for the superior education of women.

“Yesterday we went to Windsor for the day. We went to the castle library, where Natalli, the sub-librarian, showed us everything. It is very interesting regarded merely as a building—not one room, but a succession of rooms, irregularly added as space allowed and comfort dictated, by a succession of sovereigns. Queen Elizabeth’s library (the only part of the castle unaltered outside) has an old chimney-piece of her time, into which the Prince Consort cleverly inserted a bust from her figure by Cornelius Cure, and it once had a ceiling painted by Verrio, which was destroyed by William IV., who put up a stucco ceiling instead. Of Anne there is the charming little boudoir, where she was sitting with the Duchess of Marlborough when a letter (a facsimile of which is preserved there) was brought in from the Duke telling of the victory of Blenheim. The later rooms are of George III. and William IV. We saw Miles Coverdale’s Bible, all the early editions of Shakspeare, Charles I.’s Prayer-book, Elizabeth’s Prayer-book, Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ with his corrections and alterations; but better far was the view from the end window, with the terrace and its final tower standing out in burly shadow against the misty and flooded country.”

“Thorpe, Jan. 26.—We went to-day to St. Anne’s Hill. Lady Holland was sitting in the innermost of the richly furnished bright warm little rooms, but was bandaged up still from a frightful fall she had received by mistaking a staircase for a passage in the dark. One always feels one’s own talk on waggon-wheels with a person who has the conversational reputation she has, and I was glad when Madame de Jarnac came in and undertook to show us the house. Lady Holland followed, and took us to her bedroom, which is charming, with a view towards Chobham. Then we went to the gardens, with a temple to Friendship (i.e., to Lord Holland’s friendship), and the summer-house in which the preliminaries of the Peace of Amiens were signed. Other summer-houses are paved with encaustic tiles from Chertsey Abbey.”

“69 Onslow Square, Jan. 27.—Mr. Byng preached a capital sermon to-day upon ‘religious hypochondriacs’—people who say, ‘You know I was always so spoilt when I was a child, you must make allowance for my being a little selfish now,’ &c.”

“6 Bury Street, Feb. 13.—Last night I dined with the Haygarths, to meet the Woods and Leslies. The Dowager Lady Spencer [255] was there, who gave an amusing account of her Irish experiences, when her stepson was Lord Lieutenant. One day he was hunting, and had just leapt a hedge into a lane, when he was aware that a funeral was coming up. He thought it might hurt the feelings of the mourners if he passed them hunting, so he hid himself. But as the funeral came by the hounds appeared, and instantly, setting the coffin down in the road, mourners, pall-bearers, and all started in hot pursuit, and Lord Spencer found himself left alone with the body.

“Lady Spencer talked of one Irish gentleman, a Master of Hounds, who, being very much puzzled by the two Lady Spencers, and how to distinguish them, settled the matter by calling them, like dogs, one ‘Countess,’ and the other ‘Dowager.’ ‘The absurdity never struck me much,’ she said, ‘till the last day of all, when Charlotte’s eyes were so red with crying, and he, coming in, exclaimed, “Dowager, Dowager, what can we do to comfort Countess?”’

“I have just been with Lady Halifax and the Corrys to see the Duke of Suffolk’s head at the church in the Minories—a most awful object.

“Mr. Bodley [256] told us last night that when he was staying at St. John’s College, Oxford, he saw a ghost. He could swear to it. He was in a room which was in the broad moonlight of a summer’s night, for it had no shutters. Suddenly he heard a movement like that of a man under the bed, and then something thrown on the floor like a stick. He jumped up, but there was nothing. He then went to bed again, when out of the floor in the moonlight rose the head and shoulders of a man. He saw it against the chest of drawers. It hid two of the handles of the drawers, but not more. Farther than that out of the ground it did not rise. He is quite certain that he saw it, and quite certain that he was awake.”

“Feb. 14.—Luncheon at Miss Davenport Bromley’s to meet Mr. Portal. Lord Houghton and his son and daughter were there. Mr. Portal has a scheme for educating the unfortunate Americans of gentle birth who have fallen from wealth to poverty owing to the changes on the cessation of the slave trade in South Carolina, and he has been eminently successful. He described the South Carolina reverses of fortune as most extraordinary. One of his friends died in his house who had once possessed an estate worth £300,000; yet, when his will was opened, it only contained these words—‘I leave to the old and tried friend of my youth, the Rev. —— Portal, my only son!’ He had nothing else whatever to leave except £9 towards his funeral expenses. Mr. Portal described how the ‘darkies’ had been ‘done’ since the change by those who had too much of the theory of religion to have any power left for the practice of it. Being at a place on the border, where some of the greatest battles were, he asked some of the ‘darkies’ why, when they saw the Northerners gaining the upper hand, they did not join them. A ‘darkie’ said, ‘Mossieu, did you ever see two dogs fighting for a bone?’—‘Yes, very often.’—‘But, Mossieu, did you ever see the bone fight?’

“The conversation fell on Philadelphia, ‘the most conservative place in America, with its narrow streets and narrow notions.’ Lord Houghton said that his son Robin had been shocked by the non-observance of Sunday in the native city of Moody and Sankey. Mr. Portal said that Moody and Sankey were utterly unknown, entirely without influence in their own country; that it could only be the most enormous amount of American cheek which had enabled them to come over to England, ‘exactly as if it was a heathen country, to bring the light of the Gospel to the English;’ that America had heard with amazement and shock how they were run after; that they owed their success partly to their cheek, and partly to their music.

“Mr. Portal described his feeling of desolation when he first arrived in England—‘not one soul he knew amongst all these millions;’ that the next day a lady asked him to conduct her and her child to a pantomime. He consented, without understanding that a pantomime meant Drury Lane Theatre, and his horror was intense when he ‘found himself, a clergyman of forty years’ standing,’ in such a place. This, however, was nothing to what he felt ‘when a troop of half-naked women rushed in and began to throw up their legs into the air;’ he ‘could have sunk into the ground for shame.’ ‘Was not the mother of our Lord a woman? was not my mother a woman? is not my wife a woman? are not my daughters women? and what are these?’

“Mr. Knowles, the ex-editor of the Contemporary Review, who was at luncheon, said that he had taken Alfred Tennyson to see a ballet with just the same effect. When the ballet-girls trooped in wearing ‘une robe qui ne commence qu’à peine, et qui finit tout de suite,’ Tennyson had rushed at once out of the box, walked up and down in an agony over the degradation of the nineteenth century, and nothing would induce him to go in again. Mr. Knowles said, however, that a general improvement in the stage had dated from a climax of impropriety in ‘Babil and Bijou:’ it had since been much leavened by Irving. Lord Houghton described how much of Irving’s success had been due to the entirely original view he had taken of his characters; that in Hamlet he had taken ‘the domestic view, not declaiming, but pondering, saying things meditatively with his legs over a chair-back.’”

“Feb. 24.—I have been seeing a great deal of Willie Milligan lately, and cannot help thinking of the characteristics so distinctive of him whom for twenty-six years I have never ceased to feel honoured in being allowed to call my intimate friend.

“He is a thorough-bred gentleman in all the highest senses of the term. Always without riches, he has never complained of having less than was sufficient for his wants, which are most modest. Without being cultivated, he is very clever. He never talks religion, but his life is thoroughly christian. He is the soul of honour, pure, truthful, blameless, and without reproach; yet in conversation no one is more witty, original, and amusing. He is celebrated as a peace-maker, and never fails to show that chivalry is the truest wisdom. He has never done a selfish act, and never omitted to do a kind one.”

“Feb. 25.—A visit to Mrs. Lowe. She talked of the contemptible state of politics now; that it was all only playing at the old game of brag; that the object with every one seems to be who can tell most lies, and who can get any one to believe his lies most easily. If she ‘was minister it would be different; she would nail men down to a point—what will you do and what will you not do? and have a direct answer; then one would know how to act.’

“Mr. Lowe described his life in Australia. Money then scarcely existed there: payments were made either in kind or in bills of exchange. He said, ‘When we played whist, we played sheep, with bullocks on the rubber; and when a man won much, he had to hire a field next morning to put his winnings in.’”

“Feb. 28.—A charming visit to old Lord John Thynne, who told me many of his delightful reminiscences of Sydney Smith, Milman, and others.

“Then to Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who was sitting almost on the ground, covered with an eider-down. She talked of our ‘Memorials’ and of Mrs. Grote, who said, when she read of the dear mother’s marvellous trances, ‘My dear, she was thinking more than was good for her; so God in His great mercy gave her chloroform.’ She spoke of the difficulties of a like faith, of the effort of keeping it up when prayer was not answered, believing in the power of prayer just the same. She told how, when her child was dying—she knew it must die—the clergyman came (it was at Wimbledon) and used to kneel by the table and pray that resignation might be given to the mother to bear the parting, and resignation to the child to die; and how she listened and prayed too; and yet, at the end, she could not feel it. She did not, and—though she knew it was impossible—she could not but break in with, ‘Yet, O Lord, yet restore her.’

“‘Do you know,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘that till I was thirty, I had never seen death—never seen it even in a poor person; then I saw it in my own child, and I may truly say that then Death entered into the world for me as truly as it did for Eve, and it never left me afterwards—never. If one of my children had an ache afterwards, I thought it was going to die; if I awoke in the night and looked at my husband in his sleep, I thought—“He will look like that when he is dead.”

“‘Do not think I murmur, but life is very trying when one knows so little of the beyond. The clergyman’s wife has just been, and she said, “But you must believe; you must believe Scripture literally; you must believe all it says to the letter.” But I cannot believe literally: one can only use the faith one has, I have not the faith which moves mountains. I have prayed that the mountains might move, with all the faith that was in me—all; but the mountains did not move. No, I cannot pray with the faith which is not granted me.

“‘I think that I believe all the promises of Scripture; yet when I think of Death, I hesitate to wish to leave the certainty here for what is—yes, must be—the uncertainty beyond. Yet lately, when I was so ill, when I continued to go down and down into the very depths, I felt I had got so far—so very far, it would be difficult to travel all that way again—“Oh, let me go through the gates now.” And then the comforting thought came that perhaps after all it might not be the will of God that I should travel the same way again, and that when He leads me up to the gates for the last time, it might be His will to lead me by some other, by some quite different way.’”

“March 4.—Breakfast with Lord Houghton—a pleasant male party—Dr. Ralston, Henry James the American novelist, Sir Samuel Baker, and three others. Harriet Martineau’s Memoirs had just arrived, and were a great topic. Lord Houghton, who had known her well, said how often he had been sent for to take leave of Miss Martineau when she had been supposed to be dying, and had gone at great personal inconvenience; but she had lived for thirty years after the first time. Her fatal illness (dropsy) had set in before she went to America. Her friends tried strongly to dissuade her from going, suggesting that she would be very ill received in consequence of her opinions. ‘Why, Harriet,’ said Sydney Smith, ‘you know, if you go, they will tar and feather you, and then they will turn you loose in the woods, and the wild turkeys will come and say, “Why, what strange bird are you?”’

“Of course, much of politics was talked, especially about the Turkish atrocities. Sir S. Baker said that at the old Duchess of Cleveland’s he had met Lord Winchester, now quite an old man. He said that he had ridden from Constantinople to the Danube in 1832, and had passed thirty impaled persons on the way. He himself (Sir Samuel) had seen the impaling machine on the Nile—a stake tapered like a pencil, over which a wheel was let down to a certain height, and when the man was impaled, he was let down on the wheel and rested there; he often lived for three or four days; if the machine was in the market-places of the country towns, the relations of the victims gave them coffee. ‘It is not worse,’ said Lord Houghton, ‘than the stories we are told every Sunday: “he destroyed them all, he left not one of them alive;” especially of the cruelties of David, who made his enemies pass under the harrow, a punishment much worse than impalement. How grateful David would have been for a steam-roller! what a number of people he would have been able to despatch at once!’

“At Mrs. Tennant’s I saw the three girls who have been so much admired, and painted by Millais and so many others; their chief beauty consisting in their picturesqueness as a group.”

“March 5.—To Mr. Brandram’s recitation of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ at Lord Overstone’s. He said the whole play by heart, giving different character and expression to each person—an astonishing effort of memory. Hearing a play in this way certainly fixes it in the mind much more than reading it, though not so much as seeing it.”

“March 8.—Luncheon at charming old Mrs. Thellusson’s, where I met Madame Taglioni, the famous danseuse. She is now an old lady, with pretty refined features, perfect grace of movement, and a most attractive manner. She has begun in her old age to give lessons again for the benefit of her family, though she is, at the same time, presenting her princess grand-daughter—the Princess Marguerite Trubetskoi, a simple natural girl. Madame Taglioni spoke of her dancing as ‘un don de Dieu,’ just as she would of music or any other art. We asked her if she would like to be young again. ‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ she said; ‘how I should dance!’ She said her father, a ballet-master, made her practise nine hours a day; ‘however great a talent you may have, you never can bring it to perfection without that amount of practice.’

“Lady Charlemont was there, and after luncheon we asked her to recite. She made no difficulties, but said nothing; only, while we had almost forgotten her, she had glided round the room to where there was a red curtain for a background, and suddenly, but slowly, she began. It was only a simple ballad of Tennyson—‘Oh, the Earl was fair to see’—but she threw a power into it which was almost agony, and the pauses were absolute depths of pathos. You felt the power of her unfaltering vengeance, you heard the raging of the storm ‘in turret and tree;’ and, when the moment of the murder came, you quivered in every nerve as she stabbed the Earl ‘through and through.’ It was absolutely awful.

“Afterwards Mrs. Greville recited ‘Jeanne d’Arc.’ It is her best part. She cannot look refined, but an inspired French paysanne she can look and be thoroughly.

“Sir Baldwin Leighton made himself so pleasant, that when he asked me to go to their box at the Lyceum in the evening, I promised to go, though I never like seeing any, even the very best plays, twice. However, the nearness of the box to the stage enabled me to see many details unobserved before. Richard III. will always, I should think, be Irving’s best part, for he looks the incarnation of the person. In Shakspeare, Richard III. is most anxious to become king, and perfectly determined to remain king when he has become so; but Irving carries out far more than this. Irving’s Richard is perfectly determined that vice shall triumph over virtue, and utterly enraptured when it does triumph, in a way which is quite diabolical. The night before Bosworth Field is most striking and beautiful. You are with the king in his tent. He draws the curtain and looks out. On the distant wind-stricken heath the camp-fires are alight, and the lights in the tents blaze out one by one, eclipsing the stars overhead. Richard says little for a time; your whole mind is allowed the repose of the beauty. The king, who has been through the last acts trying (you feel him striving against his personal disadvantages) to be kingly, is all-kingly on that night, in the immediate face of the great future on which everything hangs. He gives his orders—simply, briefly, royally. He lies down on the couch, folding himself in the royal velvet robe, which, like Creusa’s cloak, is associated with all his crimes. He falls asleep. Then, out of the almost darkness, just visible as outlines but no more, rise the phantoms; and, like a whiffling wind, the voice of Clarence floats across the stage. As each spirit delivers its message in the same faint spiritual harmonious monotone, the sleeping figure shudders and groans, moans more sadly.

“Then there is a powerfully human touch in the way in which he, so coldly royal as he lay down, turns human-like for sympathy in his great horror and anguish to the first person he sees, the soldier who wakens him.”

“March 10.—Went with Victor Parnell down the river in search of the old houses at Limehouse and Stepney. We found them, but the accounts in the Daily News, which had led us to the excursion, were so exaggerated that the houses were scarcely to be recognised. We came back by Ratcliffe Highway. It all looked very clean, and thriving, and decent, very different indeed from the descriptions in religious magazines.”

“March 11.—Luncheon with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, who showed me a volume of portrait sketches by Downman, a little-known master of George III.’s time, but a wonderfully charming artist.”

ERRATA

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

BY

AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE
AUTHOR OF “MEMORIALS OF A QUIET LIFE.”
“THE STORY OF TWO NOBLE LIVES.”
ETC. ETC.

VOLUME V

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1900
[All rights reserved]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. V

XIX

WHILST WRITING THE BUNSEN MEMOIRS

IT was soon after the death of my dear and honoured old friend, the Baroness Bunsen, that her daughters, Frances and Emilia, wrote to consult me about a Memoir of her beautiful and helpful life. I promised all the help I could give, but did not understand, till several months later, that they wished me to undertake the whole biography myself. This, however, I rejoiced to do, being assured that beyond her own children, no one had a warmer love and appreciation for the friend of my whole life, and delighting to be raised, whilst dwelling amongst her written words and thoughts, into the serene and lofty atmosphere of her inner life.

The work which I had undertaken began at this time to bring me into constant and intimate connection with all the branches of the Bunsen family, especially with Lady Llanover, the sister of my dear old friend.

“Llanover, March 18, 1877.—I left London on my birthday and went to the Harfords at Blaise Castle. It was bright but bitter March weather, and though the woods were full of flowers, there was no enjoyment of them. I had much talk with sweet Mrs. Harford about old days and the many passed-away things and people dear to us both. Sir George and Lady Grey were staying at Blaise, to my great pleasure.

“Yesterday I came here by the ferry over the Severn. Lady Llanover’s old ramshackle carriage met me at the Nantyderry Station, and brought me to Llanover. I had received endless solemn warnings about what I was to say and not to say here, what to do and not to do; but with a person of whom one is not likely to see much in after life, one never feels any alarm. Lady Llanover is very small and has been very pretty. We have a mutual bond in our love for her sister, whose memory is enshrined in her inmost heart with that of her mother, Mrs. Waddington, to whom she was quite passionately devoted. Of the Bunsen family she talked from 4 till 10.30 P.M. ‘You see I have still the full use of my lungs,’ she said.

“At eight we had tea. There is no dinner, which I like, but every one would not. After tea she gathered up all the lumps of sugar which remained and emptied them with a great clatter into a box, which she locked up. With £20,000 a year, the same economy pervades everything. Her great idea is Wales—that she lives in Wales (which many doubt), and that the people must be kept Welsh, and she has Welsh schools, Welsh services, a Welsh harper, always talks Welsh to her servants, and wears a Welsh costume at church.”

“March 24, 1877.—I may tell you now, as it is no longer a secret, that I have acceded to the wish of all her family in undertaking to write the Life and edit the beautiful letters of my dear old friend the Baroness de Bunsen. How perfectly great and noble her character was, and the intense interest of all she wrote, few know better than myself, and, beyond her own family, no one loved her more; so, when my ‘London’ is done, I shall give myself gladly to this sacred task, and trust that it may be, as her writings cannot fail to be, a blessing to many.”

“Holmhurst, April 6, 1877.—I look back on my visit to Llanover as quite a bit apart in my life. It was important that I should please, as much of the success of the memorials of her sister, which I have undertaken to edit, must depend upon Lady Llanover’s favourable co-operation. It was equally important that I should assert my own absolute independence of will and action, and knock under in nothing. So it was a difficult course to steer. The very warnings I had received were enough to annihilate self-confidence. I was not to believe anything Lady Llanover said about different members of her family, for she was always guided by her own prejudices and sympathies. I was not to be guided by her opinion on any subject, yet was never to contradict her. I was not to make to her any one of the promises she was sure to attempt to exact from me: above all, I was never to leave any letter or paper about in my room, as there were always ‘tame panthers stealing about the house,’ who would master the contents and make it known to their mistress.

“I began by disregarding all this advice, and taking Lady Llanover as if I had never heard a word about her, and I am sure that it was the best way. I listened to all she had to say, and received part of it to profit by. I left all my papers about, and if the mistress of the house learnt what was in them, I hope it was beneficial to her. I found her difficult to deal with certainly, but chiefly because, with endless power of talking and a vocabulary absolutely inexhaustible, it is next to impossible to keep her in the straight conversational path along which she ought to be travelling: she will linger to pick all the flowers that grow in the lanes diverging along the wayside. Thus, though on an average we talked for six hours a day, not more than one of those hours could be utilised.

“There is a great deal to admire in Lady Llanover: her pertinacity in what she thinks right, whether she is right or not: her insistence on carrying out her sovereign will in all things; but chiefly her touching devotion to the memory of the mother from whom she, the youngest and favourite daughter, was scarcely ever separated. The whitewashed ‘Upper House’ in the park is kept fresh and bright and aired, as if the long-lost mother were constantly expected. In her sitting-room a bright fire burns in winter, and fresh flowers are daily placed on the little table by her old-fashioned sofa. The plants she loved are tended and blooming in the little garden; the pictures and books are unremoved from the walls; the peacocks she used to feed, or their descendants, still spread their bright tails in the sun under her windows.

“It is in the kitchen of the ‘Upper House’ that Lady Llanover’s Welsh chaplain performs service on Sundays, for to the church she and her people will not go, as the clergyman is—undesirable. Lady Llanover on Sundays is even more Welsh than on week-days. She wears a regular man’s tall hat and short petticoats like her people, and very becoming the dress is to her, and very touching the earnestness of the whole congregation in their national costume, joining so fervently—like one person—in the services, especially in the singing, which is exquisitely beautiful. I suppose it may be only from the novelty, but this earnest service, these humble prayers on the worn benches in the brick-floored kitchen, with the incidents of manual labour in the background, and farmhouse scenes outside the windows, seemed more of a direct appeal to God than any formal prayers I ever heard in a church—the building called a church. I feel more and more that I shall probably end my days—a Dissenter!

“We had more of the Welsh music in the evening. We went and sat in the armchairs in the hall, and the household filed in above, and filled the music-gallery, and sang most gloriously, especially the burial-hymn ‘It is finished,’ which was sung in parts all the way from the house to the churchyard at the funerals of Mrs. Waddington and Lord Llanover and his son. At other times, the blind harper attached to the house came in and harped to us, and four little boys sat in a circle on the floor and sang.

“One afternoon we went to the churchyard overlooking the Usk. A great pine-tree, the seed of which was brought from Rome by Mrs. Waddington, overshadows the burial-place of the family, and, in accordance with a line in some poet she liked, her grave is covered with the simple camomile. By its side is the colossal altar-tomb of Lord Llanover. It is generally supposed to be merely commemorative, but Lady Llanover herself unlocked a door concealed beneath the carving, and we went in. There are three coffins—of Lord Llanover, his eldest son, and his grandson Stephàn, son of Mrs. Herbert of Llanarth, whom she, the Roman Catholic mother, insisted should be brought here, the priests accompanying the corpse to the churchyard gate, and there delivering it to the Welsh people, who sang their beautiful hymns over it. There was a fourth place in the tomb, which Lady Llanover, tearless in her desolation, showed me as hers, which she must soon occupy. The poor Welsh women were busy ‘dressing the graves’ in the churchyard—the graves are always dressed for Palm Sunday.

“At Llanover, in the weird house of dead associations, it was a relief when pleasant, handsome young Arthur Herbert came the last day. Almost the only other guest was Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, the intimate and faithful friend of Mrs. Carlyle. I found it difficult to trace in the ancient spinster the gifted brilliancy I had heard described, though of her strong will there was abundant evidence.[258] During an illness of Mrs. Carlyle there was a comic instance of this. Miss Jewsbury had unlimited faith in black currant jelly for a cold. Now Mrs. Carlyle’s throat was very bad, and Miss Jewsbury took some of her jelly to her. ‘But I will not take it; I will not take it, Geraldine,’ said Mrs. Carlyle, with her strong inflexion on the ‘ine.’ So Miss Jewsbury sat by the head of the bed and kept her black currant jelly well out of sight. But a moment came when Mrs. Carlyle fell fast asleep, and—if the truth must be told—opened her mouth very wide. It was Miss Jewsbury’s opportunity, and she filled a spoon full of jelly, and popped it into the open mouth. ‘Good God! Geraldine, what was that?’ exclaimed Mrs. Carlyle, waking up. ‘That was the black currant jelly.’—‘Good God, Geraldine! I thought it was a leech gone the wrong way.’

“Since I returned, I have greatly enjoyed a fortnight’s halt in life at home. When here, with charming rooms full of books and pictures, inexhaustible employment within and without, and the dear Lea, the one living relic of our past, I wonder how I can ever go away.”

“April 14.—The other day I dined at Lord Charlemont’s. Lady Charlemont [259] is astonishing. I sat near her at dinner. First she startled me by saying what a bore her neighbour on the other side was: it was Lord Campbell. Then she said, ‘I am so happy. I have found some one who breaks the first commandment.’—‘What! “Thou shalt have none other gods but me?”’—‘Yes, and the man who breaks it is Dr. Schliemann; he adds Jupiter and Venus and a lot of others, all on the same level.’

“Sir Julius Benedict was at dinner, a most amusing person. He described how he was at Mentmore, and sat up very late in the hall reading, the rest of the gentlemen having gone to the smoking-room, and Baron Rothschild having gone to bed. He was surprised after some time to see Baron Rothschild come down again and cross the entrance hall in conversation with a strange gentleman. Soon after, when Sir Julius had gone to his own room, a guest in the house knocked at the door and apologised for disturbing him, but begged to know if he knew Sir James Fergusson by sight. He said, ‘Yes, perfectly,’ and then he remembered who the stranger was whom he had seen crossing the hall with the Baron: it was Sir James Fergusson; he had not recognised him at the moment.

“The guest said, ‘You do not know what an awkward difficulty you have relieved us from; a gentleman has arrived who seems to think he is expected, and whom nobody knows, and he says he is Sir James Fergusson.’ And it was.

“Sir James had been called out from dinner by a servant from Mentmore, who said that there had been no time to write, but that he had been sent off to fetch him, for the Baroness was so alarmingly ill that there was not a moment to be lost. Sir James rushed off in a cab to Euston Square, and asked for a special train. It was Sunday, and there was none to be had without great delay; but the station-master, hearing the urgency of the case, and whom it was for, said that the express, just starting, should be allowed to stop at the station for Mentmore. On arriving there, Sir James was surprised to find no carriage, but procured a trap from the inn, and drove as hard as he could. As they reached the house, the servant got down and went round it, saying he was going in the other way.

“The servant was quite mad, and the insanity first showed itself in this odd form.

“‘One day an American bishop called in his carriage at Hunt & Roskell’s. He asked to see some bracelets, mentioning that he was returning to America and wished to take a present to his wife. ‘Nothing very expensive,’ he said; ‘he could not afford that, but something about £70 or £80.’ Eventually he agreed to take a bracelet that cost £100. He said that he would pay for it with a £100 note which he had with him: it happened to be the only money he had at the moment, but he would wait while they sent it to the bank to ascertain that it was all right; he should really prefer doing this. They sent it to the bank and received answer that it was perfectly correct.

“‘Having paid for his bracelet, the bishop took it, and was just about to step into his carriage, when a policeman tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hallo, Jim! you’re up to your old tricks again, are you? You’ll just come along with me,’ and he brought him back into the shop. Hunt & Roskell said there was some mistake, that the gentleman was an American bishop, that he had just bought a £100 bracelet and paid for it with an excellent £100 note. ‘Just let me look at the note, will you?’ said the policeman. He looked at it and said, ‘Yes, it’s just as I thought; this note is one of a particularly clever batch of forgeries, which are very difficult to detect, and the man is no more a bishop than you are. We will go off to the police-station at once. I will take the note and go on with the prisoner in the carriage, and you must send your men in a cab to meet us and bear witness.’ So the policeman took the bishop and the bracelet and the note, but when Hunt & Roskell’s men reached the police-station, they had not yet arrived; and they have never been heard of since!’”

“April 15.—Dined with Mrs. Rogerson, daughter of my dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart. Irving was there. I ventured to tell him how I thought his play was spoilt by the changes he had recently made, and why, and he was quite simple, as he always is, not the least offended, and in the end agreed with me, and said he should alter the changes as I suggested, and send me a box that I might come and see the improvement. He said how, ever since he heard me tell a story at Lord Ducie’s, he had wished I should do something in public. He ‘did not know if I wanted money, but thought I could make any sum I liked.’ He ‘believed he could guarantee’ my making £8000 a year! He advised my doing what he had intended doing himself when he had been ‘making a mere nothing of ten guineas a week, and felt that could not go on.’ He intended to have got Wilkie Collins to write him a story, and to take a room at the Egyptian Hall, fit it up in an old-fashioned way, sit down by the fire, and then take the audience, as it were, at once into his room and confidence. ‘But in your case,’ he said, ‘you need not apply to Wilkie Collins.’”

“April 16.—Miss Northcote’s wedding in Westminster Abbey. I had a capital place in a stall just behind Princess Louise and Princess Mary of Teck. The church was crowded, and though it was a bitter wind outside, it was quite glorious within, all the forest of arches tinted with golden sunlight. Arthur gave the blessing magnificently, as he always does. There were 350 people at the breakfast afterwards, which was at Lord Beaconsfield’s house in Downing Street. There were endless little tables. I sat at one with Lady Aberdare, Lady Middleton, and young Lord Colchester. I was glad to see the dear little Lady Winifred Herbert again, growing up fast, but with the same sweet innocent expression, walking about with Jim Cranbourne, who is a charming boy.”

“April 23.—Dined with Lady Charlemont. Old Mr. Planché was there, and talked much about the favourable characteristics of the present Duke of Wellington; how before his father died he said how grief for his death would be aggravated by perpetual consciousness of his own name and position. ‘Think what it will be when the Duke of Wellington is announced and only I come in!’ Poor Mr. Planché, celebrated as a wit and story-teller in former times, is becoming painfully aware of having outlived the patience of his auditors!

“Lady Charlemont said, ‘Whenever I make a very naughty quotation from ‘Don Juan,’ I always preface it by saying, ‘As Dr. Watts touchingly observes.’”

“April 26.—Dined at Mrs. Stratford Dugdale’s. Lord Crewe was there, with the most extraordinary and diabolic-looking red flower in his button-hole. He always has one of these weird orchids, and delights to surprise people with them.”

“April 28.—A pleasant morning with Mrs. Hollond, Sir Hampton Lorraine, and others at Grosvenor House. The rooms were quite lovely, and the flowers more so—great blue-green bowls filled with cowslips; great glasses of blue bells, with a few yellow jonquils intermixed.

“Luncheon afterwards at Mrs. Duncan Stewart’s. Mrs. Rogerson told the story of a cat she had known who would lie on the rug with its head on the side of a little dog called Flossy. People said, ‘How selfish the cat is; she only lies there because it is warm.’ But Flossy died and the cat was missing. It was found on Flossy’s grave, and lay there all night. It was brought in and milk was given to it, but it refused to eat, and as soon as it was left alone in the room where it was shut up, it dashed straight through the window and went back to the grave again. If they took hot milk out to it at the grave, it ate it, but away from the grave it would eat nothing. It lay there day and night. At last they built it a little pent-house over the grave, and it lay there, partially sheltered, till, six weeks afterwards, it died.

“Mrs. Rogerson knew another story of a terrier and a cat, who were deadly foes and always quarrelling. The cat had kittens, and the kittens were all put out of the way and were buried. The cat was inconsolable and went mewing about the house. The terrier could not make it out, and followed her everywhere; he did not snap at her any more; on the contrary, he seemed to do all he could to console her. At last he had an inspiration. He found out where the kittens were buried, and scratched and scratched till he got them up, and one by one he brought the dead kittens and laid them down before the cat. It was a very small consolation to poor pussy, but she and the terrier never quarrelled again, and were the greatest friends as long as they lived.”

“May 2.—A pleasant party at Lady Leslie’s beautiful house to meet the Tecks. She looked more amenable than ever, yet the Princess all over.”

“May 4.—Dined with Sir Dighton and Lady Probyn in the strange houses built like the Tower of Babel by Mr. Hankey. Went to a quaint collection of anybodies and nobodies at Lord Houghton’s afterwards. He spoke of the ‘unexpected places in which gold is found’ in literature.”

“May 6.—To Lady Salisbury, whom I found in her bright sunny boudoir looking on the Park. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice and Mr. Ralli came in and talked politics furiously. Lady Maude told me of Lord Sligo’s visit to Paris immediately after the siege, and how he had driven about in the same cab for some days, and then found he had been sitting all the time on an explosive bomb which was under the seat. The cabman, when remonstrated with, as the slightest jolt might have made it explode, said he ‘had not left it at home, because he thought the children might get playing with it.’”

“May 11.—At dinner at Lady Jane Ellice’s I met Lady Waterford and Lady Folkestone.[261] The latter sang most beautifully and pathetically. She felt. ‘One cannot feel always,’ she said; ‘one cannot feel with an audience who say, “How sweet.” Lady Waterford told of Sir Philip and Lady Durham. Lady Durham died quite suddenly. She had been out in the garden the day before, seeing the gardener and ordering some bouquets she wanted. After her sudden death, Sir Philip found a paper in her dressing-box. It said—‘Something so very odd has happened to me, that I think I had better write it down. In the garden I saw a figure which beckoned to me and beckoned to me, and I followed it. I followed it a long way, and at last it reached the churchyard, and then it disappeared.’”

“May 12.—Dined at Mrs. Rogerson’s, where I took down the Countess Bremer, who has always lived at the Hanoverian Court. She is that ‘Margaret Bremer’ who is celebrated for her answer to the blind King, who loved to shock her by his improper stories. ‘What do you think of that, Margaret?’ he asked, after telling her one of his worst. ‘I think that your Majesty has a very clean way of telling a very dirty story,’ she replied.”

“May 15.—Dined at Sir John Shaw-Lefevre’s. Having two round tables made the party most pleasant. It included the beautiful and charming Lady Granville, Lady Russell, Lady Aberdeen, and Wallace of the Russian book.”

“May 17.—A party at Lord Houghton’s; every one there, from Princess Louise to Mrs. Anthony Trollope, a beautiful old lady with snow-white hair turned back. These crowded parties remind me of Madame de Staëls description—‘Une société aux coups de poing.’”

“May 26.—I have been for three days at Cobham, where the woods covered with bluebells were like expanses of Italian sky brought down and laid on the earth. There was a large party in the house—Lady Haddington and her bright Lady Ruth; Murray Finch Hatton and his wife, as delicate as a drooping lily; Meysey Clive, a charming natural fellow, and his Lady Catherine; Lord and Lady Pelham, &c. The life was most easy; we drew, read, talked, and showed the house to Lord and Lady Onslow, who arrived while touring in a four-in-hand.”

“May 30.—On Saturday I was at a pleasant party at Lord Houghton’s, meeting scarcely any one but authors, and a very odd collection—Black, Yates, and James the novelists; Sir Francis Doyle and Swinburne the poets; Mrs. Singleton the erotic poetess (Violet Fane), brilliant with diamonds; Mallock, who has suddenly become a lion from having written a clever squib called ‘The New Republic,’ and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe with her daughter. I was introduced to Mrs. Howe, having asked Lord Houghton who was the charming, simply-dressed woman with the sensible face, and then found she was sister of my Roman friend Mrs. Terry. She wrote the hymn, singing which the troops took Pittsburg. We asked her about it. She said she could not help feeling the little annoyance so many felt on similar occasions—that she should be only known as the authoress of one thing, one little waif out of all her work, and that people should treat her as if she had only written that.”

“June 3.—I have dined several times with Miss Wright to meet the Charles Wilbrahams. She sings beautifully. He had much that was curious to tell about the project of a French engineer for deepening the course of the brook Kishon, so as to let in the Mediterranean. Kishon rises near Tabor, and if the Mediterranean could once pass the watershed, it would run down on the other side into the great hollow of the Dead Sea, which is now so far below its own level. The engineer, of course, had never thought of Ezekiel xlvii., in which the fishermen of Engedi, now some 3000 feet above the level of the sea, are described as casting in their nets.

“Mr. Wilbraham was amusing with some of his American experiences. He told of two young girls who were stopped going through a turnpike gate. ‘What are your charges?’—‘Half a dollar for man and horse.’—‘Well, then, just stand on one side, will you, for we are two girls and a mare, so we’ve nothing to pay.’ He said he had asked an American at Florence what he thought of the Venus de Medicis. ‘Wal, I guess I’m not so partiklar overpowered by stone gals,’ was the reply.

“I constantly meet Froude the historian at Miss Wright’s, a somewhat shy, sardonic, and silent man. His sphinx-like character, the very doubt about him, makes him interesting: one never really knows what he would be at.”[262]

“June 4.—Dined at Lord Egerton of Tatton’s. Old Mrs. Mildmay told a rather improper story there, which was received with shouts of merriment. She was at a country-house where there was a very pleasant man named Jones, and there was also a lady who had a maid called Jones: the people in the house knew this, because there was a confusion about letters. The lady’s husband went away for the day, and, as she was going to walk to the station in the evening to meet him, the mistress of the house asked Mr. Jones to walk with her. When the train came in, the husband was not there, but just then a telegram was brought in. ‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘Oh-o-o, I’m sure my husband is dead: I can’t open it.’—‘Nonsense!’ said Mr. Jones; ‘if he is dead, he cannot have sent you a telegram.’—‘Well, I can’t open it; I know it’s something dreadful—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’ So at last, Mr. Jones opened it for her and read it aloud, not seeing at once what it contained. It was—‘I am all right, unavoidably detained. If you are at all nervous, get Jones to sleep with you!’”

“June 6.—Lady Manners and her daughters drove me down to Osterley. The great wide park looked dark and dull under a leaden sky, the house gloomy and ghostly as Bleak House. The old Duchess, stumping about with her inlaid ebony stick, seemed part of the place. I dined at Sir Edward Blackett’s, a beautiful house with Raffaellesque and pink tapestry decorations, prepared for the Duke of Gloucester on his marriage with the Waldegrave, but never lived in by him.”

“June 7.—Dined with George Lefevre. Mr. Bright was there, said to be the man who reviewed me so unmercifully in the Athenæum, and I was very glad to see the kind of man he is. He talked incessantly, never allowing a word to any one else; still after a time one found out he was interesting. He talked most of Miss Martineau, then of Hawthorne with great praise—‘the kindest, most generous of men and friends.’ Of his son, Julian Hawthorne, he said that he had ‘written a book which it took very long to read.’”

“June 13.—An excursion with the Lefevres to the Rye House, which I knew so well in my boyhood. It was like spending an afternoon in Holland, so very Dutch are those long expanses of rich meadow-lands, those streams with their boats and tall water-plants. We sat in burning sunshine to draw the old terra-cotta tower, and then had tea and eggs and bacon in the garden of the little inn, which was covered with scarlet geranium in full flower up to the attic windows.”

“June 19.—The news of poor old Cousin Susan’s [263] death. It is the glueing down of another much-read page of life, which can never be seen again. I feel ashamed of not grieving more for one whom I have known so well, but have always more feared than loved. The agent wrote desiring me to come down at once, but, backed by Lady Barrington’s decision that I had better keep out of the way till the will was decided, I excused myself. Yet I am sorry not to be at the funeral, and the old house of many associations, and the little Beltingham chapel with its view over the gleaming Tyne, are very constantly in my mind. All the cousins are quite sure that I am the heir, but I do not think that it is so. Cousin Susan knew that I did not wish it, and I have always urged the claims of the Strathmore boys.”

“June 20.—I have received from Milligan the news of Cousin Susan’s will. It is exactly the will I begged her to make—all to Mr. Bowes for life, then to the Strathmores. These pleasant boys deserve their good fortunes. I would only rather she had selected one of them to have more definitely preserved her memory.”

“June 28.—After a party at Lowther Lodge, I went to Lady Marian Alford, whom I found with a very ancient aunt, Lady Elizabeth Dickens. Lady Marian showed me her drawings. There was one glorious sketch of a Roman model, yet most unlike a model. ‘She is,’ said Lady Marian, ‘the model who is so hated by the other models because of her stateliness. “She walks down the Corso as if it belonged to her,” they say. She had two beautiful children—a boy and a girl. Last time I went to Rome, I saw her alone. “Where is your boy?” I asked.—“Oh, dead,” she answered.—“And the girl?”—“Oh, dead, dead too,” she replied, pressing her hands to her forehead. And I pitied her, and I asked her about it, and she said, “I will tell you how it was.” And she told me how she was coming downstairs with her boy in her arms and the girl behind her, and that just as she reached the house-door, a church-bell began to toll. “E un giustiziáto!” said one of the neighbours. And then, she could not tell how, it was somehow borne in upon her that her boy—her son—might, if he grew up, also some day fall into sin, also some day, perhaps, even be giustiziáto; and she turned round to the Madonna on the wall, and prayed that, if it were to be so, if such agony were possible for her, that she would take her son then, that she would take him away then, from the evil to come. And her husband, who heard her, said angrily, “Che sono queste stragonfiáte;” and he beat her; but the Madonna had heard her, and that night her boy was taken ill, and in twenty-four hours he was dead.

“‘And then she said, “That night I went again to the Madonna, and I said, ‘You have taken my boy, and, oh! if I may ever have arrossire for my girl, take the girl also, take her away in her innocence;’ e la Madonna mi ha fatto anche questa caritá, and I, I am alone, but my children are safe.”’

“July 1.—To Holland House, most lovely in all the freshness of new-mown hay, and the old elm avenue dewy from a shower. It was a delight to see Mrs. Augustus Craven, altered from the lovely ‘Pauline de la Ferronays,’ but still beautiful, and I had the happiness of finding that she liked to talk to me about her loved and lost ones.

“A very interesting dinner at Miss Davenport Bromley’s. Signor Francheschi described his life in Corsica, especially the weird women, who come like the Fates, as hired mourners, to bewail the dead, yet throw themselves so completely into their profession that they become quite absorbed in grief, and torrents of tears flow down their cheeks.

“One night he had to travel. In a desolate road he saw two strange ghastly horsemen approaching, with men walking on either side of their horses and holding them. The moonlight glared upon their fixed and horrid countenances. As they came near he heard the footmen talking to them. ‘We must hasten; they are waiting for you; they are even now lamenting you.’ Then he saw that the riders were dead. They were murdered men found by the highway, and had been set on horseback to be brought home. In Corsica it is the custom never to cease speaking to the dead.”

“July 7.—A capital party at Lowther Lodge to meet Princess Louise and Lord Lorne. The garden was illuminated with magnesium light, and looked both beautiful and—boundless!”

“July 15.—Luncheon at Lady Combermere’s, where Lord Houghton described his experience of executions. He had been to numbers of those in Newgate. Up to the time of George III. the sign-manual was necessary for every execution, and it was an odd thing that George III., usually a humane man, used to hang every one. He would sit at the council-board and ask each of the ministers in turn whether a man was to suffer death. They would bow their heads in assent. Lord Melbourne was especially ready to do this when he was sitting at the council-board. One day, however, there was a case of a man who had murdered his wife under most brutal circumstances. The evidence was quite incontrovertible, and all were surprised that Lord Melbourne, usually so ready, shrugged his shoulders and seemed to have the greatest difficulty in making up his mind to give an assent to the death-warrant. One of the ministers, in going out, asked why it was. ‘Why, poor man, those women are so damned provoking,’ said Lord Melbourne.

“Mr. Browning said he recollected seeing as many as twenty-one persons sitting together on the condemned bench in Newgate Chapel, many only for stealing a handkerchief. One day in chapel he was jostled by some one pushing in past him, and turned round annoyed. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I am going to suffer,’ said the man.”

“July 12.—Monday was a most beautiful day for the party at Chiswick, for its beautiful Italian gardens with glorious cedars. All London was there, including the Prince of Wales, with his little boy George, and the Tecks.”

“On the 14th I left my lodgings in the afternoon to go to the Athenæum, when a tremendous cataract of rain came on, in which I took refuge in the covered entry of Pall Mall Place. A number of other people took refuge there also. Amongst them, I was attracted by the agonised face of a woman crouching in a corner—a lady, for so she seemed by her face, and in a certain degree by her dress; for though her gown looked as if it had been dragged through every Slough of Despond in Europe, the rest of her dress seemed to belong to the better class. As for her expression, I cannot forget it, it was of such agonised, hopeless, bewildered despair. I suppose I looked pityingly at her, for she turned to me, and in sharp wolfish accents said, ‘I am not a beggar, I am not, I am only starving to death, I am starving to death!’ I think I begged her to tell me what had brought her to such a pass; at any rate she told me—‘I am Mrs. L.’ To many this would not convey anything, but, from having always been occupied with architecture, it conveyed something to me, and I said, ‘What! the widow of L., the architect?’—‘Yes,’ she said, and she described in the same sharp, broken, gasping accents how she had been with her husband in Paris at the time of the siege, and how he had wished to get her away and had arranged for her escape to England, and how at the moment that he was parting with her and putting a purse into her hand to pay the expenses of her journey, a shell burst near them, and her jaw was blown off. ‘When I came to myself in the hospital,’ she said, ‘I found that the shell which had blown off my jaw, had blown my husband to pieces.’ She then described how she came to England, and how the Soane Museum, which takes care of the widows of architects, had given her a pension of £75 a year. ‘You wonder,’ she continued, ‘that, having this pension, I should have reached the condition I am in, but the fact is I have been a very wicked woman. When our pension is granted, we take a vow never to lend money, which is absolutely forbidden by the rules of the Museum; but a friend of mine was in great want, and I trusted her and became security for her, and she has absconded, and they have come upon me for the debt, and yesterday morning early all my things were seized, and I could not apply to the Museum, because then they would take away my pension, and I was turned adrift in the streets with nothing at all in the world.’ And then the poor woman corrected herself and said, ‘I have told a lie. I have not quite nothing in the world. I have a silk gown. I had that on when I was turned out, but I knew it would be worse for me to spend a night homeless in the streets in a silk gown, and I went to a servant I knew, and got her to take care of it for me, and to lend me the worst gown she had.’

“‘Since yesterday morning,’ she said, ‘I have tasted nothing whatever. You wonder I have not fainted. I have not done that because I am so dreadfully ill; I am in a burning fever. Yesterday I walked up to Hampstead, because there was a governess I knew there, and I thought she would help me; but when I arrived, I found her gone to Scotland with her family, and I walked all about Hampstead and Highgate, and the police insulted me, they did not protect me, they insulted me worst of all; and all through the day I have walked in the streets.’ I asked her, ‘Have you no friend in the world?’—‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have one person who is a friend; at least there is one person who I think would help me if I could get to her, because my mother was once very kind to her, and that is Mrs. H. of the Mansfield Park School at Uxbridge, and to her, if I could have even a cup of coffee to strengthen me, I should set out and walk.’

“I got her to go and have some tea, which, as I foresaw, made her violently sick; and then, when she was a little better, I sent her by the train to Uxbridge. Immediately returning to the Athenæum, I wrote a lady who lives close to Uxbridge, briefly telling her the story, that Mrs. L. would probably arrive very ill, perhaps almost dying, and begging her to go at once to Mansfield Park and look after her.

“This was on Saturday. On Sunday there is no postal delivery. On Monday morning I received two letters. One was from Mrs. H., overwhelmingly grateful for what I had been able to do for Mrs. L., saying that she had received benefits from her mother which nothing could ever repay, and that she had been only too thankful to receive and care for the daughter. The other letter was from the lady to whom I had written, saying that there was no such place as Mansfield Park, that there was no such person as Mrs. L., and enclosing letters from the police and post-office at Uxbridge certifying this. I explained this in my own mind by remembering that, while telling me her story under the entry, Mrs. L. had said, ‘There is a little affectation about the name of Mansfield Park; it misleads people, for after all it is only a farmhouse.’

“On Monday evening the servant at my lodgings said that Mrs. L. herself had called: I was gone out to dinner. The next morning before I was up she came again, and waited till I was dressed.

“She was then quite calm and happy. She told how, when she got to Uxbridge, after being dreadfully ill in the train, her heart failed her—‘perhaps after all Mrs. H. would not receive her.’ However, she described with tears the touching kindness of Mrs. H.—that she had washed her, dressed her, put her in her own bed, tended her, and finally given her a cheque for £20, which she showed me. Her brother also, a travelling wine merchant in France, whom she had not seen for years, and to whom she had written without a hope of finding him, had also telegraphed that he was on his way to her assistance.

“Then I asked her of her past. She said she had been the daughter of a planter in Havannah, but her fine voice induced her, against the will of her family, early to take to a public life. At the Exhibition of 1851 she (as Mademoiselle Mori) sang the anthem of which Jenny Lind sang one verse. She afterwards became a sculptress, and studied under Gibson at Rome (and she described his peculiar studio accurately). She was his only female pupil, and had the charge of his studio. He taught her his mode of colouring marble, and in her statue of ‘Waiting for the Spring,’ she used it in colouring the primroses and violets in a girl’s lap. The Queen bought this statue in the Exhibition building of 1862 before the Exhibition opened. Then she married Mr. L. and went to Paris.

“‘While I was in Paris,’ she said, ‘a very curious thing happened to me. I gave birth to three boys at once. When such an event occurs in France, the sovereigns are always god-parents, and the Emperor and Empress were pleased to have the christening of my three boys in Notre Dame, where they stood sponsors at the font.’—‘And are the boys all dead?’ I said. ‘Oh, dear no, they are all alive.’—‘Then where in the world are they?’ I said. ‘Oh, they live with the Empress: she would not part with them, and my three boys are her little pages. Now they are gone with her into Spain to see her mother.’

“She then described how the Empress often sent her money to go down to Chislehurst to see her boys, and how the Prince Imperial often called to see her, and called her ‘Grannie’ because of the boys, or left her a £10 note. ‘I should have gone at once to the Empress had she been in England,’ said Mrs. L., ‘but I would have died rather than have begged from any one: I would have died on a doorstep.’—‘Then what made you confide in me?’ I asked. ‘Oh, surely you must see that,’ she replied. ‘Of course you must see that. It was the likeness. Of course people must have told you of the great, the wonderful likeness before. I was quite prepared for death, I had made up my mind to die, and then God in His great mercy sent the likeness of my Emperor to me; and I knew then that God did not mean me to die yet.’

“She wants to paint a picture in memory of what she calls my ‘saving her.’[265]

“On the 18th, I had an interesting visit to Apsley House, for which the Duke had sent me the following order:—‘Admit Mr. Hare to see Apsley House on any day on which the street outside is dry.’ The street was quite dry, and, moreover, I went in a cab and arrived perfectly spick and span; but the servant laughed as he produced a pair of huge list slippers to go on over my boots, before I was allowed to go into any of the rooms. ‘His Grace left these himself, and desired you should wear them when you came.’ Yet the floors of Apsley House are not even polished.

“On the 19th I went to Lady Ducie’s, to see the Macdonald family act the Pilgrim’s Progress. They go through the whole of the second part, George Macdonald,[266] his wife, his twelve children, and two adopted children. Christiana (the eldest daughter) was the only one who acted well. Nevertheless, the whole effect was touching, and the audience cried most sympathetically as Christiana embraced her children to go over the great river.

“On the 21st there was a delightful party at Holland House to meet the Prince of Wales, and on Wednesday I was thankful to come home.

“Never has little Holmhurst been pleasanter than this year, and I have so enjoyed being alone, the repose of the intense quietude, the radiance of the flowers, the delicious sea-breezes through windows open to the ground, the tame doves flitting and cooing in the branches of the tall lime-tree.”

“August 6, 1877.—I came home on Wednesday week, and have been alone ever since, and over head and ears in work. I have seen nobody except last Tuesday, when, though I thought no one knew I was at home, fourteen afternooners appeared. Miss Hamilton, who has taken a fancy to do my portrait, has done it very cleverly against a window, with ivy hanging down outside, only it is a sentimental suggestion of

“August 19.—I have had a pleasant visit of three days to Cobham, and felt much inclined to accede to Lord and Lady Darnley’s wish at the end, that I would consider my visit just begun, and stay another three days. It is indeed a glorious old place externally, and the gardens and immense variety of walks under grand old trees, are enchanting in hot weather. I had many happy ‘sittings out’ and talks with Lady Darnley, and could not sufficiently admire, though I always observe it, how her perfectly serene nature enables her to carry out endless people-seeing, boundless literary pursuit, and inexhaustible good works, without ever fussing herself or any one else, leaving also time to enter into all the minute difficulties of her friends in the varied gyrations of their lives.... I was taken to see Cowling Castle, a romantic old place; just on the edge of those marshes of the Thames which Dickens describes so vividly. We also saw his house, close to Dover road.”

“Walton Heath, Oct. 6.—After a delightful visit from Harry Lee at Holmhurst, I have come here to Miss Davenport Bromley at a quaint cottage, partly built out of a church, in a corner of the vast Walton Heath, but full of artistic comfort and brightness within. We drove on Thursday to Box Hill, which is most beautiful, the high steep chalky ground covered with such a luxuriance of natural wood, box grown into trees and the billows of pink and blue distance so wonderfully luxuriant and wooded. The time of year is quite beautiful, and all the last festival of nature in the clematis wreaths and the bryony with its red berries dancing from tree to tree.

“We have been to see a quaint old house of the Heathcotes. There is a great stone hall with a high gallery, from which a young lady threw herself in her rage at her lover marrying some one else, and was killed on the spot. Her picture hangs on the staircase wall, and her ghost walks on the stairs, pretty, in white, something like a shepherdess. A housemaid cut a great cross in the picture, ‘to let the ghost out,’ as the old woman who showed the house said, and the hole has never been mended. This country is full of little traditions. There is a green lane close by, down which a headless lady walks, and a phantom coach drives along the road: a countryman who met old M. de Berg on the common declared that he had seen it—that it had driven over him.

“Yesterday we went to Gatton (Lord Monson’s), which formerly belonged to Sir Mark Wood. It is a curious place: the ugly church fitted inside with beautiful Flemish carving and glass, and the house having a hall of coloured marbles, copied from the Corsini Chapel at Rome—minus the upper story.

“I have much enjoyed learning to know Miss Bromley better. She is the kindest of women, wonderfully clever and full of insight into every minutest beauty of nature. Her devotion to animals, especially pugs, is a passion. Another pleasure has been finding Mrs. Henry de Bunsen here. She told me—

“‘There was, and there is still, living in Cadogan Place, a lady of middle age, who is clever, charming, amiable, even handsome, but who has the misfortune of having—a wooden leg. Daily, for many years, she was accustomed to amble every morning on her wooden leg down Cadogan Place, and to take the air in the Park. It was her principal enjoyment.

“‘One day she discovered that in these walks she was constantly followed by a gentleman. When she turned, he turned: where she went, he went: it was most disagreeable. She determined to put an end to it by staying at home, and for some days she did not go out at all. But she missed her walks in the Park very much, and after a time she thought her follower must have forgotten all about her, and she went out as before. The same gentleman was waiting, he followed her, and at length suddenly came up to her in the Park and presented her with a letter. He said that, as a stranger, he must apologise for speaking to her, but that he must implore her to take the letter, and read it when she got home: it was of great importance. She took the letter, and when she got home she read it, and found that it contained a violent declaration of love and a proposal of marriage. She was perfectly furious. She desired her lawyer to enclose the letter to the writer, and say that she could not find words to describe her sense of his ungentlemanly conduct, especially cruel to one afflicted as she was with a wooden leg.

“‘Several years elapsed, and the lady was paying a visit to some friends in the country, when the conversation frequently turned upon a friend of the house who was described as one of the most charming, generous, and beneficent of mankind. So delightful was the description, that the lady was quite anxious to see the original, and was enchanted when she heard that he was likely to come to the house. But when he arrived, she recognised with consternation her admirer of the Park. He did not, however, recur to their former meeting, and after a time, when she knew him well, she grew to esteem him exceedingly, and at last, when he renewed his proposal after an intimate acquaintance, she accepted him and married him.

“‘He took her to his country-house, and for six weeks they were entirely, uncloudedly happy. Then there came a day upon which he announced that he was obliged to go up to London on business. His wife could not go with him because the house in Cadogan Place was dismantled for the summer. “I should regret this more,” he said, “but that where two lives are so completely, so entirely united as ours are, there ought to be the most absolute confidence on either side. Therefore, while I am away, I shall leave you my keys. Open my desk, read all my letters and journals, make yourself mistress of my whole life. Above all,” he said, “there is one cupboard in my dressing-room which contains certain memorials of my past peculiarly sacred to me, which I should like you to make yourself acquainted with.” The wife heard with concern of her husband’s intended absence, but she was considerably buoyed up under the idea of the three days in which they were to be separated by the thought of the very interesting time she would have. She saw her husband off from the door, and as soon as she heard the wheels of his carriage die away in the distance, she clattered away as fast as she could upon her wooden leg to the dressing-room, and in a minute she was down on all fours before the cupboard he had described.

“‘She unlocked the cupboard. It contained two shelves. On each shelf was a long narrow parcel sewn up in canvas. She felt a tremor of horror as she looked at them, she did not know why. She lifted down the first parcel, and it had a label on the outside. She trembled so she could scarcely read it. It was inscribed—“In memory of my dear wife Elizabeth Anne, who died on the 24th of August 1864.” With quivering fingers she sought for a pair of scissors and ripped open the canvas, and it contained—a wooden leg!

“‘With indescribable horror she lifted down the other parcel, of the same form and size. It also bore a label—“In memory of my dearest wife Wilhelmine, who died on the 6th of March 1869,” and she opened it, and it contained—another wooden leg!

“‘Instantly she rose from her knees. “It is evident,” she said, “that I am married to a Blue Beard—a monster who collects wooden legs. This is not the time for sentiment, this is the time for action,” and she swept her jewels and some miniatures that she had into a handbag and she clattered away on her own wooden leg by the back shrubberies to the highroad—and there she saw the butcher’s cart passing, and she hailed it, and was driven by the butcher to the nearest station, where she just caught the next train to London, intending to make good her escape that night to France and to leave no trace behind her.

“‘But she had not consulted Bradshaw, and she found she had some hours to wait in London before the tidal train started. Then she could not resist employing them in going to reproach the people at whose house she had met her husband, and she told them what she had found. To her amazement they were not the least surprised. “Yes,” they said, “yes, we thought he ought to have told you: we do not wonder you were astonished. Yes, indeed, we knew dear Elizabeth Anne very well; she was indeed a most delightful person, the most perfect of women and of wives, and when she was taken away, the whole light seemed blotted out of Arthur’s life, the change was so very terrible. We thought he would never rally his spirits again; but then, after two years, he met dearest Wilhelmine, to whom he was first attracted by her having the same affliction which was characteristic of her predecessor. And Wilhelmine was perhaps even a more charming person than Elizabeth Anne, and made her husband’s life uncloudedly happy. But she too was, alas! early snatched away, and then it was as if the whole world was cut from under Arthur’s feet, until at last he met you, with the same peculiarity which was endeared to him by two lost and loved ones, and we believe that with you he has been even more entirely, more uncloudedly happy than he was either with Wilhelmine or Elizabeth Anne.

“‘And the wife was so charmed by what she heard, that it gave quite a new aspect to affairs. She went home by the next train. She was there when her husband returned; and ever since they have lived perfectly happily between his house in the country and hers in Cadogan Place.’

“Mrs. De Bunsen said that a cousin of hers was repeating this story when dining at the Balfours’. Suddenly he saw that his host and hostess were both telegraphing frantic signals to him, and by a great effort he turned it off. The lady of the wooden leg and her husband were both amongst the guests.”

“Milford Cottage, Oct. 8.—I came here with Miss Bromley on Saturday to visit Mrs. Greville and her most engaging mother, Mrs. Thellusson. It is a red house, standing almost in the village street, but with a French-looking garden behind, with clipped hedges and orange trees in tubs. It was left to Mrs. Greville by her husband, an old gentleman whom she married when the Thellussons were ruined, and he said, ‘You had better marry me; there is nothing else that I can do for you.’ He always treated her with the greatest generosity and kindness, but died very suddenly, intending to leave his wife very rich. There was, however, some mistake about the will, and she only inherited this cottage and just enough to live upon. I found at Milford, Lady Elizabeth Bryan, a Paget, who goes out visiting with four dogs, one of whom, Constance Kent, is most beautiful, and she has adopted a little cousin and presented her with six-and-thirty dolls. I went to see the adopted daughter in bed; two little dogs were cuddled in her bosom, and seven dolls lay at her feet with their heads out. Lately, the little girl has displayed signs of vanity, paraded her small person before a mirror, and exulted in fine clothes, and on these occasions she is always dressed in ‘Sukey,’ a little workhouse girl’s gown, to remind her that ‘in the sight of God she is no better.’

“This afternoon I have been with Mrs. Greville to Mr. Tennyson at Haselmere. It is a wild, high, brown heath, with ragged edges of birch, and an almost limitless view of blue Sussex distances. Jammed into a hollow is the house, a gothic house, built by Mr. Knowles, the editor of the Nineteenth Century—‘that young bricklayer fellow that Alfred is so fond of,’ as Mr. Carlyle calls him. Though the place is a bleak, wind-stricken height, where the flowers in the garden can never sit still, the house is pleasant inside and well and simply furnished, but is without any library whatever. Tennyson is older looking than I expected, so that his unkempt appearance signifies less. He has an abrupt, bearish manner, and seems thoroughly hard and unpoetical: one would think of him as a man in whom the direst prose of life was absolutely ingrained. Mrs. Greville kissed his hand as he came in, which he received without any protest. He asked if I would like to go out, and we walked round the gardens. By way of breaking the silence I said, ‘How fine your arbūtus is.’—‘Well, I would say arbūtus,’ he answered, ‘otherwise you are as bad as the gardeners, who say Clemātis.’ When we returned to the house, Hallam Tennyson brought in his mother very tenderly and put her on a sofa. She is a very sweet-looking woman, with ‘the glittering blue eyes’ which fascinated Carlyle, and a lady-abbess look from her head-dress—a kind of veil. Mrs. Greville revealed that she had broken her promise of not repeating an unpublished poem of Tennyson’s by reciting it to Mr. Carlyle, who said, ‘But did Alfred give you leave to say it?’ and Tennyson said, ‘You are the wickedest old woman I ever met with: it is most profligate conduct’—and he half meant it too. Tennyson then insisted that I should tell him some stories. I did not like it, but found it was no use to resist; I should have to do it in the end. He asked for ‘a village tragedy,’ so I told him the story of Caroline Crowhurst: he said he should write it in a play or a poem. Then I told him the stories of Mademoiselle von Raasloff and of Croglin Grange. He was atrociously bad audience, and constantly interrupted with questions. He himself repeated a little story, which Mr. Greene of the ‘English History’ had told him—of a man who felt that his fiddle, to which he was devoted, was the source of temptation to him by leading him to taverns where he got drunk. On the Mississippi river, he said, he heard a voice saying to him that he must destroy the fiddle; so he went down, kissed the fiddle, and then broke it to pieces. ‘I put in that kiss,’ said Tennyson, ‘because I thought it sounded better.’

“On the whole, the wayward poet leaves a favourable impression. He could scarcely be less egotistic with all the flattery he has, and I am glad to have seen him so quietly. The maid who opened the door was Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful model, and there were pictures of her by Mrs. Cameron all about the house.

“For the poet’s bearish manners the Tennyson family are to blame, in making him think himself a demigod. One day, on arriving at Mrs. Greville’s, he said at once, ‘Give me a pipe; I want to smoke.’ She at once went off by herself down the village to the shop, and returning with two pipes, offered them to him with all becoming subservience. He never looked at her or thanked her, but, as he took them, growled out, ‘Where are the matches? I suppose now you’ve forgotten the matches!’—‘Oh dear! I never thought of those.’

“Mrs. Greville has a note of Tennyson’s framed. It is a very pretty note; but it begins ‘Dear Madwoman.’”

“Babworth, Oct. 14.—This house overflows with loveliness in the way of amateur art, and the drawings of its mistress, Mrs. Bridgeman Simpson, are most beautiful. She is the kindest and most good-natured of hostesses.... Yesterday we went to Sandbeck, an ugly dull house in a flat, and looking bare within from paucity of furniture. Lord Scarborough, once a bold huntsman, is now patiently awaiting a second stroke of paralysis in a wheel-chair. Lumley, a pleasant boy, just going to join his regiment at Dublin, drove me after luncheon to Roche Abbey, a very pretty ruin in a glen.”

“Oct. 15.—Mrs. Simpson’s very charming Polish sister-in-law, Mrs. Drummond Baring, recounted yesterday evening a curious story out of the reminiscences of her childhood, of which her husband from knowledge confirmed every fact. Her father, Count Potocka, lived in Martinique. His wife had been married before, and her beautiful daughter, Minetta, idolised by her second husband, had made a happy marriage with the Marquis de San Luz, and resided at Port Royal about five miles from her parents. The father was a great naturalist, and had the greatest interest in introducing and naturalising all kinds of plants in the West Indies. Amongst other plants, he was most anxious to introduce strawberries. Every one said he would fail, and the neighbouring gardeners especially said so much about it that it was a positive annoyance to them when his plants all seemed to succeed, and he had a large bed of strawberries in flower. His step-daughter, Minetta, came to see them, and he always said to her that, when the strawberries were ripe, she should have the first fruit.

“A ball was given at Port Royal by the Governor, and there her parents saw Minetta, beautiful and radiant as ever; but she left the ball early, for her child was not well. As she went away, she said to her stepfather, ‘Remember my strawberries.’

“Her parents returned home in the early morning, and a day and a night succeeded. Towards dawn on the second morning, when night was just breaking into the first grey daylight, the mother felt an irresistible restlessness, and getting up and going to the window, she looked out. A figure in white was moving to and fro amongst the strawberries, carefully examining each plant and looking under the leaves. She awoke her husband, who said at once, ‘It is one of the gardeners, who are so jealous that they have come to destroy my plants;’ and jumping up, he put on his gola—a sort of dressing-gown wrapper worn in Martinique—and, taking his gun, rushed out. On first going out, he saw the figure in white moving before him, but as he came up to the strawberry beds it seemed to have disappeared. He was surprised, and turning round towards the house, saw his wife making agonised signs to him to come back. Such was her livid aspect, that he threw down his gun upon the ground and ran in to her. He found her in a dead faint upon the floor. When she recovered, she said that she had watched him from the window as he went out, and that, as he reached the strawberry beds, the figure seemed to turn round, and she saw—like a person seen through a veil and through the glass of a window, and, though perfectly distinct, transparent—her daughter Minetta. Soon after describing this, she was seized with violent convulsions. Her husband was greatly alarmed about her, and was just sending off for the doctor, who lived at some distance, when a rider on a little Porto Rico pony came clattering into the court. They thought it was the doctor, but it was not; it was a messenger from Port Royal to say that Minetta was dead. She had been seized with a chill on returning from the ball, and it had turned to fatal diphtheria. In her last hours, when her throat was so swelled and hot, she had constantly said, ‘Oh, my throat is so hot! Oh, if I had only some of those strawberries!’”

“Thoresby, Oct. 17.—Lord Manvers sent for me after luncheon three days ago, and we came with a horse fleet as the wind through the green lanes of Clumber, and across part of the (Sherwood) forest, to this immense modern palace by Salvin. All around is forest. No one was at home when I arrived, so I went out for a walk, and was joined by Lord Manvers on returning.... Lady Manvers is quite delightful, and so are her son and daughter, so I have been very glad of two days alone with the family; and the forest is enchanting from its varieties of gnarled oak, silver birch, endlessly contorted fir, and gigantic beeches, with ever-varying lights on the golden and crimson fern in its first beautiful decay. Now guests have arrived, including Mr. Frederick Tayler, the artist,[267] whose blottesque treatment of the green in the forest with only gamboge, indigo, and sepia is very interesting to see. He was very funny about the late Lord Manvers, who was a wit, and who, when Lord Ossington was rather boastful about his lake, said—‘Come, come now, Ossington, don’t speak of a lake; just wipe it up and say no more about it.’

“In the afternoon we drove through ‘the Catwhins’ to Clumber—a dull ugly low-lying house. There is much fine china, but it is a dreary place.”

“Glamis Castle, Oct. 26.—I had a delightful visit to the salt of the earth at Hutton,[268] where Mr. and Mrs. Pease were entertaining a large party, chiefly of semi-Quaker relations, including Miss Fox of Falmouth, who is most interesting and agreeable. Mrs. Pease is as delightful as she is beautiful, and the place is an oasis of good works of every kind. Thence I came here, meeting Mr. Waldegrave Leslie and Lady Rothes at the station. As we drove up to the haunted castle at night, its many turrets looked most eerie and weird against the moonlit sky, and its windows blazed with red light. The abundance of young life inside takes off the solemn effect—the number of charming children, the handsome cordial boys, the winning gracious mistress; only Lord Strathmore himself has an ever sad look. The Bishop of Brechin, who was a great friend of the house, felt this strange sadness so deeply that he went to Lord Strathmore, and, after imploring him in the most touching manner to forgive the intrusion into his private affairs, said how, having heard of the strange secret which oppressed him, he could not help entreating him to make use of his services as an ecclesiastic, if he could in any way, by any means, be of use to him. Lord Strathmore was deeply moved, though he said that he thanked him, but that in his most unfortunate position no one could ever help him. He has built a wing to the castle, in which all the children and all the servants sleep. The servants will not sleep in the house, and the children are not allowed to do so.

“I found a large party here, and was agreeably surprised to see Lady Wynford come down to dinner. Then Lady Holmesdale appeared, with her piteous little white-mouse aspect; Mr. and the charming Mrs. Streatfeild, Lady Strathmore’s sister; Miss Erica Robertson, and Lord and Lady Rosehill.

“There is much of interest in the life here—the huge clock telling the hours; the gathering in early morning for prayers by the chaplain in the chapel, through a painted panel of which some think that the secret chamber is concealed, though others maintain that it is entered through Lord Strathmore’s study, and occupies the space above ‘the crypt’—an armour-hung hall where we all meet for dinner, at which the old Lion of Lyon—gold, for holding a whole bottle of claret, which the old lords used to toss off at a draught—is produced. There are lions everywhere. Huge gilt lions stand on either side in front of the drawing-room fireplace, lions are nut-crackers, a lion sits on the letter-box, the very door-scraper is guarded by two lions.

“The boys are charming, so very nice that one cannot believe any curse can affect them. Claudie (Glamis) is very handsome, and looks strikingly so in his Scotch dress. Frank is ill now, but most engaging.

“To-day, as I was drawing, Mr. Waldegrave Leslie gave a curious account of his life at Lady Rothes’ castle—that they themselves inhabit the ghost-room, and that the ghost comes frequently, and not only groans, but howls; they often hear it. When Lady Rothes’ brother died, the episcopal service was read over him in the house by a clergyman, and the ghost then howled so horribly that the service was quite inaudible, and eventually had to be stopped. He said they did not mind the ghost, but that Lady Rothes’ Dandie Dinmont dog was distracted with terror when it came, and crept upon the bed quivering convulsively all over.

“Lady Rosehill has been meeting Mr. (Dicky) Doyle, the genial fairy lover, who told her that one day when a man was walking down Pall Mall with a most tremendous swagger, somebody walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, will you have the kindness to tell me, are you anybody in particular?’”

“Oct. 29.—Yesterday was Sunday, and we had three services in the chapel, which is painted all over with figures of saints by the same man who executed the bad paintings of the Scottish kings at Holyrood. The sermons from Mr. Beck, the chaplain, head of ‘the Holy Cross’ in Scotland, were most curious: the first—apropos of All Saints—being a mere catalogue of saints, S. Etheldreda, S. Kenneth, S. Ninian, &c., and their virtues; and describing All Saints’ festival as ‘the Mart of Holiness’: the second—apropos of All Souls—speaking of prayers for the dead as a duty inculcated by the Church in all ages, and taking the words of Judas Maccabeus as a text.”

“Gorhambury, Nov. 20.—It was dark when I reached the St. Albans Station yesterday. Lord Verulam’s carriage was in waiting for guests: I got into it with three others. ‘Lord Beaconsfield was with us in the train,’ said the young lady of the party, ‘and I am sure he is going to Gorhambury, and oh! I am so glad he has taken a fly.’ We drove up to the great porticoed house in the dark, and a small winding staircase took us to a great lofty hall, furnished as a sitting-room. Here we found Lady Verulam, two of her daughters, Lady Catherine Weyland, &c. Other guests appeared at dinner—the sallow basilisk face of Lord Beaconsfield: his most amusing secretary, Montagu Corry: Lord Exeter, with long black hair: Lady Exeter, tall, very graceful and refined-looking, but with the coldest manner in the world: a young Lord Mount-Charles: Scudamore Stanhope, remarkably pleasant: Charlie Duncombe, very pleasant too: Lady Mary Cecil: Dowager Lady Craven, always most agreeable.

“Lord Verulam is permanently lame and on two crutches, but most agreeable and kindly. This morning I sat to draw the ruin of Lord Bacon’s house (Lady Craven saved it when it was going to be pulled down). The place is full of relics of him, his observatory in the park: the ‘Kissing Oak,’ beneath which Queen Elizabeth embraced him: the ‘Queen’s Ride,’ used when she came to visit him: curious painted terra-cotta busts of his father and mother and of himself as a child, in the library: and in the dining-room a large portrait of his brother, which he (the brother) painted himself, the most prominent feature being his legs, of which he was evidently exceedingly proud.

“In the afternoon I drove with Lady Exeter, Lady Catherine Weyland, and Lady Jane Grimston to St. Albans, and went over the abbey with Mr. Chapel, the delightfully enthusiastic clerk of the works, who repeatedly exclaimed, ‘It is the pride of my life, sir; it is the pride of my life.’ He has most beautifully put together, from the fragments found, the two great shrines of the place, of St. Alban and St. Amphipolis (Arthur Stanley doubts the existence of the latter saint, and thinks the name was only that of a cloak), not adding or inventing a single bit; and the whole interior of the abbey has been hitherto done in the same way, being perhaps the one church in England really restored, not remodelled. In returning we stopped at St. Michael’s to see the tomb of Lord Bacon, represented as he sat in his chair—‘sic sedebat.’”

“Nov. 21.—At dinner last night and all day Lord Beaconsfield seemed absorbed, scarcely noticed any one, barely answered his hostess when spoken to. Montagu Corry [269] said that his chief declared that the greatest pleasure in life was writing a book, because ‘in that way alone man could become a creator:’ that his habit was to make marionettes, and then to live with them for some months before he put them into action. Lately he had made some marionettes; now he was living with them, and their society occupied him entirely.

“To-day Lord Verulam showed me many of the relics of the house—the decision of his ancestor, Judge Crook, releasing Hampden: a deed of free-warren from Henry II. confirming to one of his ancestors another deed of his grandfather Henry I.: the portrait of Edward Grimston (1460), the oldest known authentic portrait in England, representing a man who fought at Towton, but afterwards made peace with Edward IV., lived in retirement, and is mentioned in the Paston Letters.

“Lord Verulam told me of his discovery that Lord Lovat was seventy-three at the time of his execution, not eighty, as is generally affirmed. The supposed date of his birth and the date of his learning to fence tend to confirm this, and his smiling when he looked upon his coffin-plate on the scaffold and the line he quoted from Horace.”

“Nov. 25.—On Friday I drove with Lord Verulam in his victoria to Wrothampstead. The old house there is one of the long many-gabled houses, vine-covered, with windows and chimneys of moulded brick, standing, backed by fine trees, in a brilliant garden. Inside it is gloriously panelled, and has a staircase approached by balustraded gates with a tapestried room at the top of it. It belongs to a Mr. Lawes, who for a long time was supposed to be wasting all his time and most of his money in chemistry, but at length by his chemistry he discovered a cheap way of making a valuable manure, and ‘Lawes’s manure’ has made him a millionaire.

“Yesterday we went to Tittenhanger, already familiar to me from Lady Waterford’s descriptions. It is a charming old house, utterly Cromwellian, most attractive and engaging, depending for its effect upon its high overhanging roofs, and the simple, admirable brick ornaments of its windows. The rooms are full of beautiful pictures and china, but Lady Caledon was not there, and it is always a loss not to see the owner with a place.

“It was on hearing some one mention this house that Sydney Smith made the impromptu—

“Lady Lilian Paulet was very absurd at dinner with her story of an American who said that, going down Piccadilly, he met a mad dog, so, as he could not avoid him, he thrust his hand down its throat and pulled out its inside; after which the dog ran on still, but it could no longer say ‘bow-wow,’ it could only say ‘wow-bow.’

“It was amusing seeing Lord Beaconsfield at Gorhambury: hear him I never did, except when he feebly bleated out some brief and ghastly utterance. His is an extraordinary life. He told Lord Houghton that the whole secret of his success was his power of never dwelling upon a failure; he ‘had failed often, constantly at first, yet had never dwelt on it, but always gone on to something else.’”

“Burghley, Nov. 29.—I have been glad to come to the place which is often called ‘the finest house in England’—a dictum in which I by no means agree. The guests are a row of elderly baronets of only hunting and Midland-county fame. An exception is Sir John Hay, a thorough old gentleman (an Admiral) and very agreeable. I took a Miss Fowke in to dinner, and complained to her of the number of old baronets. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they are old and they are numerous, and the central one is my father.’

“The house is immense, but has little internal beauty. There is a series of stately rooms, dull and oppressive, with fine tapestry and china, and a multitude of pictures with very fine names, almost all misnamed—a copy of the well-known Bronzino of the Medici boy being called Edward VI.; a copy of the well-known Correggio in the National Gallery being marked as an original by Angelica Kauffman, &c.[271] In a small closet is a number of jewelled trinkets, including Queen Elizabeth’s watch and thimble, and there hangs the gem of the picture collection—‘The Saviour Blessing the Elements,’ a very expressive but most unpleasing work of Carlo Dolci. It is the halo of the great Lord Burghley which gives the place all its interest. He lies on his back in a scarlet robe under a canopy in St. Martin’s Church at the entrance of the town, and close by is a cenotaph to his father and mother, who are buried at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. All the five churches of Stamford have merit, and the town is interesting and picturesque.

“Lord Exeter, with his lank black hair and his wrinkled yellow jack-boots high above the knee, looks like a soldier of Cromwell. In the evening he and the whole family dance incessantly to the music of a barrel-organ, which they take it in turn to wind.[272]

“The great idol of family adoration is ‘Telemachus’—the memory of Telemachus, or rather a whole dynasty of Telemachi, for they are now arrived at Telemachus X. The bull Telemachus I. gained more than £1000 at small county cattle-shows. His head is stuffed in the hall; his statue in silver stands in the dining-room (where there are also silver statues of Telemachus II. and III.), and his portrait hangs on the wall.”

“Dec. 6.—On Tuesday, at King’s Cross, I met Elizabeth Biddulph, Marie Adeane, Alethea Grenfell, and the Dalyells, and we came down together, a merry party, to Hertford, whither the Robert Smiths sent to fetch us to their picturesque new house of Goldings. Alethea is full of the story of Jagherds (near Corsham)—that ‘in the difficulty of finding a house there suitable for the clergyman, an old manor-house was suggested, which seemed to meet all requisites. The Bishop (Ellicott) himself went to see it, and was quite delighted with it, and the clergyman went to reside there. But his servants would not stay, his governesses would not stay; all said they were worried out of their lives by the figure of a lady in blue, which appeared all over the house and on all possible occasions; and at last the clergyman himself gave in and went away. With the next clergyman the same thing happened, and he appealed to the Bishop. The Bishop said he never could tell why he suggested it, but in his answer he said, “If the apparition comes again, I should advise you to throw as much sympathy as you can into your manner, and ask what you can do for it.” Soon after he heard from the clergyman that this had quite succeeded. The blue lady had appeared again, and the clergyman immediately, with an appearance of the utmost sympathy in his countenance, said, “Madam, is there nothing in the world I can do for you?”—upon which a seraphic smile came over the face of the spirit, and it vanished away and never appeared again.’

“Lately the Bishop had a letter from an old clergyman at Wisconsin in America, who wrote to him that an aged parishioner of his had sent for him on his deathbed, saying that he could not die happy without recounting the facts of a crime which he had witnessed in his boyhood. He had been taken by a gang of highwaymen who held their headquarters at Jagherds Court in Wiltshire, and while there was witness to many deeds of violence committed by them. Amongst others, they carried off a young lady, and in the row and quarrels which ensued, the young lady was murdered at Jagherds Court.

“The old clergyman, not knowing what to do with this confession, thought the best way was to write it to the Bishop of the diocese in which Jagherds was situated, and he wrote it to the Bishop of Gloucester, who verified the whole, finding his correspondent a veritable clergyman, &c. The Bishop of Gloucester told the story last week at Lord Ducie’s.”

“Holmhurst, Dec. 16.—I have been intensely busy. The life of Madame de Bunsen unfolds itself in her letters more than any life I have ever heard of. I long for the time to come when I may begin to unite, my links, but at present I have only been making extracts—such extracts! Her power of expression is astonishing. I discover so much that I fancy I have felt myself, and never been able to put into words. I see in the vast piles of MS. the means of building a very perfect memorial to her.”

“Ampthill, Christmas Day, 1877.—I came here yesterday from Holmhurst.... It was a great pleasure to find charming old Sir Francis Doyle here with his son and daughter. Sir Francis talks incessantly and most agreeably, and makes the mornings as interesting as the evenings. ‘C’étaient des matinées excellentes, pour lesquelles je me sentirais encore du gout,’ as Talleyrand used to say. Sir Francis has just been saying, apropos of how little one knows the true characters of those one meets:—

“‘H. told me a curious thing one day. He went to dine with a cabinet minister (I suppress the name), and there came down a lady, the governess, cherished by the family—“a perfect treasure.” He recognised her at once as a lady he had known very well, very intimately indeed. She sank after that, sank into the lowest depth of that class of life. “I used to help her with money,” he said, “as long as I could, but at last she sank too low even for that, quite out of my sphere of possibilities altogether, and here I found her reinstated. As I was questioning what I ought to do, she passed near me and said only, ‘I have sown my wild oats.’ I never told of her: I had nothing to do with placing her where she was.”’

“With the same intention Sir Francis told a curious story of ‘Two Shoes,’ a boy at Eton:—

“‘Two Shoes took a box to a boy-friend of his who was in another house and said, “A number of curious things are happening in my house, and this box contains things of value to me; I wish you would let it stay here for a little.” The boy said, “Yes, you may leave your box, provided only that it contains no money: I will not be responsible for anything with money in it.” Two Shoes said there was no money in the box, and it was left. Afterwards, when the box was moved, a great rattle as of sovereigns was heard inside, and as the tutor of the house whence it had been taken declared himself robbed at the same time, the boy in whose charge the box was left thought it necessary to declare what had happened. The sixty sovereigns lost by the tutor were found in the box. Two Shoes was expelled.... H. went down into —— shire lately, and there he found Two Shoes confidential solicitor to half the county.’

“Apropos of the secret crimes of so-called ‘religious people,’ Sir Francis said—

“‘I am quite sure that Abigail murdered her husband; that one is quite left to understand. He could not have died of the shock of having escaped David. Oh, no; she was a religious woman, so she waited till six o’clock on the Sabbath evening, and then she poisoned him.’

“‘I always keep a reminiscence of poor Lady Davy to laugh at. It was one of those great days at Stafford House, one of their very great gala days, and Lady Davy was in the hall in the greatest anxiety about her carriage; and she, little woman, walked up to one of those very magnificent flunkeys, six feet high at least and in resplendent livery, and besought him to look after her carriage. I never saw any one so civil as that man was. “I have called your Ladyship’s carriage three times,” he said, “and it has not answered, but if your Ladyship wishes, I will try again.”

“‘I saw the second act of that little drama. I went through the door, beyond the awning, just when the footman was stalking haughtily and carelessly among the link-boys and saying disdainfully, “Just give old Davy another call.”’

“At dinner the conversation turned on Lord and Lady Lytton. She was a Miss Doyle, a distant cousin of Sir Francis, and shortened his father’s life by her vagaries and furies. After his father’s death Sir Francis left her alone for many years; then it was represented to him that she had no other relations, and that it was his duty to look after her interests, and he consented to see her, and, at her request, to ask Sir E. Bulwer to give her another hundred a year. This Sir Edward said he was most willing to do, but that she must first give a written retractation of some of the horrible accusations she had brought against him. When Lady Bulwer heard that this retractation was demanded of her, she turned upon Sir Francis with the utmost fury, and abused him with every vile epithet she could think of. She afterwards wrote to him, and directed to ‘Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, Receiver of her Majesty’s Customs (however infamous), Thames Street, London.’ ‘But,’ said Sir Francis, ‘I also had my day. I was asked as to her character. I answered, “From your point of view I believe her character to be quite immaculate, for I consider her to be so perfectly filled with envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, as to have no possible room left for the exercise of any tenderer passion.”’ Lady Bulwer appeared on the hustings against her husband. His son told Sir Edward, ‘Do you know my Lady is here?’—‘What, Henry’s wife!’—‘No, yours.’ She said, ‘He ought to have gone to the colonies long ago, and at the Queen’s expense.’”

“Ampthill, Dec. 26.—This morning Sir Francis was attracted by the portrait of old Lady Carlisle hanging by the drawing-room door, and he said, ‘That portrait always reminds me of something Lady Carlisle said once. I was speaking to her of the death of one of her sisters, and she said, “We were all very sorry, very sorry indeed; but she (pointing to another sister), she cared.”’

“In Japan, there was one Daimio who was in rivalry with another, and who was superseded by him, and of course his honour could not stand that, so he committed ‘the happy despatch.’ His followers ought to have avenged him, it was Japanese etiquette that they should, but they did not; they, lamented and howled, but they did nothing, and the chief of them in his agony lay down in the gutter and remained there fasting for several days. Then one day the head-follower of the successful Daimio, passing by, saw him in the gutter, and spurned him with his foot and said, ‘You beast, you coward, you brute! do you intend to lie there and let your master go unavenged?’ but the man still lay crouched and grovelling and took no notice.

“But a time came when the followers of the successful Daimio were dispersed, and then the thirty-eight servants of the dead man arose and went to him, and kneeling around him said with courtesy, ‘We do not wish to cut your throat, do not compel us; take the happy despatch;’ but the Daimio would not take their advice, he could not bring his mind to it; so then the Yakonines performed their duty, and they cut his throat. When they had done that, the thirty-eight Yakonines summoned all the people together to attend them, for they were about to perform their final duty, their ‘happy despatch’ to the manes of their master, and the thirty-eight performed it, amid the acclamations of the people over their fidelity even to death. But when, afterwards, men came to count the corpses, behold there were thirty-nine: the enemy who had spurned the Yakonine as he lay in the gutter repented when he saw that he had accused him falsely, and had silently joined the procession of death: there were thirty-nine Yakonines who died.”

“Dec. 27.—Last night a French play was acted, ‘Madame Choufleuri reçoit chez elle.’ Mr. Lowther, who was merely an old French gentleman spectator, created for himself a part which was a whole dumb dramatic performance in itself.

“I had a charming drive to-day with Lady Ashburton to Woburn, the rest having preceded us. There is a long winding double avenue in the park. The stables are so enormous that we mistook them for the house, and were surprised when we turned the other way. However, the door of the real house was most dilapidated and unducal. Long passages, surrounding an open court, and filled with portraits, led to a large sitting-room, where we found most of our own party and the guests of the house. The Duchess was kind and cordial. We all went to luncheon in the Canaletti room, enlivened by endless views of Venice, which, regardless of their artistic merits, are most pleasing to the eye through their delicate green-grey tints. Afterwards we went through the rooms, full of portraits, one of Lucy Harington in a ruff, very fine. In one corner is a set of interesting Tudor portraits, including a large one of Jane Seymour; hideous I thought, though Froude, when he saw it, said he did not wonder Henry VIII. cut Anne Boleyn’s head off to marry so bewitching a creature. A great portrait of the famous Lord Essex in a white dress has a mean feeble face and stubby red beard. The Duke [273] offered to take us to the church. Lady Ashburton, Lady Howard of Glossop, and I drove there with him. We passed ‘the Abbot’s Oak,’ where the last abbot was hung. Froude says he went up to London and was swallowed up by his fate. The Duke asked what this meant. It did mean that he was hung, drawn, and quartered, ‘but Froude was very angry at the question; historians never like being asked for details.’ The banks of a stone quarry are planted with cedars and evergreens, and the drive to the church is very pretty. The church was built by Clutton, who was turned loose into a field and told to produce what he could. He did produce a very poor mongrel building, neither gothic nor romanesque. The Duke said, ‘Would you like to see what is going to be done with me when I am dead?’ and he showed us the hole in the floor where he was to be let through ‘to the sound of solemn music,’ and then took us down into the vaults beneath to see the trestles on which his coffin was to repose! I long tried in vain to get Lady Ashburton to leave the endless letters, some of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who stayed with her grand-daughter and complained that the house was so dreadfully out of repair that the rain came into her bedroom, but another year that was to be remedied. We were deep in a ‘Boethius de Consolatione,’ printed in Tavistock Abbey, when the Duchess came in. ‘Would you like to see my golden image?’ So we went by a long open cloister, with wooden pillars rose-entwined, to see where the statue of the Duchess stands on a hill, all gilt like the figure of the Prince Consort, so that one really could see nothing except that it was a standing figure, and I could say nothing except that it was very well placed. Then we were taken through the sculpture-gallery, in which the great feature is a glorious sarcophagus, with a relief of the body of Hector being weighed against gold, Priam and Hecuba standing by with tears upon their cheeks.”

“Dec. 28.—The hours at Ampthill were especially pleasant from five to seven, when one was allowed to sit with Lady Wensleydale, who, in the beautiful halo of her evergreen old age, is all that is most winning and delightful—with full memory of her ‘wealthy past’ and gratitude for present peace, hemmed in by loving care of children and grandchildren.”

“Ascot Wood, Dec. 29.—Sir John Lefevre has been talking of an old acquaintance of his named Balm, who was very extravagant. Some one said to him once, ‘Balm, Balm, if you are not sage, you’ll spend a mint in time (thyme), and then you’ll rue.’

“He described a dinner-party at which he was present with ten others, including Sydney Smith, who made them all laugh so much that they were obliged to stand up. It was the only time he ever saw it—‘Laughter holding both its sides.’”

“Jan. 6, 1878.—At Ascot Station I met Mark Napier, who resigned his first-class ticket and the companionship of Plato’s ‘Republic,’ his usual reading in the train, to travel with me. His conversation is always full of thought and interest. I went to Cobham in the evening, and liked my visit, as I always do, meeting many people, including Mrs. Russell Barrington, who dresses like a figure by Burne Jones, and is even ambitious of becoming a Botticelli.”

“Crewe Hall, Jan. 6.—The number of hats in the hall told me on arriving here that there was a large party in the house, but I find no remarkable elements except Lord Houghton and Mr. Nugee, a clergyman still in appearance, but one who has gone out of the Church at the High end, and has a sort of monastery for training ecclesiastics somewhere in London. He preached to-day in the chapel, standing on the steps of the altar, a discourse like that of a French preacher, most dramatic, most powerful, most convincing—yet, oh! how difficult it is to carry away anything even from the sermons one likes best.

“Lord Crewe welcomed me very cordially, and made himself so pleasant that I thought his eccentricities had been exaggerated, till suddenly, at dinner, he began a long half-whispered conversation with himself, talking, answering, acting, and nothing afterwards seemed able to rouse him back to ordinary life. During the fire which destroyed the interior of Crewe some years ago, Lord Crewe bore all with perfect equanimity, and said not a word till the fire-engines came and were at work. Then he turned to his sister, Lady Houghton, who was present, and said, ‘I think I had better send for my goloshes.’[274]

“It is a very fine house, with noble alabaster chimney-pieces inlaid with precious marbles, but since the fire all has been too much overlaid with decoration, and in many respects indifferent decoration. The Sir Joshuas are glorious and numerous.

“This afternoon Lord Houghton told an interesting story which he heard from Mrs. Robert Gladstone:—

“‘She went to stay in Scotland with the Maxwells of Glenlee. Arriving early in the afternoon, she went to her room to rest. It was a lovely day. Mrs. Maxwell lay upon the sofa at the foot of her bed. Soon it seemed to her as if the part of the room opposite to her was filled with mist. She thought it came from the fireplace, but there was no fire and no smoke. She looked to see if it came from the window; all without was bright clear sunshine. She felt herself frisonner. Gradually the mist seemed to assume form, till it became a grey figure watching the clock. She could not take her eyes from it, and she was so terrified that she could not scream. At length, with terror and cold, her senses seemed going. She became unconscious. When she came to herself the figure was gone. Her husband came in soon after, and she told him. He took her down to five-o’clock tea. Then some one said, “You are in the haunted room,” and she told what had happened. They changed her room, but the next morning she went away.

“Soon afterwards Mrs. Stamford Raffles went to stay at Glenlee. It was then winter. She awoke in the night, and by the bright firelight burning in her room saw the same effect of mist, collecting gradually and forming a leaning figure looking at the clock. The same intense cold was experienced, followed by the same unconsciousness, after a vain endeavour to awaken her husband, for her limbs seemed paralysed.

“‘The Maxwells soon afterwards became so annoyed that they gave up Glenlee.’

“‘Whilst at Lisbon he saw a military friend of his in England pass across the end of the room. On reaching England he went to see his friend’s family, found them in deep mourning, and learnt that his friend was dead. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I know that; he died on such a day, for I saw him.” Upon this the family became greatly agitated, and vehemently denied that he had died till several days later. “Nothing will convince me,” said General Upton, “but that he died on that particular day.” Upon this the widow flung herself on her knees before him and implored him for God’s sake not to bring utter ruin upon her by saying this to any one else. “Very well,” he said; “I do not want to injure you, but the best way will be to tell me the whole truth.” Then she confessed. It was one of those cases in which the time for a pension was not quite due for a few days, and she concealed the death till those days were past.’

“Lady Egerton, who is here, told of young De Ritchie, whose wife died in Fiji. He obtained leave of absence immediately, and wishing to break the shock of his wife’s sudden death to her friends, merely telegraphed that they were coming home at once, for Ranee was very ill. On the day they were expected to arrive, the grandparents said to the little boy left in their charge that they were going to meet his papa and mama, who were coming home. The child looked very grave and said, ‘Papa, yes; Mama, no: poor Mama sleep in Fiji;’ and nothing would make it say any more. Dr. De Ritchie (the grandfather) was so impressed with this, that he was hardly surprised when, on going to Southampton, he met his son alone.

“Sir Watkin Wynne described a curious event on his property. A poor woman earnestly implored that a certain tree near her cottage might be cut down, for she had dreamt that her husband would be killed by it. She besought it so earnestly that the tree was ordered to be cut down. In falling, the rope attached to the tree caught the poor man, and crushed him against the wall, and he was killed.”

“London, Jan. 22.—A very pleasant dinner at Lady Ashburton’s. Miss Hosmer [275] was there, very full of her strange discovery of being able to turn limestone into marble, and then to colour it to any tint she wishes—a discovery perhaps not unknown to the ancient Romans.”

“Jan. 26.—Dined with old Lady Lyndhurst,[276] who has all the clever vivacity acquired by her early life in France. Speaking of bullying at public schools, she said, ‘I discovered that my Lord had been a bully when he was a boy, and I can assure you I thumped him well at eighty for what he had done at fourteen.’”

“Battle Abbey, March 10, 1878.—I came here yesterday, finding Lady Marian Alford, and to-day Lord Houghton came. Speaking of Mrs. L. E—— ‘s poverty, the Duchess said, ‘It is so sad; really often she has actually not bread to eat.’—‘Yes,’ said Lord Houghton, ‘but then she has so many kind friends who give her cake.’

“Lady Marian described the railway adventure of a friend of hers. Two ladies got into a carriage at King’s Cross, one old and the other young. Into the same carriage got a gentleman and sat down between them. As soon as the train started, he looked round at one and then at the other. Then he took from his pocket six razors and laid them upon the seat opposite to him. Then he looked round at each of them again. Then he took from his pocket an orange and laid it down in front of the razors. Then he began to cut up the orange, using one razor for each pig. He looked round at each of his victims again. Then he walked across the carriage and sat down opposite the old lady, who instantly wound her boa three times round her throat. He said, ‘Do you like orange?’ She said, ‘Very much indeed,’ and he took up a pig on the point of one of the razors and popped it into her mouth. He then said, ‘Will you have another?’ She said, ‘Yes, presently, but wait a few minutes: I like to have time to savourer my orange.’—‘How many minutes?’ he demanded. She answered, ‘Five.’—‘Very well,’ he said, and he took out his watch and counted the minutes, and then he took up another pig on the end of another razor and popped it into her mouth. Each time she prolonged the minutes, and the gallant old lady actually kept the madman at bay till an hour had elapsed and the train stopped at Peterborough, and she and the other lady were able to escape.

“Lord Houghton’s vanity is amusingly natural. Something was said of one of Theodore Hook’s criticisms. ‘You know even I never said anything as good as that,’ said Lord Houghton, and quite seriously. Yet how truly kind Lord Houghton is, and how amusing, and he does most truly, as Johnson said of Garth, ‘communicate himself through a very wide set of acquaintance.’ In his histoires de société he is unrivalled.”

“March 12.—Yesterday Lord Houghton and I sat very long after breakfast with the Duke, who talked of his diplomatic life. He was appointed from St. Petersburg to Paris, and the revolution which enthroned Louis Philippe occurring just then, he hurried his journey. When he reached Frankfort, Chad, who was minister there, assured him that he would not be allowed to enter France, but, provided with a courier passport, he pushed on, and crossed the frontier without difficulty. At Paris the barricades were still up. The town was in the hands of the Orleanists (they bore the name then). On the evening of his arrival the Duke was introduced to Lafayette, ‘quite a grand seigneur in manner.’ Lafayette asked him if he did not know Lord and Lady Holland, and on his answering in the affirmative, begged that he would write to assure Lord Holland that he meant to save the lives of the late ministers, because he was accused of intending to have them executed.

“The Duke talked much of the wonderful gallantry of the Emperor Nicholas—how when the rebel troops were drawn out opposite his own in the square at St. Petersburg, he stalked out fearless between them, though the Governor of St. Petersburg was shot dead at his feet. The rebel troops were only waiting to fire till they saw a rocket, the signal from Prince Troubetskoi, whose courage failed him at the last. Troubetskoi was sent to Siberia, whither his wife insisted upon following. He was sentenced for life, so was legally dead, and she might, had she preferred it, have married any one else.

“We drove to Normanhurst in the afternoon. Mrs. Brassey showed her Japanese and Pacific curiosities; the house is full of them, like a bazaar. We returned through a very lovely bit of Ashburnham.”

“April 3.—I came to London on the 19th, and dined that day with Lady Margaret Beaumont, hearing there of the dear kind old Lord Ravensworth being found dead that day on the floor of the Windsor rooms at Ravensworth, when his daughter Nellie sent for him because he did not come in to luncheon.”

“On Monday, March 25, as I was breakfasting at the Athenæum, I glanced into the paper, and the first thing which met my eyes was the news of the total loss of the Eurydice, with dear good Marcus Hare and more than three hundred men. It was a terrible shock, and seemed to carry away a whole mass of one’s life in recollections from childhood.... It is many days ago now, and the dreadful fact has seemed ever since to be hammering itself into one’s brain with ceaselessly increasing horror. How small now seem the failings in Marcus’s unselfish and loving character, how great the many virtues. It is difficult also to realise that there is now scarcely any one left who really cares for the old traditions of the Hare family, the old portraits, the old memorials, which were always so much to him, and which I hoped, through him, would be handed down to another generation.”

“April 14.—On the day on which the Eurydice was lost, Sir J. Cowell and Sir John McNeill were standing together in a window of Windsor Castle which overlooks a wide extent of country. Suddenly Sir J. McNeill seemed to be dreaming and speaking aloud. ‘What a terrible storm,’ he said. ‘Oh, do you see that ship? It will be lost: oh, how horrible! Good God, it’s gone!’ It was at that moment that the Eurydice went down.[277]

“I have little to tell of London beyond the ordinary experiences, except perhaps having been more than ever shocked by the slanderous malignity of so-called ‘religious people,’ as I have been charmed by the chivalrous disinterestedness of many who do not aspire to that denomination. One often finds Archbishop Whately’s saying too true—‘The God of Calvinists is the devil, with God written on their foreheads.’ Of the many dinner-parties I have attended, I cannot recollect anything except that some one—I cannot remember who—spoke of D’Israeli as ‘that old Jew gentleman who is sitting on the top of chaos.’

“Last Sunday I went to luncheon at Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck’s. I arrived at two, having been requested to be punctual. No hostess was there, and the many guests sat round the room like patients in a dentist’s anteroom, or, as a young Italian present said, when I made his acquaintance—‘like lumps of ice.’ Lady Waterford came in and Mr. Bentinck, and we went in to luncheon. There was a table for about forty, who sat where they liked. Mrs. Bentinck came in when all were seated, greeting nobody in particular. The lady next me, a perfect stranger, suddenly said, ‘I want you to tell me what I must do to get good. I do not feel good at all, and I want to be better: what must I do?’

“‘Well, I live where I have a church on each side of me, and a church on the top of the hill under which my house is situated. But they do me no good. Now I wonder if that is owing to the inefficiency of the churches, or to the depravity of my own heart?’

“I asked afterwards who the lady was, but neither her hostess nor any one else had an idea.

“Yesterday I dined with the Pole-Carews. Mrs. Carew told me that Dr. Benson, Bishop of Truro,[278] told her:—

“‘At my table were two young men, one of them a Mr. Akroyd. He began to talk of a place he knew in one of the Midland counties, and how a particular adventure always befell him at a certain gate there.

“‘Yes,’ said the other young man, ‘your horse always shies and turns down a particular lane.’

“‘Yes,’ exclaimed Mr. Akroyd, ‘but how do you know anything about it?’

“‘Oh, because I know the place very well, and the same thing always happens to me.’

“‘It was very long ago,’ continued Mr. Akroyd, ‘and I was a boy with my father. When we drove down that lane it was very late, quite dark, and we lost our way. When we reached the gateway, we saw within a great house standing on one side of a courtyard, brilliantly lighted up. There was evidently a banquet inside, and through the large windows we saw figures moving to and fro, but all were in mediaeval dress: we thought it was a masquerade.

“‘We drove up to the house to inquire our way, and the owner came out to speak to us. He was in a mediaeval dress. He said he was entertaining his friends, and he entreated us, as chance had brought us there that night, to come in and partake of his hospitality. We pleaded that we were obliged to go on, and that to stay was impossible. He was excessively civil, and said that if we must really go on, we must allow him to send a footman to guide us back into the right road. My father gave the footman half-a-crown. When we had gone some distance I said, “Father, did you see what happened to that half-crown?”—“Yes, my boy, I did,” said my father. It had fallen through the footman’s hand on to the snow.’

“‘The gateway really exists in the lane. There is no house, but there was one once, inhabited by very wicked people who were guilty of horrible blasphemies—a brother and sister, who danced upon the altar in the chapel, &c.’”

“Seaton, Devon, May 7.—I came here on Friday to visit Lady Ashburton, but found that erratic hostess gone off to Torquay, so had two days here alone with Mrs. Drummond’s two pleasant, lively boys. This is an enchanting little paradise, looking down over the sea from a cliff. Delightful walks ramble along the edge through miniature groves of tamarisk and ilex. On one side rises the bluff chalk promontory and high down of Bere Head; on the other, one looks across a bay to the cliffs near Lyme Regis, and Portland is seen in the blue haze.”

“May 7.—Drove with Lady Ashburton and her daughter to Shute, a beautiful old house of the Poles, now a farmhouse, with a gateway like a college gate at the entrance of the park. We sat to draw in the courtyard, full of colour and beauty, and afterwards had a delicious tea in the farmhouse kitchen. In returning, we went to an old ruined house which was the original homestead of the great Courtenay family.”

“May 8.—We were off at 7 A.M. into Somersetshire by train. We got out at Yeovil, in a lovely country of orchards in full bloom, and drove first to Brympton, the lovely old house of the Ponsonby Fanes. They inherited it from Lady Georgiana Fane, who is represented in the church, having had her own head added to the body of an ancestress who was headless. The place is perfectly delightful—such a broad staircase winding endlessly away, and quaint but fresh and airy rooms opening upon a terrace with balustrades and a staircase, and close by the most picturesque of churches.

“We went on to Montacute, Mrs. Phelips’s—a most grand old house of yellow-grey stone, partly of Edward VI.’s time.”

XX

ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS

BEING at Lowther Lodge on the 21st of May, I was sent for by the Crown Princess of Germany, who was most kind and gracious. “I have read all your books. I always buy them as soon as ever they come out, and I have so much wished to see you.” She told me that she had been to Hurstmonceaux to visit my mother’s grave, and that she had one of her strong presentiments as to the place coming back into our family, adding, “And I do so hope it will.” She talked of the dear Madame de Bunsen with the greatest affection, and then of the many branches of the Bunsen family. When my little audience of about ten minutes was over, she said with great sweetness, “I am afraid I am keeping you much too long from all your other friends.” She pressed me to come to stay with her at Potsdam. I said that I was going to Berlin to visit the Bunsens. She said, “Oh, but you must come to me; I can show quite as many things, and I can certainly show you a great many more people than the Bunsens can.” I said that I feared my visit to Berlin would be during her approaching absence in Switzerland. She said, “Well, you can go to the Bunsens in the summer when I am away, and then in the winter you can come again to see me: Berlin is not so very far off.”

As spring advanced my Life of the Baroness Bunsen was so far completed as to be ready for the inspection of her children. I therefore decided to take it to them in Germany. Feeling how impossible it would be to meet all the various wishes and tastes of such a hydra-headed family, I determined only to feel bound by the wishes of the two unmarried daughters, Frances and Emilia, and any one of their brothers whom they might choose. They selected George.

I turned first towards the Rhineland to visit the Dowager Princess of Wied, and profit by her recollections of one who had ever been one of the most valued of her friends.

On the last day of May I reached Cologne, and found there a succession of telegrams from the Princess of Wied desiring me to come to her. She did not exactly say that she expected me to stay beyond the day, so I did not like to take my luggage, and was sorry, when I found my room ready and that I was expected for a long visit, that I had sent it on.

Early on June 1, I went to Bonn. The place struck me much from its being so embowered in green and flowers. In a villa thus surrounded I found the well-known authoress Fräulein von Weling,[280] whom I surprised in bargaining for ready-plucked chickens at her door. She is a very interesting person, received me with that cordial simplicity which is so charming in Germans, and in a minute had put on her bonnet to go with me to the cemetery by a quiet walk through nursery-gardens. The churchyard itself is half hidden in pinks and roses. In the centre stands an old chapel of extreme beauty, transferred stone for stone by the King of Prussia from a solitary position in the fields. Buried in flowers is the grave where the dear friends of my childhood rest side by side. Close by is that of their brother-like friend, the noble old Brandis, his invalid wife, and his son Johannes. Farther off, but still near, are the graves of the old Arndt, Niebuhr and his Gretchen, Schumann, and the widow and son of Schiller. Then we went to Bunsen’s house, with the three-windowed room where he died, the garden with its view over the Rhine to the Sieben Gebirge, and the pavilion where he gave his last birthday feast.

It is a long ascent of an hour and a half from Neuwied through orchards and meadows radiant with wild-flowers to Segenhaus, standing on the crest of the mountain, which is literally “the House of Blessing” to all around it. The beautiful spacious rooms, full of books and pictures, look down over a steep declivity upon an immense view of the Rhineland. The Princess came in immediately with a most warm welcome—a noble, beautiful woman in a black dress, something like that one sees in pictures of Spanish Queens-Dowager, with snow-white hair drawn back under a long black veil. After a life of love, having lost all those who gave its greatest charm, she still finds much happiness in making herself the mother of her people, and the centre of good to the Rhineland from her high forest-home. After a few minutes spent in explaining the towns in the vast map-like view below us, she said, “There is a lady here who is anxious to make your acquaintance, and who was delighted to hear that you were coming: it is the Queen of Sweden.” At that moment the doors were thrown open, and the Queen entered—of middle age, with a beautiful expression, and possessing, with the utmost regal dignity, the most perfect simplicity and even cordiality of manner. She desired me to sit by the Princess upon a divan facing her. She said that I must consider her at once as a friend; that, in a life of great troubles, the “Memorials” had been her greatest comfort; that she never went anywhere without them; that my mother had been for several years the intimate friend to whom she always had recourse, and in whose written thoughts she could always find something which answered to her own feeling and the difficulty of the moment. She asked after “Mary Lea,” and how old she was now. She also talked much and naturally of my Bunsen work, and entirely entered into all the difficulties of meeting the views of so large a family of varying dispositions.

The Princess took me away to see her own room with her family portraits and photographs. She spoke of her daughter, the Princess of Roumania,[281] “in her terrible position between Russia and Turkey.” Then she said, “I want to prepare you for something. At my daughter’s court there is a blind Roumanian noble who has an only daughter. She is deaf and dumb. I could not bear that they should never communicate, so I have taken her home with me, and I am teaching her to speak by making her hold her hand on my throat as I speak very slowly; and she is already learning, and, though it takes almost all my time, I am already rewarded by her making sounds which are intelligible to me.” When we went back into the other room, the young lady was there, a most strange being, making sounds inarticulate, but intelligible to the Princess. When she saw that the Princess was going to speak, she rushed across the room and held her hand on her throat, which had an almost terrible effect, like garrotting.

After tea the Queen ordered her donkey, which was brought round by a handsome Swedish chasseur. We went out into the forest. The Queen rode: the Princess led the donkey: I walked by the side, and only the chasseur followed. We actually went on thus for three hours, through beautiful forest glades with exquisite sylvan views, the whole reminding me of descriptions in Auerbach’s “Auf der Höhe.” The Queen never ceased talking or asking. She wished to know the whole story of my mother’s trances at Pau, of Madame de Trafford, of Prince Joseph Bonaparte—“a sort of cousin of my husband’s.” She talked much and most touchingly of her own life and its anxieties. “What I feel most,” she said, “is the impossibility of ever being alone. I have much happiness, much to be thankful for, but I feel that what one has really to look forward to must come after death, and I do not wish to live.” With her truly “la grandeur est un poids qui lasse,” as Massillon said. When alone with her sister at the Segenhaus in the quiet forest-life, she finds most happiness, and they live in a higher world, mentally as well as physically. As we went down a steep bank the donkey stumbled, and the Queen cried out. “Pardon me that I have seemed to be afraid,” she said; “I have been so very ill, that my nerves are quite shattered;” and in fact a severe illness, long supposed to be mortal, had at this time obliged her for several years to leave Sweden in the winter, to be under a great doctor at Heidelberg. She asked me to come to Norway to visit her. “You must also know my husband,” she said, “and my four sons, my four blessings of God.” She repeatedly expressed her wish that I should be at Rome in the winter with the Prince Royal. “I am sending him out to learn his world.” She asked most warmly after Lea, and sent a message to her—“I know her so well.” She also desired I would give her tender sympathy to Hilda Hare,[282] “For can I not feel for her? my second boy is at sea.” She gave a charming description of her first tour through Norway to her coronation. “I sat in my carriole by myself, and a peasant sat upon the little portmanteau behind which held my things, and told me all about the places and people.” We walked on and on through the vast woods, with lovely glimpses of country through the open glades, and masses of huge foxgloves where the wood was cut down, and one really forgot the queen, the almost tête-à-tête of three hours with a queen, in the noble great-souled woman, whose high ideal of life and all that it should be seemed for the time to ennoble all the world to one.

At the top of a high declivity the Princess unlocked a small gate. Within, in a little circular grove of lime-trees, were two marble crosses over the grave of the Prince of Wied and his martyr-like son Otto.[283] “And here,” said the Princess very simply, “is my grave also.” The plan of these green mausoleums has been adopted by the present family, and two more are planted to be ready for two generations.

Behind the palace of the Princess is the great white château of Monrepos, where her son lives with his wife, who is Princess Royal of the Netherlands. Above the lower range of windows is a line of huge stags’ heads, trophies of the chase of some former prince in the forest. The House of Wied are “ehenwürdig,” and so may always marry royalty.

I said something about never having seen the kitchen-garden of a German house, so when we came home the Princess took me to hers. The Queen then walked with us. The Princess prunes and grafts her own roses, &c., but she seems to have no perception whatever of any beauty in wild-flowers. We went in, and I was shown to a room, whence I came down to that in which the court ladies were assembled. It was rather formidable, but the Countess Ebba von Rosen, dame du palais of the Queen, talked pleasantly in English. Doors were thrown open, and the Queen and Princess entered and we went in to supper. The Queen made me sit by her: the four court ladies sat opposite: the Princess, on the other side of the Queen, made tea. Thick slices of bread and butter, like those of English school-feasts, and mutton-chops were handed round. When we went into the other room, I wrote down some names of books as desired, and then at 9.30 took leave. The Princess most cordially invited me to return, and the Queen again pressed me to visit her in her own country. The vision of the Queen’s serene noble face as she took leave has ever since remained with me, and I parted from both the royal sisters with a stronger feeling of affectionate regard than I have ever felt towards any one else upon so short an acquaintance.”

“June 2.—I slept at Neuwied, and then crossing the Rhine in the morning mist, passed a few hours at Boppart, where the colouring of the river and old houses and the peculiar grey hills was most lovely. Charles de Bunsen met me at the station of Mosbach, and took me to his villa, much like one in Italy, with the same rich intermingled vegetation of fruit and flowers growing around it.”

“June 4.—Yesterday, a very sultry day, we went to Wiesbaden. The heavy trees in the gardens looked dripping even more with heat than with rain, and there is a splendid dulness in the great rooms, formerly the gambling-house, and in the park beyond, with the many chairs under the trees on which people sit to listen to the band; but the fountain is pretty.

“Mrs. de Bunsen [284] was very amusing in her account of the crowded musical festival at Baireuth. When they complained that there were not enough carriages there, a native replied, ‘Pardon me! of carriages there are quite enough, but of people there are too many.’

“In and out, whilst I have been here, has come the next neighbour—‘the Herr Major.’ He is quite a character, and devotes his whole life to his garden. From Holland he—a poor man—ordered some fruit-trees for a very large sum, but they have been a total failure and have borne nothing. The other day Charles, driving with him, passed these trees, and knowing they were a sore subject, turned his head the other way and pretended not to see them. ‘Oh, thank you, dear friend; I appreciate what you are doing,’ said the Herr Major, enthusiastically clasping his hand. When the boys of Mosbach stole his fruit, he put up an electric wire on the wall which caused a bell to ring in his bedroom whenever any one got over it. A few nights ago the bell rang violently; the Herr Major took his stick and rushed down the garden in his night-shirt: it was only his own bulldog, which had jumped over the wall to pay a visit to a friend in Mosbach. Another time, when his fruit was stolen, the Herr Major issued a placard offering a reward of a hundred marks to any one who would deliver up the thief. The placard was read by two men sitting outside a beer-house, who were the men who had stolen the fruit. They immediately agreed upon their course of action; one man delivered the other up to justice, and he was sentenced to pay ten marks or to three days’ imprisonment; the other claimed the hundred marks, of which they had ninety to divide and to spend in drinking for whole days together to the health of the Herr Major.”

“June 15.—I have had a charming week at Herrenalb, whither Charles and Theodore de Bunsen accompanied me. It was a real pleasure to be again with the dear Frances and Emilia de Bunsen, who are so like sisters to me, and the kind pleasant Sternbergs. We were occupied almost entirely with my book, the sisters taking it in turn to talk over all the different parts, but there were also delightful intervals of forest rambles, and sittings out under the old apple-trees with Emilia. Reinhold von Ungern Sternberg came for the Sunday with Herr von Klüden, the ‘Bräutigam’ of his sister Dora. The place is just what my sweetest mother would most have enjoyed for a summer residence—no grand scenery, but very high forest-clad hills all round the rich green meadows, with the crystal Alb tossing through them. The village of quaint black and white houses clusters round the old-fashioned inn and the water-cure establishment in the buildings of the suppressed monastery, of which a beautiful ruin of red sandstone—‘The Paradise’—still stands in the churchyard. In all directions are well-kept walks and drives, and comfortable seats at every picturesque point. The people are most friendly and primitive, all the men taking off their hats, and all greeting strangers with a friendly ‘Morgen’ or ‘Tag.’

“A terrible sensation has been created by the attack on the Emperor, and still more by the first false report of his death. Men and women were alike in tears, and the national disgrace is intensely felt. I hope, if the Emperor is better, that I may see the Crown Princess again at Berlin.

“I spent four hours at Heidelberg, and revisited all our old haunts, the gardens most lovely in their luxuriance of green. Thence I had intended to go to Weimar to visit the Grand Duchess, but at Eisenach received a telegram from her lady-in-waiting, the Countess Kalkreuth, to put off my visit, as they were gone off to Berlin, the Empress Augusta being sister of the Duke of Weimar. A wet morning at the Wartburg and an afternoon at Erfurth brought me to Jena. There my cousin Alexander Paul met me at the station, a pleasant, fat, frank Prussian officer, with a face very like that of the first Napoleon.[285]

“There is much charm in this old town of Jena and its simple population, increased by the five hundred students of the university. The houses of Schiller, Alex. v. Humboldt, &c., have inscriptions in honour of those who lived there: the streets wind picturesquely around the old Schloss and its gardens, and the trumpet still sounds every quarter of an hour from the tall grey tower of the noble old church. From my own window in Alexander’s house in the Cahl’sche Allée, I see on one side a robber castle, on the other a wonderful old church of the time of the ‘Heilige Bonifacius.’

“On Thursday afternoon we went to Dornberg, where three castles crown the cliff above the village with a narrow terrace running in front of them along the edge of the precipice. One castle is occasionally inhabited by the Grand Duke; another, very old and picturesque, was given by Carl August to Goethe, and having been inhabited by him in the last years of his life, still contains much furniture of his time: the third was the palace of—the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.

“Yesterday we went a fatiguing excursion to Schwartzberg, the palace of the Prince of Rudolstadt, by which we saw the finest parts of Thuringia. A railway took us to Schwarza, where, in a ball on the top of the church steeple, is a dart thrown by a Cossack as the Russian army passed through Germany. Thence we took an omnibus to the little Chrysopraz Hotel at Blankenberg, where, after beer and brown bread and butter under the trees, we walked up the Schwarzthal to Oppelei, where a Swiss cottage has been built by the Prince to indemnify a forester, whose daughter he had made his mistress! Hence, by a steep path, we ascended the Treppstein, whence there is a lovely view over the hollow in the forest-clad mountains, in the midst of which the great castle of the Prince of Rudolstadt rises above the little town. The Prince is not unpopular, though his life has an Eastern license. On the day when he succeeded to his tiny sovereignty he happened to be at Berlin. ‘Bonjour, souverain,’ said the Emperor when he met him, and, when he took off his hat—‘Pray put on your crown.’

“We dined at the charming little inn, where thousands of wild stags often assemble under the windows in the evenings, when the place is comparatively empty, but take flight into the woods before the summer guests. In returning, we were much amused with the old ‘Herr Apotheke’ of Rudolstadt, who had come out with a tin case to gather simples, and who insisted upon stopping to drink a tankard of beer wherever one was to be had.

“To-day we have been in a different direction, by rail to Roda, a charming little Thuringian town, and thence by carriage to the Fröhliche Wiederkunft, the old moated castle built by Friedrich Johann, father of Friedrich der Weise, on the spot where he met his family on his return from a long captivity abroad. The old Princess Therèse of Saxe-Altenbourg now lives there, she and her sisters—the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess of Oldenbourg, and the Grand Duchess Constantine of Russia—having been daughters of the old Duke Josef, by whom the castle was restored. The news of the King of Hanover’s death had just arrived. ‘How many tears,’ said the old man who showed the castle, ‘did the old Duke my master shed in that chair over the King’s misfortunes.’ The story of the founder is most quaintly told in paintings on panels round one of the rooms, and there are pictures and memorials of Luther and of Friedrich Johann and his wife Sibylla over and over again.”

“June 23.—A vision of many great towns is all that I carry away from the varied journey which has brought me to Hildesheim—the old cities of Wittenberg and Eisleben, with their glorious works of Lucas Cranach and varied memorials of Luther and Melancthon: Magdeburg, great and noisy, with its dull, restored cathedral: Halberstadt, also restored, but glorious in spite of its injuries, and with intensely picturesque streets of old houses: the romantic beauty of imperial Goslar: stately Quedlinburg, where German princesses constantly reigned as abbesses: beautiful Thale, at the entrance of the Harz, with its exquisite combination of wood and rock and water: Brunswick and its many market-places, full of old houses: dull Hanover, with the great deserted gardens of Herrenhausen.

“Aunt Marcia (Frau Paul von Benningsen [286]) and my cousins Jane and Clementine met me here at the station.”

“Berlin, June 27.—My visit at Hildesheim had much of quiet interest. The town is wonderfully picturesque, and I was glad to make acquaintance with my cousins, who are perfectly grandes dames and highly educated young ladies, though they cook and do almost all the housework themselves. I drew in the early mornings, and went to dinner each day with them at 12.30.

“The Hildesheim churches are magnificent, but spoilt, ruined, by so-called restoration—the old pavements torn up, the old ornaments removed and replaced by tawdry and vulgar imitation of Munich wall-painting.

“On Monday George de Bunsen met me with his carriage at the Berlin station, and brought me through the Thier-Garten, like a bit of wild forest, to the charming airy Villa Bunsen, standing in its own garden on the extreme outskirts of the town. Here I have a most luxurious room, filled with royal portraits, and every possible luxury. We dined al fresco on the broad terrace amid the flowers. On the next evening there was a party of about fifty people—tea, and the garden and terrace lighted up, a very pretty effect; the ladies in bright dresses, the men with uniforms and orders, moving and sitting amongst the shrubs and flowers, amid which endless little supper-tables were laid at a late hour. Many were the historic names of those to whom I was introduced—Falk of the Falk laws, Mommsen the historian, Austin the poet, Mohl, and many ministers and generals. I found also Arthur Balfour, and many waifs and strays of old acquaintance. The ‘Congress’ is going on, but excites little or no general interest, and is scarcely mentioned here, German affairs being far too important.

“Berlin interests me extremely, though without preparation it can be of small interest. It is almost entirely modern. In the sixteenth century it must have been a tiny electoral town, the houses encircling the old Schloss by the Spree in the time of the Great Elector, whose statue, a grand though rococo work, stands close by on the bridge. Friedrich I., who got a kingdom by bribery, added the enormous castle, which, ludicrous as it then was in a kingdom of five millions, is now satisfactory in a kingdom of twenty millions. Close by, Frederick the Great built two domes, merely as features in the distant view of an otherwise featureless city, and to these his son added buildings which turned them into churches. Under Friedrich Wilhelm III. and IV. the great classical revival took place and endless fine buildings arose. The library is one of the few buildings which date from Frederick the Great. The architects were an endless time disputing over the designs, and at last he said, ‘Damn you all, don’t waste any more time; this commode opposite me is of a very good design, copy that,’ and accordingly the design of the commode was copied.

“The Museum was begun when the country was poor and had no money to spend. After the French war, when the country became rich, the design expanded and became magnificent. Of the sculptures, four works deserve especial attention—the ‘Adorante,’ the exquisite bronze boy who, in the early morning, stretches out his arms in adoration: the noble vivid bust of Julius Caesar in basalt, with agate eyes, so speaking though voiceless, so never to be forgotten, of which Rauch had three copies in different parts of his house that it might never be long absent from his mind: the bust of Sappho, with banded hair, recognised as the poetess from a Hermes; and the Augustus statue, more noble than that of Livia’s villa, because taken in earlier youth, when his one feeling was that he was born to command, and when no furrow of disappointment or care was yet traced on his brow.

“The collection of casts is most interesting, as showing the important statues of each subject, Venus, Minerva, Mercury, &c., side by side for instruction or contrast.

“The pictures are a grand collection, spoilt by over-cleaning. Especially worthy of remembrance are an Adoring Madonna by Filippino Lippi, with God the Father above in glory; two noble portraits by Giorgione; one by Lorenzo Lotto (possibly of Sansovino); some marvellously graphic pictures, eloquently expressed in well-considered touches, by Franz Hals; and a noble Holbein of ‘Kaufmann Georg Gigge aus Basel.’

“Last night we went late to the Zoological Garden. The most interesting thing was a solemn congregation of ibises listening in a row, each bird with one foot in the air, and its head attentively on one side, to an ibis preacher, who never ceased a continuous discourse to them, standing on a stone. The elephant is said to be five hundred years old; what a solemn silent witness! Apropos of the future of beasts, George de Bunsen talked much of the absence of all allusion to any future in the Old Testament—that it grew up, partly in the Talmud, partly in the Apocryphal writers, in what Luther beautifully calls ‘the great empty leaf between the Old and New Testaments.’

“Montbijou, the curious little one-storied palace of Sophia Charlotte, wife of Friedrich I., is now a museum for relics of the House of Brandenbourg. The chairs, sledges, and table of Friedrich I. are very curious; the wheel-chairs of his unhappy second wife: the wax figures of his grand-daughters as babies; and their portraits as grown women—queens and duchesses. Here also are three masks from the dead face of the lovely Queen Louisa, that taken immediately after death most exquisitely beautiful.”

“June 30.—The day after I last wrote, I went with the Bunsens and Mr. Waddington, the French Minister [287] (come for the Congress of Berlin) to Charlottenbourg. The palace there is charming—the large gardens, the groves of orange-trees in tubs, the great lawns sweeping away into woods, and above all the mausoleum in one of the thick groves, with the tombs of Queen Louisa and her husband. Hither the old Emperor and all the royal family come still once a year, on the anniversary of her death, to look upon the beautiful form of his young mother, snatched away in the very zenith of beauty and popularity, not living to see the re-establishment of the kingdom in whose cause she sacrificed her life. Exquisitely, perfectly beautiful is the intense repose of her lovely countenance, in what I must ever feel to be the most beautiful and impressive statue in the world. The statue of the King is very fine too, but in her angelic presence he is forgotten. And such was the feeling for her, that though he did not marry again for many years after he had lost her in his youth, his people at first would not believe it, and then never forgave it. Mr. Waddington felt nothing in the presence of this sublime statue. ‘Yes, it is very clever, it is a very clever figure indeed,’ he said. Never was any remark more completely out of tune, making it difficult for one to believe in the great power of the man.

“The next day I went to Potsdam—quite a place by itself in the world, with its endless great ultra-German palaces and stiff gardens, arid and dusty, though surrounded by many waters. Without Carlyle’s ‘Frederick the Great,’ they would be mere dead walls enclosing a number of costly objects; illuminated by the book, each room, each garden walk, thrills with human interest. In the Residenz Schloss are the rooms in which Frederick the Great passed his winters, with massive silver furniture and priceless ornaments, amid which the portrait of Wilhelmina in her childhood is a touching feature. In the Garrison Kirche is the tomb of the great king. The terrace at Sans Souci, in this dried-up land, is quite lovely with its fountains and orange-trees. Close behind is the famous windmill.

“When I returned to the station, I was surprised to find the Bunsens’ servant, sent on with my evening clothes, that I might accept an invitation (by telegram) to dine with the Crown Princess. I had only eight minutes before the royal train came up, and it was an awful scramble to wash and dress in a room the servant had taken at the station. However, when the royal train set off, I was in it. The palace-station of Wildpark was a pretty sight, red cloth laid down everywhere, and sixteen royal carriages waiting for the immense multitude of guests—quantities of ladies in evening dress (all black for the King of Hanover) and veils, splendid-looking officers, an Armenian archbishop and bishop in quaint black hoods and splendid diamond crosses. I went in a carriage with the Greek minister, and we whirled away through the green avenues to the great Neue Palais, with the sun striking warm on the old red and grey front. Count Eulenborg, Master of the Household, stood on the steps to receive us, and we passed into an immense hall, like a huge grotto, decorated with shells and fountains, where several of the court ladies were.

“At the end of the hall were some folding-doors closely watched by two aides-de-camp, till the rapping of a silver stick was heard from a distant pavement, when the doors were flung open, and Count Eulenborg came out, preceding the Prince and Princess. She immediately went up to Mrs. Grant (General Grant’s wife) and several other ladies, and then began to go the round of the guests. I had more than my fair share of her kindly presence. ‘Oh, Mr. Hare, I am so glad to see you again so soon. How little I expected it, and how sad the causes which have brought it about!’ And she went on to speak of how, at our last meeting, the Duchess of Argyll had been sitting with her at tea, and how three days after she died. ‘And for me it was only the opening act of a tragedy,’ she said. She talked of the shock which the news of the attack upon the Emperor was to her, coming to her in the picture-gallery at Panshanger, and of her hurried journey to him. The Crown Prince came up then, and led her away to dinner. Mrs. Grant was on his other side (General Grant, a very vulgar officious man, was also there). I had been directed to a place near the Archbishop and Bishop of Armenia, but as they only spoke Armenian, I was glad that a very handsome, agreeable aide-de-camp eventually took his place between me and them. The dinner was excellent, in a huge long marble hall, with windows opening to the ground on the terrace above the flower-garden. Occasionally I met a bright kindly smile as the Princess looked to see how I was getting on. There were about fifty guests, servants waiting noiselessly, not a footfall heard.

“After dinner we all went out on the terraces, and there the Crown Princess had the goodness to come again to me. She talked of all I had seen at Berlin, and of Sweden and Queen Sophie. She talked also of Queen Louisa, her husband’s grandmother, preferring her statue at Potsdam even to that at Charlottenburg, and wished to have sent an aide-de-camp with me to see it. She was so good as to desire that I should return to Potsdam, and when I showed her that I could not, said, ‘Oh, but you will now find your way again to Berlin to see me.’ The scene on the terraces was very pretty, looking upon the bright flowers beneath in the subdued light of a fine evening in this transparent atmosphere, the whole air scented with lime-flowers.

“At a quarter to nine all the carriages came again to take us away: Count Eulenborg announced them. In the ante-chamber I found the Crown Princess again. I kissed her hand, and she shook mine with many kind words, and sent affectionate messages to the Queen of Sweden.

“How we whirled away through the green avenues to Potsdam, where all the people turned out to see the cavalcade! I travelled back to Berlin with the young and very handsome Prince Friedrich of Hohenzollern (brother of the Prince of Roumania and the Comtesse de Flandres), who was saved in the annihilation of his regiment of guards in the second battle of Metz by being sent back with the standard.”

“July 5.—I spent Sunday at beautiful old Lübeck, full of colour and rich architecture, rising spire upon spire above the limpid river. In the streets and market-place are the quaintest towers, turrets, tourelles, but all end in spires. A great fat constable went about on Sunday morning, keeping everybody from following any avocation whatever during church-time: when the services were over, they might do what they liked.

“Then came the long weary journey across West Holstein—peat flats varied by marshy swamps—and a night at Schleswig, a white, colourless old town moored as if upon a raft in the marshes, where the Princess of Wales’ grandmother and other royal potentates lie in exposed coffins upon the floor of the ugly rugged old cathedral, which has a belfry like a dovecot. Everywhere roses grew in the streets on the house-walls. The children were hurrying along, carrying the shoes they were to wear in school.

“Peat and marsh again for many hours, the interminable straight lines of landscape only broken by the mounds, probably sepulchral, which are so common here. A straight line with humps at intervals would do for a view almost anywhere in Jutland, Fuhnen, or Seeland. After hours upon hours of this engaging scenery, we crossed the Middelfardt at Fredericia into Fuhnen, which we traversed by rail, and embarked again on the Great Belt at Nyborg. Then came four hours’ more rail in Seeland, and, at 10.30 P.M., long lines of light glistening on streets of water showed that we had reached Copenhagen. Here I met the two daughters of Sir Henry Holland (Caroline and Gertrude), with whom I had arranged to go on to Norway, and their niece, Miss Chenda Buxton. As they had already been waiting for me several days, I felt obliged to give up a visit to Baron Troll (the stepson of Madame de Bülow) and the château of Gaüno, but I had three full days for Copenhagen, and greatly enjoyed them, the air being that of the high mountains in Switzerland with a mixture of sea—the most bracing place I ever was in. There is a ‘Dragon Tower,’ which is quite ideally Danish; and the old palace of the Danish kings, Rosenborg, surrounded by a moat, is fairy-like in the beauty of its old age, in the midst of a stately and brilliant old garden, and filled with historical memorials, which carry you back into marvellous depths of Danish history, in which the Christians and Friedrichs, always alternating with each other, are most bewildering. The museums also are full of interest, especially the Thorwaldsen collection, with casts of all the works of the great sculptor, and many most grand originals, especially interesting to me, as being described in Madame de Bunsen’s letters from Rome in their first conception and progress.

“One day we went out to Roeskilde, to the great church near a fiord where the kings are buried. Some of the older sovereigns have grand tombs, but those of later date than the grandfather of our Charles I. lie in their black and silver coffins unburied upon the floor of the church, with very odd effect.”

“Stockholm, Grand Hotel Rydberg, July 13.—On the evening of the 5th we crossed to Helsingfors in Sweden by a very rough passage of ten minutes, and had a wild evening walk in the storm, looking upon the opposite Danish coast, and Helsingborg with the great traditional castle of Hamlet, whose father was really a pirate-chief in Jutland.

“A journey of twenty-four hours brought us to Stockholm. We only lingered on the way to see the very fine Cathedral of Lund, the Oxford of Sweden. The scenery is not beautiful, but pretty—an exaggerated Surrey, low hills and endless fir-woods, with tiny glistening lakes.

“Stockholm has deeply interested us, and there is an odd feeling in being at a place and knowing that it is for once and once only in a lifetime. It is a modern city of ugly streets, but in a situation quite exquisite, on a number of little rocky islets between Lake Malar and the Baltic, surrounding, on the central islet, the huge palace, which is very stately and imposing from its size, and the old church of Riddarholmen, where Gustavus Adolphus and many other kings and queens are buried under the banner-hung arches. Next to the palace, the stateliest building is certainly this hotel, where our windows overlook all that is most characteristic in the place, the bridge which crosses the junction of the Baltic and Lake Malar, the mighty palace dominating the central island, the great white seagulls poised upon the blue waters, and the steam-gondolas, filled with people, darting to and from one island to another. These are the chief means of communication, and we make great use of them, the passages costing twelve öere, or one penny.

“We shall not go to see the midnight sun at Hammerfest; it would be very fatiguing, and indeed there can be little to see which we have not here; for we have only about two hours’ night in Stockholm, and by 2 A.M. it is light enough to read the smallest print. This has a very odd effect at first, but one soon gets used to it.

“Alas! we have been here a week, and, except one day, it has rained almost incessantly. One pities the poor Swedes in losing their short summer, for there are only about three months without snow, and every day is precious. The streets are sopping, but we have managed several excursions in the covered gondolas to quiet damp old palaces on the banks of lonely fiords. On our one fine day we went to Upsala by rail, and saw the cathedral where Gustavus Wasa lies aloft on a great tomb between his two pretty little wives, and we drove on to Old Upsala, where Odin, Thor, and Freya reigned as human beings and were buried as gods. In the tomb of Thor—a grassy mound—the Government still gives the mead of ancient times to foreign visitors. It is a very delightful place, like a dip in the Sussex downs, the quaint church, of immemorial antiquity, probably once a pagan temple, nestling behind the mounds of the heroes.

“Yesterday we heard a hundred Upsala students, the best singers in the world, sing the best national music in the Caterina Church. The King was there, a noble royal figure. He is the sovereign of the age, artist, poet, equally at home in all modern languages and several ancient ones, profoundly versed in all his duties and nobly performing them. The Crown Prince was with him, a fine young fellow, spoilt in appearance by his mother’s Nassau mouth, and the Prince Imperial, who is here with his cousins on a visit. The Queen is still away. I had many introductions here, but as the Court is at the country palace of Drottningholm, have not thought it worth while to present them; generally, however, Swedes are quite charming, especially in their manner to strangers.

“Cheating or imposition in hotels or elsewhere is utterly unknown; the only fear is lest you should not be charged enough. We asked what we should do with our luggage if we went to Dalecarlia—‘Oh, you can leave it anywhere under a bush, no one would touch a thing,’ and I am sure that it is so.

“The Hollands are delightful companions, full of interest in everything, glad to draw, reading up all the history, learning Swedish, holding historical and retrospective examinations once a week. We do a great deal of ‘lessons’ together. Certainly that one’s travels should ‘leave a good taste’ behind entirely depends upon one’s companions. And we are never even reduced to the state which I find alluded to in a French guide-book—‘Dans une voiture découverte, quand il y a une personne de mauvaise humeur, les autres admirent le paysage.’ Mr. and Mrs. Eric Magnusson are in this hotel, and we see a good deal of them. He is an Icelander, but now a Professor at Cambridge, and sent here by the University to investigate and inspect the Runic inscriptions.”

“July 15.—Yesterday we steamed down Lake Malar to Gripsholm, a very quaint castle with domed red towers, full of ancient pictures, and with the wonderful old room and bed where Queen Catherine Jagellonica (delightful name!), whose tomb we saw at Upsala, gave birth to her son Sigismund, afterwards King of Poland.”

“Throndtjem, July 28.—Surely this old cradle of Northern Christianity is one of the most beautiful places in the world. No one had ever told us about it, and we came here only because it was the Throndtjem of sagas and ballads, and expecting a wonderful and beautiful cathedral; but it is really a dream of loveliness, so exquisite in the soft silvery morning lights on the fiords and purple mountain ranges, and the nearer hills covered with bilberries and breaking into steep cliffs, that one remains in a state of transport, which is at a climax when all is engraven upon an opal sunset sky, and when ships and buildings meet their double in the still transparent water. Each old wide street of curious wooden houses displays a new vista of sea, of rocky promontories, of woods dipping into the water, and at the end of the chief street is the grey massive cathedral of St. Olaf, where Northern art and poetry have exhausted their loveliest and most poetic fancies around the grave of the national hero. Here alone in Scandinavia I have gone back perpetually to the old days of my life, and felt how happy the mother would have been here, so much—almost everything—being within her own walk; and I seem to see our trio spending a quiet month at this homelike hotel (where the landlord and landlady—highly educated people of good family—receive their guests like friends in a country-house), and sallying forth to draw in all the sheltered coves and wooded rocks by the side of fiord or river. The air too is most bracing, an arctic feeling combined with the brightest sunshine.

“My companions and I get on perfectly, and I am filled with admiration of Miss Holland’s strong, decided nature, and her perfect knowledge of all she wishes and intends, combined with great good-nature. Both sisters take boundless interest in all they see, and the journeys seem shortened by alternate lessons in history, Norsk, &c., and games of different kinds, even charades, one side of the carriage acting against the other!

“But I must go back to Kristiania, which was steaming in intensity of heat when we reached it, the wet of Stockholm having cleared in Norway into cloudless sunshine which had hatched all the mosquitoes. There is no beauty in the mean little town, which was built by Christian IV. (brother of our Anne of Denmark), and has a good central church of his time. We went by rail to Kongsberg, a primitive place with a nice little hotel kept by a Dane, where, however (and at many other places), we were annoyed by the ludicrously consequential advent of General Grant and Co. Here we hired a carriage and carriole for a five days’ excursion in Tellemarken. What a drive!—by silent lakes or through deep, beautiful, ever-varying woods of noble pine-trees, rising from thickets of juniper, bilberries, and cranberries. The loveliest mountain flowers grow in these woods—huge larkspurs of rank luxuriant foliage and flowers of faint dead blue, pinks, stagmoss—wreathing around the grey rocks, and delicate lovely soldanellas drooping in the still recesses. But what a road, or rather what a want of one!—hills of glassy rock, up which our horses scrambled like cats, abysses where they gathered up their legs and flung themselves down headlong with the carriages on the top of them, till at the bottom we were all buried in dust, and picked ourselves up, gasping and gulping, and wondering we were alive, to begin the same pantomime over again.

“Our midday halt was at Bolkesjö, where the forest opens to green lawns, hill-set, with a charming view down their smooth declivities upon a many-bayed lake with mountain distances. Here, in a group of old brown farm-buildings, covered with rude picturesque painting and sculpture, is a farmhouse inhabited by its primitive owners through many generations. The little rooms and their furniture are painted and carved with mottoes and texts, and portraits with autographs of royal visitors hang on the walls. The entrance to the cellar was under the bed. ‘Ajö, ajö,’ exclaimed Miss Buxton, in our newly acquired Norsk, as the old landlady descended into it to get us some ale.

“We arrived at the little châlet of Tinoset on the wrong day for the steamer down its lake, and had to engage a private boat. The little lake was lashed by the wind into furious purple billows, and the voyage was most wretched. A horrid male creature from Middlesborough, whom we surnamed the ‘Bumble Bee,’ accompanied us. I was brutal enough to make him over to Miss Holland, by saying, ‘This lady will be deeply interested to hear all you have to say,’ and to her he buzzed on perpetually. He told us that the people of Middlesborough were astonished—and no wonder—at his building in the midst of that hideous red manufacturing place a black and white timber house in imitation of one at Coventry, and designing to be carved on its barge-board the charming inscription—

“From our landing-place at Strand we had several hours’ drive along an unprotected precipice to the Rjukan-foss, the 560 feet high fall of a mountain torrent into a black rift in the hills. It is a boiling, roaring abyss of waters, with drifts of spray which are visible for miles before the fall can be seen itself, but the whole is scarcely worth the trouble of getting there, though a little mountain inn, with a well-earned dinner of trout and ale, and a quiet hour amongst the great grey larkspurs, furnish pleasant recollections.

“As we returned to Kongsberg, we stopped to see Hitterdal, the date-forgotten old wooden church so familiar from picture-books. Here we were told by our landlady that she would not give us any dinner—‘Nei, nei, nothing would induce her; perhaps the woman at the house with the flag would give us some.’ So, hungry and faint, Miss Holland and I sallied out as avant-couriers to the house with the flag. All was silent and deserted except for a dog, who received us furiously. Having pacified him, and finding the front door locked, we made good our entrance at the back, examined the kitchen, pried into all the cupboards, lifted the lids of all the saucepans, and not till we had searched everything for food ineffectually, were met by the lady of the house, a pleasant young lady, speaking English perfectly, who informed us, with no small surprise at our conduct, that we had been committing a raid upon her private residence. Afterwards we found a lonely farmhouse, where also there had once been a flag, where they gave us a very good dinner. Two young girls, whom we had first met at the Rjukan-foss, dined with us, and made us acquainted with their parents. The father, an old man who smoked an enormously long pipe, turned out to be the Bishop of Christiansand.

“On the 25th we started from Kristiania for Throndtjem, the whole journey of three hundred and sixty miles very comfortable and only costing thirty francs. There is no great beauty in the scenery, but pleasant variety—rail to Eidswold, with bilberries and strawberries in birch baskets for sale at the railway-stations: a vibrating steamer on the long dull Miosen lake: railway again, with some of the carriages open at the sides: a night at Koppang, a large station, where several people, strangers to each other, are expected to share the same room. On the second day the scenery improves; the railway sometimes runs along, sometimes over the river, till the gorge of mountains opens beyond Storen into a rich open country, with turfy mounds which reminded us of the graves of the hero-gods of Upsala, till, beyond the deep cleft in which the river Nid runs between lines of old painted wooden warehouses, rises the burial-place of St. Olaf, the centre of Northern Christianity, the shrine of Northern faith, the stumpy-towered cathedral of Throndtjem.

“The most northern railway station and the most northern cathedral in Europe.”

“August 8.—To the last the unspeakable beauty of Throndtjem grew upon us. It is not at first sight of its wide streets of low timber houses, or even of its fiord with purple mountain background, or of its glorious cathedral in the wide-spreading churchyard, which is the town-garden as well as the centre of all its sympathies, that you learn to admire it, but after many sunsets have turned the fiord into rippling gold, and sent an amethystine glow over the mountains, and after many rambles along the shores to rocky points and bosky hillocks.

“After much indecision, we determined to return from Throndtjem by road, and engaged two carriages at Storen, with a pleasant boy named Johann as a driver. At every ‘station’ we changed horses, which were sent back by a boy who perched on the luggage behind, and we marked our distances by calling our single carriole horses after the kings of England. Thus, setting off from Storen with William the Conqueror, we drove into the Romsdal with Edward VI., but (after a drive with Lady Jane Grey) setting off again with Bloody Mary, our kings of England failed us long before our driving was over, and we used up the kings of Rome also. It was a very wild interesting life, and there was a great charm in going on and on into the unknown, meeting no one, dining on trout and pancakes at a station at midday, sleeping in odd, primitive, but always clean rooms, and setting off again at 5.30 or 6 A.M. There are bears and wolves in the forest, but we never saw any. Their skins, shot during the winter, are hanging up in almost all our sleeping-places. The prices are extraordinarily low, and the homely, cordial people kissed our hands all round on receiving the smallest gratuity, twopence halfpenny being a source of ecstatic bliss. But the journeys were tremendous, as we were sometimes called at four, and did not get in till twelve at night.

There was for a long time nothing especially fine in the scenery, except one gorge of old weird pine-trees in a rift of purple mountain, and the high moorland above Jerkinn, where the great ranges of white Sneehatten rise above the yellow grey of the Dovre Fyeld, hoary with reindeer moss. From Dombaas, we turned aside down the Romsdal, which soon became beautiful, as the road wound above a chrysopraz river, broken by many rocky islets, and swirling into many waterfalls, but always equally radiant, equally transparent, till its colour is washed out by the melting snows in a ghastly narrow valley which we called the ‘Valley of Death.’

“The little inn at Aak is very delightful, with a large garden on the hillside, and the views indescribably glorious—of the tremendous peaks of pink granite, or fields of pathless snow embossed against a sky delicately blue above, but melting into clearest opal.... There was much in the place, as at Throndtjem, which recalled my former life, and I seemed to go back into a lost past, to read a page long pasted down and put away. In both places we should have stayed for weeks; in both, I could see our trio sallying out every morning with campstools and books, making friends with the natives, or in the quiet of home life, with its home occupations in the little inn.

“And now, after many more stations, we have passed through Lilliehammer, and are again on the Miosen lake, speeding through the closing days of our tour.”

“Orkeröd near Moss, on the Kristiania Fiord, August 9.—On reaching Kristiania last night, I found a most gracious telegram from the Queen, through Countess Rosen, desiring that I would spend my last days in Norway with her. So I came this morning by the early steamer. Most beautiful were the long changing reaches of the fiord, with the rocks covered with foliage, already waving towards autumn, the rich russet and golden tints of the trees repeating themselves in the water. At Moss (to the intense astonishment of a very vulgar American family on board, who had given themselves indescribable airs to me) a royal carriage with two chasseurs in cocked hats and plumes was in waiting, and the King’s chamberlain was standing on the pier to receive me. We drove swiftly up a rocky forest road to the large villa which a merchant of Kristiania has lent to the Queen for the benefit to her health from the pine air. Another merchant close by has lent his to the King, as the immense personnel of the court could not possibly live in one house. As we drove up through the garden, a tall figure in a wide-awake hat emerged from one of the windows upon the terrace. ‘Sa Majesté le Roi!’ said the chamberlain; so I jumped out of the carriage, and he came forward at once with ‘Is it Mr. Hare? The Queen has spoken of you so much, that you are not like a stranger. The Queen will be delighted to see you, and so am I. We were so glad to hear that you would come to see us in our quiet country life. You will find nearly the whole family, only my second son, Oscar, has left us to-day. I am especially glad that you will see the Prince Royal, my eldest son, Gustaf. You will have a very little room with us, for we are so full, but you will have a good bed, and that is the essential. Come now and take a walk with me in the garden.’ So we walked and he talked, chiefly about Rome. Then he took me to the Prince Royal, who was sitting under the trees with the Countess Rosen, two maids of honour, and Baron Holtermann, the marshal of the palace. There we sat some time and talked till the Queen emerged from the house. I went towards her, and met her amongst the flower-beds. She looks wonderfully well, far better than at Segenhaus. Nothing could be more cordial or kind than her reception of me. We walked on the terrace for some time, and she talked of the great event since we parted, the attack on the Emperor, and of the Crown Princess.

“Then we went to sit under the trees and we talked of Throndtjem. The Queen described her first journey thither to her coronation. The King had been making a tour round by the North Cape, and she went to meet him. She went in a succession of carrioles by Lilliehammer and then by the Romsdal. At all the little stations people met her with flowers. ‘Art thou the mother of the land?’ they said, ‘art thou the mother of the land? Thou lookest nice, but thou must do more than look nice; that is not the essential.’ She said that even at Throndtjem the peasants touchingly and familiarly always called her ‘Du.’ ‘Art thou the mother of these tall boys?’ they said, and they would pray aloud that she might be blessed—in her husband, in her children, and in her home. One old woman asked the Countess Rosen to beg the Queen to go upon the roof of the house—‘then we shall all see her.’ The Queen also described her last journey back from Segenhaus. Her two horses, her dog, and her donkey travelled with her.

“Soon the beautiful donkey of our Segenhaus walk was brought round, with its crimson trappings, and the Queen mounted, and went off through the forest to the King’s house. I went in a kind of large open car with the Countess Rosen, the maids of honour, and the chamberlain. We reached the King’s villa before the Queen, and all drew up in two lines in the porch to receive her. There were also a great number of the people of Moss to see her arrive, as it is known she always does so at this hour. The King gave his arm to the Queen, and we all went to luncheon in a garden pavilion. Here the two youngest Princes came in,—Carl, a very handsome boy of seventeen, and Eugène, of twelve. The King called me to come up to a tiny round table at the end of the room on a daïs, where he and the Queen were alone, and made me sit with them on their divan. He said, ‘I shall now leave out your Mr. and only call you Hare, and upon that we will all drink healths;’ and he made me clink my glass with his and the Queen’s. The King talked much of the Prince Royal and his education, of all the languages he thought he ought to learn, and (perfectly without ostentation) of his own very great facility for learning—‘catching’—languages, and of the great advantage it had been to him through life. I had had no food since six o’clock in the morning and was almost fainting with hunger, so, in spite of the honour of sitting with the King and Queen, I greatly envied the court at their good luncheon below, as their Majesties (and consequently I) had only coffee cups for their soup, and a tiny slice of bread and cheese apiece.

“Then the Queen mounted her donkey again, the King lifting her up, while the young Princes, climbing the pillars of the verandah behind their mother, made a pleasant family group. The cap of the Queen’s chasseur fell off, and the King picked it up for him and playfully pushed it tight down upon his head. Then the King and Princes started to walk, and I for a long drive with the Countess Rosen and some of the court. And now I am resting and the Queen has sent me a number of English newspapers to read. A propos of the picture of Lord Beaconsfield receiving the Garter in the Illustrated, the King said, ‘Now, let us talk a little politics. I like and admire most things English, but I will not conceal from you that I do not admire Lord Beaconsfield. I did not think his conduct about Cyprus was quite straightforward.’”

“August 10.—At four o’clock yesterday the whole court met in the drawing-room, so many gentlemen turning up from hidden corners, that it made twenty-four persons in all. The Prince Imperial recognised me immediately when he came in, and was exceedingly cordial and friendly. I was really glad to see him again. He is as nice as he can be, but as to appearance, his photographs flatter him, as he has such a bad complexion and his legs are too short. He is, however, quite delightfully frank and winning. He kissed the Queen’s hand very prettily and gracefully as she came in, looking very well with large bunches of natural double geranium upon the white lace of her dress and in her hair. He took the Queen, the King took Countess Rosen, and we all followed to dinner. I was desired to sit by the Prince Royal. His peculiar features are redeemed by a good expression when animated. He talks no English and atrocious French, and was difficult to get on with at first. Prince Carl, the third son, is very handsome, and seems to have a charming disposition. After dinner the princes were to go out fishing, and the head fisherman sent to say that there would be no room for little Prince Eugène, as there were so many of the Prince Imperial’s suite to be taken. Prince Carl came to the Queen and begged that Eugène might not be told, he would be so disappointed, and that he might stay at home in his place; and the Queen said, ‘Charles is always like that; he never can be persuaded to think of himself.’ I tried to talk of Rome to the Prince Royal, but whenever a maid of honour on the other side claimed his attention, was glad to subside into conversation with an old chamberlain. The King drank healths at dinner, the Prince Imperial’s, mine, Count Murat’s. The Prince Royal asked me to clink glasses with him. ‘Do you like that custom?’ he said. A Swedish noble, appointed to wait on the Prince Imperial, stood up when the King drank his health. Then I saw the other side of the King—in very cold stern rebuke. ‘In good society gentlemen do not stand up when their healths are drunk,’ and that in the severest tones. The Queen looked surprised, and a momentary chill fell upon the whole party. I am sure that the Swede, who was a very bumptious young man, had done or said something before which had displeased the King.

“When the princes were gone to their fishing, the Queen made me come and sit by her. She returned at once to the subject of the Prince Royal and her great anxiety that I should be much with him abroad. ‘He must learn his world,’ she said, ‘he knows so little of it. He is thoroughly good, but what he wants is enthusiasm, he wants to be incited to knowledge, to learning his future out of the past, and oh! you can help him so much, and if you will, I shall always be so grateful to you: but remember, and I know it will always help you to be kind to my boy if you do remember, what my boy’s future must in all probability be. Oh, Mr. Hare, do when there is a chance, sow some little seeds of good in my son’s young heart, and remember that what you do is not only done for the Prince Royal, not even for his mother, who entirely trusts you, but for the thousands upon thousands of people whom he may one day be called upon to influence. Whatever happens, if you will only interest yourself for my boy, you will believe in his mother’s gratitude.’

“The Queen continued to talk long in this manner with the utmost animation, till the Countess Rosen, suddenly seeing some sign of illness unobserved by us, ran round and said, ‘Dear Majesty, you must not now speak any more,’ and led her away with a charming mixture of motherly affection and playful deference.

“When Countess Rosen returned, she said, ‘The King desired that as soon as the Queen had ceased speaking to you, you should go to him: he especially wishes to talk to you alone.’ I found the King under a tree in the garden, reading a book (the ‘Odes of Horace,’ I think), and, fearing to disturb him, I pretended to occupy myself with the flowers, but he perceived me at once, closed the book, and coming to me, took my arm, and walked up and down on the terrace. ‘The Queen has been speaking to you of our son,’ he said; ‘I know what the Queen has been saying, and I wish to continue her conversation. He is a good boy, but he has not been tried; he has no idea what the world is like, nor of the many temptations which lie in wait for a young man, above all for a prince. Now the Queen and I are quite agreed that it is our wish that you should be as much to our son as possible, and I wished to see you alone that you might believe that all that his mother wishes, his father wishes also.’ The King then talked in detail of the Prince’s probable life in Rome, of the places and people he must see. ‘Please understand at once that my son must go to the Quirinal,’ he said. He went on to talk more earnestly of England, of the difficulties of all the lines to be drawn, and of all the individual persons whom it might be well for the Prince to see, and also some to be avoided. He wished the Prince to have a quiet month in England, to accustom himself to language and people, before going to London: he thought of Torquay; I suggested St. Leonards. He talked of Lady Waterford, whom he remembered many years ago, and admired almost more than any woman living, and wished that she might be persuaded to give an invitation to his son.

“Speaking of the course of study which would be best for the Prince led the King to talk of the great pleasure a thorough knowledge of Latin had been to himself, both for its own sake and as making all other languages easy to him.

“The King talked much of the anxieties at Berlin, and of the cloud over the royal life there. ‘Oh, how thankful I ought to be, how thankful I continually am, for our quiet corner, for a reign which is one of love. I never felt this more than in the Queen’s lonely carriole journey to her coronation at Throndtjem, and it was renewed lately in our son’s journey to Tellemarken. And though our people care for us, they do not flatter us. When the Queen was in the little village churches, near the different small stations where she passed her Sundays, the simple village curates of those mountain districts did not hesitate to preach to their Queen of all that she ought to do, of all that her life ought to be for herself and others, and oh! we are so grateful to them.’

“While we were talking, the court ladies were playing at croquet on the lawn. The King afterwards joined them, and I took a short walk with Baron Holtermann, marshal of the palace, and then went in and sat down to read in the drawing-room. Presently the King put in his head from the Queen’s room—‘Yes, he is here,’ he said, and then he called me to come in to the Queen. They then both of them took my hands and spoke to me in a most touching manner about the Prince Royal. The Queen also spoke of the uncertainty of her life, and of renewed meetings in distant Norway, and of her hope of seeing me in another world. She gave me her portrait. I could not but feel it a very solemn moment and very affecting. They took me out on the balcony of the room for one quiet moment. ‘Remember how we trust you,’ they said. And we looked down upon the fountain playing and the burnt grass and brilliant flowers in the moonlight and then we went back to the public rooms.

“The Prince Imperial and the Swedish princes now returned from fishing, singing at the pitch of their voices through the woods, and we all went upstairs to supper. Their Majesties and the whole court had—Swedish fashion—each a great bowl of sour milk, with a great hunch of bread and two preserved peaches in a glass. The Prince Royal, by whom I again sat, fortunately asked for sweet milk, so I was able to do so also. Then the King and princes went to the other house, and I took a sad farewell of the beloved Queen. If ever there was a woman who united the truest, widest spirit of Christianity with every earthly grace, it is Queen Sophie of Nassau.

“The Queen’s dresser was turned out of a room for me—a good room, but with neither soap nor bath, no chance or understanding of hot water, and the looking-glass quite unavailable! Swedes are accustomed to none of these things as necessaries in houses where they visit.

“At 8 A.M. Baron Holtermann fetched me to walk through the woods to the King’s house to breakfast, after which I walked with the King to the pier at the end of the garden. There the younger princes kissed their father, and the Prince Imperial (who was going away at the same time and whom the King would accompany to Kristiania) took leave of the court. It was an intensely hot day, the town of Moss and the shore of the fiord seeming to steam with hot mist and the flowers all drooping. A little steam-pinnace took us all to the luxurious steamer, where there was boundless space for sitting or walking or whatever we liked. The voyage was very long—five hours. I sat reading ‘Ticknor’s Memoirs,’ and the King and Prince Imperial came occasionally to talk to me. I found in the book an account of the Prince’s grandmother, Comtesse de Téba, in her prime, which interested the King very much. He said, ‘The Prince Imperial keeps me in a perpetual state of mental tension: he does ask me such questions. I am always wondering what he will say next. He is almost too intelligent a young man. He has just asked me to tell him how long a steamer takes to get up steam. I have seen hundreds of steamers getting up steam, but I never thought before how long it took. However, I have had to think now, and it takes five quarters of an hour. Oh, the Prince Imperial is very good mental exercise.’

“Half-way down the fiord, the Prince Imperial insisted upon it that he must bathe. At first the King said it was impossible, that the moment of his arrival at Kristiania was fixed, that the people were waiting to see him, that the steamer could not be delayed—in fact, that it was out of the question. But while the King was discoursing, the Prince Imperial stripped off every article of clothing he had on, and after rushing up and down the deck perfectly naked, jumped into the sea over the poop and swam like a fish. The King then was obliged to stop the steamer, as he could not leave the Prince Imperial in the middle of the fiord, and he told an aide-de-camp to undress and go to pick out the Prince. The Prince lay on the breast of the waves laughing at the King till the aide-de-camp reached him, and then he dived, disappeared for some time, and came up on the other side of the vessel. The Prince Royal then undressed and went in too, and two aides-de-camp, and they all swam and pursued each other like mermen. When at last the Prince was persuaded to re-embark, he sang and shouted in most uproarious spirits. Then came luncheon. The King proposed the Prince’s health—‘Mon cher hôte et mon cher neveu’—and then he proposed mine, saying, ‘I drink to your meeting with the Prince Royal at Rome, and you will be kind to my boy?’

“We entered Kristiania in triumph—all the towers, houses, and masts of the vessels in the harbour decorated with flags, cannon firing, and crowds of people on the quays. At the station were crowds too, waiting for the royal carriages as they drove up. There was quite a procession of them. I went in the second carriage with Count Murat. At the station I had just time to present the Miss Hollands, then I took leave of the king.”

“August 17.—The Prince Imperial travelled with us from Kristiania. It was an ovation to him the whole way—crowds at all the stations, and shouts of ‘Hoch, Hoch!’ instead of ‘Hurrah.’

“We parted company with the Prince at Helsingor, whence we went to Fredensborg, a dull château and pretty garden, and then to Frederiksborg, really magnificent, one of Christian IV.’s grandest buildings, on three islands in a lake.

“We have since seen Bremen with the grand calm face of the gigantic Roland-Säule raised above the busy market, and Münster with its old cathedral and Congress-hall, and now we are at Tournai, where there is a noble cathedral, contrasting in its serious thoughtfulness of design with the frippery and sameness of Cologne. And to-day, being in the octave of St. Roch, Tournai is hung with flags for a really beautiful procession—crosses, banners, images, reliquaries carried aloft by troops of young girls in white and blue and little boys in mediaeval dresses. Some of the tiny children in golden oak-chaplets, and with great golden oak-bouquets or golden lilies, are quite beautiful.

“And to-day, too, we pass out of the peculiar existence of the last two months into ordinary working life again. Great is the thankfulness I feel for all, especially for my kind and pleasant companions.”

I spent the late summer of 1878 very quietly at home, busied in completing the Life of the Baroness Bunsen. Many guests came and went, amongst them Miss Wright, whose constant kindness and affection had been so much to me for many years. Whilst with me she was very ailing, but it was only supposed to be rheumatism, and doctors, who examined her carelessly, sent her from Holmhurst to Buxton, which was fatal to her, for her real disorder was heart-complaint. I never shall forget the bitter anguish of the shock, gently and tenderly broken as it was by Mary Lefevre, when I read that I should never see again the loving devoted friend of so many years, who alone was always ready to help me in any difficulty, always glad to fight a battle for me, and whose humble nature so terribly overrated me, making me, however, long to struggle up in reality to that higher shelf on which I saw she had mentally placed me. Hers was one of—

Wonderfully, though simply and unconsciously, did she fulfil the ideal of a holy life which is given us in the 15th Psalm. But it was not till she was gone, till her outpouring of gentle tenderness was silenced for ever, that one realised all she had been, and that her loss left a void for life which could never be filled up. Constantly have I gone back with useless self-reproach—would that I had done more to make her happy! would that I had always been more grateful in reciprocating so much kindness!—and most constantly have I been reminded—

Years have passed away as I write, but I can scarcely bear to speak of her, even to write of her, even now. “How holy are the holy dead! How willingly we take all the blame to ourselves which in life we were so willing to divide.”[290] “Nevermore” is one’s echo of regret, but “too late” is that of repentance.

Dear Lady Williamson passed away from us in the same autumn, deeply loved too, but in her blindness and deafness one felt that her life—her entirely noble and beautiful life—was lived out, which one could not feel dear “Aunt Sophy’s” to be. She seemed to die, her life unfulfilled.

Throughout the autumn I had heard frequently from the Queen of Sweden and Norway, through the medium of her principal lady in waiting, the Countess Ebba von Rosen. The entire confidence and noble friendship expressed in these letters made it impossible for me to hesitate, when, after the Prince Royal had spent some time in Paris, it became the strong wish of her Majesty that I should join him at Rome. It was in entire concert with the King and Queen that I drew up the scheme of a series of peripatetic lectures for the Prince, in which, by describing historic events on the places with which they were connected, I hoped to fix those events and their lessons in his recollection. Their Majesties also agreed to the plan of my inviting others to join the excursions of the Prince. It was, however, with great misgiving that I left England, feeling that I gave up my pleasant home and congenial occupations in England for the constant companionship of a young man who had not, in our short previous acquaintance, made a very favourable impression upon me, and who might—should he take that line—resent my exertions in his behalf, and look upon me rather as a spy for his parents than as a friend to himself. When I once reached Rome, however, these fears were soon set at rest, and during the whole nine months which I passed in constant intimacy with the Prince, I never once had to reproach him with want of consideration for myself personally, but, on the contrary, always received from him marks of the utmost esteem and affection.

On the evening of November 16 I left Holmhurst, having worked at the index of my Bunsen Memoirs till within ten minutes of my departure. Upon the passage of the Mont Cenis I came in for terrible snowdrifts. Suddenly, after passing the tunnel, the walls of snow increased on each side of the train so as almost to block out the light, and, with a dull thud, the train came to a standstill near the wretched village of Oulx. An avalanche had fallen upon the luggage train which was pioneering our way, and three poor men were engulfed in it. The cold was terrific, and the suffering was increased in my case, because, having usually been much tried by the overheating of foreign trains, I had brought no carriage-rug or other wraps with me. After some time a way was cut through the snow walls to a miserable tavern, where sixteen ladies decided to sleep or cower in one wretched room and twelve gentlemen in another, but I gladly made my way back to the carriage before the passage was blocked again. It was then two in the afternoon, and wearily the day wore on into night, and still more wearily passed the night hours, with snow always falling thickly. I had a little brandy in the carriage, but no food. The suffering from cold was anguish. There were several invalid ladies in the train, for whom I felt greatly, knowing what this catastrophe would have been in times past before I was alone. Before morning two more avalanches had fallen behind us and the return to France was cut off. The telegraph wires were all broken, and the guard assured us that it was possible we might be detained days, or even weeks. At midday, cold and hunger made me try the hovel once more, but the filth and smells again drove me back to the carriage. At 4 P.M., however, on the second day, a welcome shouting announced that our deliverance was at hand. No trains arriving at Turin, our position was suspected, and the town-firemen were sent out en masse to cut a way for us. At 6 P.M. we were released from our twenty-eight hours’ imprisonment, but the way was so dangerous, that we did not reach Turin till long after midnight.

“26 Piazza di Spagna; Rome, Nov. 25, 1878.—You will imagine how touching—I shall never grow used to it—was the slow approach by rail round the walls of Rome, crossing all the little lanes we knew so well in our drives, and seeing, one after another, S. Paolo, the Caius Cestius, the Porta S. Sebastiano, S. Giovanni in Olio, Porta Maggiore, the Minerva Medica, and then the vast space once occupied by the beautiful Villa Negroni, but now parcelled out for straight streets and stuccoed houses.

“Yet, considering it is four years since I was here last, the changes are not great yet: the same old man with peaked hat and long beard and the same pretty girls stand waiting as models: the same old stonecutter is grinding away under the Tempietto, and Francesco threw open Miss Garden’s door and announced (simply) ‘Il Signorino,’ as if I had been there the day before.

“On Sunday, Umberto and Margherita of Savoy made a triumphal entry into Rome, and I went to the Palazzo della Consulta to see them arrive at the Quirinal. It was an exquisitely beautiful evening—not a breath of air stirring the many flags: the obelisk and statues and the grand fountain of Pius VII. were in deep shadow, but the sun was glinting through the old ilexes in the Colonna Gardens and illuminated S. Peter’s and the town in the hollow. There was an immense crowd of every class, from ex-guardia nobile to peasants in the costumes of Sora and Aquino, and through them all the vast procession of sixty carriages moved to the palace, with flags flying, and flowers falling, and cannon thundering, and the one little bell of the royal chapel tinkling away as hard as it could, because the other churches would make no sign. ‘I Sovrani,’ as all the people called them, looked very proud and happy, and Queen Margherita marvellously graceful, and pleased to see the millions of marguerites, which people were wearing in honour of her. The little Principe de Napoli is quite hideous, but they say well brought up under an English governess, and King Umberto in every way seems to wish to reform his dissolute father’s court, as well as to screen his memory, having taken the whole of his enormous debts upon himself, besides paying off Victor Emmanuel’s eight ‘domestic establishments’ out of his private purse. The King and Queen came out upon the balcony of the Quirinal, and were triumphantly received. (Next after the royal carriages had come a fourgon with the bouquets presented at the station.) Last night there was a torchlight procession, tens of thousands bearing torches, with music, banners, and gigantic marguerites, who passed through the Piazza di Spagna on their way to the Quirinal. Still, taxes are rather increasing them otherwise; the misery of the formerly prosperous Romans is extreme, and many think a revolution imminent.

“Monsignor Prosperi is dead. I wonder if you remember about that most extraordinary person, who was supposed to have the evil eye. The Romans believe that all the many misfortunes of this year, and the attacks on royalty, &c., are because it fell to his turn to cantare la missa at S. Maria Maggiore on the first day of the year. No end of shipwrecks and railway accidents are attributed to him, and so the poor man’s death is a subject of general rejoicing. It is recollected that after the last visit he ever paid, the servant of the house fell down on the stairs, and cut his eye open with the Monsignore’s visiting-card which he held in his hand.”

On arriving in Rome, I had found a tolerable little apartment for myself in 29 Piazza di Spagna, and the Prince Royal established in the charming sunny first floor of the Palazzo Rocca-Giovine in the Forum of Trajan. Thither I used daily, often twice a day, to go to the Prince. From the first he welcomed me very cordially, and I could see that he was really glad of my coming, still I was uncertain whether there would ever be more than an interchange of courtesy and duty between us. I never hoped to be able to give him the real affection I afterwards so sincerely felt. Somewhat to my consternation, I was desired by the King to fix my first lecture for the Prince for one of the very first days after my arrival, in order that Baron Holtermann, marshal of the palace, who was returning to Stockholm, might take back a full account of “how it went” to their Majesties. The Queen added her special request that I would say nothing except in English, in order to force the Prince-Royal to learn that language.

As being the central feature and axis of ancient Rome, I chose the Capitoline for my first lecture. General and Mrs. Stuart and Lady Agnes Douglas met me there at the top of the steps, and waited for the Prince, who arrived on foot with Baron Holtermann and two other Swedish gentlemen. I doubt at first whether they understood a word I said in English, and the being obliged constantly to translate into French or bad German did not add to the liveliness of the lecture. Our procession passed from point to point in the most funereal manner. The Prince made no observation whatever, Romulus, the Tarpeian Rock, Marcus Aurelius passing equally unnoticed; only when we came to Palazzo Caffarelli he said, “Oh, that was where Mim Bunsen was born:” it had touched a chord of human interest.

I wonder what sort of account of this lecture Baron Holtermann can have taken to the Swedish court; but we did better next time, when, on the Palatine, the Prince’s spirits quite rose over all the murders of the emperors and empresses. In the latter part of the winter, the lectures, which took place three times a week, were quite an enjoyment, he was so merry, so kind and pleasant to every one, so glad to know everything.

Very soon, after consultation with M. de Printzsköld, the Queen’s chamberlain, who had accompanied the Prince to Rome, I proposed going twice a week to read English with the Prince in the late afternoon, which was gladly accepted, and on those occasions we read “Mademoiselle Mori” alternately, and translated “Tolla” into English. It was in the little conversations which inevitably interspersed themselves with these readings that I first learnt to know my Prince really well. The readings themselves he found it very difficult to attend to, and the exercises he prepared for me were much against the grain, so we did not make much progress till I obtained an order from the Queen that the equerries should do the same exercises as the Prince, which roused his ambition, and he went ahead at once, and always did much better than his companions. I think it is Adam Smith who says that “the great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.” After our lessons, I always dined with the Prince, sitting on his right hand. Afterwards the Prince and his Swedish gentlemen smoked, and as soon as it was possible to do it, I took my leave, except on evenings when I went out into the world with the Prince. But for the most part the Prince’s evenings were spent at home, the Italian court showing him no attention, and scarcely any of the Roman princes inviting him, except during the Carnival. Old Lady Morton was throughout exceedingly kind and helpful where the Prince was concerned, and gave several parties for him. At these, the Prince’s distant cousins, Princess Gabrielli, Countess Primoli, and Countess Campello, the round fat elderly daughters of Lucien Bonaparte, were always present.[291] They were pleasant sensible women, especially Countess Primoli (Princess Charlotte Bonaparte). Having all married beneath their rank, they always made a point of going in and out of a room in the order of their age, which had often a funny effect.

Of all the people who welcomed me back to Rome, the most cordial were the blind Duke and the Duchess of Sermoneta, whom I was delighted to find established for the winter in the upper floor of the old Caëtani Palace. Since her marriage, the Duchess had contrived to conciliate the whole Caëtani family, not only to herself, but to each other. She had also ransacked the unknown corners of the palace, and had found endless old hangings, old portraits, &c., things almost valueless in themselves, but which gave the bare walls a look of historic antiquity. I often took the Prince to the evening receptions of the Duchess, at which, as at all the princely Roman houses, some tea and very sour lemonade were considered quite sufficient as refreshments. Without the Prince, I often dined with the Sermonetas at their homely early excellent Italian dinner, and an oasis in commonplace life was meeting there the Abbot Marcaldi of La Cava, the Abbot Pescitelli of Farfa, and a most beautiful old Don Pietro Tailetti, canon of St. Peter’s—like a mediaeval picture. They had all wished to see me, from their pleasure in the chapter on the Benedictine rule in “Days near Rome.”

“Dec. 11, 1878.—I always see the Prince now with increased satisfaction and an increasing certainty that he likes having me with him. I also feel that I am able to be to him all that the Queen of Sweden wished, of which at first I was uncertain. In our walks he asks so many questions about what he sees, that I have to work hard in the evenings before to prepare myself to answer properly, for I find that I have forgotten much of the detail of my Roman history, &c.... Last week we went for the whole day to Corneto, eating an excellent breakfast provided by the Prince’s cook in the train. Professor Helbig, who had preceded us, met us at the station with a little omnibus. With this we went up into the high hills above old Tarquinii, and then descended with torches into the great sepulchres, where the dead of two thousand years ago are seen (in terra-cotta figures as large as life) sitting round at imaginary banquets, while the walls are covered with paintings of their deeds in life—hunting, fishing, dancing, &c., as fresh in colour as when they were painted. Then we went to visit a Countess Bruschi, who had a great collection of jewels and other beautiful things found in the tombs. This lady was the only person to whom we revealed who the Prince Royal was; but whilst we were at dinner the secret transpired, for there came from the Bruschi palace a bouquet of the most magnificent roses, like a sheaf, carried by two footmen, and another bouquet of camellias, arranged in a huge citron; and then the governor of the town arrived to make a little speech, to which the Prince gave a suitable answer, which I had to translate into Italian; and then all the people found out, and came to look at the Prince.”

On Christmas Day I received a telegram from the Queen of Sweden expressing her good wishes, and thanks for the kindness shown to her son. From a letter received about the same time from Countess Rosen I extract:—

“Stockholm, Dec. 18, 1878.—H.M. the Queen charges me to convey to you her thanks for your letters, which are very welcome. The Queen says you manage to tell just what interests her most about the doings of the Crown Prince. Both the Queen and the King thank you heartily for all your kind interest in the Crown Prince, and they perceive already that you have succeeded in gaining a good and useful influence over him, and that you have kindled up his interest for all that now surrounds him. The Queen is charmed if you write often, but she is afraid that it takes up too much of your time, which is much taxed already through all that you do for the Prince....

“The Queen begs you to write with perfect frankness, even when everything is not quite as one would wish it to be. Be sure that what you say will never be misunderstood.”

“Dec. 5, 1878.—I think my last letter may have expressed some of the depression I certainly felt as to the uncertainty of my position with the Prince Royal, and I know with how much pleasure you will hear that these clouds have completely cleared away. I have increasing, indeed I have now perfect satisfaction in my position with the Prince, and in the internal conviction that I can and may be to him all that the Queen has wished. The great secret is, I suppose, that I am becoming really very fond of him. He not only daily unfolds new gifts and graces for every one, but he is hourly pleasanter and more charming in all his relations to me, and I have now the certainty that I am most welcome to him; but indeed he has always treated me with entire confidence, though you will easily understand that had he possessed the slightest shadow of small-mindedness, he must have looked upon me with a sort of suspicion, from the intimacy with which his parents have honoured me, and my constant letters—which he knows must be about himself—to the Queen.

“To-day my lecture for him was on the Aventine. At S. Sabina I sent in notice of their visitor to the Abbot and the Father-General of the Dominicans, and in his honour the two ladies of our party, Countess Barnekow and Lady Agnes Douglas, were allowed to penetrate the inmost recesses of the convent, and to visit the cell of S. Dominic, with his exquisitely beautiful picture, and the cell of S. Pius V. As we came out of the church, the Abbot presented the Prince with a large basket of oranges and apples, and some leaves from the sacred tree of S. Dominic, and the Father-General with photographs of the convent pictures and view. Afterwards we visited the lovely Priorato garden, still full of flowers, and S. Prisca, and the wild, beautiful Vigna dei Gesuiti.”

It was one of the wise and kind thoughts of the Queen at this time to make it appear to the Prince that an eagerly coveted permission to go to Bucharest and Athens upon leaving Rome was granted in consequence of my petition in his favour. And indeed it was granted—as a Christmas gift—in consequence of my letters to the Queen as to the progress he was making, &c. I often wonder whether my letters to the court of Sweden of this winter have been preserved: I wrote such volumes, often illustrating them with sketches, &c.—“Memoires pour servir pour la vie du Prince Royal.”

“Dec. 19, 1878.—Ere this you will probably have received Madame de Bunsen’s Life ‘from the author.’ There is much in it which will interest you, some things you will not like. So it is with everything and everybody. But I am quite satisfied that it is the most truthful portrait I could have painted, and I trust it may worthily commemorate my dear old friend.

“The news of Princess Alice’s death, announced in a sermon on Sunday, was quite a shock, as I had not heard of her being ill; and she was so kind to me when here, and so interested and amused in correcting ‘Walks in Rome.’

“My dear Prince is very well and happy and enjoying everything. I see him daily, generally for half each day, but have very little new to say about it. I have found a passage about Charles I., by Cowley I think, which expresses just what I hope may be said of him some day: ‘Never was there a more gracious Prince or a more proper gentleman. In every pleasure he was temperate, in conversation mild and grave, in friendship constant, to his servants liberal, to his Queen faithful and loving, in battle brave, in sorrow and captivity resolved, in death most Christian and forgiving.’

“The Queen writes through the Countess Rosen that she is delighted that I am going with the Prince to Florence, and that it was quite the Prince’s own idea; but she fears I shall find him rather a dull companion there, as he has very little taste for picture-galleries.”

“Jan. 6, 1879.—I was very glad to part with 1878—a year of many sorrows—dear Miss Wright’s death the greatest. On the last evening I went to Mrs. Terry’s, where Miss Trollope sang exquisitely ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot’ in the last minutes of the year.

“My last lecture for the Prince was upon the last days of S. Paul, going to the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the last surviving witness of his life, to the desolate Tre Fontane, and then to the huge basilica which sprung from his martyrdom. At the Tre Fontane the Prince found a beautiful piece of old marble railing and a fine fragment of pietra-dura pavement, used to wall in a flower-bed; bought them, and he and I lugged them back to the carriage between us. He is now very happy, and (though there are black days) enjoys everything very much. We have increased our little party by the handsome widowed ‘Anne, Countess of Dunraven,’ and the charming Countess Schulenberg, a North Prussian.

“The Prince and I dined with Lady Morton the other day, meeting Prince and Princess Altieri, Prince and Princess Sulmona, Countess Apponyi, &c. I was very glad that he should meet this completely ‘black’ party, as he has had few opportunities of meeting that phase of politics. On Thursday the Duchess Sermoneta gives another party for him, to which she has taken the fancy to ask all the ‘learned’ people in Rome. My poor Prince will not make much of them, but will be amused with many, especially with Donna Ursilia Lovatelli, who likes to converse in Sanscrit, and who had to be told that she must not bring with her more aides-de-camp than the Prince (four); as her ‘court,’ as she calls it, which likes to follow her, sometimes numbers sixty persons. Madame Minghetti will also bring her court, which is far more Bohemian, amusing, and agreeable.

“But daily I feel more the force of something which I think was said by Charles V. of France: ‘On doit nourrir les princes des vertus, afin qu’ils surmontent en mœurs ceux qu’ils doivent surmonter en honneurs.’”

“Dec. 29.—I am glad to hear of my book, which I have not seen, though it reached Stockholm long ago. It is a pleasure to have an outburst of approval from the Bunsens. Of reviews I think little, knowing how they scarcely ever have anything to do with the merits or demerits of a work, but only with the wish of an editor to advantage or injure an author: besides, the newspapers all copy one another, only changing the words.

“We have had burning sun and intense scirocco here, which of course means a great deal of rain, and there have been torrents each day, but lovely effects between, such masses of cloud rolling over St. Peter’s, with brilliant light falling through upon the many-domed town, and tremendous conflagrations at sunset. I spent Christmas Eve at the Palazzo Colonna, where the Duchess Marino had an immense Christmas-tree for her servants and friends, and a merry party of children. A prettier sight than the tree was the little Duchess herself, in a white silk dress, with a long lace veil looped upon her head and enveloping her figure, ceaselessly carrying presents to servants, poor women, &c. She is really charming, with simple, sincere, cordial manners, and her husband is most pleasant, the very best type of an Italian gentleman. Donna Olympia Colonna was at the tree—very bridal-looking, bright, and pretty.

“With the Prince I have ever more entire satisfaction. I constantly see more of him, and have daily increasing affection for him. Of course the position is not perfect, but I expect this in everything, and am quite sure of his absolute confidence to a degree which I never expected. I am happy in feeling that Rome is doing for him all that the Queen hoped, but which I did not, and that he will return to her indescribably improved in every way. I suppose people who have children of their own are familiar with it, but I could not have conceived before the interest of watching the gradual unfolding and expansion of a character to which one utterly devotes oneself; and with him all was new, it was entirely fallow ground to work upon.

“One day we went to Frascati by rail, taking with us Count and Countess Barnekow and Count and Countess Lievenhaupt, Swedes, and Lady Agnes Douglas. While Lady Agnes did the honours of some of the villas, M. de Printzsköld and I got an excellent though thoroughly Roman dinner ready at the little inn, and afterwards the ladies had donkeys, the Prince a horse, and we others walked up to Tuseulum. Here the Prince was very happy picking up mosaics in the long grass, and eventually insisted on excavating, and lugging back to Rome in his arms, a great mass, as big as that in the verandah at Holmhurst. We came down by the great desolate villa of Mondragone, and returned to Rome in the evening laden with fern and butcher’s-broom, which, with its bright scarlet berries, is the Roman apology for holly.

“The Prince hates the churches, and generally has to be bribed to bear them with equanimity by the promise of a little marble-hunt in some vineyard afterwards, when it is amusing to see the whole party fall to grubbing simultaneously among the artichokes. It has been hard work refusing the endless people who want to go with us, but besides Lady Dunraven we have only admitted pretty little Miss Trollope, the historian’s daughter. I like Princess Teano very much, and am charmed with her anxiety to make the very most of all she sees, and Lord Hylton’s boy, George Jolliffe, is delightful, brimming with enthusiasm and intelligence.”

“Feb. 20, 1879.—Each day, as I have known the Prince Royal better, I have liked him more. He has no sense of beauty and no care for it, and he has naturally very few of my tastes, but he has the most transparent, truthful, simple, loyal character I have ever known, and he has ever been unspeakably kind and affectionate to me. We have been wonderfully thrown together, even all the little circumstances intended by others to divide us having acted the other way, and made us cling to each other with truest friendship.

“All the earlier part of the winter I continued my lectures for him, in which we visited almost every remarkable object in Rome. Our party was much increased latterly, one of its most interesting elements being the Prussian Countess Schulenberg, with whom I formed a great friendship. I wish now that I had written down the many conversations of interest I had with her; she left suddenly in January to take care of a sick cousin in Germany.

“One of the last evenings of the year was spent in the Palazzo Colonna with the sweet little Duchess of Marino. She is a great addition and enlivenment to the dull egotistical Roman society, and is brimming with good intentions and high aspirations, many of which she is really able to carry out. Greatly, for instance, did she astonish modern Rome, with its vulgar attempts at exclusiveness, by opening her rooms for a grand party in the noble old Roman style, in which princes and sculptors met on equal terms, and artists were as cordially received as if they were ambassadors.

“Amongst the acquaintance who came to me with the New Year were the Dutch Minister and Madame de Westenberg, his American wife, from whom I have received much cordiality. Other people with whom I have been intimate are the admirable Swedish Count and Countess Barnekow, the latter especially charming, and full of life and intelligence. The Count has been taking the post of consul here this year, but they have been welcomed in all societies. There is something quite charming in their relation to their children—little girls—and their influence over them. Of these, the second, Elisabet, was compelled at six years old to have her finger amputated. The mother prepared her for it, and told her how terribly it would add to her distress if she did not bear the operation bravely. The child said she could bear it if only they did not tell her it was nothing: she knew it was dreadful, but if no one attempted to deceive her she could bear a dreadful thing. She sat on the surgeon’s knee while the finger was being taken off; she never uttered a sound, and when the operation was over, she kissed him to show she bore no malice!

“On the 16th of January I went, away with my Prince for a tour in Tuscany. I very soon found that for me the trial of the tour would be his hatred of fresh air. He never would have the carriage window opened, even on the hottest day and with steaming hot-water pans. Otherwise all was luxury, kindness, and comfort. We arrived at Perugia on the most glorious evening I ever remember: violet mists were rolling through the valleys, the snow mountains were rosy in the sunset. It was such a scene as can only be enjoyed in Italy, and in Italy can only be found in Umbria, perhaps only at Perugia. But the Prince was much more interested in an illuminated church where there was a function in honour of S. Mauro. Next day we drove to Assisi, where he was far more delighted at buying a little old silver box in a sidestreet than with all the old churches and monasteries. He travelled under the name of the Comte de Tullgarn, and at Perugia no one found out who he was, which made him very happy. At Florence, however, he was unfortunately discovered, and we found great preparations—two smart carriages waiting at the station, twenty-six candles and three lamps burning in our rooms, with prices in proportion, and a serenade of music outside the windows.

“Therefore, as soon as we arrived, I began to look up Florentine acquaintance, and called on the charming Marchesa Elisabetta Torrigiani, who lives with her four sons, three of them married, in the greatest harmony, in the fine old Torrigiani palace. We dined with them, and were greatly delighted with the three beautiful daughters-in-law, especially the Marchesa Cristina, wife of Don Filippo, a member of the once-sovereign house of Malaspina. The Marchese Pietro placed his carriage at our disposal. The family of Corsini were also most civil to us, and their head, the Marchesa Lajatico, gave a great ball in honour of the Prince. Other parties were given to us by the Marchesa Cavoni, Baron de Talleyrand, Sir Digby and Lady Murray, and the Fenzis. One evening we spent with the C. de Bunsens, who asked many interesting people, including Sir James Lacaita, Villari the historian, and the old Duc de Dino, to meet us. One beautiful day we drove out to Castagnuolo, where we were entertained in the ancient hill-set villa by the Marchese della Stufa and Mrs. Ross, and the Prince fed all the rare birds, and visited the farm and the wine-making.

“On leaving Florence, the Prince and I had a really happy day together at Pisa. M. de Printzsköld was then sickening with Arno fever, and when we were at Siena was unable to go out with us: with the others we drove to the mediaeval castle of Belcaro, whose owner, the Marchese Camajori, had long been slightly known to me, and wandered much about the old streets and into the shops of the antiquaries.”

We returned to Rome on the 25th. My regular lectures were over then, but as the Prince missed our little parties, I had some for him to the villas and galleries. At this time, as often afterwards, those who surrounded the Prince gave me the opportunity of testing the truth of Lord Chesterfield’s observation, that “courts are the best key to characters; there every passion is busy, every character analysed,” as well as the dictum of La Bruyère, that at court “les joies sont visibles mais fausses, et les chagrins cachés mais réels.”

“Rome, Feb. 3, 1879.—I feel as if it must be dull reading letters only about the Prince, but as I have not even the possibility of seeing much of any one else, what else can I say? I am obliged to give up everything to his lessons, his invitations, and to trying to help him to make the most of all he sees. He enjoyed Pisa, where I saw the Limosins,[296] and we drove through the forest of San Rossore to the Gombo, where the Prince and I sat long in the warm afternoon upon the little pier above the sea waves, which the dear Mother enjoyed so much there in 1857. I often wonder if she knows what I am doing now, but I feel sure she would be glad and satisfied that so much time should be given up to one who must one day influence tens of thousands. I have many struggles now and much to contend with in the position, but with the Prince himself have nothing but satisfaction. I tumbled downstairs on Saturday night, and was so much hurt as to be all yesterday without seeing him: so to-day at eleven the donna announced—‘Un signorino.’ I was sitting for my picture and was afraid of moving, so waited for the visitor to come round from behind my chair, when behold the Prince, who had escaped from his gentlemen, seized a little carriage in the street, and come off to me. I mention this as an example of the ever-pleasant terms I am on with him, and which make it impossible not to be fond of him.

“I am glad you like the Bunsen Memoirs on the whole. I knew you would not agree with details. She always wondered, as I have always done, how those who really love their Saviour, and wish to follow His precepts, can reconcile themselves to setting up the great idol of Sabbatarianism, the sin against which He was most eager and earnest in warning His disciples, and against which more of His teaching was directed than any other single offence. She also thought, as I have always done, that, next to churches (often misused), theatres (also often misused) were instruments which could be made most widely useful in leavening great numbers of people at once; and therefore she considered that an immaculate company and a play of high principles ought always to be encouraged.”

“Feb. 13.—I have had a series of lectures for the Prince in the Vatican galleries and St. Peter’s, and at the latter, by kindness of Monsignor Théodoli, had all the chapels of the crypt illuminated, and the precious plate and vestments (Charlemagne’s robes, &c.) exhibited. We climbed up to the cross, but the ladies of our little party succumbed on the different roofs, except Lady Dunraven, who went with us to the ball.

“On the 4th I was with the Prince at a ball at the Palazzo Caffarelli, the German embassy, which is much done up since Bunsen’s days and exceedingly magnificent. The great hall was entirely surrounded with palm-trees, under one of which I stood, with the Swedish Countess Barnekow, to watch the procession come in and the state quadrille—which Queen Marguerite danced with M. de Keudel, and my Prince with Mme. de Keudel—alone on the long sides of the room, with a perfect tourbillon of ambassadors and ambassadresses at the narrow ends. A much prettier ball was that at Palazzo Caëtani. This the Prince had to open with the Queen, so we had to be there by eleven, but because the King and Queen were to be there, all the great nobles stayed away, so for once Palazzo Caëtani did not shine. The Queen looked lovely, but, ever since the attack on the King, has been more nervous than ever, perpetually picking at her gloves, twisting her fan, and shaking out the folds of her dress. Her beautiful hair was full of marguerites in diamonds. The King looked glaring and demoniacal, yet really is going on very well, and does all he can to sweep away the abuses and immoralities of his father’s court, unpopular as it makes him with his father’s sycophants. Yesterday I was with the Prince at a great ball at Prince Altieri’s—the blackest of the ‘black’ houses—where I had the great pleasure of seeing again my sister’s dear friend the Duchess Sora, who has lived in a sort of exile hitherto, ever since the Sardinian occupation of Rome.

“Yesterday morning I went with the Prince to the antiquity market in the Campo de’ Fiore. We left the carriage in the courtyard of the Cancelleria, and made a raid upon the old bookstalls, till our arms were quite full, and then we deposited our burthens and made another. The Prince is getting on wonderfully with his English, and will talk fluently by the time he reaches London. I see him ceaselessly. He has been twice to my lodgings to-day, and I have been out with him besides. He dances till 4 A.M. every night now (it is Carnival), but is never tired, and up at eight.”

“Feb. 24.—My present work is likely to end for a time on Thursday, when my dear Prince goes to Naples and Sorrento. On looking back, I have unmixed satisfaction that I came. He leaves Rome quite a different person from the Prince I found here—much strengthened, and I am sure much improved in character, as well as speaking and reading English and French (which he did not know before), and being able to take a lively animated part in a society in which he was previously a cypher. Of course, I personally have been able to do very little more than introduce him and constantly throw him with those who have influenced him, and I have been most ably seconded and helped in everything I wished for him by Lady Morton, the Sermonetas, Princess Teano, and—in her own way—by Lady Paget. To me he has been unfailingly pleasant. I have never had a difficulty with him.

“We have been together several times in the Vatican, with Monsignor Pericoli, at the sale of Pius IX.’s things—quantities of things, from valuable pictures and sculptures to empty jam-pots; but touching in many ways, especially the boxes of the well-worn Papal slippers. All is obliged to be sold, as the produce is divided into three parts—one to the family, one to the cardinals-in-waiting, and the third to the Church. The Prince bought some valuable amethysts, and I have the Papal despatch-box engraved with his arms, a picture which hung in his room, and a pair of the Papal slippers.

“For the last ten days we have been in all the dirt and squalor of the silly, filthy Carnival, which is more mesquin and contemptible than ever; but the Prince is only twenty, and it has amused him. I have only been obliged to go with him to the Corso one day, when we went to one-o’clock luncheon with the Dutch Minister, and were astonished to find every shutter closed, chandeliers and candles lighted, ladies in white satin and diamonds, gentlemen in evening dress; in fact, midnight at midday! so that the Prince and I felt rather shy. However, Mrs. Bruce cheered us by appearing in a bonnet.”

I saw much at this time of Madame Minghetti, the wife of the senator, still wonderfully beautiful and captivating, though a grandmother. Her rooms were draped with every possible nuance of colour which can harmonise together, great palm-trees and bananas shaded the sofas and arm-chairs, and the heavy curtains only let in witching rays of half light upon a gorgeous gloom. Here, in her receptions in the early Sunday afternoon, she would sit upon the floor and sing, break off in the middle of a line to receive or embrace some one, and, in an instant, be again in her place, singing as before and taking up the line which was left unfinished.

Another new friend was the pretty lively Princess of Salm Reifferscheid, whom, with her husband, I invited to accompany us to Tivoli, when the Prince gave me a carriage and told me to ask whom I liked. At Tivoli our party had a charming day, riding on eleven donkeys, penetrating into the depths of the cascades, having luncheon in front of the temple, and sitting in the sun opposite the cascatelle. At sunset we were at the Villa d’Este, and went down into the hollow to look up at the grand old villa, golden through the dark cypresses.

I saw, however, comparatively little of those who usually make the pleasure of my Roman winter, and devoted myself to the Prince. There is no use—none—in trying to be, or to do, two things at once.

“Lady Vernon [297] dreamt. She dreamt that she saw the butler, with a knife in one hand and a candle in the other, crossing the entrance hall, and she woke with a great start. After a little she composed herself to sleep again, and she dreamt—she dreamt that she saw the butler, with a knife in one hand and a candle in the other, on the middle of the staircase, and she woke with a great shock. She got up; she thought she could not be quite well, and she took a little sal-volatile. At last she fell asleep again, and she dreamt—she dreamt that she saw the butler, with a knife in one hand and a candle in the other, standing at her bedroom door; and she awoke in a great terror, and she jumped out of bed, and she said: ‘I’ll have an end of this, I’ll have an end of these foolish imaginations,’ and she rushed to the door, and she threw the door wide open. And there at the door stood the butler, with a knife in one hand and a candle in the other. And when he suddenly saw Lady Vernon in her white night-dress, with her hair streaming down her back, he was so dreadfully frightened that he dropped the candle on the ground and rushed off down the staircase, and off to the stables where there was a horse ready saddled and bridled, on which he meant to have ridden away when he had murdered Lady Vernon; and he rode away without ever having murdered her at all, and he was never, never, never heard of again.”

On the 3rd of March, a well-known partnership of upwards of sixty years was closed at Rome by the death, in his little apartment at 55 Via Sistina, of William Howitt the author leaving his sweet old Mary [298] alone with her unmarried daughter Margaret. Though never very remarkable, the many books of William and Mary Howitt were always excellent, and the writers were deeply respected. I attended Mr. Howitt’s funeral on the 5th, walking with Mrs. Terry, Baron Hoffmann, and Prince George of Solms, immediately after the daughter and son-in-law. The ceremony was a very touching one, and the coffin buried in wreaths of camellias, lilies, and violets. As William Howitt was a Quaker, the service was different from ours, but hymns were beautifully sung over his coffin in the chapel and at the grave, where the American clergyman, Dr. Nevin, gave a really touching and beautiful address, as the daughter was pouring basket after basket of flowers into the open grave.

I dined with the Prince on the day before that fixed for his departure to Naples. When our last moment together came, he took me into his room and parted from me there, with many most affectionate words, and gave me the Order of St. Olaf, which the King of Sweden and Norway had conferred upon me, begging me to wear it for his sake.[299] I left him with the truest affection, and with, I think, unbounded confidence and regard on both sides.

“February 23.—As the Prince’s stay in Rome is now drawing to its close, their Majesties charge me once more to express to you their most heartfelt thanks for all your kindness to the Prince, all the good and useful influence you have had over him, and all your arrangements to combine the useful with the amusing in order to kindle his interest. Their Majesties have always been so happy to know that you were at his side and smoothed all his difficulties. In his own letters the Prince shows that he has learnt to love and appreciate you, and is thankful for all you have done for him.”

“Feb. 28, 1879.—You ask if I was alarmed over my lectures with the Prince, and found them difficult. No, not very. From the first I thought of what Johnson told Sir J. Reynolds, and I tried to do the same. He told him that he had ‘early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company: to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in, and that by constant practice and by never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it had become habitual to him.’ So you see that I have been fortifying myself by wise advice! And I am sure that it is the way in which things are said that fixes them in the mind.”

“Fabj. Altini, the sculptor, says Thorwaldsen declared clay to be the life of art, plaster its death, and marble its resurrection.

“Mrs. F. Walker told me how she went out one evening at Freshwater to meet her brother-in-law and niece as they were returning from an excursion along the cliffs. On her way she saw a lady in deep mourning, with a little boy, emerge apparently from a side path to the one on which she was, and walk on before her. She noticed the lady’s peculiarly light step. Mother and son stopped at a little railed-in enclosure at the top of the hill, and gazed over the railings; then they went on again in front of her. At length, beyond them, Mrs. Walker saw Mr. Palmes and his daughter coming to meet her. Between her and them she saw the lady and boy suddenly disappear—apparently go down some side path leading to the sands; but, when she came to the place, there was no path, the cliff was perfectly precipitous. Miss Palmes equally saw the lady and boy coming towards her, and was greatly agitated by their sudden disappearance.

“Afterwards they found that the same sight was constantly seen there. It was the little boy’s grave into which the two had gazed. He had fallen over the cliff just there and been killed, and was buried by his mother’s wish inside that little circular railing.”

The Prince was in Rome for one night on his way from Naples to Munich, I went to him in the early morning, and was with him till 2 P.M., when he left, spending the time in driving about with him, chiefly to the antiquity shops, in which he always had the greatest delight. The very day after he left I fell in with other royalties, of whom at first I seemed likely to see a great deal. I was at the Princess Giustiniani Bandini’s, when the Hereditary Grand Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Weimar were announced—a very simple homely pair. The lady-in-waiting, hearing my name, most cleverly recollected all about me, and I was presented, and very cordially and kindly received. A few days after, Princess Teano asked me to meet them at dinner. Only the Keudells of the German Embassy and the Minghettis dined besides the family, but an immense party came in the evening. The Hereditary Grand Duke is a weak-looking little man with a very receding forehead. The Grand Duchess (who was his cousin) is a fine big woman—“bel pezzo di carne”—with intense enjoyment and good-humour in everything. “How can anybody be ill, how is it possible that anybody can be unhappy in Rome!” Both talked English perfectly. They arranged then that I should show them the Palatine. But a few days afterwards I heard from the Duchess Sermoneta that the Grand Duchess had said to her that, owing to the furious jealousy of the German archaeologists, she was unable to go with me.

“March 17, 1879.—At Mrs. Terry’s I have met again her sister, Mrs. Julia Ward-Howe, the American poetess. When she wanted me to talk to her and I did not, she said, ‘In your case, Mr. Hare, I must pervert a text of Scripture—“to do good and to communicate forget not.”’

“I have seen much, almost daily, of Lord Hylton’s young son, George Jolliffe, for whom I have an affection ever increased by his confidence in me, which makes me feel more of responsibility as an instrument of possible good in his case than I have ever done in any other. He is a delightful companion in Rome, so full of interest and enthusiasm in all we see.... We went together yesterday to the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, where the old blackened portico was hung with bright tapestry, and the whole staircase and rooms strewn with box, because it was the day on which S. Filippo Neri raised the Massimo child from the dead. Most surprising were the masses of people—cobblers and contadini elbowing cardinals up the long staircase, washerwomen on their knees crowding princesses round the altar. Prince Massimo, in full evening dress, received in the anteroom of the chapel, and the Princess (daughter of the Duchesse de Berri) invited every one she knew to have ices and coffee.

“I went afterwards to Miss Howitt, who talked cheerfully about her father. ‘Rome might possibly not be the place to live in, but it certainly was the place to die and be buried in.’ She spoke of the extraordinary shots made at her father’s life by the English newspapers—how one of them described her mother’s daily walk on the Pincio by the side of a Bath-chair which ‘contained an ancient man,’ &c., the fact being that her mother never walked, that her father always walked, and moreover that there was no Bath-chair in Rome.

“Last night I was at the British Embassy till 1 A.M. I conquered shyness sufficiently to go and talk to the Grand Duchess, though she sat in a row of princesses. The younger Marchesa Lajatico was there—most graceful and charming.”

“March 20.—A young American drove me to the meet at Centocelle. It was a lovely day of soft scirocco, fleecy clouds floating over the pale pink mountain distances and the Campagna bursting into its first green, across which the long chains of aqueduct arches threw their deep shadows. Crowds of people and carriages were out, but we followed Princess Teano, who knew all the ups and downs of the ground, and drove with young Lady Clarendon so cleverly, that we were in at the death in the great ruins of Sette Basse.”

“March 21.—Tea with Countess Primoli (Princess Charlotte Bonaparte) in her little boudoir at the end of a long suite of quaint old-fashioned rooms. She talked very pleasantly, but with too constant reference to the Empress and Prince Imperial as ‘my family.’ I went afterwards to see the Favarts at Ville Lante. It is a beautiful place, and the noble face of Madame Favart is worthy of its setting. Consolo was there and played marvellously on the violin, every nerve seeming to vibrate, every hair to leap in unison with his chords.”

“March 23.—Once more I am on the eve of leaving Rome, more sorry to part with my little winter rooms than I ever expected to be; even my ugly squinting donna, ‘Irene,’ having proved very good and faithful. The time here has been full of interests, independent of royal ones—one of them, the going out to India of Frank Marion Crawford, the son of my dear friend Mrs. Terry. He would probably have done no work in Europe, though he has evinced an ambitious perseverance by voluntarily pursuing the study of Sanscrit—‘because it was so difficult,’ and this has enabled him to accept a vacant professorship in the University at Bombay.”[300]

“Florence, March 27.—I left Rome on Tuesday—a lovely morning, and I looked my last at the glorious view from the Medici Terrace with a heavy heart.

“Now I am in the old Palazzo Mozzi at Florence, as the guest of the Sermonetas. On the side towards the Via dei Bardi the palace rises up gaunt and grim like a fortress, but at the back it looks into a beautiful garden, with terraces climbing up the steep hillside to the old city wall. The rooms are large and dreadfully cold, but the Duchess has made them very picturesque with old hangings and furniture. The Duke talks incessantly and cleverly. I asked him why his Duchess signed ‘Harriet Caëtani,’ not ‘Sermoneta,’ and he explained how all the splendour of the family arose from the fact that they were Caëtani; that many of the greatest of the old families, such as the Frangipani, had no titles at all: that even the Orsini had no title of place, and that it was only modern families, like the Braschi, who cared to air a title. The oldest title in Italy was that of Marchese, which came in with the French: Duke came with the Imperialists; but the title of Prince, for which he had the utmost contempt, was merely the result of Papal nepotism: Borghese was the first Prince created.

“The Duke declared that the word ‘antimonial’ was really ‘antimonacal.’ The alchemists who lived in the old convents used to throw out of the windows the water which they had used in their search after the philosopher’s stone: pigs drank the poisoned water and died: monks (monaci) ate the pigs and died also: hence the expression.

“The Duke is very adverse to open windows: ‘If I want the air I can go out into the piazza,’ he says. To his relations, for the most part, he greatly objects—‘Questi sono i flagelli di questo mondo.’ A monk or nun, he says, is ‘Un insétto chi puo vivere senza aria a senza acqua.’

“We have been at a large party at the Palazzo Torrigiani, and it has been a great pleasure to see again the many members of the large, pleasant, amiable Florentine society.”

Having undertaken to devote myself exclusively to the Prince Royal had made me give up all my usual employments during this Roman winter of 1878-79. The chief event in my life disconnected with the Prince was my being asked to open the session of the British and American Archaeological Society. This I long refused, urging that many others were more worthy and competent, but it was insisted upon, and, to my great surprise, I found myself speaking to a crowded meeting words which I had written down before, but which I never found any need of referring to. Here they are (for I have preserved them nowhere else) from the notes I made:—

“The Secretary of this Society conferred upon me a most unexpected honour when he asked me to open this meeting. I could have wished that he had selected some one more worthy of that honour, for not only am I unaccustomed to public speaking, but I may truly say that I never made a speech in my life. I will therefore hope that my many deficiencies—my more than many deficiencies, may be either overlooked or pardoned.

“But, though the Secretary could have found many persons in Rome better able to address you, with more power of doing justice to their subject than myself, he could not have found one to whom Rome was dearer, about whose heart all its sympathies were more tenderly and closely entwined. Long and intimate family association, perhaps the very fact of having a birthplace in the once beautiful Villa Strozzi, have added to that sense which comes to so many, of looking upon Rome as a second home—a home as familiar almost, quite as tenderly beloved, as the home in far-away England. How truly Chateaubriand has said that those who have nothing left in life should turn their footsteps to Rome: there the very stones can waken into speech; there the very dust beneath our feet can kindle into memories of a past ever fresh and ever sacred. To those who come here first as strangers, the decay, the stagnation, the ruin of everything may be oppressive; they may see only the bareness of the stuccoed streets, they may grumble at the rough pavements, they may be wearied with the petty discomforts and difficulties of daily and practical life:—but no matter! If they only stay here long enough, the love of Rome will insidiously creep upon them; they will feel it difficult to tear themselves away from it; and, when they have left it, it will ever come back to them—in silent hours, in visions of the night—grand ruins lying in silent slumbrous solitude; desolate vineyards flower-carpeted; beautiful villas, where the ancient ilex avenues are peopled with marble statues, relics of a mythical past which in Rome seems almost as real as the present; and above all, the recollection of a mighty purple dome embossed upon a sky whose sunset glory recalls the splendours of the New Jerusalem—first a sapphire, then a chalcedony, then an emerald, then a chrysopraz, last an amethyst.

“In regard to how many Roman scenes do we echo such thoughts as Clough has expressed in his beautiful lines to the Alban Mount:—

“What Madame Swetchine says of life, that you find in it exactly what you put into it, is also true of Rome, and those who come to it with least mental preparation are those least fitted to enjoy it. That preparation, however, is not so easy as it used to be. In the old days, the happy old days of vetturíno travelling, there were so many quiet hours, when the country was not too beautiful, and the towns not too interesting, when Gibbon, and Merivale, and Milman were the pleasantest of travelling companions, and when books of art and poetry served to illustrate and illuminate the graver studies which were making Italy not only a beautiful panorama, but a country filled with forms which were daily growing into more familiar acquaintance. Perugia and Spoleto, Terni and Civita Castellana, led fitly up then to the greater interests of Rome, as courtiers to a king. But in the journeys of the present, the hurried traveller has not these opportunities of preparation, and must rest upon his home-knowledge, and such reading as he can find time for in Rome itself. To such travellers—to those, I mean, who wish to take away from Rome something more than a mere surface impression—I would give one piece of advice gathered from long experience: Never see too much; most of all, never see too much at once; never try to ‘do’ Rome. Better far to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen, and to see well the rest, to see them not once, but again and often again, to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they become a part of your life and your life’s recollections.

“Thus, too, in the galleries. What can be carried away by those who wander over all the Vatican at once but a hopeless chaos of marble limbs, at best a nightmare of Venuses and Mercurys and Jupiters and Junos? But if the traveller would benefit by the Vatican, let him make friends with a few of the statues, and pay them visits, and grow into greater intimacy:—then will the purity of their outlines, the majestic serenity of their godlike grace, have power over him, raising his spirit to a perception of creations of beauty of which he had no idea before, and enabling him to discern the traces of that noblest gift of God which men call ‘genius’ in the humblest works of those who, while they have found the true and right path which leads to the great end, are still very far off.

“I would urge those who are sight-seeing at Rome to read twice about that which they see, before they see it, to prepare themselves for the sight, and after they have seen it, to fix the sight in their recollection. I would also urge all archaeologists to believe that it is not in one class of Roman interests alone that much is to be learnt; that those who devote themselves exclusively to the relics of the kings and the Republic, to the walls, or to the vexed questions concerning the Porta Capena, and who see no interest in the reminiscences of the Middle Ages, and the memorials of the saints and of the popes, take only half the blessing of Rome, and the half which has the least of human sympathy in it. They are blind of one eye, because they see with the other: they are like the foolish Athenians, who have lately pulled down the noble Venetian towers on the Acropolis because they were not Greek.

“Besides this, one should recollect that important relics of Pagan Rome are to be found elsewhere—at Nismes and Treves beyond the Alps, and at many places in Northern Italy; but the memorials of Christian Rome, and of its early bishops and martyrs, are to be found only in Rome and its neighbourhood.

“Those who wish to fix the scenes and events of Roman history securely in their minds will do best to take them in groups. Suppose, for instance, that people wish to study the story of St. Laurence. Let them first visit the beautiful little chapel in the Vatican, where the whole story of the saint’s life is portrayed in the lovely frescoes of Angelico da Fiesole. Let them stand on the green sward by the Navicella, where he distributed the treasures of the church in front of the house of St. Ciriaca. Let them walk through the crypto-porticus of the Palatine, up which he was dragged to his trial. Let them lean against the still existing bar of the basilica, where he knelt to receive his sentence. Let them visit S. Lorenzo in Fonte, where he was imprisoned, and baptized his fellow-prisoners in the fountain which gives the church its name. Let them go hence to S. Lorenzo Pane e Perna, built upon the scene of his terrific martyrdom, which is there portrayed in fresco. Let them see his traditional chains, and the supposed gridiron of his suffering at S. Lorenzo in Lucina; and, lastly, at the great basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura let them admire the mighty church which for 1200 years has marked the site of that little chapel which Constantine built near the lowly catacomb grave in which the martyr was laid by his deacon Hippolytus.

“Let us turn to a very different character. Let us turn to Rienzi. How vivid will his story seem to those who go first to the old tower of the Crescenzi near the Bocca della Verità, which belonged to his ancestors, and then to the street behind S. Tommaso where he was born—the son of a publican and a washerwoman, for to such humble offices were the Crescenzi then reduced. They will find Rienzi again at the little church of S. Angelo in Pescheria, whither he summoned the citizens at midnight to hold a meeting for the re-establishment of ‘the Good Estate,’ and in which he kept the Vigil of the Holy Ghost—and at the Portico of Octavia, on whose ancient walls he painted his famous picture allegorical of the sufferings of the Romans under the oppression of the great patrician families, thus flaunting defiance in the eyes of the Savelli, who could look down upon the picture from the windows of their palace above the Theatre of Marcellus. At S. Giorgio in Velabro the pediment still remains under the old terra-cotta cornice where an inscription proclaimed that the reign of the Good Estate was begun. We must follow Rienzi thence, bareheaded, but in full armour, to the Capitol, and to the Lateran, where he took his mystic bath in the great vase of green basalt in which Constantine is falsely said to have been baptized. We must think of his flight, after his short-lived glories were over, by the light of the burning palace, down the steps of the Capitol, and of his wife looking out of the window to witness his murder at the foot of the great basaltic lioness, which looks scarcely older now than on the night on which it was sprinkled with his blood. Lastly, we may remember that his body was hung, a target for the stones of those by whom he was so lately adored, in the little piazza of S. Marcello in the Corso, and that, in strange contradiction, it was eventually burnt by the Jews in the desolate mausoleum of Augustus, surrounded by Roman emperors, in a fire of dried thistles, till not a fibre of it remained.

“Let us take one more character from a much later time. Let us take Beatrice Cenci. In the depths of the Ghetto, ghastly and grim, still stands the old palace of Francesco Cenci, whose colossal rooms and dark passages were the scene of her long misery. Hard by is the little church which one of that wretched family built in the hope of expiating its crimes. As we walk through the wearisome Tor di Nona on our way to S. Peter’s, we may think of the old tower which gave the street its name, in which the beautiful young girl is said to have undergone for forty hours the torture of the ‘vigilia,’ followed by the still more terrific agony called ‘tortura capillorum.’ At Sta. Maria Maggiore we may look upon the stern face of Clement VIII., the cruel judge who knew no mercy, and who, in answer to all pleadings in their behalf, bade that the whole Cenci family should be dragged by wild horses through the streets of Rome. The ancient Santa Croce palace still stands, in which the Marchesa Santa Croce was murdered by her two sons on the night in which a last effort was being made for the pardon of Beatrice—an event which sealed her fate. In the Corte Savelli we may think of her terrible execution. Before the high altar of S. Pietro in Montorio she reposes from her long agony. And finally, we must go to the Palazzo Barberini, where, in the picture which Guido Reni is said to have painted in her prison, we may gaze upon the pale composure of her transcendent loveliness.

“It is by thus entwining one sight with another, till they become the continuous links of a story, that they are best fixed in the mind. They should also be read about, not merely in guide-books, but in the works of those who, from long residence in Italy and the deep love which they bear to it, have become impressed with the true Italian spirit. Amongst such books none are more delightful than the many volumes of Gregorovius, from his ‘History of the City of Rome’ to his enchanting ‘Lateinische Sommer,’ and his graphic little sketches of the burial-places of the Popes. I have often been laughed at for constantly recommending and quoting novels in speaking of Rome and its interests; yet in few graver works are such glimpses of Rome, of Roman scenery, Roman character, Roman manners to be obtained as in Hawthorne’s ‘Marble Faun,’ which English publishers so foolishly call ‘Transformation;’ in ‘Mademoiselle Mori;’ in the ‘Improvisatore’ of Hans Christian Andersen; in the ‘Daniella’ of George Sand; and, will my audience be unutterably shocked if I add, in the Pagan-spirited ‘Ariadne’ of Ouida. The writers of these books have really known Rome and loved it, and yet several of them have only spent one or two winters here. The same knowledge, the same inspiration, is open to all of us, and the reason why English and American visitors so seldom carry away from Rome more than they bring to it is because they have never seen it at all; because the life in a hotel, with its English and French dinners, its English or French-speaking waiters, its newspapers and reading-rooms, is not a Roman life; because the shop-keepers in the Via Condotti, their washerwomen, or their masters of music and languages, are the only Italians these visitors have come in contact with; because their sights are doled out to them by conceited couriers or ignorant ciceroni; because they have no ideas of the peasants and their costumes beyond the models of the Via Felice and the Trinità de’ Monti.

“And all this might be so different! Can one look at the amethystine mountains which girdle in the Campagna around Rome without wishing to penetrate their recesses? In the mountain towns which hang like eagles’ nests to their rocks there are not only costumes, but every one wears a costume: there the true Italian life may be seen. By the railway which leads to Naples it is very easy now to reach many of these beautiful places and to have glimpses of a true Italy. The grand temples of Cori, the rock-perched Norba, and mysterious beautiful flower-peopled Ninfa may now be visited in one day from the station of Velletri, returning to Rome in the evening. At Sora near Arpino, the gloriously situated home of Cicero and of Marius, and at San Germano, close to Monte Cassino and to Aquino with its beautiful Roman arches of triumph, there are now very tolerable hotels; and oh! believe me, there is no enjoyment more intense than that of spring days on these lonely mountain heights carpeted with sweet basil and thyme, or in these old desolate cities where the women come up from the fountains with great brazen conche poised upon their black locks, like animated caryatides.

“But I would also urge those who cannot make these excursions to do at least something which will give them an individual interest, a personal property in Rome itself. Let them collect marbles or plants, or even photographs, or let them make sketches, choosing perhaps some special line of interest, either the ancient Roman remains, or the memorials of the saints, or the mediaeval tombs, thus appropriating and having their own little personal share in the great field of archaeology. I remember that two English ladies,[301] long valued members of the society here, made a perfect collection of drawings of all the mediaeval towers in Rome, whether campanile of the churches, or old brick fortresses of the Anicii and Frangipani. I have known another lady, a much honoured American resident in this place,[302] who spent much of her time in making a perfect collection of drawings and photographs of all Italian subjects connected with Dante. And, depend upon it, that the very fact that these persons thus created for themselves a private centre around which all other interests should circle, gave them a wider grasp and an easier remembrance for all that came across them.

“Archaeology is generally regarded as a dead and dry study, though it need not be so. But its animating power is history, and to bring it into life it must be combined with history, not in its narrowest, but in its widest sense. To a life-long student of classical details, it may be a matter of vital importance whether a stone on the Palatine is of the time of the kings or the Republic; but to the casual visitor to Rome, to the ladies who form so great a portion of my present audience, this can scarcely be a question of thrilling excitement. To the unlearned, I believe it to be of more interest to reflect upon the gladiatorial combats and the Christian martyrdoms in the Coliseum than to discuss the exact manner in which its sheltering velarium was sustained.

“Let our Roman archaeology, then, be unlimited as to ages, let it grasp as much as it can of the myriad human sympathies which Rome has to offer or awaken; for thus, and only thus, can it do a great work, in arousing highest thoughts and aims, as it opens the ancient treasure-house and teaches the vast experience of more than two thousand years. Then, as John Addington Symonds says:—

“Let archaeology help the beauties of Rome in leaving their noblest impress—in arousing feelings which are worthy of the greatest of Pagan heroes, of the sweetest of Latin poets, of the most inspired of sculptors and painters, as well as of Paul of Tarsus, who passed into Rome under the arch of Drusus, upon whom the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius fell as he passed out of Rome to his martyrdom, in that procession of which it is the sole surviving witness, and who here in Rome is sleeping now, with thousand other saints, till, as St. Ambrose reminds us, he shall awaken here, in Rome, at the great resurrection.

“Rome, as Winckelmann says, is the high-art school which is open to all the world. It can supply every mental requirement, if people will only apply at the right corner of the fountain. This is what an archaeological society ought to help us to find: this is what I trust the British and American Archaeological Society may help us to find.”

“April 29, 1879, London.—I have heard again the curious story of Sir T. Watson from Mrs. T., to whom he told it himself, so will write it down.

“Sir Thomas Watson, better known as Dr. Watson, was a well-known physician. During the last years of his life he was in failing health, and only saw patients at his own house, but till then he went about in England wherever he was sent for. One day he was summoned to attend an urgent case at Oxenholme in Cumberland. There was only one carriage in the train which went through to Oxenholme, and in a compartment of that carriage he took his seat. He tipped the guard, and said he should be glad to be alone if he could.

“The train at Euston was already in motion, when a young lady came running down the platform, with a porter laden with her hand-bags and cloaks. The man just contrived to open the carriage door, push the young lady in, throw in her things after her, and the train was off. The young lady, a very pretty, pleasing young lady, took the seat opposite Dr. Watson. Being a polite, gallant old gentleman, very soon Dr. Watson began to make himself agreeable: ‘What beautiful effects of cloud there were. How picturesque Harrow church steeple looked through the morning haze,’ &c. &c., and the young lady responded pleasantly. At last, as their acquaintance advanced, Dr. Watson said, ‘And are you travelling far?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said the young lady, ‘very far, I am going to Oxenholme in Cumberland.’ ‘How singular,’ said Dr. Watson, ‘for that is just where I am going myself. I wonder if you happen to know Lady D. who lives near Oxenholme.’ ‘Yes,’ said the young lady, ‘I know Lady D. very well.’ ‘And Mrs. P. and her daughters?’ said Dr. W. ‘Oh yes, I know them too.’ ‘And Mr. Y.?’ There was a moment’s pause, and then the young lady very naïvely and ingenuously said, ‘Yes, I do know Mr. Y. very well; and perhaps I had better tell you something. I am going to be married to him to-morrow. My own parents are in India, and I am going to be married from his father’s house. Since I have been engaged to him, I have made the acquaintance of many of his friends and neighbours, and that is how I know so many people near Oxenholme, though I have never been there before.’

“Dr. Watson was charmed with the simple candour of the young lady. They went on talking, and they became quite friends. The train arrived at Rugby, and they both got out and had their bun in the refreshment-room. They were in the carriage again, and the train was already moving, when, in great excitement, the young lady called out: ‘Oh stop, stop the train, don’t you see how he’s urging me to get out. There! that young man in the brown ulster, that’s the young man I’m going to be married to.’ Of course it was impossible to get out, and the young lady was greatly distressed, and though Dr. Watson assured her most positively that there was no one standing where she described, she would not and could not believe him.

“Then Dr. Watson said, ‘Now, my dear young lady, you’re very young and I’m very old. I am a doctor. I am very well known, and from what you have been seeing I am quite sure, as a physician, that you are not at all well. Now, I have my medicine chest with me, and you had better let me give you a little dose.’ And he did give her a little dose.

“The train arrived at Stafford, and exactly the same thing occurred. ‘There, there! don’t you see him! that young man with the light beard, in the brown ulster, don’t you see how he’s urging me to get out.’ And again Dr. Watson assured her there was no one there, and said, ‘I think you had better let me give you another little dose;’ and he gave her another little dose.

“But Dr. Watson naturally felt that he could not go on giving her a dose at every station all the way to Oxenholme, so he decided within himself that if the same thing happened at Crewe, the young lady’s state indicated one of two things: either that there was some intentional vision from Providence, with which he ought not to interfere; or that the young lady was certainly not in a state of health or brain which should allow of her being married next day. So he determined to act accordingly.

“And at Crewe just the same thing happened. ‘There, there! don’t you see him! he’s urging me more than ever to get out,’ cried the young lady. ‘Very well,’ said Dr. Watson, ‘we will get out and go after him,’ and, with the young lady, he pursued the imaginary figure, and of course did not find him. But Dr. Watson had often been at Crewe station before, and he went to the hotel, which opens on the platform, and said to the matron, ‘Here is this young lady, who is not at all well, and should have a very quiet room; unfortunately I am not able to remain now to look after her, but I will leave her in your care, and to-morrow I shall be returning this way and will come to see how she is.’ And he slipped a five-pound note into the woman’s hand to guarantee expenses.

“Dr. Watson returned to the railway carriage. There was another young lady there, sitting in the place which the first young lady had occupied—a passenger who had arrived by one of the many lines which converge at Crewe. With the new young lady he did not make acquaintance, he moved his things to the other side of the carriage and devoted himself to his book.

“Three stations farther on came the shock of a frightful accident. There was a collision. The train was telescoped, and many passengers were terribly hurt. The heavy case of instruments, which was in the rack above the place where Dr. Watson had first been sitting, was thrown violently to the other side of the carriage, hit the young lady upon the forehead and killed her on the spot.

“It was long before the line could be sufficiently cleared for the train to pass which was sent to pick up the surviving passengers. Many hours late, in the middle of the night, Dr. Watson arrived at Oxenholme. There, waiting upon the platform, stood the young man with the light beard, in the brown ulster, exactly as he had been described. He had heard that the only young lady in the through carriage from London had been killed, and was only waiting for the worst to be confirmed. And Dr. Watson was the person who went up to him and said: ‘Unfortunately it is too true that a young lady has been killed, but it is not your young lady. Your young lady is safe in the station hotel at Crewe.’”

“Holmhurst, May 3.—I have had a visit from the people who formerly lived here, so surprised at the changes—at the continuation of the walk in the firwood, &c., but most at the number of pictures and books everywhere inside the house, a clothing of walls which they evidently thought most unsuitable in a dining-room and passages, and most of all were they rather shocked at finding an ancient Madonna and Child of the Luca della Robbia school over the kitchen fireplace, though in an Italian house you might almost expect one there.

“I have nothing else interesting to tell you, so I will send you some scraps from my notebook. Lord Brownlow, at a public meeting, heard a schoolmaster say—‘Education is that which enables you to despise the opinions of others, and conduces to situations of considerable emolument.’ Miss Cobbe told me—‘Conscience is that which supplies you with an excellent motive for doing that which you desire to do, and which, when it is done, leaves you filled with self-satisfaction.’

“Mrs. L. (who has plantations in South America) has been telling me of a nigger preacher there who said in the pulpit, ‘I am so blind I cannot see; I’ve left my specs at home,’ and all the congregation thought he was giving out the line of a hymn, and sung it lustily.”

“May 13, 1879, 34 Jermyn Street, London.—This morning I went with Mrs. Duncan Stewart and a very large party to Whistler’s studio—a huge place in Chelsea. We were invited to see his pictures, but there was only one there—‘The Loves of the Lobsters.’ It was supposed to represent Niagara, but looked as if the artist had upset the inkstand and left Providence to work out its own results. In the midst of the black chaos were two lobsters curvetting opposite each other and looking as if they were done with red sealing-wax. ‘I wonder you did not paint the lobsters making love before they were boiled,’ aptly observed a lady visitor. ‘Oh, I never thought of that,’ said Whistler! It was a joke, I suppose. The little man, with his plume of white hair (‘the Whistler tuft,’ he calls it) waving on his forehead, frisked about the room looking most strange and uncanny, and rather diverted himself over our disappointment in coming so far and finding nothing to see. People admire like sheep his pictures in the Grosvenor Gallery, following each other’s lead because it is the fashion.”

“May 14, Sunday.—An immense luncheon at Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck’s. I sat near Mr. Herbert, the artist of the great fresco in the House of Lords. He described things over which he became almost inspired—how in the Bodleian he found an old MS. about the Magdalen which made him determine to go off at once to St. Maximin in Provence (near La Sainte Baume, the mountain hermitage where she died) to see her skull: that when he reached St. Maximin, he found that the skull was in a glass case upon the altar, where he could not really examine it, and he was told that it was never allowed even to kings and emperors: that he represented with such fervour his object in making the pilgrimage, that at last the priests of the church consented to his sending twelve miles for a vitrier and having the case removed: then he was allowed to place a single candle behind, and in that moment, as he described it, with glowing face and voice trembling with emotion—‘I saw the outline of her profile; the Magdalen herself, that dear friend of our Blessed Lord, was revealed to me.’

“Miss Leslie, who was sitting near, asked how it was known that the Magdalen came to St. Maximin. ‘How can you help knowing it,’ said Mr. Herbert, ‘when it is all written in the Acts of the Apostles!!’”

“May 15.—Dined with Lord and Lady Aberdeen—a very large party, seventy-four pots of flowers upon the table. The dinner was very fine, but rather uninteresting—the after-dinner better.

“May 16.—I received the sad news that poor Sir Alexander Taylor was on his death-bed in Lady Dashwood’s house at Hampstead, and went to him. He knew me and was pleased to see me, but immediately relapsed into unconsciousness. It was sad to stand by the utter wreck of one whom I had known so well.”

“May 17.—News of poor Sir Alexander’s death. Even at such a solemn time one could not help smiling at his characteristic last words—‘Present my duty to the Princess Amalie’ (of Schleswig-Holstein).[304]

“At luncheon at Lady Florentia Hughes’s I met George Russell, who told me a story which Lord and Lady Portsmouth had just brought back from Devonshire.

“‘On the railway which runs from Exeter to Barnstaple is a small station called Lapford. A farmer who lives in a farmhouse near that station awoke his wife one night, saying that he had had a very vivid dream which troubled him—that a very valuable cow of his had fallen into a pit and could not get out again. The wife laughed, and he went to sleep and dreamt the same thing. Then he wanted to go and look after the cow. But the wife urged the piercing cold of the winter night, and he went to sleep instead, and dreamt the same thing a third time. Then he insisted upon getting up, and, resisting his wife’s entreaties, he went out to look after the cow. It was with a sense of bathos that he found the cow quite well and grazing quietly, and he was thinking how his wife would laugh at him when he got home, and wondering what he should say to her, when he was aware of a light in the next field. Crawling very quietly to the hedge, he saw, through the leafless branches of the hawthorns, a man with a lanthorn and a spade, apparently digging a pit. As he was watching, he stumbled in the ditch and the branches crackled. The man, hearing a noise, started, threw down the spade, and ran off with the lanthorn.

“‘The farmer then made his way round into the next field and came up to the place where the man had been digging. It was a long narrow pit like an open grave. At first he could make nothing of it, then by the side of the pit he found a large open knife. He took that and the spade, and began to set out homewards, but, with an indescribable shrinking from the more desolate feeling of the fields, he went round by the lane. He had not gone far before he heard footsteps coming towards him. It was two o’clock in the morning, and his nerves being quite unstrung, he shrank from meeting whoever it was, and climbed up into the hedge to conceal himself. To his astonishment, he saw pass below him in the moonlit road one of the maids of his own farmhouse. He allowed her to pass, and then sprang out and seized her. She was most dreadfully frightened. He demanded to know what she was there for. She tried to make some excuse. “Oh,” he said, “there can be no possible excuse; I insist upon knowing the truth.” She then said, “You know I was engaged to be married, and that I had a dreadful quarrel with the man I was engaged to, and it was broken off. Well, yesterday he let me know that if I would meet him in the middle of the night, he had got something to show me which would make up for all the past.”—“Would you like to know what he had to show you? It was your grave he had to show you,” said the farmer, and he led her to the edge of the pit and showed it to her.

“May 19.—The Prince (of Sweden and Norway) has arrived with his suite at Claridge’s. He received me most cordially and affectionately. We made many plans for sight-seeing and people-seeing, but in England I have no responsibility; Count Piper, the Swedish Minister, has it all.

“I dined at charming Lady Wynford’s, sitting near Lord Delamere, who was very full of a definition he had heard of the word ‘deputation.’ ‘A noun of multitude, which signifies many, but not much.’ It was attributed to Gladstone, who said, ‘I only wish I had made it.’ Lord Eustace Cecil produced a definition of ‘Independent Member’ as ‘a Member on whom nobody can depend.’

“There was an immense gathering at Lady Salisbury’s afterwards; my Prince there and much liked. There, for the first time, I saw the Empress Augusta of Germany.”

“May 22.—A party at Lady Denbigh’s to meet Princess Frederika of Hanover, a very sweet-looking and royal woman of simple and dignified manners.”

“May 24.—Lady Salisbury’s party at the Foreign Office, the staircase, with its interlacing arches and masses of flowering shrubs, like the essence of a thousand Paul Veroneses. My Prince was there in a white uniform.”

“May 27.—At dinner at Sir John Lefevre’s I met Mr. Bright. He has a grand old lion-like head in an aureole of white hair, and his countenance never seems to wake from its deep repose, except for some burst of enthusiasm on a subject really worth while. He spoke of Americans, ‘who say an infinity of foolish things, but always do wise ones.’ Mr. Bryce of ‘The Holy Roman Empire’ was there, a bearded man with bright eyes, who talked well. Afterwards there was a party at Lady Beauchamp’s to meet Prince and Princess Christian. How like all the princesses are to one another.”

“May 29.—A dinner at Lord Carysfort’s and ball at Lady Salisbury’s. I presented so many relations to the Prince that he said that which astonished him more than anything else in England was ‘the multitude of Mr. Hare’s cousins.’”

“May 30.—With the Prince to Westminster Abbey, after which Arthur met us in the Jerusalem Chamber and took us into the Deanery. In the evening with the Prince to Lady Margaret Beaumont’s.”

“June 8.—Luncheon with the Prince. We drove afterwards to see Lady Russell. Pembroke Lodge looked enchanting with its bright green of old oaks and its carpet of bluebells—a most perfect refuge for the latter years of an aged statesman. Lady Russell was waiting for us at the entrance, with Lady Agatha and Rollo. On the lawn we found many other members of the family, with Mr. Bouverie and Mr. Froude the historian. I presented them all, and we walked in the grounds. At tea Lord Bute came in from a neighbouring villa—always most pleasant and cordial to me.”

“June 11.—Dined with old Lady Harrington, and left as early as I could to go to Mrs. Schuster’s, where Sarah Bernhardt was to act. She appeared first in the great scene of the ‘Phédre’—her face bloodless, her arms rigid, her voice monotonous and broken. Gradually, under the influence of her love, she became animated, but the animation began at the tips of her fingers, till it burst all over her in a flood of irrepressible passion.

“She did not seem to see her audience or to think of them. For the time being she was only her part, and, when it was over, she sank down utterly exhausted, almost unconscious.

“She appeared again in a small part, in which she was a great lady turned sculptress. The part was nothing; she had little more to say than ‘Let me see more of your profile; turn a little more the other way;’ yet the great simplicity of her perfect acting made it deeply interesting, and, in the quarter of an hour in which the scene lasted, she had done in the clay a real medallion which was a striking likeness.”[306]

“June 12.—Dined with Madame du Quaire—her table like a glorious Van Huysum picture from the fruit and flower piece in the centre. The hostess is famous for the warmth and steadfastness of her friendships. Mrs. Stewart says—‘Fanny du Quaire is the only person I know who would do anything for her friends. If it were necessary for my peace that I should have poison, I should send for Fanny du Quaire, and she would give it me without flinching.’”

“June 13.—Dined at Sir Charles Trevelyan’s. I took down a lady whose name seemed to be ‘Mrs. Beckett.’ I did not interest her, and she talked exclusively to Lord O’Hagan, who was on the other side of her. Towards the close of dinner she said to me, ‘We have been a very long time at dinner.’—‘To me it has seemed quite endless,’ I said.—‘Well,’ she exclaimed, ‘I do not wonder that you were chosen to speak truth to Princes.’

“I asked her how she knew anything about that, and she said, ‘I have lived a long time in a court atmosphere myself. I was for twelve years with the late Queen of Holland.’—‘Oh,’ I said, ‘now I know who you are; you are Mrs. Lecky!’ and it was the well-known author’s wife.”[307]

“June 14.—Luncheon with Lady Darnley, and a long quiet talk with her afterwards, then a visit to young Lord Lansdowne in his cool, pleasant rooms looking upon the garden.

“Dined with Count Piper, the Swedish Minister,[308] to meet the Prince Royal. I sat by Madame de Bülow, who is always pleasant. The only other lady unconnected with the Embassy was Mademoiselle Christine Nilsson, who sang most beautifully afterwards till Jenny Lind arrived. Then the rivalry of the two queens of song became most curious, Nilsson planting herself at the end of the pianoforte with her arms akimbo, and crying satirical bravas during Jenny’s songs, and Jenny avenging herself by never allowing Nilsson to return to the pianoforte at all. The party was a very late one, and supper was served, when the Prince offered Jenny his arm to take her down. She accepted it, though with great diffidence; which so exasperated Nilsson, that with ‘Je m’en vais donc,’ utterly refusing to be pacified, she swept out of the room and out of the house, though how she got away I do not know.”

“June 15.—A quiet luncheon with Lady Reay. Afterwards to Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who told me:—

“‘A great friend of mine was living lately in Brittany, and, while there, made acquaintance with a lady and her daughter who were staying in the same place—the mother a commonplace woman, the daughter a pleasant interesting girl.

“‘A short time after, the mother and daughter came to England, and my friend, who was in very delicate health at the time, invited them to visit her. The mother was prevented coming at first, but sent her daughter and said that she would follow.

“‘One day my friend was sitting in her boudoir, of which the door was ajar, very little open. The girl had gone to her own room, which was immediately above the boudoir, saying that she had letters to write.

“‘Suddenly my friend was aware that something was coming in at the door, not pushing it wider open, but gliding through the opening which already existed, and, to her horror, she saw, perfectly naked, propelling herself serpent-like upon her belly, with her hair rising like a crest over her head, and her eyes, without any speculation in them, staring wide open, the figure of a young girl, whom she recognised as her guest.

“‘With snake-like motion the girl glided in and out of the furniture, under the chairs, sofas, &c., but touching nothing, and with her eyes constantly fixed upon my friend, with an expression which was rather that of fear than anything else. At length she glided out of the room as she came in.

“‘As soon as my friend could recover herself a little, she pursued the girl to her room and quietly opened the door. To her horror, all the articles of crockery in the room, jug, basin, &c., were dispersed about the floor at regular intervals and in a regular pattern, and through them all, in and out, without touching them, the girl was gliding, snake-like, with her head erect, and her vacant eyes staring.

“‘My friend fled to her room and began to think what she should do; but such was her horror that she thinks she fainted; at any rate the power of action seemed to fail her. When she could move, she thought it her duty to go up to the girl’s room again, and perhaps was almost more horrified than before to find the room in perfect order and the girl seated dressed at the table, writing. She sent for the girl’s mother, who was terribly distressed. She allowed that her daughter had had these utterly inexplicable attacks before, but long ago, and she had hoped that she was cured of them.’

“Mrs. Stewart told this story to Mr. Fergusson the great naturalist, who only said, ‘I am not the least surprised: there is nothing extraordinary in it. There have been many other instances of the serpent element coming out in people.’”

“June 16.—Met the Prince early at Paddington, whence we had a saloon carriage to Oxford, with Sir Watkin Wynne as director to watch over us. We went a whole round of colleges and to the Bodleian, where Mr. Coxe exhibited his treasures. Then the Prince wished to see the boats, so we walked down to the river. Just before us I saw an undergraduate in boating costume and ran after him.

“Upon which the boy very soon found that he could take a Prince anywhere, and proud he probably was afterwards to narrate to whom he had been acting cicerone. In the barge, a number of undergraduates were looking at the Prince’s portrait in the Graphic. He looked at it too, over their shoulders, but they did not recognise him.

“It was a fatiguing day, and I felt greatly the utter apathy and want of interest in all the Swedes, who scarcely noticed anything, admired nothing, and remembered nothing.”

“June 18.—Again to Oxford with the Prince. This time the town was in gala costume, and we drove through a street hung with flags, and through crowds of people waiting to see the Prince, to the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge at Pembroke. Here the Prince dressed, and I went on at once with his gentlemen to the Theatre, where places were reserved for us just under the Vice-Chancellor’s throne. My Swedish companions were amused with the undergraduates’ expression of their likes and dislikes, till the great moment came and the great doors were thrown open, and, amid a flood of sunlight, the procession streamed in headed by all the gold maces. Immediately after the Vice-Chancellor came my Prince, looking tall and handsome in his white uniform with the crimson robe over it, and perfectly royal. I knew that he felt nervous, but he could not have been half as nervous as I was. He played his part, however, perfectly. He received his degree standing by the Vice-Chancellor’s side, and the whole body of undergraduates sang a little impromptu song, to the effect of ‘He’s a charming Swedish boy.’

“We adjourned from the Theatre to the green court of All Souls, where, in the sunlit quadrangle, I brought up, one after another, all the principal persons to be presented to the Prince—Lord and Lady Dufferin, Rachel and Sir Arthur Gordon, Lord Selborne, the Dean of Christ Church and Mrs. Liddell, &c. There was a luncheon for 300 in the All-Souls library, and afterwards we drove with Mrs. Evans, the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, to the Masonic fête in the lovely Wadham garden, and then paid official visits, before leaving, to the Vice-Chancellor and Dean.

“In the evening I was with the Prince at Mrs. E. Guiness’s ball, on which £6000 are said to have been wasted. It was a perfect fairy-land, ice pillars up to the ceiling, an avenue of palms, a veil of stephanotis from the staircase, and you pushed your way through a brake of papyrus to the cloak-room.”

“June 19.—We dined with the Aberdeens. I went before the Prince, and was with Aberdeen to receive him at the door, and then presented a quantity of people—Lord and Lady Carnarvon, Lord and Lady Brownlow, Lady Balfour, Dowager Lady Aberdeen, &c. The London Scottish Volunteers played soft music during dinner. Soon afterwards the Prince went away to the Scandinavian ball, rather disappointing many people who came to see him in the evening.”

“June 20.—Oh, what a shock it has been that, while the balls last night were going on, telegrams announced the death of the dear young Prince Imperial! I am sure I cried for him like a nearest relation; there was something so very cordial and attaching in him, and there is something so unspeakably terrible in his death. The Prince was overwhelmed, and could not dine at Lowther Lodge, where there was a large party expressly to meet him, but he was quite right.”

“June 21.—We can think of nothing else but the Prince Imperial and the awful grief at Chislehurst. Immediately on hearing the telegram, Lord Dorchester wrote to M. Pietri a letter of condolence. M. Pietri was away in Corsica, and the Empress opened his letter. It begged Pietri to offer deep sympathy to the Empress in her overwhelming affliction. She felt her son was dead, and when Lord Sydney and Mr. Borthwick arrived, they found her in tears; but when she heard the awful truth that her darling had been deserted and assegaied, she gave terrible shrieks and fainted away.

“Most of the day she was unconscious. Those who went to Chislehurst describe the scene as too heart-rending. The old servants could not rest, and walked in the garden in groups, wringing their hands and crying ‘O mon pauvre petit Prince! O mon pauvre cher petit Prince!’

“In the morning I went with the Prince to Lambeth,—all of us very sad and tearful. I had mentioned a rather later hour to the Archbishop, so that he was not ready to receive us, and Lord and Lady Charles Clinton, who were there, were dreadfully shy. When the Archbishop came, he showed us his library treasures, and climbed up the high Lollards’ Tower to take the Prince to the prison of the early Reformers; but I felt how fearfully dull the Archbishop must think all the Swedes, who made no observation whatever upon anything they saw.”

“June 23.—With the Prince to the Rose and Crown Coffee-House. Lord and Lady Aberdeen and Lady Cairns met us there. It is a beautifully managed institution, and fresh and clean to a degree. All the workmen crowded in for dinner before we left, but I would not let Aberdeen let them know who was there till the last moment, when the news gave great satisfaction; but they behaved beautifully—no crowding or staring: the Prince wrote his name in their book.

“Luncheon afterwards with Lord and Lady Garvagh, meeting only Madame Rouzaud (Christine Nilsson).”

“June 25.—Dinner at Lord Sandwich’s—a particularly good party. I sat by Lady Elcho, whose mind seems to be in perpetual moonlight, very calming and refreshing.”

“June 26.—To the Tower of London with the Prince, who was very good-humoured and absurd. It is a long fatiguing sight. Our being at Trinity Square was curious in its results, as persons were just then visiting it (the site of the block at which More, Fisher, Laud, Strafford fell) with a view to its destruction, and the fact, afterwards adduced before the House of Lords, that the Prince Royal of Sweden and Norway was at that very moment being taken to see it as one of the great historical sites of London, proved its salvation.

“How wearisome it is to steer the Prince through people’s little intrigues. They have to-day involved a letter of six sheets to the Queen of Sweden. Yesterday I was free, as he went with the ‘Four-in-Hand Club,’—an odd arrangement for me to have to make for him.”

“June 27.—Went with the Prince by appointment to Hertford House, where Sir R. Wallace received us. His riches are untold and indescribable. He showed them very pleasantly, and had much that was interesting to tell about them.”

“July 3.—To Syon with the Lockers and Leslies. So few people came at first, owing to the wet, that we were most cordially welcomed by the Duke and Lady Percy. Soon it cleared and half London began to pour in; but the long wide galleries never seem crowded. I reached the conservatories with Mary and Lily Hughes, and the gardener showed us some bamboos which, he said, grew twelve inches a day!”

“July 4.—Oh, the constant variety of the tangle of London life! This morning was occupied by a special farewell service in Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster for Arthur Gordon and Victor Williamson going out to Fiji. Arthur Stanley preached, standing behind the altar over Edward VI.’s grave, a most pagan little sermon about Alexander and Priam and the sacred fire of Troy as a comfort to wandering souls! We all received the Sacrament together, and then took leave of the travellers in the Chapter-House.”

“July 5.—A reprieve from duties to the Prince, who has gone to Windsor and Aldershot. I had the great happiness of seeing Lady Castletown and Mrs. Lewis Wingfield again after four years. It is delightful to see any one who ‘knows how’ to enjoy themselves: every one wishes it, but scarcely any one has an idea how it is to be done.

“At dinner at Sir Rutherford Alcock’s I heard the startling news of the death of Frances, Lady Waldegrave.[311] To me she was only a lay figure, receiving at her drawing-room door, but I remember her thus ever since I was a boy at Oxford, when she was living at Nuneham. In spite of her faults, she had many and warm friends: Lord Houghton sobbed like a child on receiving the news in the midst of a large party. News which affected me more personally was the death of dear young Charlie Ossulston [312] from cholera in India.... I heard it at the Speaker’s party, which was most beautiful, with windows wide open to the river in the glory of full moonlight, with which the many lamp-reflections were vainly contending, gold against silver, upon the wavelets.”

“Sunday, July 6.—To Bedford Chapel to hear Mr. Stopford Brooke preach on the world as an arena and men as gladiators. ‘But who are the witnesses on the encircling seats?’ These he described, from dwellers in the present life to a crowd, such as that painted ‘by artists of illimitable ideas but limited powers,’ of the glorious army of apostles, confessors, and martyrs, who all diverge from Christ as a centre.”

“July 10.—A charming party at Syon, where I walked about with dear old Lady Barrington. A very pleasant dinner at Lord Brownlow’s, where was a whole succession of beautiful ladies—the lovely hostess herself, Lady Pembroke, Lady Lothian, Lady de Vesci, Lady Wharncliffe, Mrs. Reginald Talbot, &c. These high-bred beauties are indeed a contrast to those known as the ‘professional beauties.’ Most exquisite singing in the evening, then a party at the Duchess of Cleveland’s to meet the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.”

“July 11.—Dined at Sir Dudley Marjoribanks’—Brook House a beautiful interior with marvellous china. There was such a procession of Earls and Countesses, that it fell to my share to take Mrs. Gladstone in to dinner. Disraeli had said to her, ‘Now do take care of Mr. Gladstone; you know he is so precious.’”

“July 12.—The dear Prince Imperial’s funeral. I was very sorry not to go, but my Prince evidently thought I could not, having known him so well and yet having no recognised place.

“Our whole hearts are with the Empress. How many instances there have been of her perfectly noble character since she has been in England. None are more striking than that which regarded M. Guizot. He had hated the Imperial government, he had reviled the Emperor: there was no ill which he did not wish him. But his youngest son, Guillaume, got into serious money troubles, and eventually he borrowed a large sum—£4000 it is said—from the Emperor. It was concealed from his father. Long, very long afterwards, when the Emperor was dead, M. Guizot found it out. It was agony to him. It was most difficult to him to pay the money, but he determined to do it at any sacrifice, and he wrote to tell the Empress so. The Empress answered by telegraph—‘L’Impératrice donne, mais elle ne prête pas.’”

“July 15.—Lady Ashburton had asked the Hereditary Grand Duke of Baden to dinner as well as my Prince, so I went to help her by acting Master of the Ceremonies and receiving the royalties in the hall of Kent House. While I was waiting, watching at the window, a fair young man arrived unattended and ran upstairs. I took no notice of him. Then I received the Prince Royal properly, escorted him as far as Lady Ashburton’s curtsies, and came back to wait for the young Grand Duke. At last Lady Ashburton sent down to tell me he was there, had been there the whole time: he was the young man who ran upstairs.

“I had much talk with him afterwards—a tall, simple, pleasing-mannered youth, much more responsive than my Prince, and good-looking, though very German in appearance. There were glees at dinner, sung in the anteroom, and a large party and concert in the evening.”

“July 16.—A beautiful party at Holland House. There was quite a mass of royalty on the lawn—the Prince and Princess of Wales and their little girls (in pink trimmed with red), the Edinburghs, the Connaughts, the Tecks, with their little girl and two nice boys in sailor’s dress, the Duchess of Mecklenbourg, the Prince of Baden, and my Prince. The royal children were all in raptures over some performing dogs, which really were very funny, as a handsome Spitz looked so ecstatically delighted to ride about on the lawn on a barrel pushed by a number of other dogs.

“Dined at Lord Muncaster’s, where I sat by Lady Cairns and Mrs. Cross, both worth listening to. The Muncasters, by M. Henri’s aid, have given quite an old Flemish interior to a handsome commonplace house in Carlton Gardens.

“A concert afterwards at Lady Brownlow’s—all the three beautiful sisters were there, and most lovely in their different phases.”

“July 18.—Luncheon with young Lady Morley and dinner with her mother-in-law, then to a concert at Stafford House. The Duchess (of Sutherland) talked much and affectionately of my sister, whom so few remember now. The Spanish Students were ranged with their instruments on the broad landing of the staircase, and the whole scene was like that of the play of ‘Hamlet.’ The Prince of Wales walked about and talked, winning good opinions by the attention with which he always seems to listen to whoever is speaking to him.”

“July 19.—Went down with the special train to Hatfield, and drove up from the station to the house with old Lady Ailesbury. An immense party of Dukes and Duchesses, &c., were already collected to welcome the royalties, Lady Salisbury receiving them in a large rough straw garden-bonnet. The Hereditary Grand Duke of Baden arrived early, and I was sent off with him to see the old Elizabethan buildings, the stables, &c. He is extremely pleasing, responsive, and conversable, and his admiration of the place was most intense and natural. I walked about with different friends till the royal party drove up in six carriages. They were all going to stay at Hatfield till Monday, fifty people, besides servants. I came back at eight.”

“July 21.—Met the Prince Royal at Waterloo Station, where a great many people were collected to see him off. Lady Marian Alford joined us, and we floated into Hampshire in a royal saloon carriage. I went to my Prince in the little private compartment, and had a long talk with him, in which all the growing mists of the London season seemed to be swept away at once, and our intimate trust and affection for each other restored upon its old footing.

“Carriages from Lady Waterford met us at Holmsley, and we had a pleasant but rather cold drive through the forest. In the gothic porch of Highcliffe, Lady Waterford was waiting with Mr. and Lady Jane Ellice, and Miss Lindsay. Alwyn Greville came in the evening, and a few people to dinner. The ladies sang, Miss Lindsay recited, and the Prince also sang a little.”

“The King had said so much to the Prince about Lady Waterford, that he is at his very best here, and he has had well-worth-while conversation with Lady Marian. We drove with Colonel Thursby’s four-in-hand to Herne Park, and in the afternoon looked for fossils on the cliffs, where M. de Printzsköld sank up to his knees in a bog of black mud. In the evening there was a little ball, opened by the dear Lady herself with the Prince.... The Prince was enchanted with everything, and said he would rather sit by either of ‘the three ladies’ at Highcliffe [313] than by the most beautiful young lady in England.”

“July 23.—The Prince was so anxious that I should go with him to Devonshire that I consented to leave Highcliffe with him after breakfast. We had a pleasant journey through the rich Somersetshire orchards, and during a wait at Templecombe, a ramble with the Prince to the church. We have met the Swedish equerries again, and life is not always quite as easy as it has been without them: however, though we have our ups and downs, we have also our downs and ups, and ‘si gravis, brevis,’ is a proverb one can always remember.”

“July 24.—Torbay is bluer than I ever saw the Bay of Naples, and the sun shines on the red rocks of Paignton and the white sails flitting over the limpid water. My windows look into the grounds of Rockend—the steep field, the little wood, the very windows of the house connected with many of the miseries of my childhood.[314] I have wandered on the terraces—to the rock walk; the seat where I used to see Uncle Julius and Aunt Esther sitting in the first year of their marriage; ‘Cummany’s Corner,’ where ladies-finger and coronilla grow still; the tower where Aunt Lucy used to meditate and pray. Almost all the friends—and enemies too—of my childhood have passed away now, and it is in places like this which recall them so vividly, that I feel the longing Webster describes in the ‘Duchess of Melfi’:—

“July 26.—I took leave of the Prince in his bedroom before he was dressed. Our real separation must come soon; and though in many ways I shall feel wonderfully set free when my responsibility is over, my heart always yearns toward him.”

“Lyme Hall, August 6.—After two days at Thornycroft in familiar scenes, I have come to Lyme to receive the Prince Royal. Only Mr. and Mrs. Davenport are here, with their pretty daughter, engaged to marry Tom Legh.”

“August 7.—The Prince arrived from Manchester. I went to receive him at Disley Station and to present Mr. Legh, who had never seen him before. James II.’s rooms were prepared for him.”

“August 8.—I sat out much of the day with Mrs. Legh, while the Prince played at lawn-tennis, and in the afternoon I drove with Mrs. Legh and Mrs. Davenport along the hills and moor, while he rode with the others. He is much delighted with the great Lyme dogs, and is to have one of them; to his great disappointment the wild cattle have almost ceased to exist. He will only be interested in facts, never in vision or its emotions, and it is no use to tell him that—

“August 9.—Left Lyme with the Prince and the Davenports in a saloon carriage to Crewe. I sat alone with the Prince most of the time in the inner compartment. We parted at Crewe intending to meet again in three days’ time.”

“Betton House, August 10.—With the dear old Tayleurs. To church at Mucklestone, and afterwards to Mr. Hinchcliffe’s charming vicarage garden. From the church tower Margaret of Anjou watched the battle of Blore Heath, and in the village the same family (with the same name) still officiate as blacksmiths, one of whose members shoed the Queen’s horse backwards to be ready for her escape if it was needed, and thus saved her.”

“August 11.—To Buntingsdale, beautiful as in childish remembrance,[316] with the real scent of the lime-trees, which has often come back to me in dreams.”

“Glamis Castle, August 13.—I arrived at Glamis at 9 P.M., and found an immense party in the house—Sir James and Lady Ramsay, Lord and (the very charming) Lady Sydney Inverurie, Lord and Lady Northesk, and many others. Lord Strathmore has made great preparations, and the Prince would have had the most royal reception here which he has met with anywhere; but, to the great inconvenience of every one, he has put off leaving Hopetoun, where he is, being ill with toothache.

“I have been sitting out much with Lady Sydney Inverurie, who went for her wedding tour to—Japan! She is most amusing about her children and the agony they keep her in as to how to answer their questions. One had just asked her ‘Who cut God’s hair?’ and upon her describing the events of Eden, asked why Adam and Eve did not climb over the walls and get out the other way, because the angel could not come after them, as God had commanded him to stay at the gate.”

“August 15.—I have greatly enjoyed this visit at Glamis, and am glad to feel the cousinly tie drawn closer to the Lyon boys individually as well as collectively. Miss Macdonald was very amusing in her stories.

“A Bishop (Wilberforce of course) remonstrated with a country curate in his diocese for driving tandem. The curate said, ‘Well, my Lord, I cannot see that there is more harm in my driving my horses before each other than in my driving them side by side.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Bishop, ‘there really is a fitness in things; for example, if I put my hands so (folding them together), no one can reproach me, but if I put them so (cutting a snooks), they might reproach me very much indeed.’

“In the winter the Duchess of Leinster had a large Christmas party for her servants, and took particular pains to make it agreeable for them. Afterwards she asked her old housekeeper how she had enjoyed it. ‘Oh, your Grace, I should have enjoyed it very much indeed, if something most dreadful had not happened, which has made me perfectly miserable.’—‘What can it have been?’ said the Duchess. ‘Oh, it was something so dreadful, I really cannot tell your Grace: I was so dreadfully insulted by the butler, I really cannot repeat his words.’—‘Oh, but you really must,’ said the Duchess. ‘Well, your Grace, if I really must, I must tell your Grace that I was coming out from supper, and I had only had the wing of a pheasant and a little bit of jelly, and I met the butler, and he said to me “Is your programme full?” Now your Grace will allow that that was so insulting that pleasure was not to be thought of afterwards.’

“‘Bishop Wilberforce was going, in a visitation tour, to stay at a very humble clergyman’s house. The maid was instructed that, if he spoke to her, she was never to answer him without saying “My Lord.” When the Bishop had written his letters, he asked who would take them to the post. “The Lord, my boy,” said the terrified maid.’”

“August 24.—I left Glamis on Monday, and went by Dalmally to Oban through the Brender Pass—beautiful exceedingly, the mountains so varied and encircling such varied waters.

“On Thursday, at dawn, I saw all the mountains meeting their shadows in the still waters of Oban Bay, and determined to go to Staffa. It was a crowded, rolling, smelly steamer, and I was very miserable, but rather better than worse when the fresh air in the Atlantic made up for the additional rolling. At twelve we reached Iona—different from what I expected, the island larger and the ruins smaller, and without the romantic effect of those on Holy Island. Still, of course, the interest is intense of the cradle of Scottish Christianity, the Throndtjem of Scotland. I found some pleasant boys, sons of a Glasgow merchant, sketching, and made great friends with them. An agony of Atlantic swell brought us to Staffa, but oh! how grand it is!—the grandest cathedral of nature, black with age and roofed with golden vegetation, rising out of the blue sea and lashed by the white foam. I drew a little on the basaltic columns opposite Fingal’s Cave, whilst the mass of the passengers were landing and scrambling about the cavern, and then my boy friends and I climbed the long staircases to the top, where the breezy downs are enamelled with flowers, and the view is most sublime—of the Atlantic, the islands in their fantastic shapes, the distant ghost of shadowy mountains in Skye, and the turbulent waves beneath. I never saw any single place which makes such an impression of natural sublimity.

“How the interests and emotions of life are mingled! In the train, on leaving Glamis, I heard of the death of my dear uncle-like cousin Lord Bloomfield, and while I was drawing Dunolly Sir John Lefevre was passing away! Though the delicate thread which bound his life to earth was so indescribably frail, it had lasted so long, that it is difficult to realise that his loving sympathy and the holy example of his beautiful, humble, and self-forgetful life are removed from us. He was the best man I have ever known and the truest friend. His sweet courtesies were unbounded. His advice was always worth taking, for it was always unselfish, always carefully considered, and it always came from the heart. While I honoured him like a father, he was so genial that I could also love him as an intimate friend.”

“Ascot, August 25, 1879.—I am thankful to have come here to the Lefevres’ to-day, so filled with crushing sorrow to all my dear cousins, though no one can help being comforted in the beautiful recollections of the beloved father—of his boundless love to all, and his painless passage, full of thankfulness and love to the last, to the full fruition of that love in the unseen.

“I walked with his children to the church, where his coffin already lay [317] in the chancel covered with garlands. Lord Eversley and Emma Lefevre were there, and many others. The grave was in a sheltered corner of the churchyard, a sunny peaceful spot, and there, with aching hearts, we laid him.”

“Ledbury Court,[318] Sept. 13.—This is just the sort of place which is pleasantest—great comfort and no pretension, rather under than over a very good income. The house, many-gabled and quaint, is in the old street of the town, but you drive into a large paved court with a porter’s lodge and pavilion, and clipped bay-trees in tubs like those of an old hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain. Behind, pleasant modern rooms and an oak library open upon lawns with brilliant flowers, beyond which a deer-park extends up wavy hills to a high terrace with a noble view over the western counties.

“On Wednesday we went to the musical festival at Hereford. The cathedral is entirely ruined by restoration—a disgusting polychrome roof, and a piteous glazed-tile floor replacing the ancient pavement consecrated by five centuries. After the Oratorio we went to luncheon with the Bishop, Dr. Attley, and at the palace I met many old friends.

“Yesterday we went to Eastnor. Lord and Lady Somers were away, but we saw the gardens, which would be beautiful if they were not spoilt by too many pines and araucarias, and the house, a hideous castle of Otranto, so unworthily occupying a noble situation. It contains a few fine pictures, but the rooms are frightful.”

“Holme Lacy, Sept. 14.—My visit at Ledbury was a very happy one, Libbet so cheerful and pleasant, Charlie Adeane so engaging and affectionate, dear Lady Hardwicke so delightful, and Alick Yorke so amusing.

“I came here last night, met at the station by Sir Henry Stanhope. It has been a magnificent place, but was injured as much as possible by the late possessor with the assistance of the ignorant architect who built Lord Dudley’s house in Park Lane, who tried hard to turn it from a French château into a Grecian villa. Some of the ceilings, however, are quite glorious, and there are many fine portraits.... Lady Scudamore Stanhope, ‘the most popular woman in the county,’ was Sir Adam Hay’s eldest daughter Dora.”[319]

“Cheltenham, Sept. 15, 1879.—I do not know when, if ever, I have seen anything so beautiful as the park at Holme Lacy. All Sunday afternoon I wandered with Sir Henry Stanhope in its glorious glades, with fern nine feet high, grand old oaks, white-stemmed beeches, and deep blue depths of mossy dingle. The garden too is quite a poem—such a harmony of colour backed by great yew hedges and grand old pine-trees. Seven hundred people on an average come to see it on the days it is shown, and no wonder.... We went to service at an old church full of tombs of the family, and afterwards to the rectory close by, where there is a wonderful old pear-tree, of which the branches always take root again when they fall off, and cover an immense extent, sometimes producing as much as 2000 gallons of perry.

“In coming hither I stayed to see Gloucester—scarcely worth while, all is so modernised. Yet the cathedral tower and crypt are beautiful, and the Norman nave fine. I saw there the tomb of an ancestor, Sir Onesiphorus Paul, of whom I knew nothing before, but it appears from his epitaph that he was ‘the first to put into practice the humane designs of Howard as to prison discipline.’”

“Cheltenham, Sept. 16.—Mrs. Orlando Kenyon is staying here with the Corbetts. She was a Cotton, and is a very charming person. She described going with her cousin Miss Cotton (now Dowager Marchioness of Downshire) to Peover for a ball. Just as they were setting off news arrived of the death of her cousin’s grandfather, old Mr. Fulke Greville. However, as the visit was settled, it was decided that it should take place, only that Miss Cotton should not go to the ball and her cousin should. They slept together at Peover. In the night Miss Cotton woke Mrs. Kenyon and said, ‘I have had such an extraordinary dream. I have seen my mother moving backwards and forwards between the doors at the end of the room, not walking, but apparently moving in the air—floating with a quantity of gossamer drapery round her; and when I close my eyes, I seem to see her still.’ In the morning the cousins returned to Combermere.

“Just before dinner a servant called Mr. Cotton (Mrs. Kenyon’s father) and said Lord Combermere wanted to speak to him. ‘Oh,’ said Miss Cotton, springing forward, ‘then I am sure some news has come by the post,’ and she tried to insist upon following her uncle, but he would not allow her. Mr. Cotton came back greatly agitated, but insisted on their all going in to dinner. It was a most wretched meal. Afterwards he told the son and daughter that their mother had died (just after her father’s funeral) very suddenly, just when she had appeared at Peover.

“We went yesterday to Southam, the beautiful old house of the De la Beres. After the De la Beres became extinct, it was bought by Lord Ellenborough, and it contains a mixture of relics of the two families—charming old furniture and pictures, including a grand Holbein of Edward VI. One of the De la Beres saved the life of the Black Prince at Crecy, and a Prince of Wales’s helmet and feathers over a chimney-piece commemorate the fact. Three Miss Sergisons of Cuckfield Park inhabit the house now—kindly, pleasant old ladies.”

“Llanover, Sept. 20.—From Cheltenham I went to the Vaughans at Llandaff. It is a hideous drive from Cardiff, but at length you ascend a little hill which is crowned by a knot of buildings—deanery, canonry, a few houses, a cross, and the picturesque ruins of the old palace, while the lofty steeples of the really beautiful cathedral shoot up from the depths below. It is, in fact, far more picturesque than many more important places, and the graveyard around the cathedral, and many picturesque corners inside, make it very attractive.

“Kate took me to Castle Coch—a restored castle of Lord Bute, beautifully situated. We went to the Palace and saw Mrs. Oliphant, the charming old wife of the Bishop of Llandaff. Bishop Perry and his very amusing wife took us with them to dine at Dufferin with a brother of Lord Aberdare, whom we found there.

“Yesterday I went for an hour to Caerphilly on the way here to Llanover, where I arrived at 7 P.M. The Hereditary Grand Duke of Baden had already arrived and gone up to his room. I first saw him when the party was assembled for dinner—Lord and Lady Raglan, Miss Johnes, Mr. Ram, Mr. and Mrs. Sandford, and Mr. and Mrs. Herbert of Llanarth, with two sons, daughter, and daughter-in-law. The Duke received me most cordially and pleasantly.

“After a very long dinner we all went into the hall, when, from the curtains at the end, all the servants tripped in, each footman leading a maid by each hand, in most picturesque Welsh costumes, made obeisance to the Prince, went backwards, and then danced the most complicated and picturesque of reels, with ever-varying figures. Lady Llanover’s own maid was the great performer, and nothing could exceed her consummate grace and dignity. Then a board was brought in and placed in the centre of the floor and three candles upon it, around and between which the footmen and the harper’s boys performed the wonderful candle-dance with the greatest agility.

“Lady Llanover’s excess of courtesies and overwhelming deference were rather oppressive to us all, and evidently frightened the poor boyish Prince dreadfully last night; but this morning she did not come down, and we have got on splendidly, and he delighted in being talked to like other people, and was as natural and nice as he could be. He is certainly a most bewitching Prince, so full of animation and fun, so right-minded and so courteous and simple.

“In three carriages we went to Llanarth to luncheon. I went with the royal carriage, which, with its smart scarlet postillions, certainly went slow enough; for the dear old lady, to do the Prince more honour, had engaged for the occasion not only the two horses used for the weddings at Abergavenny, but also the two used at funerals, and the steeds of death outweighed those of mirth, and kept us down to a funereal pace.

“Llanarth is a sunny, well-kept place. Its great relic is the portrait of Pope’s Arabella Fermor, whose sister was a direct ancestress of the present possessors. After luncheon, we all ranged on the steps and were photographed, and then went on to Raglan, where Lord and Lady Raglan (she a very charming person) did the honours of the really beautiful ruin. To my surprise, I heard the Duke beginning to compare it to Hurstmonceaux, not knowing my connection with the latter. I drove back with him, and told him many stories, and we made pleasant friendly acquaintance. He ran after me when we came in, and kept me to talk to him quietly, and spoke very nicely and kindly of his mother’s liking for my books. He has one of the most open, frank countenances I have ever looked upon.”

“Llanover, Sept. 21.—This morning the Herberts went to mass at Llanarth, and we (English Church) had a queer service in the drawing-room, with a congregation of eight, and a clergyman in a surplice, &c. He gave a capital little sermon, but illustrated his text, ‘Pray without ceasing,’ by the story of the Welsh Prince for whom all the birds sang when they were asked. He was taken captive, and the birds immediately became silent. Then his captors commanded them to sing, but still all the birds in Wales held silence. Then they asked the captive Prince to desire them to sing, and he, kneeling down, prayed that God would open the mouths of the birds, upon which they all sang lustily. This was to prove that prayer was worth while even in the smallest things of life!

“The poor Prince has been victimised to-day to see all the relics of Mrs. Delany, the fetish of this house, and was afterwards taken to the lake to see two coracles, the boats of ancient Wales, in which Ivor and Arthur Herbert besported themselves.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 27.—On Monday, all Llanover was in motion for the Prince’s departure, more scarlet cloth than ever all over the place, the Welsh harpers harping at the door, the Welsh housemaids, in high hats and bright scarlet and blue petticoats, waiting with bouquets in the park, and every guest in the house compelled to go to the station to see the Prince off. Highly comical was the scene on the platform—the yards of red cloth hurriedly thrown down by two footmen wherever the poor boyish Prince, in his brown frieze suit and wideawake hat, seemed likely to tread. I wished to have travelled to Windsor by Gloucester, which is two and a half hours’ less journey; but no, that was impossible: the Queen of England sometimes has her own way; the Queen of South Wales always.

“Mrs. Herbert of Llanarth was sent to travel with the Prince to Malvern, Mr. Ram to Worcester, I to Oxford. However, one could hardly see too much of him, he is such a nice Prince—kind, courteous, clever, intelligent, simple, and sincere. Captain Sommer, the gentleman in waiting, is also a most superior person.

“I reached Ronald Gower in the evening. He met me at the Windsor station, and took me to his really charming little house, which is full of lovely things. It is an odd ménage, with the artistic valet, Robert Stubbs, supreme. It was a great pleasure to take up with Ronald the links of a much-relaxed, never-forgotten friendship, and to find him far nicer than I had remembered him.

“We spent Tuesday at Cliveden, a pouring day, but it did not matter. The Duchess of Westminster [320] is Ronald’s favourite sister, and was very pleasant and cordial to his friend. She is gloriously handsome, though so large. We talked for four hours without ceasing, and she took us into every corner of the beautiful house full of charming pictures, and then put on an ulster and hood and walked with us through the torrents of rain to the conservatories. One felt that she was a person to whom one could say anything without being misunderstood, and who would become an increasingly true friend. Her daughter, Lady Beatrice Cavendish, was there, and the handsome young husband, Compton Cavendish, Lord Chesham’s son, came in to luncheon and tea. All saw us off at 5 P.M. in the little cart with Piggy the pony.

“On Wednesday morning we went into the castle to see Lady Ponsonby, who lives in the old prison over Edward III.’s gateway—most curious, and fitted up in admirable taste, despairing to Mr. Ayrton.”

“Osterley Park, Nov. 13.—I came here yesterday, most kindly welcomed by the good old Duchess of Cleveland, who is delightful. The greatness of her charm certainly lies in the absence of charm: no one ever had less of it. But what bright intelligence, what acute perceptions, what genuine kindness, what active beneficence! I found Julia, Lady Jersey, here, and Mr. Brandling, and a Mr. and Mrs. Bramston, relations of the Cleveland family. After dinner, the Duchess made me sit exclusively by her, saying kindly that she could not waste any of my short visit. She talked in a very interesting way of the great Duke of Wellington, and then of the present Duke. She said that when she asked the latter if the great Duke had never shown him any kindness, he said, ‘No, he never even so much as patted me on the shoulder when I was a boy, but it was because he hated my mother.’

“After luncheon to-day I walked with Brandling and Colonel Bramston to Boston Hall, the fine old house of the Clitherows.

“As Lady Caroline Paulet, the Duchess of Cleveland used to be very proud of her little foot. She wore an anklet, and would often sit upon a table, and let it fall down over her foot to show it. It was inscribed, ‘La légèreté de Camille et la vitesse d’Atalante.’ One day Lady Isabella St. John, who was equally proud of her little foot, said, ‘I wish you would let me try if I can get your anklet over my foot, Lady Caroline.’ And she put it on, and, to Lady Caroline’s great disgust, kicked it off, to show how easily her foot would go through it.

“In those long-ago days—one cannot imagine it now—she used to be very décolletée, and the Duchess Elizabeth (Miss Russell), who did not like her, once flung a napkin at her across the table, saying, ‘Caroline, here is something to cover your nakedness with.’

“How many and amusing are the anecdotes remembered of that Duchess Elizabeth, who went on receiving a pension from the Duke of Bedford, as his cast-off mistress, after she was married to the Duke of Cleveland. She had been a washerwoman. She left Newton House, where she lived as a widow, to her nephew Mr. Russell, whose grandson married a Lushington. She gave £70,000 to her niece Laura when she married Lord Mulgrave, and the marriage very nearly went off because the Normanbys stuck out for £100,000. ‘Laura is not my only niece, remember that,’ she said, and then they became frightened. She used to call Lord Harry Vane ‘My ‘Arry.’ One day, with Mr. Francis Grey, the conversation turned upon Venus. ‘I do not like her,’ she said; ‘she had a bad figure, and by no means a good character.’ Her companion laughed and said, ‘She mistakes her for a living person,’ and so she did.”

“Nov. 14.—Life is very pleasant in this fine old house, and its long sunny gallery full of books and pictures is a delightful resort on winter mornings. We breakfast at ten, during which Mr. Spencer Lyttelton, who is frequently here, does his best to shock people for the day, but is certainly very clever and amusing. I never saw any one who called a spade a spade as he does, but I believe he likes every one to think him worse than he is. This morning I walked with Brandling in the long shrubberies, the great trees casting perfectly blue shadows upon the park white with hoar-frost and the lake thinly coated with ice.

“In the afternoon we went to Ham House—a most curious visit. No half-inhabited château of a ruined family in Normandy was ever half so dilapidated as this home of the enormously rich Tollemaches. Like a French château too is the entrance through a gateway to a desolate yard with old trees and a sundial, and a donkey feeding. All the members of the family whom I knew were absent, but I sent in my card to Mr. Algernon Tollemache, who received us. As the door at the head of the entrance-stair opened, its handle went through a priceless Sir Joshua of Louisa, Countess of Dysart: it always does go through it. We were taken through a half-ruined hall and a bedroom to an inner room in which Mr. Algernon Tollemache (unable to move from illness) was sitting. It presented the most unusual contrasts imaginable—a velvet bed in a recess backed by the most exquisite embroidery on Chinese silk; an uncarpeted floor of rough boards; a glorious Lely portrait of the Duchess of Lauderdale; a deal board by way of washing-stand, with a coarse white jug and basin upon it; a splendid mirror framed in massive silver on a hideous rough deal scullery table without a cover; and all Mr. Tollemache’s most extraordinarily huge boots and shoes ranged round the room by way of ornament.

“The vast house is like a caravansary; in one apartment lives young Lord Dysart, the real owner; in another his Roman Catholic mother, Lady Huntingtower, and her two Protestant daughters; in a third, his great-aunt, Lady Laura Grattan; in a fourth, his uncle, Mr. Frederick Tollemache, who manages the property; in a fifth, Mr. and Mrs. Algernon Tollemache, who made a great fortune in Australia.

“We were sent over the house. All was of the same character—a glorious staircase with splendid carving in deep relief; the dismal chapel in which the different members of the family, amongst them Lady Ailesbury [321] and Lady Sudeley,[322] have been married, with the prayer-book of Charles I., in a most wonderful cover of metallic embroidery; marvellous old rooms with lovely delicate silk hangings of exquisitely beautiful tints, though mouldering in rags; old Persian carpets of priceless designs worn to shreds; priceless Japanese screens perishing; beautiful pictures dropping to pieces for want of varnish; silver grates, tongs, and bellows; magnificent silver tables; black chandeliers which look like ebony and are solid silver; a library full of Caxtons, the finest collection in the world except two; a china closet with piles of old Chelsea, undusted and untouched for years; a lovely little room full of miniatures, of which the most beautiful of all was brought down for us to examine closer. ‘Do you see that mark?’ said Mr. Tollemache. ‘Thirty years ago a spot appeared there upon the miniature, so I opened the case and wetted my finger and rubbed it: I did not know paint came off(!). Wasn’t it fortunate I did not wipe my wet hand down over the whole picture: it would all have come off!’[323]

“And the inhabitants of this palace, which looks like that of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, have wealth which is inexhaustible, though they have scarcely any servants, no carriage, only bread and cheese for luncheon, and never repair or restore anything.

“All the family have had their peculiarities. The late Lord Huntingtower was at one time separated from his wife, and when he was persuaded that he ought in common justice to allow her to return to Ham, he assented, but he draped the gates and portico with black cloth for her reception, and he put a band of black cloth round the left leg of every animal on the estate, the cows in the field, the horses in the stable, even the dogs and the cats. His grandfather, Lord Huntingtower, was more extraordinary still. When he bought a very nice estate with a house near Buckminster, he bought all the contents of the house at the same time. There was a very good collection of pictures, but ‘What do I want with pictures? All that rubbish shall be burnt,’ he said. ‘But, my lord, they are very good pictures.’ ‘Well, bring them all down here and make a very great fire, and I will see them burnt.’ And he did.

“There is a ghost at Ham. The old butler there had a little girl, and the Ladies Tollemache kindly asked her to come on a visit: she was then six years old. In the small hours of the morning, when dawn was making things clear, the child, waking up, saw a little old woman scratching with her fingers against the wall close to the fireplace. She was not at all frightened at first, but sat up to look at her. The noise she made in doing this caused the old woman to look round, and she came to the foot of the bed, and grasping the rail with her hands, stared at the child long and fixedly. So horrible was her stare, that the child was terrified, and screamed and hid her face under the clothes. People who were in the passage ran in, and the child told what she had seen. The wall was examined where she had seen the figure scratching, and concealed in it were found papers which proved that in that room Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart, had murdered her husband to marry the Duke of Lauderdale.”[324]

“Holmhurst, Nov. 24.—Here I am at home again, and we are very busy increasing the walks round the tiny property with the money which dear Aunt Sophy left. They will present quite a miniature variety of scenery now—the ilex walk recalling Italy, and the fir-wood the Black Forest, but the thick wood at the bottom, and its tiny glens and brook and bridges, could only be in England. In this wood we are trying to coax a thousand interesting flowers to ‘grow wild,’ and puzzle the botanists of the twentieth century.

“I spent the last three days of my absence with Hugh Pearson in his canonry at Windsor, a delightful old house overlooking the steep ascent of the hill, where different members of the royal family are constantly dropping in to visit the dearest man in the world, as the princesses of George III.’s time did to visit Mrs. Delany—and no wonder!

“Willie Stephens [325] and I had much interesting talk with the beloved H. Pearson; after being with other people, there is an ease in talking to him which is like exchanging a frock-coat for a shooting-coat.

“On Friday poor Prince Alemayu of Abyssinia (King Theodore’s son) was buried in Windsor Castle. After he came from Abyssinia the Queen adopted him, and he had no one else to look to, for his mother died of consumption on her way to England, and his only other near relation, his uncle, the present King, would certainly have cut his head off at once if he had returned to Abyssinia. He was at Rugby at Jex Blake’s house, and then at a private tutor’s to prepare him for the army, but he always passed his holidays in the castle with Lady Biddulph, and was like a younger brother to Victor Biddulph, her son. Every one liked him. Lately he had been at a tutor’s near Leeds, where he became ill of inflammation of the lungs, probably rapid consumption. Lady Biddulph did not believe in the danger, but Mrs. Jex Blake went to him, and her account of his last hours was most touching. He said to her, ‘No doubts: no doubts at all,’ and then he died.

“On Thursday he was brought to Windsor, and we went to look at his coffin in the little mortuary chapel, draped with black and white, in front of Princess Charlotte’s monument.

“The funeral was at twelve on Friday. The chapel was full. Most exquisitely beautiful was the singing—the gradual swell of ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ as the procession formed at the west door and moved slowly up the nave into the choir. The coffin was piled with flowers upon a violet and white pall. Lady Biddulph and her children knelt on one side. Prince Christian, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (as guardian of the Prince), and Mr. Lowe were amongst the mourners. The Dead March was played most grandly as the procession moved out again to the little graveyard by the west door, where the snow had fallen thick upon the flowers by which the newly-made grave was surrounded.

“I have heard a very eerie story from Lady Waterford:—There is a place in Scotland called Longmacfergus. Mr. and Mrs. Spottiswoode lived there, who were the father and mother of Lady John Scott, and they vouched for the story. The villagers of Longmacfergus are in the habit of going to do their marketing at the little town of Dunse, and though their nearest way home would be by crossing the burn at a point called ‘the Foul Ford,’ they always choose another and longer way by preference, for the Foul Ford is always looked upon as haunted. There was a farmer who lived in Longmacfergus, and who was highly respected, and very well-to-do. One night his wife was expecting him back from the market at Dunse, and he did not appear. Late and long she waited and he did not come, but at last, after midnight, when she was very seriously alarmed, he knocked violently at the door and she let him in. She was horrified to see his wild and agonised expression, and the awful change which had taken place in his whole aspect since they parted. He told her that he had come home by the Foul Ford, and that he must rue the day and the way, for he must die before morning. He begged her to send for the minister, for he must see him at once. She was terrified at his state, and implored him rather to send for the doctor, but he said, ‘No, the minister—the minister was the only person who could do him any good.’ However, being a wise woman, she sent for both minister and doctor. When the doctor came, he said he could do nothing for the man, the case was past his cure, but the minister spent several hours with the farmer. Before morning he died, and what he said that night to the minister never was told till many years after.

“Naturally the circumstances of the farmer’s, death made the inhabitants of Longmacfergus regard the Foul Ford with greater terror than before, and for a few years no one attempted to use it. At last, however, there came a day when the son of the dead farmer was persuaded to linger longer than usual drinking at Dunse, and after being twitted by his comrades for cowardice in not returning the shortest way, he determined to risk it, and set out with a brave heart. That night his wife sat watching in vain for his return, and she watched in vain till morning, for he never came back. In the morning the neighbours went to search for him, and he was found lying dead on the bank above the Foul Ford, and—it is a foolish fact perhaps, but it has always been narrated as a fact incidental to the story, that—though there were no marks of violence upon his person, and though his coat was on, his waistcoat was off and lying by the side of his body upon the grass; his watch and his money were left intact in his pockets.

“After his funeral the minister said to the assembled mourners and parishioners, that now that the second death had occurred of the son, he thought that he should be justified in revealing the substance of the strange confession which the father had made on the night he died. He said that he had crossed the wooden bridge of the Foul Ford, and was coming up the brae on the other side, when he met a procession of horsemen dressed in black, riding two and two upon black horses. As they came up, he saw amongst them, to his horror, every one he had known amongst his neighbours of Longmacfergus, and who were already dead. But the man who rode last—the last man who had died—was leading a riderless horse. As he came up, he dismounted by the farmer’s side, and said that the horse was for him. The farmer refused to mount, and all his former neighbours tried to force him on to the horse. They had a deadly struggle, in which at last the farmer seemed to get the better, for the horseman rode away, leading the riderless horse, but he said, ‘Never mind, you will want it before morning.’ And before morning he was dead.”

It was with a feeling of strangeness that, in the autumn of 1879, I felt that my royal duties were over. I did not see the Prince of Sweden again after his return from Scotland.

I have heard since at intervals from the Prince (whose career I always follow with deepest interest), and from the beloved Queen, by the hand of Countess Rosen; but their letters have referred rather to the past than to the present or future: my part in the Prince’s life is probably over.

XXI

A HALT IN LIFE

IN May 1878, my publishers, Messrs. Daldy and Isbister, had astounded the literary world by becoming bankrupt. They had been personally pleasant to deal with; I had never doubted their solvency; and I was on terms of friendly intercourse with Mr. Isbister. In April 1878 he wrote to me saying that he knew I applied the interest of money derived from my books to charitable purposes, and that he would much rather bestow the large interest he was prepared to give for such purpose than any other, and he asked me to lend him £1500. I had not the sum at the time he asked for it, but, about a week later, being advised to sell out that sum from some American securities, I lent it to him. Then, within a month, the firm declared itself bankrupt, owing me in all nearly £3000, and the £1500 and much more was apparently lost for ever.[326] In accepting contracts for my different books, I had always fully understood, and been given to understand, that I never parted with the copyright. I believe that most publishers would have informed an ignorant author that the very unusual forms of agreement they prepared involved the copyright, but I was allowed to suppose that I retained it in my own hands. I first discovered my mistake after their bankruptcy, when, besides owing me nearly £3000, Messrs. Daldy and Isbister demanded a bonus of £1500 (which I refused, offering £850 in vain) for giving me the permission to go on circulating my own books through another publisher.

As it was impossible to come to terms, my unfortunate books lapsed. In the autumn of 1879 Messrs. Daldy and Isbister offered to submit to an arbitrator the question of the amount to be paid to my so-great debtors for the liberty of continuing to publish my books. Three eminent publishing firms chose an arbitrator, but when he sent in his estimate they would not agree to it.

These circumstances made such a discouragement for any real work, that for two years I did nothing of a literary character beyond collecting the reminiscences contained in these volumes. The first year was chiefly occupied by my duties towards the Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway. In the second year I had a comparative holiday. It is therefore that I call it “A Halt in Life.”

In November 1879 an event occurred which would at one time have affected me very deeply—the death of the Mary Stanley who for many years ruled my adopted family by the force of her strong will, and who, after my dearest Mother was taken away from me, remorselessly used that power to expel me from the hearts and homes of those over whom she had any influence, in her fury at the publication of the “Memorials of a Quiet Life.” Yet, when her restless spirit was quieted by Death, I could only remember the kind “Cousin Mary” of my childhood, when my greatest delight was to go to her room at Norwich, and so many of my little pleasures came from her.

Hard to those in her own class, and with them ever occupied in asserting and insisting upon her own little imaginary dignities, Mary Stanley did more unselfish work for the poor than almost any one, and hundreds of whom nothing is known in the society in which she lived miss and mourn her. Probably only the poor knew the best, the really beautiful side of Mary Stanley’s life, which was most beautiful.

I often wish, as regards her, I could have profited more by words of Mrs. Kemble which I read too late to apply them—“Do you not know that to misunderstand and be misunderstood is one of the inevitable conclusions, and I think one of the especial purposes, of our existence? The principal use of the affection of human beings for each other is to supply the want of perfect comprehension, which is impossible. All the faith and love which we possess are barely sufficient to bridge over the abyss of individualism which separates one human being from another; and they would not, or could not, exist, if we really understood each other.”

In December I went abroad to join the two Miss Hollands—my Norwegian companions—at Ancona, and go on with them to Sicily, a journey through deep snow and agonising cold. After I met the Hollands and their friend Miss Lily Howard, we went rapidly south, with Sir George Baker, his wife and daughter, semi-annexed to our party, and at Reggio we found summer—palms, bananas, blue skies and sunshine.

Our wretched journey made the first morning at Messina quite enchanting, as we climbed the heights, looking down upon the straits and to the purple peaks of Italy, their tips glistening with snow. Nespoli, daturas, and camellias grew as trees in full bloom; the gardens were a mass of salvias, trumpet-flower, and roses; heliotrope in full blossom hung over the high walls, and quantities of scarlet geraniums grew wild upon the beach.

More lovely still was Taormina, hanging like an eagle’s nest on the ledge of the mountain, and looking down into the blue sea, which breaks into emerald near the snowy line of breakers. On one side is Etna, quite gigantic, with pathless fields of snow even upon the lower heights; on the other are the grand ruins of the Theatre, from which, above the broken arches and pillars, the queen of fire and snow looms unspeakably sublime. Our pleasant primitive inn was in a quiet street, where all the daily incidents were lovely—the goats coming in the early morning to be milked: the peasants riding in upon their asses: the convent bells jangling: the women returning from the fountain with vases of old Greek forms upon their heads, burnished yellow, green, or red: the singing at Ave Maria and Benediction. We spent several days at Taormina, drawing quietly in the mornings amongst the rocky beds of pinks, and snapdragon, and silene: reading aloud in the evenings—Thucydides, Gregorovius, and then a novel for relaxation: the four ladies and their maid occasionally singing in parts as in Norway.

We were sorry to go on to Syracuse, for though many had told us of its intense interest and curiosity, no one had spoken of its extreme loveliness. Of its five towns, only the island-town of Ortygia remains. Acradina, Neapolis, Tycho, and Epipolae are desolate hillsides covered with pink-grey limestone, overgrown with wild figs, olives, prickly pears, and ten thousand lovely flowers; and from their sunny slopes you look to the blue mountains of Hybla and the rose-coloured rocks of Megara. Here and there, in the most exquisite situations, are Roman, and still more beautiful Greek ruins, which seem to have grown into the scenery and become part of it, gilded by lichen, fringed with flowers.

Each morning at Syracuse we engaged little carriages (costing one shilling the hour) for the day, and took with us a well-filled luncheon basket for ourselves and our charming young drivers, and we wandered, and studied, and drew for hours. We spent a whole day on the grand heights of Epipolae, looking on one side across a luxuriant plain to snowy Etna, and on the other across the vast ruined city to the blue sea, with Ortygia gleaming upon it like a jewel. Another whole day was given to ascending the rivers Anapus and Pisma to the mystic blue fountain of Cyane: the most romantic of boating excursions, the boatmen every now and then being obliged to jump into the water and push the boat over the shallows or through the thick water-plants: the papyrus with its exquisite feathery crests almost meeting overhead, or grouped into the most glorious masses on the islets in midstream: enchanting little views opening every now and then to palms and cypresses and blue rifts in the roseate rocks of Megara; now a foreground of oleanders, then of splendid castor-oil plants. In returning, we walked up a hill to the Temple of Jupiter Olympus, through a perfect blaze of dwarf blue iris, the loveliest flowers I ever saw.

We spent the four first days of the New Year at Catania, a dull town, though backed by the glorious snow-fields of Etna, and we made thence two excursions—to Aci Castello, a beautiful old castle on lava rocks, and to Aci Reale, with the spring into which Acis, the lover of Galatea, is supposed to have been changed.

At Girgenti we found an excellent hotel, with rooms opening to delightful balconies, overhanging—at a great height—one of the noblest views in the world, billow upon billow of purple hill, crested with hoary olives, and with masses of oranges and caroubas in all the sheltered nooks, a vast expanse of glistening sea, and a range of Greek temples in desolate loveliness. The landlord, Don Gaetano de Angelis, was a stately old Sicilian, who treated us far more like honoured guests than customers, and fed us so luxuriously and magnificently that we wondered how it was possible he could repay himself. He had lately married for the second time, a pretty merry child-wife in huge gold earrings, who paid us frequent visits, and was delighted with us and our drawings, and to sit for her portrait. They quite enjoyed the preparation of the luncheon basket, with which we always set off at 9 A.M., not returning till the sunset had turned the sea rose-colour and set the mountains aflame. Each day we picnicked amongst the asphodels and lilies in the shadow of one of the Greek temples, and were glad to find a shelter from the burning sun, which blazed in a sky that only turned from turquoise to opal. Some of the temples are nearly perfect, some mere masses of ruin, or one or two pillars with a beautiful bit of yellow architrave set in the most exquisite landscape—delicate pink mountain distances, and foregrounds of grand old olive-trees or almonds flushing into richest bloom, above a ground enamelled with flowers of every hue. We all agreed in thinking Girgenti more beautiful than any other place, and its people even more charming than the scenery, so full of kindly simplicity, from the Syndic to Pasqualuccio, the little goatherd, with coins in his earrings after the old Greek fashion, who gives each of his goats a colazione of acanthus leaves, set out like plates on a dinner-table, on the fallen columns in the Temple of Juno.

The second day after our arrival, as we were returning home up the hill in the still warm evening light, we turned aside to the old deserted convent of S. Niccola. A merry crowd of gentlemen and ladies and little boys and girls were shouting and singing on the terrace, and dancing the tarantella to the music of three peasants on a bagpipe, tambourine, and triangle. Like a Bacchanalian rout of old times they came rushing down to meet us, twenty-six in number, chained together with garlands, and the girls all wreathed with wild scarlet geranium. They escorted us all over the garden, gathering flowers and fruits for us, the crowd of little children gambolling and dancing in front. Then they begged us to go back with them to the terrace, and began dancing again, and were delighted when Miss Howard and Miss G. Holland danced with them. Afterwards, standing on the terrace, our three ladies sang one of their beautiful part songs, tumultuously applauded with prosit and evviva. The result was showers of visiting-cards from all the notables in Girgenti, especially from a family who rejoice in the singular name of the Indelicati. Then came invitations to a party and ball at Casa Gibilaro, the sons of the house, Cesare and Salvatore, coming to escort us up the steep street. Italian ladies sang, and so did our party, and all danced, and we taught the Girgentines Sir Roger de Coverley, which greatly enchanted them. The family of twenty-six—grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins, were all there, living in the happiest union and affection, no daughter of the house ever marrying out of the place, and all meeting constantly. Carmela and Pasqualina Gibilaro were so enchanted with our two younger ladies, that they scarcely ever let go of their hands, and expressed their delight over them in the most naïve manner, and I became great friends with Salvatore and Antonio. One day, Salvatore and Pasqualina dined with us, and we afterwards went again to their house, where there was another dance, at which all the professors of the university (on delightful terms of merriment with their pupils) assisted, the Professor of Theology frisking about in the tarantella, and the Professor of Philosophy leading the cotillon. We wished this time to leave early, but our hosts insisted on our waiting till the arrival of ices, an unwonted luxury with them, but ordered in our honour. We had dined before, and since coming to the dance had been obliged to eat quantities of pasticcie, so were aghast when we found that we were each expected to eat an ice larger than an ordinary tea-cake. We managed as well as we could, but it was dreadful. I deposited more than half mine under a table. Miss Holland thought she was getting on pretty well with hers, when a Contessa Indelicato, on the opposite side of the room, seeing her flagging, filled a large spoon with her own ice, and rushing across, popped it into her mouth. With great promptitude Miss Howard instantly popped a spoonful of her ice into the mouth of a Contessina Indelicato! Great were the lamentations and embraces from this amiable family when we left Girgenti, dear little Antonio Gibilaro going with us to the station.

I spent the last morning at Girgenti in drawing the sea glistening through the pink almond-trees, and the rocky road with its troops of goats and donkeys, and in the afternoon of January 11 we went on to Palermo.

Under the later Bourbon kings Sicily was perfectly safe and brigandage utterly unknown, for the principal officials in each village and parish were made responsible for its security; but the annihilation of the rural police under the Sardinian Government taking place at the same time with the abolition of capital punishment, had introduced brigandage; and though it had become rare since the formation of railroads, it was not considered safe for us to go far from Palermo without an escort, and we were obliged to give up Segeste. When we were at Palermo, murders for vendetta were of constant occurrence, and only cost three hundred francs, as the punishment was so slight,—generally two years’ imprisonment without labour, and with a life of much greater comfort than the culprit could have enjoyed at home. Besides, the murderers are scarcely ever given up, as the vendetta would then fall upon those who betrayed them. Some of our party went to visit Calatafimi, the brigand who carried off a gentleman from Cefalu, and, when he got only half the ransom required, laboriously snipped with scissors till his head came off, in a cave on Monte Pellegrino. He was found very merry, in most comfortable quarters, with quantities of fruit, newspapers, &c. When he was tired of being there, his family would bribe the gaoler, and he would get out.

The glorious weather we enjoyed in the south of the island turned to torrents of rain at Palermo, but it is said that there are only forty-two days in the year without rain there. On the rare occasions when it clears, Palermo is most lovely, backed by such grand mountains, the nearer ones rugged purple rocks, over which the snow-peaks peep out. The cathedral also is very beautiful, with a great courtyard in front of it planted with palm-trees and geraniums; but there are none of the glorious flowers of Girgenti; the climate is a constant damp chill, like that of Pau and Pisa, and I shall always associate the place with the ceaseless melancholy roar of the sea, the drip and splash of the rain, which fell day and night, and the monotony of the mouldy deserted walks. In the Lazaretto cemetery—a lovely little spot hedged with Barbary aloes—it was touching to see the tomb of my almost unknown father. He also hated the place and was deeply depressed there.

Our one really fine day was delightful. We drove along the shore to Bagaria, where all the old nobility have their country palaces, enormous and stately in form, with huge courts and immense armorial shields over their gates, but the windows generally half choked up or glassless, the courts overgrown with weeds, and the roofs tumbling in. Sad indeed would be the shock to an English girl who married a Sicilian prince for his title and his “palace,” upon her arrival at one of these old barracks, where she would be lucky if she could find one weathertight chamber.

Beyond Bagaria, Capo Zafferano strides into the sea—a grand mountain, covered with cactus almost to the top; and here, high on the rocks, are the ruins of Solunto, a Carthaginian city—broad streets edged by diminutive houses and temples in the style of Pompeii. We picnicked at Solunto in the cactus shade, and drew all day the glorious view across the bay to the purple crags and fantastic forms of Monte Griffone.

Another day we went to Monreale, the grand semi-Saracenic cathedral, covered with mosaics, on the heights behind Palermo. It reminds me of a story the late Lord Clanwilliam used to tell, which I will insert here:—

“A Knight of Malta, who, by the rules of his Order, was both a soldier and a priest, was once travelling in Sicily. Being at Palermo, he strolled up to Monreale; it was a lovely evening, and in the great cathedral, where the shade was so welcome after the heat of the way, the effect was exquisitely beautiful, as the sunset streamed through the long windows upon the mosaic walls. Being an artist, the knight took out his sketch-book and began to draw, first one lovely arch and then another, till the waning light warned him that night was approaching. Then he made his way to the western door, but it was closed. He turned to the side doors, to the sacristy; they were closed also. It was evident that he was locked into the cathedral, and though he shouted and kicked at the door, he could make no one hear. Spending the night alone in a church had no terrors for him: it was only on account of the discomfort that he objected to it; so he found his way to a confessional far up the church, and made himself as comfortable there as he could with all the cushions he could collect.

“Most wondrously beautiful is the cathedral of Monreale when the moon casts its magic halo over the ancient mosaics, and so it was on this night, when the artist-soldier-priest sat entranced with its unspeakable loveliness. The whole building was bathed in softest light, each avenue of arches at once a poem and a picture, when the clock struck twelve. Then from the west door a figure seemed to be approaching, a cowled figure in monastic robes, and the stranger felt with satisfaction that he had been missed and that one of the monks of the adjoining monastery was come to seek him. But, as he watched the figure, he observed its peculiar movement, rather floating than walking up the nave, enveloped in its sweeping draperies, and as it passed he heard a low musical voice like a wiffling wind which said, ‘Is there no good Christian who will say a mass for my poor soul?’ and the figure passed on swiftly, on behind the altar, and did not return.

“Through an hour the Knight of Malta sat watching and expecting, and then, as the clock struck one, the figure again floated up the nave, and again the same sad low voice murmured, ‘Is there no good Christian will say a mass for my poor soul?’ Then the Knight came out of the confessional and pursued the vanishing figure, pursued it to a particular spot behind the altar, where it disappeared altogether.

“When the clock struck two, the figure appeared again, and when it again uttered the words, ‘Will no good Christian say a mass for my poor soul?’ the priest-soldier answered, ‘I will; but you must serve the mass,’ for there can be no mass without a server. The holy vessels were upon the altar, and the soldier-priest began the mass. Then the monk threw back his cowl and displayed a skull, but he served the mass, which the priest courageously went through to the end: then he fell down unconscious in front of the altar.

“In the morning, when the monks came into the church, the stranger was found still unconscious upon the altar steps. He was taken into the convent, and, when he came to himself, he told what had happened. Great search was made in the archives of the monastery, though nothing was found to account for it. But long after, when some repairs were being made in the cathedral, the body of a monk in his robe and cowl was found walled up, evidently for some crime, near the altar, just at the spot where the Knight had seen him vanish.”[338]

A railway took us from Palermo to Caldane, almost on the opposite coast, and there we were transferred to a wretched tumble-down diligence, which went swinging and jolting over the deep pools in the rocky road. Though there were no regular brigands on this road, the peasants, who were too idle to work, constantly formed themselves into great bands and attacked the diligences; so the Sardinian Government, too feeble to attempt managing the people themselves, sent a guard to defend us from them. Two soldiers with guns sat on the luggage, and loaded pistols peeped ominously from under the cloaks of the Sicilians within, one of whom was an impiégato per la caccia dei briganti. However, late at night we reached Caltanisetta, a great poverty-stricken city, with white houses, white rocks, and no vegetation, high in the sulphur district.

On going to the station the next morning, we heard that the railway near Messina was washed away, and that the last train had narrowly escaped a Tay Bridge disaster by the breaking of the high bridge at Ali. So we telegraphed to Taormina to send a carriage to meet us at Giardini, the place nearest the scene of the disaster. We did not reach Giardini till it was pitch-dark; the sea was raging close to the railway, and the rain had been falling all day in torrents. It was such a night as one scarcely ever sees, so tempestuous, so utterly black! There was no carriage for us, and no one to meet us; the telegraph had been swept away in the storm. Blankly and grimly did the officials see the large party deposited at the desolate station surrounded by waters, and great was the consternation of my four female companions when they found that it was just going to be closed and abandoned. We got a man to wade through the marsh to Giardini to try to get a carriage to come to us: the carriage tried, but an intercepting torrent was so swollen, it was impossible for it to cross without being swept out to sea. The man came back along the railway parapet, and told us that we must give up all hope of getting away. The officials refused to send any one with us; no one would face the furies of the night; nor could they lend us a lanthorn; they wanted it themselves. Happily I had made friends with a young man of Taormina—capo della musica—who happened to be at the station. He had a lanthorn, and kindly waited for us, till at last my companions consented to kilt up their dresses and venture out into the blackness. It was four miles by the road, about a mile and half by the precipices; we chose the latter. But the path through the precipices, which we had toiled up before in burning sunshine, was now a roaring torrent. However, there was nothing for it but to plunge in absolute blackness from stone to stone of the steep ascent, holding on to the broom and asphodels. At the most dangerous points the capo della musica, who made the little joke of “Io solo sono sole,” kindly waited with his lanthorn till each of the party of eight was safely round the corner. Fortunately the rain almost ceased during the ascent, and at last, by scrambling, jumping, or grovelling, we found ourselves in the street of Taormina. The people of the inn were gone to bed, but soon the great event of a large party with ladies arriving on such a terrific night caused many windows to open in the friendly primitive street, and heads and candles to appear: the hotel was roused, and we were warmly welcomed.

For three days we remained in a state of siege with the elements howling around in our rock-fortress of Taormina, sometimes seeing Etna reveal itself above the black storm-clouds. Then we crossed to Reggio, and went on by night to Taranto, where we spent the morning in drawing the curious island-town, and took the train again to Trani. Hence we made an excursion—three hours in a carriage and one on foot—to Castel del Monte, the favourite castle of the great Frederick II., long since a ruin, but not roofless, and presenting a more perfect picture of mediaeval splendour in its suites of marble halls than any castle I ever visited. Yet it must always have been a most desolate place and the most uninteresting of royal residences. Trani itself is full of interest, and has a beautiful cathedral. Accounts we had read of “the all-glorious cathedral of Andria” beguiled us to toil next to that old episcopal city, which we found a complete delusion, and went on to Barletta, visiting thence the battlefield of Cannae and the curious old town of Canosa, where Ariosto’s hero Bohemund is buried. Then we proceeded to Foggia, where we saw the remains of Frederick II.’s palace, and thence we made another excursion to his favourite town of Lucera, full of Saracenic remains. The next day we saw Beneventum, another glorious cathedral, mosque, and a grand Roman gateway, and arrived at Naples on the 12th of February. My last days with my companions were spent at beautiful Amalfi, and after a few lovely days at Naples and Rome, I followed them to England.

“Elton Hall, Peterborough, April 1, 1880.—I have been two days here at Lord Carysfort’s.... The house is a jumble of architecture of every style and age, from Henry VII. to the present, and, without ever being very picturesque, is thoroughly satisfactory and comfortable, with a delightful library and a number of fine portraits. The park overlooks long lines of flat, amid which rises Fotheringhay Church. An old watermill is called ‘Pereo Mill,’ because when Mary Queen of Scots arrived and saw all the waters out, as they so often are to this day, she thought all was over with her and exclaimed, ‘Pereo,’—I perish. We have driven to Fotheringhay, and seen again the mound and the one remaining stone of the castle. The church is like a lanthorn, so full of windows, and very fine, though perpendicular. By the altar are tombs with stately inscriptions on the wall over them to Richard and Cicely Plantagenet, father and mother of Edward IV., and to his grandfather Edward Plantagenet, who was killed in the battle of Agincourt. We went on to Oundle, a charming old town with a noble church. Here, in the street, is the house of Lord and Lady Lyveden, with a large garden on the other side. The two Lady Lyvedens were there. The old one, Lord Castletown’s sister, was once the beautiful little girl of Sir T. Lawrence’s masterpiece; the younger, a plain, simple, sensible woman, well fitted for a poor peer’s wife, is perfectly adored in the town of Oundle.

“Sir Frederick Peel is here with his young wife, who is charming, so very pretty, with quantities to say on all subjects.”

“St. James’s Place, May 8.—To Mrs. Stewart’s. Lord Houghton was there, very cheery and kind. I was struck the other day by hearing some one say, ‘Lord Houghton is not only a friend in poverty, he is a friend in disgrace.’ Can there be higher praise? He was very amusing apropos of my employing Henningham and Holles to leave my cards, and said that Miss Martineau at first absolutely refused to conform to the ways of the world in paying visits, it was ‘such a waste of time;’ but it was suggested to her that she should send out ‘an inferior authoress’ with her trumpet in a hackney-coach to represent her and do her work, and that if the authoress only let the trumpet appear out of the coach-window, she would do just as well as herself.

“Dined at Lord Sherborne’s, meeting, amongst others, Lady Powerscourt, surely one of the sweetest of God’s creatures.”

“May 13.—Having heard of George Paul’s death, I went to see Auntie.[343] It was strange to find the familiar figure of my childhood, who had been inexplicably separated from me for twelve years, and with her to see again many of the silent objects connected with Esmeralda and those sealed chapters of life. We spoke only on indifferent subjects, but I cannot think poor Auntie can have felt indifferent, though she refused to show me the slightest affection, or evince the least pleasure at seeing me.”

“May 15.—I paid £50 into Auntie’s account at Coutts’s, and shall continue to do so at this date annually. More I think she would reject, but she will allow this to pass, and I am thankful even in the smallest degree to contribute to her comfort.”

“May 19.—A luncheon party at Lady Ducie’s. Mrs. Stewart was there. Some one said Sir William Harcourt’s late election failure would be as good as a dose of physic to him—‘No,’ she answered, ‘it will be no good at all; it has been a dose of castor-oil administered to a marble statue.’”

“May 25.—Luncheon at Lady Sherborne’s. Dear old Mrs. Stewart was there in great force, and recited Swinburne’s really grand lines apropos of the Prince Imperial’s proposed monument, exhorting the illustrious dead to veil their faces and leave Westminster Abbey on the arrival of his statue.

“Lady Airlie was at luncheon. She spoke of the almost necessity for a cloud over the most beautiful lives. She said how one might observe that in almost all the finest summer days the sun was clouded over for some hours.”

“May 26.—Dined at the Thorntons’. Lord Houghton was there. He said how he had discussed with George Sand the question how far it was well to know authors whose works you admired. She had urged him never to know them, that they all put their best into their books; whatever you find afterwards can only be inferior material. Carlyle, Lord Houghton allowed, was just like his books; in his case you could know the man and not be disappointed: it is the same mixture of grim humour, irony, and pathos, of which his books are composed, which enables the man personally to produce such an indescribable impression. Carlyle always hated having his picture taken, but was persuaded to sit to Millais. When he went there, to the beautiful house full of priceless art-treasures, he asked what brought them there. ‘My art,’ answered Millais proudly. ‘Then there are more fools in the world than I imagined,’ said Carlyle.”

“May 30.—Sat a long time with Lady Airlie, who talked of the power of prayer and the number of people who really believed in it. She said she prayed for everything, but always left it to God to decide for her, making a complete act of submission, but adding, ‘I should like this or that best.’ The mystic Mr. Laurence Oliphant came in and talked for a long time. Being asked as to his past and future, he said he could only act ‘under direction,’ i.e., of spirits. He said the separation from the spiritual world was entirely dependent upon the constitution of the individual. No wonder that the hallucinations of this brilliant and fascinating visionary wreck the comfort as well as the practical usefulness at once of his own life and the lives of those dearest to him.

“A few days ago Ronald Gower came and took me to Frank Miles’s studio—a new-old house in Tite Street, Chelsea. Frank Miles is a charming handsome young Bohemian, who has a delightful garden in the country filled with every lily that ever was heard of. He paints all the ‘professional beauties,’ who hover round him and his studio like moths, but his pictures have no great power.”[344]

“May 31.—I was at Stafford House in the evening, the hall brilliantly lighted, a deafening band on the staircase, and all the Campbell-Percy-Gower connection looking on.”

“June 1.—I dined with the Boynes, and went afterwards to Lady Sudeley and Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck. At these great parties I find my difficulty in recognising people an immense disadvantage. Then, with those who do not care for contemporary history or art, there are so few topics of conversation, for almost every one in London is occupied ‘de rien faire, ou de faire des riens.’”[345]

“June 4.—A party, where I heard Mrs. Caulfield sing and Genevieve Ward recite—first only some fables of La Fontaine, to which she gave a marvellous infinity of expression, and then a ballad. She is a simple and very striking-looking woman.”

“June 9.—Dined with the Haygarths. Mr. Bouverie was there, and very entertaining with stories of the old Duke of Wellington, of whom he justly said that his character had greatly risen through the publication of his letters, while other characters had been lowered. ‘They will knock down a great many statues,’ the Duke had said in speaking of them to Mr. Bouverie in his lifetime.

“Apropos of the Duke’s love of military discipline, Mr. Bouverie mentioned how, when he was at Walmer, all the officers of the neighbouring garrison called except Lord Douro, who thought it would be absurd, as he was seeing his father every day. Consequently, the Duke asked all the officers to dinner except his own son, and at dinner said to the Colonel, ‘By-the-bye, who is your Major? for he has not called on me.’

“Another example of the Duke’s character as a martinet was that Lord Douro once met him in plain clothes. The Duke took no notice of him whatever. Lord Douro, knowing how angry his father must be, rushed in, changed his clothes for uniform, and met his father again. ‘Hallo, Douro! how are you? it is a long time since I have seen you,’ said the Duke; but he had seen him quite well a quarter of an hour before.”

“June 10.—Dined with the Miss Duff Gordons, meeting Tosti the singer and tall young Carlo Orsi from one of the old castelli in the Tuscan valley of Signa. He was very naïve about his coming to London, and his asking himself when he woke, ‘And can it be thou, Carlo, who art here?’ Mrs. Caulfield (née Crampton [346]) and Tosti sang exquisitely in the evening.”

“June 14.—With Mrs. Stewart to Alma Tadema’s studio—a small house on the north of the Regent’s Park. Inside it is a labyrinth of small rooms with gilt walls and ceilings, and doors hung with quaint draperies. A vague light fell through alabaster windows upon Madame Tadema in a cloth of gold dress backed by violet draperies. The Dutch artist, her husband, thinks her red hair glorious, and introduces her in all his pictures. In his studio is a strange picture of ‘The Triumph of Death’ by Breughel the Devil. I was glad to meet again Madame Riaño—Doña Emilia de Guyangos—gliding through the half-dark rooms after the ubiquitous wife of Tom Hughes.”

“June 15.—Luncheon with Lady Dorothy Nevill in her charming house in Charles Street, which has all the attractions of an old manor. Lady Dorothy is very pretty still, like a piece of Dresden china. She and Lord Houghton were very amusing over Mr. Wolff,[347] who married her aunt, Lady Georgiana. Nothing could persuade him to cleanliness. Once they tried to insist upon his washing his hands, and took him to a jug, basin, and clean towel for the purpose, but he would only dip the ends of his fingers in the jug and dry them on his pocket-handkerchief. If he went to stay anywhere, he would never take any luggage. He was, however, persuaded for three days to take three clean shirts, but he arrived with them all on, and peeled gradually.

“Mr. Wolff went to stay with George Anthony Denison, who was frightfully bored with him. He stayed a week. As he was in the carriage going off from the door, Mr. Denison said to him, ‘Well, good-bye, my dear fellow; I’m sorry you’re going.’—‘Are you sorry I’m going?’ said a gruff voice from the carriage; ‘then I’ll stay another week.’”

“June 16.—A huge party at Devonshire House—the staircase most beautiful.”

“June 17.—To Lady Airlie to meet Miss Farrer and Emmeline Erskine—a long talk quietly about spirituality and the Quietists. Miss Farrer told me first-hand a story I have often heard before:—

“Her brother knew well a shopkeeper in Plymouth, who felt one day, he could not tell why, that he must go to Bodmin. To get there, it was necessary that he should cross a ferry. It was late at night, and he expected to have great difficulty in getting across, but, to his amazement, he found the boat ready for him. The ferryman said, ‘I am ready, because you called me an hour ago.’

“When the shopkeeper reached Bodmin, the town was full of crowds and confusion; the assizes were going on. He made his way to the court. A man was being tried for murder, and likely to be condemned. He protested his innocence in vain, and in an agony was just saying, ‘I was in Plymouth at the time, if I could only prove it.’ The shopkeeper was just in time to hear him, and exclaim, ‘I can prove it, my Lord; I remember the prisoner perfectly: he came into my shop at the very time in question.’ And it saved the man’s life.

“Emmeline told of Mr. Richmond’s little children, who, playing in a long almost dark gallery, saw their dead mother standing at the end, and went to their father and told him, ‘Mama is come back.’ An open cistern was found at the spot where they had seen her.”

“June 18.—Dined with the Owen Grants. At ninety-three old Lord Kilmorey is dying. He took his immense drives as usual till a few days ago. Then, returning from one of them, he sent for George Higginson and Owen Grant, and said, ‘Now I am going to die; I think it is time, and I wish you to stay with me to the end.’ They sent for the doctor, who persistently declared that Lord Kilmorey had nothing whatever the matter with him. They remonstrated as to the pain it would give to many. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘yes, my sister Georgiana, perhaps she will feel it; I will wait till I have seen her.’ And he waited till he had seen old Lady Georgiana, talked to her very affectionately, took leave of her, and since then has eaten nothing.”

“June 24.—With the Mark Woods to Charlton, the fine old house of Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, near Greenwich. It was built by James I. for his son Prince Henry, and is in wonderful keeping with its surroundings of broad terraces, old pine-trees, &c. In the richly polished chimney-piece of one of the rooms, a lady while dressing is said to have seen a murder reflected while it was being committed in the park, and her evidence to have found the man guilty.”

“June 26.—In the evening I was at the Speaker’s party. His beautiful rooms were additionally illuminated by the glare from a great fire on the opposite bank of the river. The bridge, and the chain of omnibuses and cabs, with their roofs crowded with the black figures of spectators, and the background of flames, gave the whole scene the aspect of the Devil’s funeral with appropriate fireworks. In a great hooded car, nodding against the flame, the Devil’s widow seemed to follow. We watched from the windows for nearly two hours—inside, bright uniforms, low dresses, glistening diamonds: outside, flames and a black shimmering river. At last the fire-engines got the victory, a roof fell in, the glare began to fade, the bereaved demons returned from the ceremony, and the illuminations were extinguished. No human life was lost, only the two great bloodhounds which were the guards of the timber-yard, and which for years have gained the prize in every dog-show.”

“June 29.—Lady Lucy Grant had a pleasant party in her pretty garden. Old Madame Mohl was there, a wreck, but a curious reminiscence of the past. In the little garden-studio Miss Grant’s reredos for Edinburgh Cathedral was lighted up. In the main features it is fine, but the women are all exactly the same height as the men, and all the figures stand in a line, with an equal amount of individuality, too little occupied with each other.”

“July 7.—Dinner at Lord Ducie’s. I was delighted to sit once more by Madame de Riaño [348] and enjoy the flow of her ever-fresh originality.”

“July 8.—The Duchess of Norfolk’s ball. The house had not been opened to a great party for forty years, but the noble suite of rooms, with their old ceilings and pictures, is well adapted for it.”

“July 9.—Lord Denbigh has sent me what he calls ‘a bundle of wonders.’ It contains one curious history related by Henry Malet in August 1869.

“‘In the winter of 1854-55, at the end of December, I was in Paris, and among other people of whom I saw a good deal was Palgrave Simpson, the dramatic author. There was something about him I liked, and a certain originality in the tone of his mind interested me. One evening, after a bachelors’ dinner at Charlie Webster’s rooms, the conversation turned on clairvoyance. Palgrave Simpson expressed himself a believer in many of the clairvoyant phenomena which were then astonishing people in Paris, but nearly all the rest of us, except myself, laughed in his face, and told him that he must be insane to credit such nonsense. He and I walked home together, and I believe that I told him I should be glad of an opportunity of investigating some of the stories which had impressed him.

“‘Within a few days I received a sudden order to return at once to London and hold myself in readiness to embark for the Crimea with a large detachment of my regiment.

“‘Our departure was delayed from day to day, but about the end of March it was fixed for the first week in April. When the day was finally settled, I prevailed on my mother, who was in despair at the idea of my going on active service, to leave London with my brother and go to Frankfort, as I concluded that the actual blow of the separation would be lessened by this means.

“‘I am not quite positive as to the date of our sailing, but it was two or three days after my mother arrived at Frankfort.

“‘We were to parade in Wellington Barracks at 5 A.M., and, after midnight on the last night, I looked in at the Guards Club, and found there a note enclosing an antique ring. The note was from Palgrave Simpson and said, “Do not laugh at me, but while you are in the Crimea wear the enclosed ring. It was given to me by the last representative of an old Hungarian family on her death-bed. In her family it was an heirloom, and considered as a most precious talisman to preserve the wearer from any external harm.”

“‘I slipped the ring on my finger, I must own, without attaching any great importance to the matter, and turned in, after writing Palgrave Simpson a note to thank him for his kindness.

“‘The next morning I sailed at 10 A.M. from Portsmouth. We touched at Gibraltar, but it was not till our arrival at Malta that I heard from my family. Then I found a letter from my mother dated from Frankfort on the very day of our sailing from England. It said, “I have been quite broken-hearted about you, and could find no comfort anywhere; but now all is changed, for a most extraordinary reason. This morning, as I lay in bed in broad daylight, and after my maid had brought my hot water, just as I was about to get up, a most beautiful young lady, very fair, and dressed in grey silk, drew aside the curtain of my bed and leant over me and said, ‘Do not be unhappy about your son: no harm shall happen to him.’ I am quite certain I have had a vision, yet it seemed as if I were awake: certainly I was so the moment before this happened. The whole thing is as distinct as possible, and as unlike an effect of imagination. Of course I cannot account for it, but it has made me quite happy, and I know you will come back safe.”

“‘On receipt of this letter I bethought me of the ring, and begged my mother in reply to describe minutely the appearance of the mysterious visitor. My mother said it was a young woman about twenty-seven years of age, rather pale, with very straight features, large grey eyes, and an abundance of brown hair worn in rather an old-fashioned manner: the sleeves of the grey silk dress were what we call “bishop sleeves.”

“‘I sent copies of my mother’s letters to Palgrave Simpson, and he answered me that the description was in the minutest particular the counterpart of the lady who on her death-bed had given him the ring some sixteen or seventeen years before.

“‘It is to be observed that no communication whatever passed between me and my mother between the receipt of the ring and my arrival at Malta, and I will swear that I told no one the story.

“‘On my return from the Crimea I restored the ring to its owner, but he sent it back to me, begging me to keep it. Last year he wrote to me that he was threatened by a certain danger, and he wished to have back the talisman. I at once returned it to him, and it is now in his hands.’”

“July 10.—Dining at Louisa, Lady Ashburton’s, I sat near George N. Curzon, eldest son of Lord Scarsdale, the sort of fellow I take to at once, and we made great friends in one evening, unfolding ourselves in a way which makes me sure we shall meet again.”

“July 11.—Dined at Lord Foley’s. George Russell was there. He said he had said something about Lord Salisbury’s carriage to the Duchess Dowager of Cleveland. ‘I did not know Lord Salisbury had a carriage,’ said the old lady. ‘Surely, my dear Duchess?’—‘No; I have even heard it said that the present Marquis of Salisbury goes about in a vehicle called a brougham!’

“Sir Robert and Lady Sheffield were going down to visit some friends near West Drayton, where a carriage was to meet them. Arriving in the dark, they found a carriage waiting and jumped into it. After driving some way, they entered a park and drove up to the door of a great house. They were shown up to a long gallery, where a little old lady was arranging some books. ‘Ah! some companion,’ they thought, and for a time they took no notice of her. At last they said, ‘Is Lady —— not coming down soon?’—‘I am not cognisant of the movements of my Lady ——,’ said the old lady very sharply, rapping her ebony stick violently on the floor; ‘but you are under a misapprehension. This is Osterley Park, and I—am the Duchess of Cleveland.’ And then subsiding into her most gracious manner,—‘And now, whilst my carriage is getting ready to take you on to Lady ——, I hope you will allow me to have the pleasure of giving you some tea.’”

“July 14.—Dinner at Lady Charlemont’s. Mr. Synge, who declared at once his belief in ghostly apparitions, told a pretty story of a clergyman in Somersetshire who had ridden to the bank and drawn out all the money for his poor-club, which he was taking back with him, when he became aware of another horseman riding by his side, who did not speak, and who, at a certain point of the road beyond a hollow, disappeared. In that hollow highwaymen, who knew the clergyman was coming with the money, were waiting to attack him; but they refrained, ‘for there are two of them,’ they said. It was his guardian angel.

“Mr. Synge told us that his grandfather was the magistrate to whom the man came who said that he ought to warn Mr. Percival because he had twice dreamt of a man in a white plush coat with purple glass buttons who was going to murder him. But his grandfather restrained the man from saying anything on so slight a foundation as a dream. After the murder of Mr. Percival, the man went up to London, and in the prisoner in Newgate recognised at once the man he had seen, and found him wearing the white plush coat with the purple glass buttons.

“Lady Charlemont talked much of the Lord Chancellor Thurlow. He asked for the Bishopric of Durham for his brother. George IV. replied that he thought Lord Thurlow should have known that that Bishopric, being a principality, could only be given to persons of the very highest rank and connections. ‘It is therefore, your Majesty,’ said Lord Thurlow, ‘that I have asked for it for the brother of the Lord High Chancellor of England.’

“A clergyman desirous of a living went to the Bishop of London and asked him for an introduction to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow. The Bishop said, ‘I should be willing to give it, but an introduction from me would defeat the very end you have in view.’ However, the clergyman persisted in his request, and the introduction was given.

“The Lord Chancellor received him with fury. ‘So that damned scoundrel the Bishop of London has given you an introduction: as it is he who has introduced you, you will certainly not get the living.’—‘Well, so the Bishop said, my lord,’ replied the clergyman. ‘Did the Bishop say so?’ thundered Lord Thurlow: ‘then he’s a damned liar, and I’ll prove him so: you shall have the living,’ and the man got it.

“At Arundel the guests were astonished by the butler coming in one day abruptly and saying to the Duke, ‘May it please your Grace, Lord Thurlow has laid an egg.’ It was one of the owls which existed at Arundel till the time of the present owner. Lord Thurlow’s daughter, going round their cages in the wall, had stopped opposite one of them, and, looking at the blinking bird, said, ‘Why, he’s just like papa.’ The bird was ever after called Lord Thurlow.”

“July 16.—At Mrs. Ralph Dutton’s I took Mrs. Procter in to dinner—Barry Cornwall’s widow, always full of interest and excellence, and of many unknown kindnesses. She talked of her early days, of the charm of Monckton Milnes when young—his brightness and vigour: of the decadence of society now, when at least a thousand persons were invited to Grosvenor House whom our grandmothers would not consent to be in the same room with; but that society now required high seasoning, and royalty the strongest pepper of all: that in former days no guest would have continued in a house where he was received on entering by a wet sponge from ——: that the abbreviation of P. B.’s in use for ‘professional beauties’ was a sign of the depth to which we have fallen.

“Mrs. Stewart told me a characteristic story of Mrs. Procter’s wit. ‘The Lionel Tennysons—dear good excellent people—asked that woman Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, to luncheon, asked her to go all the way to them in Kensington, and invited some good, quiet, simple folk to meet her, just trusting in his prestige as the laureate’s son. I need hardly say that, though they waited luncheon for Sarah Bernhardt till four o’clock, she never came. She knew the company she was to meet, and she did not think it worth while. They told Mrs. Procter of it. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘if people will invite monkeys, they must provide them with nuts.’

“‘Dear Mrs. Procter is so satirical,’ says Mrs. Stewart, ‘that when I go to her and find other people in the room, I always stay till the last, that she may have no one to discuss me with.’

“When Mrs. Procter dies, her last daughter will probably go into a convent. She has had three daughters; two have become Roman Catholics, and one is already in a convent. ‘I have another daughter, but you will never see her,’ is the only way in which the mother alludes to this.”

“July 17.—Sat by Matthew Arnold at breakfast. Speaking of the odd effect misspelt words often produced, he quoted a begging letter he had just received from a lady who said she had a decided claim upon charity, being ‘the sole support of an aged Ant’ (sic).

“Called on Mrs. Stewart. She said that the evening before she had asked Mr. Froude what she should reply to Mr. Tennyson if he asked her what she thought of his last wretched poems. ‘Oh, say, “Blessed sir, would I presume?”’ returned Mr. Froude.

“Two days ago I went to Lady Airlie’s, where a large party was collected to hear Mr. Browning read. I never heard any one, even a child of ten, read so atrociously. It was two of his own poems—‘Good News to Ghent’ and ‘Ivan Ivanowitch,’ the latter always most horrible and unsuitable for reading aloud, but in this case rendered utterly unintelligible by the melodramatic vocal contortions of the reader.”

“July 23.—By invitation of Mrs. Stephen Winkworth to see Lewis Campbell’s translation of the ‘Agamemnon’ acted. Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin took the parts of both Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and was very grand in both, especially the latter. She has an infinity of action, but it is all graceful and very Greek. The chorus loses much, because each of the old men is made to say his speech separately, whereas in the original Greek they evidently all talked together.”

“July 24, Milford.—I have ended a very happy season by leaving London immediately after the marriage of Evelyn Bromley Davenport with Tom Legh of Lyme. Here, at Mrs. Greville’s, I find Lady Archibald Campbell, a pale, beautiful young woman, strangely occupied with spiritualism, and Mr. Watts, one of the principal writers in the Athenæum, and the man who, living with Swinburne, has, by his personal influence, cured him of the habit of drinking.”

“July 25.—A hot Sunday afternoon, spent chiefly in sitting on the terrace, where great orange-trees are set in tubs as in a French garden, and in listening to the discursive conversation of Mr. Watts and Lady Archie about Swinburne and Rossetti.

“I am very sorry, now that it is too late, that, in my last visit here, when asked to choose which I would be taken to see, I did not say George Eliot instead of Tennyson. Mrs. Greville went to see her with an aching heart after Lewes’s death, and ‘found them all in the drawing-room playing battledore and shuttlecock, nothing changed but the man.’

“Mrs. Greville’s mother, sweet Mrs. Thellusson, was one of the claimants for the great Thellusson fortune—an unsuccessful claimant. She is lovely still in her old age. Mrs. Greville has a picture of a young man in a dress of the beginning of this century. She described his return lately from India. ‘He came to Milford, and paid me endless attentions and made me endless presents; I really thought he wished to marry me, until he proposed to—my mother!’”[349]

“Ammerdown Park, August 2.—I have been several days with Lady Waterford—always charming, always so full of holy teaching, that she recalls the closing lines of St. Patrick’s Hymn—

Yet this visit leaves nothing especially to remember except a story of Lord Waterford pursuing a robber who had broken into his house, finding him in a public-house some four miles off, and convicting him amongst a number of other men by insisting upon feeling all their hearts; the man whose heart was still beating quickly was the one who had just done running.

“On Saturday I came to Wells, the lovely old city of orchards and clear running brooks, whence Lord Hylton fetched me to Ammerdown. Sir Augustus Paget and all his family are here, the daughter a lovely, bright, natural girl,[350] and the sons, Victor and Ralph, most charming, kind-hearted, winning fellows. We have been to Mells—an overgrown park with pretty natural features, which was the favourite manor of the Abbot of Glastonbury. At the dissolution, Mr. Horner was sent to take up the parchments of the abbatial lands to Windsor, and for better security took them in a pasty. On the way he put in his thumb and pulled out for himself the title-deeds of Mells, the best plum of all, which has ever since remained in the family of ‘Little Jack Horner.’”

“Ryde, Oct. 10.—I have spent a quiet, peaceful summer: so little from the outer world seems to ruffle me now, and the storms of four terrible years have been succeeded by six years of calm. It has been a constant pleasure to visit the dear Mrs. Grove, now confined to the upper floor of her house. Charlotte Leycester has been long at Holmhurst, and other guests have come and gone, relics from my dearest Mother’s life, and waifs and strays from my own, by many of whom I am sadly overrated; the moral of which is, I suppose, that one should try really to clamber up to that high shelf on which one is placed in imagination. Of original work I have done little enough, except one article on ‘Lucca’ for Good Words.

“One of my chief occupations has been editing the life of the nun Amalie von Lassaux, translated from the German by Fräulein von Weling. As ‘Sister Augustine,’ her story possesses that interest which is always attached to a struggle in the cause of truth amid many persecutions and torments, rather mental than physical.

“I was away twice for a few days—first with young Mrs. Hamilton Seymour at Aylesford, a charming little old town on the sluggish Medway, with ‘The Friars’ close by, where pleasant Lady Aylesford lives in a beautiful old house, with oak staircase, gateway, water-gate, clipped yew-trees and terraces. Then I was two days at Hampton Court with witty old Lady Lyndhurst, and greatly delighted in the glories of the old palace and its gardens. And now I am with dear old George Liddell,[351] enjoying this otherwise dull watering-place through his genial hospitality.”

“Melchet, Hants, Oct. 23.—From Ryde I went to Amesbury to stay with Sir Edmund and Lady Antrobus, who are some of the kindest and most hospitable people in London, and have a fine house in Piccadilly. Their house in Wiltshire is very fine too, though it has never been finished. Gay’s Duchess of Queensberry lived there, and in the grounds are a cave and summer-house where the poet wrote verses to her. But the great interest of Amesbury lies in its being the scene of Guinevere’s penance, and it recalls Tennyson’s poem in the swirling mists which arise with morning and evening. Each morning we drew at Stonehenge amongst the hoary and mighty stones standing out against the ethereal lights and shadows of the plain.

“Next, I went to Rushmore, to which the Lane Fox’s have succeeded, with the name of Pitt Rivers and £36,000 a year, since the death of the 6th Lord Rivers. It is a dull country-house on Cranbourne Chase—swooping moors sprinkled with thorn-trees or thick woods of hazel. I was taken to see Shaftesbury; Cranbourne, the fine old house of the Salisburys; and Wardour, with noble cedars too closely overhanging the ruins of its castle. Lord Arundel lives in the Park at Wardour, in an immense house which he is too poor to keep in repair. He has another place somewhere near the sea, where his grandfather went to reside, to the great discomfiture of a gang of smugglers, who had previously had sole possession, and who tried to frighten him away by ghostly sights and sounds, but in vain. One night Lord Arundel was sitting in his room, having locked the door, when some one knocked. He demanded who was there, when a voice said, ‘Open and you will see:’ He opened it, and found a very rough-looking man with a keg of spirits under his arm. The man said, ‘Well, my Lord, we’ve done our best to frighten you, but you won’t be frightened, so I’ve, come to make a clean breast of it, and I’ve brought you a little offering. I only hope you won’t be hard on us.’ ‘Oh, dear no, I won’t be hard on you,’ said Lord Arundel; and Lady Marian Alford, to whom he told the story at Rome when she was four years old, vividly remembers his vigorous assertion, ‘And the smuggler gave me the very best Hollands I ever had in my life.’

“From Rushmore, after a visit to the old Shipley home at Twyford, I came here to Lady Ashburton. Melchet is a magnificent house in a beautiful country, and is filled with art-treasures of every kind. Lady Marian is here, always pleasant with her ripple of conversation and anecdote. She has been very amusing about her mother’s parrot, which used to hop about upon the lawn. One day it was carried off by an eagle. Old John Tooch, one of the dynasty of John Toochs who worked in the garden, was mowing the lawn, and as the parrot, in the eagle’s gripe, was sailing over his head, he heard a voice in the air call out, ‘We’re ridin’ noo, John Tooch, we’re ridin’ noo;’ at which strange sound the eagle was so dreadfully frightened that he let the parrot fall, so that John Tooch took it home to its cage again.”

“Melchet, Oct. 28.—Yesterday we went to Longford—Lord Radnor’s—a great castellated house in a dull park, with no view, but very fine pictures.

“In the morning the (Melchet) footman woke me with the news that the house had been broken into. The robbers had entered through the drawing-room window, perambulated the lower apartments, drunk up all the wine in the dining-room, and found all the valuables too big to carry off!”

“Oct. 29.—A charming visit to Broadlands, Lord Mount-Temple’s—the people so full of genial goodness, the house most comfortable and gardens lovely. Lady Mount-Temple—in whom, as Miss Tollemache, Ruskin saw such statuesque severity with womanly sweetness joined—a marvellous union of beauty, goodness, and intelligence. The grounds, with fountain, river, well-grouped trees, and a Palladian summer-house, are like a beautiful Claude-Lorraine picture. The same landscape—of a river, winding amongst cedar-shadowed lawns—forms the predella to Rossetti’s picture of ‘The Blessed Damozel.’”

“Holmhurst, Nov. 13.—Mr. and Mrs. Paterson have been here for the day. He told me two stories:—

“A lady was awoke in the night with the disagreeable sense of not being alone in the room, and soon felt a thud upon her bed. There was no doubt that some one was moving to and fro in the room, and that hands were constantly moving over her bed. She was so dreadfully frightened that at last she fainted. When she came to herself, it was broad daylight, and she found that the butler had walked in his sleep and had laid the table for fourteen upon her bed.

“A lunatic, who had escaped for some time from his asylum, was eventually captured. When he came in and saw the keeper who was accustomed to take care of him, he said, ‘Well, I’ve been very much occupied since I went away: I’ve been occupied in being married.’—‘Well, and whom have you married?’ said the keeper. ‘Oh, I’ve married the Devil’s daughter.’—‘Well, I hope it’s a happy union?’—‘Oh, very, thank you,’ said the lunatic; ‘only I don’t much like the old people.’”

“Holmhurst, Nov. 24.—Last week I was for two days at Cambridge as the guest of Jock Wallop, the best and kindest of hosts, under whose popular auspices I saw the present undergraduate life to perfection. There is a most charming set of fellows there now, all delighted to be young, and not aiming at juvenile senility, as was the fashion in my day at Oxford.”

“Dec. 16.—Several Midland county visits afford nothing to recollect. Certainly country-house visits are a lottery. One old lady said, ‘My dear, I am so glad to see you. It is so delightful to see any one at all pleasant. In London one can have any agreeable company one likes, but you know God Almighty fills one’s house in the country.’

“I have, however, been to George Curzon at Oxford. He is most delightful, and sure to become distinguished. At the meeting of the Conservative ‘Canning Club’ I heard a most capital paper on Ireland by young Edward Arnold. Afterwards I was three days at Sherborne, meeting, amongst other less interesting elements, the ever-charming Dowager Lady Craven. Lady Sherborne sang in a way which would move the heart of a basilisk. The country around Sherborne was the scene of innumerable battles in Saxon times, commemorated in the names of the fields and farms, which are supposed to owe their fertility to the carnage with which they had been covered. This supposition makes the peasants eager for the use of bone-dust, which they believe to be imported from the plains of Waterloo. If a field, after having been thus manured, still yields no crop, they say ‘Waterloo bean’t no use here!’”

I spent the Christmas of 1880 again with the kind Lowthers at Ampthill, meeting, as before, Louisa, Lady Ashburton, and going, as before, to spend a day at Woburn. In January 1881 I was at Bretton with the Beaumonts, meeting Julia, Lady Jersey, and a large party.

We went to see Nostell, a very grand but little known house of the Winns, full of splendid things, glorious tapestries, china, Chippendale furniture, but, most remarkable of all, a doll’s house of the last century, with miniature fairy furniture, exquisitely carved and painted, a doll trousseau with point lace, and a Liliputian service of plate.

We also went a long drive to Stainborough (Wentworth Castle), through a country which may be pretty in summer clearness, but which is hideously black in winter. The house is a great Italian palace, half Queen Anne, half older, with little temples in the grounds, the building of one of which is described by Evelyn. Inside there are fine tapestries, and many pictures of the Stuarts, ascribed to Vandyck, but probably copies. Lady Harriet Wentworth, who showed us everything herself, gave us the characteristic of her life when she said “I do so hate the thraldom of civilisation.” Her stately rooms have no charm for her, and, though they are so immense, she declares she cannot breathe in them, and she lives entirely and has all her meals in the conservatory, with a damp, warm, marshy climate, from which she does not scruple to emerge through the bitter winds of the Yorkshire wolds (for the conservatory does not join the house) with nothing extra on. From Bretton I went to Tortworth—Lord Ducie’s—in Gloucestershire.

“Jan. 11, 1881.—There is a large party here (at Tortworth), but one forgets all its other elements in dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart. ‘L’esprit pétille sur son visage.’ Never was there a more marvellous coruscation of wit and wisdom; and she not merely evades ever saying an ill-natured thing of any one, but, where there is positively nothing of good to be said, has some apt line of old poetry or some proverb to bring forward urging mercy—‘Mercy, so much grander than justice.’

“Last night she wanted to introduce me to Mrs. Grey, an American lady who is staying here. ‘I cannot do it better,’ she said, ‘than in the words of Alfred d’Orsay when he brought up Landseer to me, saying, “Here, Mrs. Stewart, is Landseer, who can do everything better than he can paint,”—so here, Mrs. Grey, is Mr. Hare, who can do everything better than he can write.’

“To-day, at luncheon, Mrs. Stewart talked much of Paris, and of her intercourse with a French physician there. Dr. —— spoke to her of the happy despatch, and unhesitatingly allowed that when he saw a patient condemned to hopeless suffering, he practised it. ‘But of course you insist on the acquiescence both of the patients and of their families,’ said Mrs. Stewart. ‘Never,’ shouted Dr. ——. ‘I should be a mean sneak indeed if I waited for that.’

“She talked much of George Sand and of her journey to Italy, from which three books resulted, her’s, ‘Elle et Lui:’ his, ‘Lui et Elle,’ and ‘Lettres d’un Voyageur.’

“Afterwards Lord —— was in a box at the opera in Paris with a number of other young men. There was a knock at the door, and George Sand came in. ‘Il y a place pour moi?’—‘Certainly,’ they said. By-and-by one of them inquired, ‘Et Musset?’—‘Oh, il voyage en Italie,’ she replied. Presently the door opened, and a man came in—haggard, dishevelled, worn to a degree. It was Musset. He shook hands with one and other of the young men. ‘Et pas un mot pour moi?’ said George Sand. ‘Non,’ he exclaimed. ‘Je vous haïs, je vous deteste! c’est que vous avez tué le bonheur de ma vie.’

“Mrs. Stewart talked of the great want of appreciation of Byron—of his wonderful satire, evinced by the lines in the ‘Age of Bronze’ on Marie Louise and Wellington: of his philosophy, for which she cited the lines on Don Quixote: of his marvellous condensation and combination, for which she repeated those on the burning of Moscow.

“She also talked of Trollope’s novels, and said how Trollope had told her of the circumstances which led to the death of Mrs. Proudie. He had gone up to write at the round table in the library at the Athenaeum, and spread his things all over it. It was early in the morning, and there is seldom any one there at that time. On this occasion, however, two country clergymen were sitting on either side of the fire reading one of his own books: after a time they began to talk about them. ‘It is a great pity Trollope does not get some fresh characters,’ said one. ‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘one gets so tired of meeting the same people again and again, especially of Mrs. Proudie.’ Then Trollope got up, and planting himself on the rug between them with his back to the fire, said, ‘Gentlemen, I do not think it would be honest to listen to you talking about my books any more, without telling you that I am the victim; but I will add that I quite agree with what you have been saying, and that I will give you my word of honour that Mrs. Proudie shall die in the very next book I write.’”

“Jan. 12.—Dr. Asa Grey, who is here, a Professor of Harvard University, is one of the most famous botanists living; but he is also a very charming person. Lowell describes how his

“Mrs. Stewart talked of Madame Jerome Bonaparte, née Paterson—her beauty, her cleverness, her father to whom she always wrote of her succès de société, looking down upon him; but he could always avenge himself; he could always write to her, ‘My dear Betsy.’ ‘She would tell him how she had been received at this court and at that, and then would come his answer with “My dear Betsy.” Oh, it was a terrible revenge.’

“She talked of the society of her youth, when it was real society, for people were never in a hurry. ‘One of the marked figures then was Lady Cork,[353] who, after eighty, always dressed in white, with a little white pulled bonnet and a gold-headed stick. Another, whom you are none of you old enough to remember, was Lady Morgan, a little old lady, who used to rouge up to the eyes. M. Fonblanque—he was the editor of the Examiner—used to say, “She is just a spark of hell-fire, and is soon going back to her native element.”

“‘I wonder,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘what has become of an early picture which I remember of Leighton’s. A lady went to all the great artists in London to get them to paint a dream of hers, and they refused, and Leighton, who was quite a young man, undertook it. She dreamt that she had died, and that she had gone up—up to Christ, and that He had turned her back, and she said, “Why, Lord?” and He replied, “Because your work on earth is not yet done.”

“‘Leighton painted the Saviour in a glory of yellow light, and the woman being turned back by Him.’

“‘Creswick the actor was once at a dinner where Irving absorbed all the conversation and allowed no one else to speak. At last he could stand it no longer, and turning round to his next neighbour, said, “I had such an extraordinary dream last night.” Of course, the whole party were attention at once.’

“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I dreamt that I was dead, and that I went up to the gates of heaven and knocked at them. ‘Who are you?’ said St. Peter. ‘I am Mr. Creswick.’—‘What, Creswick the Academician?’—‘No, Creswick the actor.’—‘Oh, then I can’t let you in here; we don’t admit any actors here,’ said St. Peter, and he turned me away. Dreadfully crestfallen, I went and sat down under a juniper-tree, and watched other people arriving at the gates. Many of my friends came and were let in. Then I took heart and went and knocked again, and when St. Peter said again that I must go away, for he could not admit any actors, I said, ‘But really that is not the case, for you have let in Mr. Irving.’—‘That is true,’ said St. Peter, ‘but—he was no actor.’”

“‘Take care,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘or you will become that most dreadful of all things, a self-observant valetudinarian. I was once in the house with a lady, who, after talking of nothing else for an hour, said, “I won’t speak of my own health, for, when I was young, a dear old wise and judicious woman said to me, ‘When anybody asks you how you are, always say you are very well, for nobody cares.’”

“‘Many people fall into sin,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘merely because they are tired of the monotony of innocence.’

“‘He was very fallible,’ she said, ‘and yet capable of becoming that greatest of all things—a good man.’

“‘I think it was a bishop who said, “Most people now go to seek their ancestors at the Jardin des Plantes; for my part, I am content with the Garden of Eden.”’

“‘Mr. Pigott is a finished critic, but with the innocence of a child picking daisies.’

“‘It was one of the cases in which the highest and the lowest motives combine, and oh! in life there are so many of those cases.’”

“January 12.—Mrs. Stewart has been talking of the cases in which a lie is justifiable. Of herself she said, ‘There was once a case in which I thought I ought to tell a lie, but I was not sure. I went to Dr. and Mrs. Bickersteth, and I asked them. They would only answer, “We cannot advise you to tell a lie;” they would not advise it, but they did not forbid it. So when a husband came to question me about his wife, I equivocated. I said, “She was certainly not seduced by that man.” He said to me very sternly and fiercely, “That is no answer; is my wife innocent? I will believe you if you say she is.” And I said, “She is.” I said it hesitatingly, for I knew it was false, and he knew it was false; he knew that I had lied to him, and he did not believe me in his heart; but he was glad to believe me outwardly, and he was grateful to me, and that husband and wife lived together till death. I believe that was one of the cases in which it is right to tell a lie. You will say that it might lead me to tell many others, but I don’t think it has. Stopford Brooke once said that strict merciless truth was the most selfish thing he knew.”

“Dudley Smith, as a very young man, went out to China, and was employed in the opium trade. He then married and had several children. When he was thirty-three his conscience began to work, and he felt the abuses of opium. He left the trade and became a wharfinger, in which profession he made some money, though it was not nearly so lucrative as the occupation he had given up, in which he had made £12,000.

“When he was thirty-five, though he had then a wife and several children, Dudley Smith brought the £12,000 to his man of business, saying that it burnt a hole in his pocket, and desiring him to so invest it as to realise £500 a year for a mission to the Chinese, from whom it was taken. This story is delightful to me. It reminds me of a saying of old Mr. Planchet’s, which meant, though I cannot remember the exact words—

We have been to luncheon at Berkeley Castle to-day. Lady Fitzhardinge, fat to a degree, is charming, and has the most wonderful knowledge of all the delicate finesses of form and colour, and the application of them to furniture. Her rooms are quite beautiful, everything composing the most harmonious picture, down to a string of blue beads suspended from a yellow vase. Lord Fitzhardinge came in to luncheon with Lord Worcester, Lord Guildford, and another man—four statues! Not one of them spoke a word, I believe because not one of them had a word to say, except about racehorses, about which we none of us could say anything. The castle relics are most interesting—Sir Francis Drake’s furniture, Queen Elizabeth’s plate, bequeathed to her cousin Lord Hunsdon, and the last prayer of Edward VI., written out by his sister herself, in the tiniest of little jewel-embossed volumes.”

“Jan. 15.—Mrs. Stewart has been talking much of her great delight in the works of Ampère, and of the intense devotion, the passionate love of the younger Ampère for Madame Recamier. She was guilty of a trahison to him, though. When he was at Weimar, he wrote to her a private letter, telling her particulars about all the people there, which he had better not have told, but he wrote them in strict confidence. She made that letter public. ‘My dear Mr. Hare,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘I have never read any letter more exquisitely, more tenderly pathetic than that which Ampère wrote her when he heard this—a letter struggling between his old respect and admiration and the feeling that his idol had fallen, that he could not but reproach her.

“When Lowell (the American poet and minister) was describing his wife’s terrible illness, he said, ‘My dear Mrs. Stewart, I would have given Job ten and won.’

“After Lady Fitzhardinge came, Mrs. Stewart talked much of her acquaintance with Brother Ignatius. She was at the place of her son-in-law, Mr. Rogerson, in Scotland. One day out walking, Mrs. Rogerson met a young man, of wonderful beauty, dressed as a monk, with bare feet and sandals. He asked her whether they were near any inn, and said, ‘The fact is, I have with me two sisters, Sister Gertrude and another, and a brother—Brother Augustine. And the brother is very ill, possibly ill to death, and we cannot go any farther.’ So Mrs. Rogerson made them come to her house, and showed them infinite kindness, ‘giving them at once water for their feet and all Scripture hospitality.’ Brother Augustine was very ill, very ill indeed, and they all remained at Mrs. Rogerson’s house three weeks, during which Mrs. Stewart became very intimate with them, especially with Brother Ignatius and Sister Gertrude. They used to go out for the day together, ‘and then, in some desolate strath, Brother Ignatius would sing, sing hymns like an archangel, and then he would kneel on the grass and pray.’

“Many years afterwards, Mrs. Stewart heard that Brother Ignatius was going to preach in London—‘some very bad part of London,’ and she went. The room was packed and crowded, but she was in the first row. He preached, a beautiful young monk, leaning against a pillar. ‘There were at least a hundred of his attitudes worth painting,’ but there was nothing in his words. At last a little girl thought he looked faint, and brought him a smelling-bottle, which she presented to him kneeling. ‘He smelled at it, and then seeing me, an old woman, near him, he sent it on to me, and I smelled at it too. Afterwards I stayed to see him, and we talked together in a small room, talked till midnight. Then he gave me his blessing, gave it me very solemnly, and afterwards I said, ‘And God bless you too, my dear young man.’

“In the evening Mrs. Stewart spoke much of the Sobieski Stuarts—their gallant appearance when young, and their change into ‘the mildew of age.’

“Apropos of the last words of St. Evremond, ‘Je vais savoir le grand peut-être,’ Mrs. Stewart mentioned Mrs. Grote having said to her at their last meeting, ‘I trust, dear, that you are living, as I am, in respectful hope.’

“This led to much talk of Mrs. Grote, who had died (Dec. 29, 1878) when I was away at Rome with the Prince Royal, and Mrs. Stewart described how, when she returned from Hanover after the fall of the royal family, and was quite full of events there, she went down at once to visit the Grotes in the country. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Grote, ‘I cannot enter into your feelings about all your princesses and duchesses, but as regards your king, I can enter into them fully: he has lived “as it is written.”’ Mrs. Stewart wrote this to the King, who knows Shakspeare to his finger-ends, and he said it did him more good than anything else anybody wrote or said to him. As long as he lived, he and Mrs. Grote exchanged stories and messages afterwards, through Mrs. Stewart.

“Lady William Russell said with much truth of Mr. and Mrs. Grote, ‘He is ladylike, and she is such a perfect gentleman.’

“When Lady Catherine Clive was painting her town-hall at Hereford, she was very anxious to find new, not conventional, attributes for some of her allegorical figures; she especially wished for something instead of the scales of ‘Justice.’ Mrs. Stewart wrote this to Mrs. Grote: ‘Tell your friend,’ she answered, ‘not to try to struggle against conventionalities. Tell her to be content with the scales: she will come to find the cross conventional next.’

“When Lady Eastlake undertook to write Mrs. Grote’s life after her death, she asked Mrs. Stewart for all her ‘jottings’ of Mrs. Grote’s conversations, but she made no use of them. She was so anxious that every one should find the book too short, that she really omitted almost everything characteristic. She wrote her regrets afterwards to Mrs. Stewart, who answered, ‘You are suffering, my dear, from a granted prayer,’—for, in fact, the book was so short and dry that it passed almost unnoticed.

“Mrs. Stewart spoke again of how far a lie might be made right by circumstances—giving a wrong direction to a man who was in pursuit of another to kill him, &c., and, when some one objected, dwelt upon its being far greater to be noble for others than holy for one’s self. Some one said that in this case all should follow the inner voice, which would tell them truly what their real duty was. She replied, ‘Yes, having formed your character by the Master without, you may then act in a crisis by the voice within, which will never be false to your life’s teachings.... But perhaps,’ she added, ‘I should say, like Dr. Johnson, “I have been speaking in crass ignorance, according to the failings of my fallible human nature”’ (and she repeated some lovely lines on Mary Magdalen, from Moore’s ‘Rhymes of the Road’);[354] ‘and yet, may we all, whilst acting like fallible human beings as we are, trust respectfully in God’s mercy,—though speaking of no glorious future as reserved for us, lest He should say, “What hast thou done to deserve that?”’

“The letters written to the Morning Post from Hanover during the last days of the monarchy, and signed H. S., were by Mrs. Stewart: those in the Times, bearing the same signature, were by another lady.

“After being for a time with Mrs. Stewart and hearing her talk, I feel how great the decay of conversation is since my childhood, when there were many people who knew how to converse, not merely to utter. Scarcely any one now ever says what they really think, and there is an unwholesome striving after aestheticism, Louis Quatorze, blue china, &c., which another age, if it remembers it, will think most ridiculous.”

“London, Jan. 24.—To Miss Bromley, who had been on Saturday to take leave of Carlyle, to whom she has been the most faithful of friends for many years. He has been sinking for some time, full of power, pathos, and patience. He woke out of what was supposed to be a death stupor to recognise her, and pressed her hand to his lips.”

“Feb. 26.—Went by appointment to see the Queen of Sweden, who is at Claridge’s Hotel for two nights. She was most kind and gracious, and said that she was glad to thank me in person for all that I had been to the Crown Prince. She talked of her illness and its anxieties; but there were many other people waiting for an audience, and there was no time for any real conversation.”

“March 1.—Met Lady Lyveden at dinner at General Higginson’s. She described Mrs. Grote saying one day, ‘I have to go out this morning, my dear; it’s not my usual time, and in fact it’s very inconvenient to me, but then you know, my dear, it’s an affliction job.’

“Mrs. Grote, to the last, was very proud of her appearance. Her hands and feet she was especially proud of. One day Lady Lyveden asked her to come in the evening to meet some pleasant people in her neighbouring house in Savile Row. She would not do it. ‘I shall not come, my dear,’ she said, ‘because I never go out; but besides that, I could not come, for, if I did, I should have to put my well-formed figure into one of your abominably low arm-chairs.’[355]

“There was a charm about her primitive household. There was not one of her servants who spoke of her otherwise than ‘the Missis.’

“After dinner, she would leave ‘the historian,’ as she called him, in his study, and come up to the drawing-room, where she would talk to her guests and be most entertaining. At nine o’clock, tea would be brought up—such a tea as one never sees now, with tablecloth, muffins, cakes, &c. Then she would say to the servant, ‘Bring up the historian’—and the historian was ‘brought up.’ He was vastly civil, of the old school, and wore a great deal of frill. He would take his place opposite the table, and immediately taking a large clean pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, spread it very deliberately over his knees, after which a dog jumped up and sat upon it. Then he would say, as to a perfect stranger, ‘And now, Mrs. Grote, will you kindly favour us with a sonata?’ and Mrs. Grote, who was an admirable musician, would play a very long sonata indeed; after which he would say, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Grote. I am sure Lady Lyveden joins with me in being very much obliged to you for your beautiful sonata.’[356]

“Lady Eastlake’s written portrait misses all the wit, all the acted comedy of Mrs. Grote’s real life. She made, however, a capital pencil sketch (which Lady Lyveden has) of Mrs. Grote, who was greatly pleased with it.”

“March 9.—Met Princess Mary at luncheon at Lady Harrington’s, who only presented me by ‘Here is Augustus.’ The Princess was good enough to talk to me for a long time afterwards.”

“March 22.—Dined at Lady Airlie’s, sitting by Lady Herbert of Lea, who talked much of her long residence in Sicily, with which she was connected through her mother. She went about a great deal amongst the poor at Palermo, generally accompanied by a Sister of Charity, and on one occasion nursed a sick brigand. Soon afterwards, her children, going to the Bay of Mondello to pick up shells, were seized by brigands, but as soon as they found whose children they were, they sent them back to her safe. Another day, Lady Herbert was returning from a village, whither she had been on some office of charity, to Palermo, as it was almost dark. There were high walls on either side of the way. Suddenly the Sister of Charity who was with her began to go so fast that she could not keep up with her. ‘Non posso, Sorella mia, non posso cammináre più,’ she said. ‘But look behind you,’ said the Sister. She looked, and saw three brigands following them. It would have been impossible to get away, so she waited till they came up and said, ‘Che vuole?’ They begged her to excuse them: they were sent by their chief to protect her as far as the walls of Palermo: they knew her, but others might not, and they were ordered to ascertain that she came to no harm.

“A Hungarian Count and Countess were at dinner. He talked of fashion very amusingly. He said he had learnt much from his herdsman, a very clever man (‘he was hung afterwards, poor man, but he was very clever’), who chose the animal to bear the bell, which was accustomed to go in the centre of the herd. He asked why this was, and the herdsman answered, ‘Because the one who goes first naturally runs first into all dangers, and when he has done it once or twice, the herd begin to find it out, and they cease to follow him; and the one who goes last is constantly left behind, and the herd begin to find it out, and they cease to follow him; but the one that is in the middle, and chooses the safest place, that is the one they know to be wise, and so, in any time of danger, they will assuredly follow him. The Count spoke of the mania for husband-murder which prevailed at Marseilles till it became quite a fashion. Six women were tried at the same assizes for murdering their husbands. In some of these cases there seemed something of reason or excuse, but at last there came a lady whose husband had been all that was most charming and delightful, and where the crime seemed incomprehensible. The judge pressed her as to her motive, and at first she said, ‘Ces dames me l’ont mis dans l’esprit,’ and, when urged further, ‘Mais, cela se fait à Marseilles!’

“The London world has been full of the ‘Reminiscences of Carlyle,’ published with furious haste by Froude a fortnight after his death. They have dwarfed their subject from a giant into a pigmy. His journal and letters speak well of no one except his own family, and assail with the utmost vituperation all who differed from him. For his wife there is a long wail of affection, which would be touching if the devotion had not begun after her death. ‘Never marry a genius,’ she said to Lady Ashburton; ‘I have done it, and suffered from it; but then, after my death I shall have an apotheosis’—and she has had it. Much of Carlyle’s virulence arose from the state of his health: he used to say, ‘I can wish the devil nothing worse than that he may have to digest with my stomach to all eternity; there will be no need of fire and brimstone then.’”

“March 28.—Dined at Lady Lyveden’s. Sat by Lady S., who was very pleasant. She talked of Tennyson, who had been to stay with her. He desired his sons to let her know that he should like to be asked to read some of his poems in the evening. Nevertheless, when she asked him, he made a piece of work about it, and said to the other guests, ‘I do it, but I only do it because Lady S. absolutely insists upon it.’ He read badly and with too much emotion: over ‘Maud’ he sobbed passionately.

“Afterwards, at Lady Ridley’s party, Lord Houghton talked to me about Carlyle—of how his grimness, which was unrelieved in the ‘Reminiscences,’ was relieved in the man by much kindly humour. He said that he and Lady Houghton were almost the only people spoken well of in the book. Mr. Spedding used to say that Carlyle always needed that kind of indulgence which most of us need in a fit of violent toothache.”

“April 3.—Dined with old Lady Combermere, who declared that only two people ever had any excuse for living in the country, and they were Adam and Eve!”

“April 8.—An amusing luncheon at Lady Sebright’s, with an immense party of actors, actresses, painters, literati, and ‘great ladies.’ It seemed a reversion of the old order of things when the actresses had said they ‘must inquire a little into the characters of the great ladies’ they were asked to meet!”

“Holmhurst, April 9.—Lea says, ‘It’s seven weeks from Guttit to Aaster, and seven weeks from Aaster to Whissuntide.... You needna’ to tak’ any trouble about the clocks, for when Lady Day comes it ‘ull mak’ ’em all right, for there’s just twelve hours of sunshine on Lady Day.’

“‘After New Year’s day every day is just a cock’s ted longer than the last: a cock’s ted, you know, is just the time a cock stops between its crowings.’

“‘When we were any ways contrairy, my father used to say, “Yes, it’s always too wet or too fine: it’s always too hot or too cold: that’s the way of the world.’”

“London, May 12.—To Mrs. Duncan Stewart, whom I found, after her severe illness, sitting in a picturesque wrapper reading old Figaros. ‘So much in them, you know, so much more than in any other newspaper.’ They called up reminiscences of Lady Blessington, whom she thinks Lady Airlie like, though without her perfect beauty: then of the trial of ... for forgery, she being a grand-daughter of Stephanie Lafitte, ‘whom I remember, not in her wedding-dress, but in one of her trousseau dresses, for it was velvet. All French girls—and I was a French girl then—are brought up to observe and think a great deal about dress, and it is terrible, quite horrible to them, that an unmarried girl should have a velvet dress: thus the remembrance clings to me.’

“Mrs. Stewart had been most alarmingly ill, but said she had rallied from the moment Alfred Denison paid her a visit. She had said to him that she had a presentiment she should not recover, and he had answered her that he had never been ill without such a presentiment, and that it had never come true.

“Yesterday I went to the Hollands to meet Princess Louise, and to tell her some stories which she had graciously wished to hear. I knew that I was to do this, but it was sufficiently formidable notwithstanding. The Princess felt that it must be so, and was very sympathetic, and as nice as she could be, talking first of my books, and saying that my Italian volumes were never out of her hands when she was in Italy, &c. I had been allowed to choose the rest of the audience, and the Childers, Northcotes, Goschens, Lady Taunton, and Mrs. Dundas were there.”

“May 18.—Luncheon with Catherine Vaughan at the Temple. She was very full of a story of Sir F. Gore Ouseley. He took a house near London, and a young man went to stay with him, an atheist and a reprobate. The next morning this man came down an altered person, saying that he had heard a supernatural voice in the night, which had so horrified him that it would change his whole life—the voice had blasphemed in the most awful language. That day was November 22. The young man went away, and he really did change his life.

“The following year, on November 22, Sir F. Gore Ouseley suddenly opened his door at night, and saw at the end of the passage a brilliant light, and in the light the figure of an old man in a dressing-gown—luminous, and all the rays of light issuing from his figure. Suddenly the light went out: there was nothing more to be seen.

“Some time after, Sir F. Gore Ouseley went to visit the owner of the house he had rented, who lived at a distance. Whilst waiting for him, he was attracted by the picture of an old gentleman over the chimney-piece, and recognised the very man he had seen. When the master of the house came in, he said, ‘Pray excuse me, but whom does that portrait represent?’—‘Oh,’ answered the owner, ‘that is no one you are likely to have heard of: it is a grandfather of mine, who was a very bad man indeed: so bad, that, in fact, we never mention him.’ Afterwards, Sir Frederick found that he had strangled his wife in the very passage where he appeared, and had then committed suicide.

“Mr. Austen, Rector of Whitby, was present when Catherine told this. He said that Professor Owen had gone to stay at a house in Essex, where the hostess apologised for putting him into the haunted room. The next morning he was asked if he had heard anything. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have heard something, but I should like to say nothing about it till I have slept in that room again.’ The second morning he said that each night he had heard loud cries of a child proceeding from the hearthstone, and begged that a mason might be sent for and the stone removed. This was done, and the skull of a child was found beneath the stone. They buried it in the garden, and the cries have never been heard since.”

“Holyrood Palace, May 27.—On the evening of the 14th, at Cleveland House, first Lady Aberdeen, and then Aberdeen, asked me to come hither with them as equerry, during their residence for the Lord High Commissionership. I stayed in London for Miss Beaumont’s wedding with Coplestone Bampfylde, and joined them on Friday, arriving at 9 P.M., when ninety guests were at dinner in the brilliantly lighted picture gallery, in which all the kings of Scotland were, painted to order by the same hand and from the same model. After dining by myself in a small room, I joined the party in the reception-rooms, where I entered at once upon my duties, which, for the most part, seem to be to talk right and left to every one I see. Each evening the Synods of the different districts dine, some eighty or a hundred clergymen, and I have generally found from my clerical neighbours that they regard it as their carnival, looked forward to throughout the whole year, and giving them much to talk of when they return home. Sometimes military, legal, or other classes are mixed with them. In the afternoons we have generally gone in state to visit institutions of one kind or other, the most interesting being the really beautiful Infirmary, built entirely by the people of Scotland, and the marvellous printing establishment of Messrs. Nelson. When we were at the latter, most hands were busy over the revised New Testament, in which there are 7000 alterations from the older edition, 2000 of them being important.”

“Holyrood Palace, May 28.—It is an interesting life here, but a very fatiguing one—the hours and hours of standing, as for real royalty; the etiquette of always addressing Aberdeen as ‘Your Grace,’ and getting up when he comes into a room; the whirlpool of invitations to be sent, in which one is always being swallowed up.

“I have had little enough of individual conversation, except with Ally Gordon, the very pleasant aide-de-camp, and with Dr. Russell the chaplain, who has talked much of Carlyle. He said to a friend who visited him a short time before his death, ‘We are both old men now, and I daresay you find, as I do, that it is well to rest upon the simple answer to the first question in our Shorter Catechism—‘What is your object in life?’—‘To glorify my Maker and to enjoy Him for ever.’

“On Sunday we were at St. Giles’s in the morning, and in the afternoon had a long service and sermon in the picture-gallery. These Scotch services are most wearisome, and the long prayers, informing the Almighty upon subjects on which He is all-wise and we are utterly ignorant, are most revolting.

“One especially feels the length of these prayers in standing, in great heat, in the General Assembly, where we occupy places near the throne, which is raised in a gallery: the Moderator and ex-Moderator sit at a table beneath, and the five hundred members occupy the body of the house. The Moderator, Dr. Smith, is a most beautiful and benign old man, full of simple and true Christianity, who looks, with his courtly manners, as if he never could wear anything but his court dress. To-day we and about a hundred other guests breakfasted with him at his hotel.

“The Holyrood which struck such ‘dismay and terror’ into the hearts of the French emigrant princes is to me most captivating. I am often reminded of Hogg’s admirably descriptive lines:—

“On Sunday afternoon I went up Arthur’s Seat with Ally Gordon and the ladies-in-waiting—Lady Margaret Hely Hutchinson and Lady Mary Ashburnham. Most exquisite was the view over the sunlit slopes of Edinburgh in its purple haze. Besides this, I shall have many recollections of the delightful gardens of Holyrood in this still hot weather, the apple-trees bursting into bloom, the hoary chapel with its gothic arches and windows, the Salisbury Crags, deeply purple above, and fading into mist below.”

“May 29.—All has gone well and smoothly, and there is great interest in the Holyrood life—the moving diorama of people, with the varying lights and shades of character which they display, the old-world aspect of all that has to be done, with the pages in their crimson and white liveries, the chaplain and purse-bearer in their court dresses, and the mounted guard. It has all been made especially pleasant by being on such thoroughly friendly terms with the ladies-in-waiting and with one of the aides-de-camp, Ally Gordon: the extreme goodness of the other, who has been vehemently ‘converted,’ being a sort of barrier to intimacy.

“Old Miss Louisa Hope has been amongst the people who have come to Holyrood. She talked much of her friendship with Lord Brougham, with whom she corresponded constantly for many years. She had many religious conversations with him, and he often used to dwell with her, as in his public lectures, on the sublimity of that description of God, ‘eternal, immortal, invisible,’ which has been spoilt in the revised translation by changing the word ‘immortal’ into ‘incorruptible.’ After he had been betrayed into especially bad language in her presence, she wrote a strong remonstrance to him. He said nothing definite in answer, but thenceforth always addressed her as ‘Dearest Miss Hope.’ When she heard that he was not likely to live, Miss Hope wrote to him, saying that she trusted that, if he was able to write himself, he would give her some sign of his assurance as to a future life; but that, if he were not able to write himself, he would not notice her request. Lord Brougham wrote, ‘I trust entirely in the graciousness of Him who died for me,’ and she was satisfied.

“Yesterday we drove out to Winton to Lady Ruthven. It was a lovely day, the sea deep blue, and the trees, especially the sycamores, in their richest foliage. We found the house just set in order after its devastation during the fire which consumed the dining-room three weeks ago, when everything was thrown out of the windows. Dear old Lady Ruthven herself sat all the time on a chair on the lawn watching the flames. She asked if every one was out of the castle, and being assured that it was so, said, ‘Is Peppy (her dog) safe?’—‘Yes, my lady.’—‘Is my blue vase safe?’—‘Yes, my lady.’—‘Then I am quite satisfied.’ And she bade every person on the property go to church the next day to return thanks for her preservation. She received me with the greatest affection, and bade me kiss her.[357]

“At the great dinner at Holyrood in the evening I took in a Mrs. Murray, who talked pleasantly about the old phase of Edinburgh society which she remembered. ‘There were three subjects—wine, law, and contradiction: wine is extinct now as a topic, but the other two, and especially the last, are as much to the fore as ever.’ She said that she had studied law herself, because it was the subject on which her husband was most interested, and she liked him to be able to discuss all his occupations with her.

“Another day I took in Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, the marvellous amateur actress. She described her home life and the reading aloud to her boys. She read Landor, Alison, Scott. Only Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ was a failure. They got through the first two cantos, then the youngest boy said, ‘Did the Childe never cheer up?’ and she was obliged to allow that he did not: so the book was closed.

“Yesterday I talked much with Mrs. Fraser—Professor Fraser’s wife. She described her visit to Hurstmonceaux—a week spent at the Rectory after her wedding tour, and going down twice to Lime, and my dear Mother sitting by the open window looking on the sunny lawn and flowers and the sparkling water.

“To-day, at St. Giles’s, Professor Flint preached a magnificent sermon on ‘I am the True Witness,’ describing how the doctrine which Christ preached was that of the kingdom; ‘that of the Church He left to others.’ His whole teaching was that inculcated by Diderot—‘Elargissez Dieu, montrez-lui à l’enfant, non dans le temple, mais partout et toujours.’”[358]

“May 30.—Our stay is nearly at an end, and I am very sorry.... It is impossible to live with the two charming old sisters (Lady Aberdeen and Lady Ashburnham), so one in every thought and act, without being impressed by their extreme simplicity and goodness; and Scottish ideas of clanship are more captivated by the fact of ‘His Grace’ being followed everywhere by his mother and aunt, and their going hand in hand with him in every good work, than they could be by the most brilliant court. Yesterday the preaching and praying were tremendous. Now we are just off to a luncheon, then to visit the castle in state, then a soldiers’ home, a sculptor’s studio, an artist’s studio, a dinner of a hundred, and the Assembly again in state at 10 P.M. I cannot say how kind every one is to me at Edinburgh.”

“London, July 10.—With Lady Paget to hear Spurgeon preach at his great Tabernacle near the Elephant and Castle. The vast congregation, the united sound of the thousands of voices in the hymn, the earnestness and zest of everything, were very striking: but far more so the strange, common, coarse preacher. The text was from Rev. xxii. 17, ‘Let him that heareth say Come.’ He described a sinner as like Leviathan, in whom there must be some weak spot betwixt its thousand scales, between which the dart of the exhorters could penetrate before death intervened and set the ‘wax-tablet’ of his character for ever. He spoke of the different ways of saying ‘Come,’ and acted them: that a ‘plain English, not half Dutch-Latin-Hebrew way of speaking,’ should be employed: that ‘prayer was as necessary as that a servant should tell her master who had called: that no servant was equal to answering for herself without referring to her master.’

“The rough similes just suited the congregation, and also the jokes, at which the people laughed aloud, but not irreverently. ‘A friend of mine was preaching in the street the other day, and one of those fellows passed by who has felt the hand touched by a bishop’s lawn sleeve upon his blessed pate (not that I think there is any good in that; I do not know if you do), and asked him by what authority he was preaching, and my friend answered, ‘By the authority of Jesus Christ, who said, “Let him that heareth say Come.”’ ‘Popes were represented sometimes with a dove whispering the words which they should speak into their ears—they were represented with a dove; I hope it was not really a raven.’”

I was suddenly called away in the middle of the season by the alarming illness of my dearest old nurse, and for several weeks was at Holmhurst with her, in the mysterious solitude of the shadow of death, in which so many of my earlier years were passed, and then I had the intense thankfulness of seeing life return into the dear old face connected with so much that no one else remembers.

XXII

HOME SORROWS

IT was on the 11th of July, after I had returned to London, that I was drawing in the cloisters of Westminster with Alethea Grenfell, when Miss Johnes (the charming correspondent of Bishop Thirlwall) passed by, and told me that Arthur Stanley was ill. I thought little of it at the time, as he was so often sick, and I had lately seen him looking better and happier than he had done since his sister Mary’s death. On Thursday 14th there was a great dinner-party at the Deanery. Catherine Vaughan dined, and as, at the last moment, Arthur was not well enough to appear, she went in to sit with him after dinner, and finding him very dispirited and unwell, gave up her intention of going to Llandaff next day, and moved to the Deanery instead. That day erysipelas came on, and she was prevented seeing him till 3 A.M. on the morning of Monday the 18th, when the doctors called her, saying that an alarming change had come on. Canon Farrar was then summoned, and administered the Sacrament, but when he came to the blessing, Arthur motioned him to silence, and gave the words of the longer Benediction himself, with the same solemnity with which he spoke them at Augusta’s funeral. Then also Arthur spoke some farewell words—of grateful affection for the Queen, of trustful exhortation for his successor in the Deanery, of thankful appreciation of the fidelity of his housekeeper, Mrs. Waters, and the services of his butler and Charlotte the housemaid. Those who surrounded him then thought that he was sinking, but he rallied, and in the morning all the symptoms were favourable.

At 10 A.M. on Monday, I broke through the cordon which surrounded the Deanery, and made my way up to Catherine, who was glad to have me with her. The large rooms were silent and hushed, though many persons, chiefly Bruces and Baillies, were moving in and out. It was the dead heat of July, not a leaf stirring. In the afternoon, Arthur was so much better that I went away, and even kept an engagement to dine out. But next morning came the shock of his death—Arthur—the “Cousin Arthur” of my childhood. He had become worse at 9.30 P.M. The Archbishop read prayers in the room; they all knelt around; he never spoke more; and before midnight it was over.

Catherine and I both took leave of the Deanery for ever the next morning, but I went back to Westminster for the sad services of Sunday and Monday. The funeral sermons were much more affecting than the funeral itself; that was far less touching than Augusta’s, for he was not there to be felt with and for; and yet the number and the unusual variety of true mourners made it a very remarkable sight.

To me it was a reopening of many beloved memories, and then a sealing them away for ever. On the day after his death his sister and Hugh Pearson, his dearest friend, wrote to me, asking me to undertake his biography, to which I gladly assented, feeling sure that I could do it well, and that no one could possibly know his life as well as myself. But Sir George Grove, one of his literary executors, did not permit my undertaking it.

The following weeks at Holmhurst were occupied on an article which I wrote upon Arthur in Macmillan[359] (Sept. 1881), or rather in hunting up material for it amongst the few papers I myself possessed, as the literary executors allowed me access to nothing else. Yet, in doing it, I could feel that, though somewhat estranged from him in late years, there was no other who knew all his life, its surroundings, motives, and interests as I did. I went afterwards to Catherine, but first paid a short visit in Suffolk to the ever-kind and pleasant Mrs. Paterson and her husband at their charming Rectory of Brome. I extract from my journal.

“Brome Rectory, Sept. 15, 1881.—On Tuesday I came here ... into thickly wooded Suffolk, which thoroughly needs its shelter of trees from its exposure to the north-east winds, for they say there is not a hill between it and the Ural Mountains. I only just missed meeting two Mr. Tyrrells, who have been building a church, not uncalled for, they said, as an expiatory offering, for one of their ancestors murdered William Rufus, and another the Princes in the Tower. We saw Eye, with its fine church and pretty black and white grammar-school. The magnates of this neighbourhood are Sir Edward and Lady Caroline Kerrison, who possess two places, of which Brome Hall has delightful old gardens, while Oakley contains the trunk of the tree under which St. Edward was said to have been shot by the Danes, and in which, when it was cut down, an arrow-head was found imbedded. Sir E. Kerrison has just demolished a fine old wooden bridge, the successor of that under which the king concealed himself, and where he was discovered to a newly married couple by the light gleaming on his spurs. They betrayed him to the Danes, who shot him. Dying, he cursed all persons who should cross that fatal bridge over the Waveney on their way to or from a marriage, and on such occasions the country people will always go two miles round to avoid it. Close by is a spot where the discovery of flint weapons in a pre-historic stratum has compelled an entire re-arrangement of geology, as proving the existence of the world some millions of years before it was supposed to have been created.

“Yesterday I went to Norwich, and how many memories were awakened by the first sight of its beautiful spire! The river, the gateways, the ferry, the cathedral were the same: only the beautiful palace was turned into a common fifth-rate house. All who met there have now passed away except Catherine Vaughan and Lea; but one seemed to see them all—the venerable white head of my uncle the Bishop in his stall; Sedgwick emerging from his house; Aunt Kitty in the broad garden-walk; my dearest Mother in the Abbey Room; Sarah Burgess [360] in her still existing little room down the steps; Arthur and Mary, Owen and Charlie—all gone!”

“Sept. 25.—We went from Brome to see Roydon. Mr. G. E. Frere is squire there, an eccentric man of old family, who has planted the churchyard with flowers appropriate to each of the graves near them. One is covered with wormwood: it is that of two old sisters in the parish, horribly ill-tempered, who both became bedridden, but each was provided with a stick that she might whack her companion as she lay in the bed near her. We met Mr. H., an ugly man, intensely. proud of his worthless pictures. Warren, the son of ‘Ten Thousand a Year,’ the clergyman who preached such a capital sermon on the single word ‘but,’ dined with him, and when Mr. H. pointed out what he calls a Murillo, said, ‘Really a Gorillo—a family portrait, I suppose!’ We also went to see Wingfield, an interesting old fortified manor of the De la Poles, and their magnificent tombs in the church. One of them married Chaucer’s grand-daughter and was murdered at Calais in the time of Henry VI.; another married the sister of Edward IV.

“On leaving Brome, I made a tourette into Norfolk—to dilapidated Walsingham, once the most celebrated shrine in England: to Lynn, with a custom-house worthy of Flanders: to Castle Rising, a Norman tower almost hidden in its green ballium: to Wymondham, with a splendid semi-ruined church, perpendicular outside, but Norman within: and to the glorious ruins of Castle Acre. The Coke of Elizabeth’s time bought so much land in Norfolk, that the Queen ordered him to be told that he must not buy any more, he would own too much for a subject. He petitioned, however, that he might just buy three acres more, which would complete his estate. The Queen said, ‘Yes, he might certainly do that;’ and he bought Castle Acre, West Acre, and South Acre, three huge properties, only the nucleus of which has descended to Lord Leicester.

“On the 20th I came to Llandaff.... We have been to see the ruins of a deserted manor-house which belonged to Sir George Aubrey. It was abandoned on account of a family tragedy. Sir George’s only son, a little boy, one day refused to eat his pudding. ‘You must,’ said the father. The child said he really could not, and implored with strange anguish to be excused, but the father insisted. Three hours after the child died in frightful agonies. That day the cook, by mistake, had put arsenic into the pudding instead of sugar.

“Yesterday Lord and Lady Romilly [362] fetched me to their pretty little house of Porthkerry, overhanging the Bristol Channel, and to-day we have driven through pouring rain to visit Fon Mon (pronounced Fun-Mun), a very curious old house of the thirteenth century.”

“Penrhos, Anglesea, Oct. 9.—From Llandaff I went to Tenby, an indescribably delightful place, with its varied coast, its wonderful caves, its rich festoons of clematis hanging over the cliffs, and its sapphire and chrysoprase seas. A girdle of old castles and abbeys surrounds the place, affording an endless variety of excursions. I saw something at Tenby of many members of the kindly respectable family of Allen, and the Dean of the same name welcomed me to St. Davids, which is truly marvellous in charm and interest—the cathedral, richly, exquisitely beautiful; the ruined palace and college; and the village, with its fine old cross, isolated in the solitude of a hollow in the vast swooping hills, sixteen miles from a railway, almost from any other inhabited place. It is said that if you take a sod from the churchyard and stand upon it on the shore of the neighbouring sea, you look across the mist of waters into all the glories of fairyland; and truly this seems almost the case without the assistance of the churchyard sod, all is so wondrously, uniquely, weirdly beautiful.

“On my way to this Stanley home of many memories, I went to visit the Williams’s of Parcian, in central Anglesea, where the very savageness of the country gives it an interest, and the desolate coves of its sea-shore, in one of which, with the beautiful name of Moelvra, the Royal Charter was lost.

“Mr. (William) Stanley [363] is very kind, and has a great deal of shrewd cleverness of its own sort; but a great deal has been written about the charms and moral advantages of the life of a country gentleman who never leaves his own place; nothing of its still more evident disadvantages. Surely no life has so strong a tendency to generate self-importance, exclusive possession, tenaciousness of authority, jealousy of interference, hatred of independence in others.”

“Kinmel, Oct. 14.—A kind invitation from Lord and Lady Penrhyn took me from Penrhos to Penrhyn Castle, which is a very stately building outside, though the huge stone corridors and richly decorated Norman rooms are very unsuited for home comfort. A regiment of young ladies, Miss Pennants—daughters, step-daughters, and step-grand-daughters of Lady Penrhyn [364] appeared at every meal. The lady of the castle herself is one of the most natural and unworldly women in the world; and Lord Penrhyn [365] was most agreeable with his personal reminiscences. He described the coronation of George IV., where he stood close to Queen Caroline as she entered the carriage to drive away, and he said the expression of her countenance was the most diabolical thing he ever looked upon. Lord Penrhyn rode after Lord Anglesea, the Waterloo hero, when he was followed by a hooting mob through St. James’s Park. Lord Anglesea backed his horse between the trees, set his teeth, and hissed back at the yelling people. Then he said, ‘If every man of you were a hundred men, and each of them had a hundred hands, and a bayonet in each hand, I should still do my—duty!’ Then the people cheered him.

“Lord and Lady Penrhyn took me to Pennisinant, Ogwen Bank, and the slate quarries. The two first cannot be much altered since my mother’s descriptions of them in her childhood, except by the growth of trees, and are very lovely, with mossy rocks breaking the cascatelle of the Ogwen, and old sycamores—now glorious in colour—on the grassy knolls, relieved against a wild background of purple mountains. At Ogwen Bank, the representation of our Lady Penrhyn’s pugs remains over the chimney-piece.

“The life at Penrhyn Castle was most easy and agreeable, with the freedom which only exists in very great houses, the plenty of time to oneself, and yet interesting society. The same may be said of Kinmel, which is like a great château in France.

“And here it has been a real pleasure to meet my sweet cousin Lizzie, Lady Loch,[366] and her charming husband, Sir Henry, Governor of the Isle of Man: she is really one of the best people I ever saw, as well as one of the pleasantest.”

“London, Nov. 1.—Dined with Lady Lyndhurst in Eaton Square. She talked of her early life. ‘I lived in Paris with my father, and I saw nobody. I never expected to marry; why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions. The first time I saw my Lord was when he came to Paris with his first wife. He came to see my father, and we went out driving with him. He and my father sat forward, and another young lady and I sat back, and most terribly afraid I was of him, and not a word did I speak—a shy, awkward girl sitting bolt upright.

“‘When my Lord was a widower, he came to Paris again. I was seven-and-twenty then, and was keeping my father’s house. Lord Lyndhurst came to breakfast with my father, and I gave them their coffee and whatever they wanted, and then sat there reading my Galignani, and not thinking a bit about them. Suddenly Lord Lyndhurst asked me if I knew of any very sunny apartment to let. “Oh, yes,” I said; “there is a friend of mine who wants to let just what you wish for, and, if you will wait a minute, I will run and get the keys, and can show it you.” So I got the keys, and he went with me, and the apartment was a capital one and suited him very well; and then, to my surprise, he asked me if I should be at home in the afternoon, and I thought, “What on earth can the old man want to come again for?”—and I answered him that I did not know. And, in fact, I forgot all about it, and went out driving to the Bois; and when I came in, the servant said Lord Lyndhurst had been. It gave me a sort of shock, and I went to my room, and said to myself, “What on earth can this mean?” But the next day before I was up—before I was up, if you please—I had a note from Lord Lyndhurst asking when I should be at home; and he came at that hour, and he came twice a day for three months, and it became quite awkward, every one talked of it—Paris is so small a world. However, at the end of that time he proposed. Afterwards I said, “Now do tell me what the dickens made you want to marry me—a woman without family, without fortune, and most decidedly without beauty?” and he said he did not know. After he had engaged me to marry him, he had to go back to England to his law-courts, and my father told me that I had better begin to get my things ready and buy my trousseau; but I said, “No, I should most certainly do nothing of the kind, for I did not believe for an instant that my Lord would ever come back again.”

“‘But he did come back, and we were married, and I had twenty-six years of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman. My Lord had the most perfect temper in the world, and in all the years we were together, we never had even a difference of opinion. He never came in to breakfast, and he never took luncheon, so he never appeared in our rooms till dinner-time, but I trotted in and out of his library, and the oftener I went in, the better he was pleased.

“‘I had seen nothing of the world before I was married, but I saw plenty of it afterwards: indeed, a few years after, he was made Lord Chancellor, and that was the top of everything. The world was the one drawback to my happiness, for through almost the whole time of my married life I had to go out. My Lord’s eldest daughter was married three years after I married my Lord, and four years after, Soph, his second girl, was married; and then very soon there was my own girl to take out. Oh, how I hated it, but I never let my Lord know what I felt. We dined with him, and afterwards there was his whist, or people came to see him, and at ten o’clock he went to bed; then I went to my daily task of dressing to take the girls out, and sometimes I fairly cried as I was dressing.

“‘I was always up so late at night that I breakfasted in my own room, but there was always breakfast downstairs for the girls and Auntie—for my Lord’s elder sister, Miss Copley, always lived with us. Auntie was no trouble in the house, and I was very fond of her, for she perfectly adored my Lord. When I married, people wondered at my wishing to have my sister-in-law to live with me, but I said, “Bless you, have I not been brought up in France, where whole families live together, and have to accommodate themselves to each other? and it would be hard indeed if I could not get on with poor old Auntie, when she is so fond of my Lord.”

“‘It was at the marriage of my daughter to Sir Charles Du Cane that my Lord said he had nothing left to live for, his work was done. He comforted me by telling me that he was so very old—and so he was,—and that if he lived he must become helpless, and so perhaps would be unhappy, and then perhaps even his mind might go. He said, “You will take care of Auntie?” and I said, “Of course I will,” and Auntie was always with me afterwards, and I loved her dearly, and she died in this very room at ninety-three. She was always well and cheerful, but one day she asked for her cup of tea as usual, and afterwards she—fell asleep,—she was so very old.

“‘My dear Lord was very old too when he died, but to me he was always like a young man, he was so bright and cheerful and so kind—always the pleasantest of companions. However, I could believe it was time that he should go, because he told me so.

“‘That is the story of my life, Mr. Hare, and now I am only waiting, hoping that some day,—perhaps some day not very far off,—I may see my dear Lord again.’”

“Athenæum Club, Dec. 13.—Sir G. Dasent, sitting at the next table at breakfast this morning, said, ‘I see you always sit in the historical corner.’—‘Do I? how?’—“Why, it is the place where Sam Wilberforce always sat (behind the door leading to the kitchen), and so did Theodore Hook. It was from that corner that, when he had finished two bottles of port, he used to be heard calling out “Waiter, lemonade: bring more lemonade.” And they all knew what it meant: he hadn’t the face to ask for another bottle of port.’”

“Heckfield Place, Dec. 30.—I have had a pleasant visit here, meeting Sir Erskine May, a most winning and agreeable person. He revived for me the old story of Mrs. Blomfield, who forgot her Royal Academy ticket for the ‘private view,’ and, when they tried to prevent her coming in, said, ‘Oh, but you must let me pass: I am the Bishop of London’s lady.’—‘No, Ma’am, I could not let you in,’ said the doorkeeper, ‘if you were the Bishop of London’s wife.’

“We went with Lord Eversley to see Bramshill, one of the places intended for Prince Henry, a most noble and beautiful old house.”

“Jan. 13, 1882.—With Ronald Gower and Hugh Pearson over the three great houses of London in the same morning. Grosvenor House is the pleasantest to live in, but Stafford House the most magnificent. When the Queen was being received there by the late Duchess, she said, with her happy power of expression, ‘I come, my dear, from my house to your palace.’

“Hugh Pearson talked of Archbishop Longley’s singular tact in saying the right thing. Some one asked him what tact was. He said, ‘It will be difficult for me to describe what it is, but I will give you an instance of what it is not. This morning I received a letter from a clergyman beginning—“In consideration of your Grace’s many infirmities and failing powers.” Now the beginning of that letter was not tact.’”

“Jan. 14.—To Lady Lyndhurst, whom I found in her room ill, and in great grief for the death of General Macdonald, her oldest friend, ‘who was the pleasantest, frankest, and handsomest of young men when I first came to England, and whom everybody has liked ever since. He was so well known, that when Mrs. Norton directed a letter to him “Jem at his Club,” the postman made no difficulties at all, but took it straight to him at White’s. There have been several pleasant notices of him in the papers since his death, but they have all committed the fatal blunder of calling him “Jim,” the thing of all others he would have disliked—he was always Jem with an e.’”

“Athenæum, Feb. 3.—Sir G. Dasent sat by me at breakfast. He described how he had almost bought the famous Vercelli MS. for £150, when ‘a stupid old canon interfered, and thought it ought not to be taken out of the place. It was taken to Italy from England by a Cardinal S. Andrea, who was tutor to Henry II., and who collected everything relating to St. Andrew, because of his name, and the MS. begins with the legend of St. Andrew. It ought some day to be restored to England by an interchange, England sending over some Italian MSS.; and now that it has been removed to the National Collection, this has been facilitated.’

“Sir G. Dasent talked of St. Olaf again. ‘He is what I call a good wearing saint, for he has lasted nine hundred years. It was just when St. Olaf was “coming up” that Earl Godwin and his sons were banished for a time. Two of them, Harold and Tosti, became Vikings, and in a great battle they vowed that, if they were victorious, they would give half their spoil to the shrine of St. Olaf, and a huge silver statue which they actually gave existed at Throndjem till 1500, and, if it existed still, would be one of the most important relics in archaeology. The old kings of Norway used to dig up the saint from time to time and to cut his nails. When Harold Hardrager was going to England, he declared he must see St. Olaf again—“I must see my brother,” he said: and he also cut the saint’s nails. But then he thought that from that time it would be better that no one should see his brother any more—it would not be for the good of the Church; so he took the keys of the shrine and threw them into the fiord; but at the same time he said that it would be a good thing for men who came after to know what a king was like, and he caused St. Olaf’s measure to be engraved upon the wall of the church at Throndjem—his measure of six feet.’”

“Feb. 21.—I sat at dinner by Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who talked with her usual power. ‘When I was young, I lived with my guardian and his wife at Havre de Grâce, and thence I married Mr. Duncan Stewart, who was a Baltic merchant, a prosperous and well-to-do man then, though he was ruined afterwards. We lived in Liverpool; but my husband loved hunting and fishing, and at certain times of the year he was “away after the grouse,” as every Scotchman is. I stayed with my children then, but I too had my time of the year for going away, and I always went to London, where I became very intimate with Lady Blessington and all that set—a very bad set, it must be allowed.

“‘One day when I was sitting alone in my house in Liverpool, and my husband was away with the grouse, a note of introduction was brought in for me from Mrs. Milner Gibson, whom I had known in London, with the cards of Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli. He was a young man then, all curly and smart, and his wife, though so much older than himself, was a very handsome, imperial-looking woman. I told them that I should be delighted to show them everything in Liverpool, as Mrs. Milner Gibson asked me.

“‘When I went to see them next day at the hotel, I asked Mrs. Disraeli how she had slept, and she said, “Not at all, for the noise was so great.” Then I said, “Why not move to my house, for my house is very quiet, and I am alone, and there is plenty of room?” And they came, and a most delightful ten days I had. We shut out Liverpool and its people, and we talked, and we became great friends, and when we parted it was with very affectionate regard on both sides; and afterwards they wrote to me every week, and when I went to London, my place was always laid at their table, and if I did not appear at their dinner, they always asked me why I had not come to them.

“‘After she died, we drifted apart, he and I, and though I saw him sometimes, it was never in the old intimate way. The last time I saw him though, we had a really good talk together. It was not till we were parting that I said to him, “I hope you are quite well,” and I shall never forget the hollow voice in which he said to me, “Nobody is quite well.” After that I never saw him again, but I had a message from him through William Spottiswoode. “Tell Mrs. Stewart always to come to talk to me when she can: it always does me good to see her.”’

“Mrs. Duncan Stewart described Lady Beaconsfield as originally a factory-girl. Mr. Lewis first saw her going to her factory, beautiful, and with bare feet. He educated her and married her, died, and left her very rich, and then she married Disraeli. When asked why she married her second husband, she would say, as if it was a feather in her cap, ‘My dear, he made love to me whilst my first husband was alive, and therefore I know that he really loved me.’

“It was at ‘Greenmeadow,’ a house four miles from Llandaff, that Disraeli served his apprenticeship as secretary to Mr. Lewis, living in the house with him and Mrs. Lewis in the position of a dependant. When the house overflowed with visitors from London, as was often the case, he was sent out to sleep at ‘The Holly Bush,’ a little public-house in the village. Both Greenmeadow and the Holly Bush exist still.”

On the 11th of March I again left England for Italy. I could not endure leaving Holmhurst and my dear old nurse, but it seemed necessary to go to finish collecting materials for my book on Southern Italy, as there were still so many places which I had not seen. At Rome I paid an interesting visit to the blind Duke of Sermoneta, still full of mental vigour, and of indignation at “la stupidézza del Vaticano e l’infámia del Quirinale.” Miss Garden had been to see him, and defended the policy of the Quirinal, saying Italy was a young country, would come round, &c. He retorted, “If you say that from politeness, as I think you do, you are wrong; but if you really think so, you must be an idiot.” This was my last visit to the kind old Duke, for he died in the following autumn.

At Naples, returning at night from the hotels in the lower town to those on the ridge of the hill, a gentleman engaged me in conversation and strolled along by my side. Suddenly, in the most desolate part of the road, he blew a whistle, and another man leapt out of the bushes, and both rushing upon me demanded “L’orológio e la bórsa.” I declared that I had neither watch nor purse. They insisted on my turning out all my pockets, which contained only three francs in paper and sixteen soldi in copper. Then they demanded my ring. I refused, and said it was no use for them to try to get it; it had not been off my finger for more than thirty years: it would not come off. They struggled to get it off, but could not. Then they whispered together. I said, “I see what you mean to do: you mean to cut off my finger and then drop me into the sea (which there—opposite the Boschetto—is deep water); but remember, I shall be missed and looked for.”—“No, we took good care to ascertain that first,” said my first acquaintance; “you said you had only been two days in Naples (and so I had): people who have been only two days in Naples are never missed.”—“But I do know Naples well—bisogna esaminarmi sopra Napoli,” I protested. “Dunque chi fu la Principessa Altamonti?”—“Fu figlia del Conte Cini di Roma, sorella della Duchessa Cirella.”—“E chi è il Principe S. Teodoro.”—“Fu Duca di S. Arpino, se maritava con una signora Inglese, Lady Burghersh, chi sta adesso Lady Walsingham.” After this they decided to let me go! But the strangest part of all was that the first brigand said, “After this scene you will not be able to walk home, and a carriage from the guardia costs sixty centesimi; therefore that sum I shall give you back,” and they counted twelve soldi from the sum they had taken. It is this fact which makes me speak of the men who attacked me at Naples as brigands, not as robbers.

I spent a few days delightfully in beautiful Capri, but most miserable were my after travels in the desolate wind-stricken plains or malaria-teeming swamps of wretched Calabria, of which I had formed a lofty estimate from Lear’s almost wholly imaginary drawings. Each place I had to visit seemed uglier and more poverty-stricken than the last, but perhaps came to a climax at Cotrone, where the windowless prison-van (being the only vehicle in the town) was sent to meet us, arriving by the night-train at the distant desolate station, and where the stairs of the hotel were crowded with beggars, who had nowhere else to sleep, lying in heaps, and swarming with vermin.

I see that I wrote to Miss Leycester—“Calabria was indescribably horrible, its poisonous swamps and arid plains too hideous for words: nothing whatever but dry bread to eat: the so-called inns the filthiest of hovels: the people ruffians: the remains of the Greek cities a few stones apiece.” I pushed on to Reggio and Scilla. But soon I became so ill that I fled to Venice, where I was fit for nothing but to float in a gondola on the breast of ocean till I grew better.

“Venice, April 25, 1882.—It was by a happy accident that I found myself here on St. Mark’s Day. Madame von Usedom [370] called for me in her gondola, and we went together to S. Marco at 10 A.M. Most glorious it looked, glints of sunlight falling here and there on the golden walls and waving peacock-hued pavement, and violet shadows resting on all the inner recesses of arcades and cupolas, through which the grand mosaic forms of the saints were dimly visible. Crowds of people were present, yet in that vast space many thousands can move with ease. It is only a few days since the Patriarch, newly elected and a cardinal, entered Venice in triumph, followed by three hundred gondolas, standing at the prow of his barge, in his new scarlet robes, blessing the people. He is a young man, but is greatly beloved,[371] and every eye followed him as the grand procession swept chaunting round the church, and he was almost borne along by his huge golden robes, held up by the white-mitred attendant bishops of Chioggia and Torcello.

“I returned afterwards with the Usedoms to luncheon, and Madame von Usedom talked, as usual, of the great change which is sweeping over religious belief, but of how, in most thinking minds, the great essentials remained untouched. She had told Tholuck that she was troubled about her belief in the Trinity. He replied that in being so she confounded Religion with Theology: that the doctrine of the Trinity was a purely theological question, and not the least necessary to religion.

“In the afternoon the Comtesse de Lützow took me to see Besarel, a very remarkable self-taught genius, and a very good simple man and sculptor in wood and marble: and then we floated peacefully for hours through the labyrinthine streets of this wonderful water-city. In the evening, as I was sitting with the Lützows and Lady Augusta Cadogan at one of the tables in the piazza in front of Florian’s caffè, a table near was occupied by a party in which the conspicuous figures were a lady, not old, but with snow-white hair, and a very beautiful young woman, sipping graniti and listening to the music: they were Queen Mary and Princess Mary of Hanover.

“And all this late evening, as I am sitting up writing, a monotonous song is wafted through the windows from the boats on the canal—

I returned to England by way of Nüremberg, which seemed to me strangely smaller and less interesting than when I saw it as a boy, and was more thankful than ever before to find myself again, on the 10th of May, at Holmhurst, where my dear old Lea’s most sweet and beautiful old face welcomed me with a brighter smile than ever, and where I spent a happy month alone with her, going back into our “wealthy past,” and living again in memory many happy scenes in our long-ago.

At Venice a great sorrow had come to me—another blank in the narrowing circle of my beloved ones. It was the sort of sorrow from which “all at once one awakes and finds a whole wing of one’s palace has fallen,” as Emerson says. Dearest Hugh Pearson was dead. He was altogether the most perfectly good man I have ever known, and, strange to say, at the same time the most perfectly charming. He was, from his earliest youth, as free from self-consciousness as he was from selfishness, but rippled over with geniality, cordiality, warmth of interest, affection to all around him. He was really, not nominally, the father of his parish, and I believe there was scarcely one of his parishioners who was not fonder of him than of most of their own nearest relations. To the children of his village he was simply adorable, and his manner to them, his fun, his sympathy, his solicitude, the prettiest and most enchanting thing imaginable. “He was like James amongst the Apostles, who wrote nothing at all, and said nothing we know, and yet was one of the chosen three who were with the Master that day when His glory was revealed, and that night when His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Trust came to him; he never sought it. He was at home in the human heart, but he never seemed to probe it.”[373]

I suppose dear Hugh Pearson was very ugly, but one loved him so much, one thought there was no face like his. Though he was so very much older than I was, there was no one with whom I was more intimate, and nothing I would not have confided to him. His goodness, his religion, were equally attractive and charming to all. One never felt with him as if God had been rather unfortunate in His good intentions. His christian spirit christianised everything it came in contact with. His memory is a possession, and I may exclaim like the Duke of Ormonde, “I would not exchange my dead friend for any living friend in Christendom.” In the later years of his life, he had yielded to urgent request in accepting a canonry at Windsor, where I had delighted to visit him; but his heart was always in his country vicarage of Sonning on the Thames, and with his dear people there. He had refused the Queen’s persistent offer that he should succeed Arthur Stanley at Westminster, saying that he wished to die as he had lived—“a private person.”

The end came suddenly. On Easter Sunday (April 9) he told his people that it was his fortieth Easter Sunday amongst them, but he was taken ill whilst he was preaching, and two days after mortification came on. On Wednesday, the last evening of his life, when it was known that there was no hope of saving it, he desired that all his people—his true children—might be admitted to see him once more, and for three hours multitudes of his parishioners, men, women, and children, passed weeping through his room. He was able to speak separately to many of them, to give them all his blessing, and with a message of peace—the last effort of his great loving heart—upon his lips, he passed into the perfect life.

He has left the most undimmed memory it is possible for man to leave. To none of those who knew him is it possible that there can be even a breath upon the mirror of his perfectly beautiful and lovable life. To no one could the words of Dante be applied with greater truth:—

“London, June 4, 1882.—In the last week I have spent three pleasant days with the Husseys at Scotney, a lovely place, where an old tower of Richard the Second’s time and a ruined house by Inigo Jones stand in a wooded hollow, surrounded by a moat so clear that its reflections are even brighter than the reality. On the hill above is a handsome modern house with a glorious garden of azaleas and herbaceous flowers formed out of an old quarry. Here at this season ‘tout fourmille de vie,’ as Buffon would say. In the Roman Catholic persecution a priest was long imprisoned in the dungeon of the old tower, but escaped by persuading his gaolers that robbers had broken into the stables and were carrying off the horses, and by swimming across the moat whilst they were gone to the rescue.

“The whole country-side is full of traditions of smuggling days. Goudhurst church, which crowns a steep hill-set village on the horizon of hills opposite Scotney, was fortified by smugglers, who held out there for three days against the military sent against them in George the Third’s time. They were forced to capitulate at last and a number of them were executed, one of them, no one knows why, being afterwards buried under the hearthstone in one of Mr. Hussey’s cottages. This siege of Goudhurst church is described in James’s novel. One of the best remembered instances of successful smuggling was when a great funeral was announced as arriving from the Continent. A gentleman, who had died in France, and who had lived far on the other side of London, was being taken home to be buried with his ancestors. A hearse with four horses met the coffin at Dover. Relays of horses were ordered, and they were changed at Ashford, at Lamberhurst, and several other places. But the funeral never went beyond London, for the coffin was full of lace, which was soon dispersed over the city.

“To the same wild times belongs the story of the outlawed Darrell, a former owner of Scotney. News came that he had died abroad, and his body was brought home to be buried at his native place. Great was the concourse of neighbours and acquaintance at his funeral, but amongst the mourners was a tall figure wrapped in a cloak, who, as the body was lowered, said, ‘That is not me!’ to the mourner who stood nearest to the grave, and immediately disappeared.

“A few years ago, Mr. Hussey mentioned the tradition that Darrell had attended his own funeral to the old sexton, and asked if he could throw any light upon it. He said, ‘Yes, forty years ago, when your uncle was buried, the coffin next to which he was placed was that of Mr. Darrell, which was falling to pieces, and so I looked into it, and was surprised to see no remains whatever of a body, but only fragments of stone.’

“On the first day of my visit an old Lady Smith Mariott dined, bringing with her a magic crystal ball, in which she was very anxious that we should ‘see something,’ and was greatly disappointed when we did not. The ball was given to her by the old Lord Stanhope,[374] a firm believer, and many strange things had been seen in it—figures, and sometimes figures in armour. Mr. Hussey heard of a curious sixteenth-century MS. on magic balls in the British Museum, and went to look at it, and it was strange to find it say that ‘men in armour frequently appeared, especially on Sundays.’

“In the evening the conversation turned on witchcraft, and on Mr. Maitland, author of the ‘Church in the Catacombs,’ chaplain of Archbishop Howley, who undertook to prove the absurdity of belief in witchcraft, but, on examination, found such incontrovertible evidence of its reality, that he abandoned the subject. Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French king preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and, before any one could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever. Dr. Buckland used to say that he had eaten his way straight through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole—that was utterly horrible.[375]

“Speaking of Lady Waterford, led Mr. Hussey to recall some of the wild escapades which he remembered in Lord Waterford’s youth. At one time, when he was living in Dublin with his uncle the Primate, coming home late at night, he had a great quarrel with his carman about the fare, and left the man swearing outside the door. Coming into the hall, he found his uncle’s gown and trencher lying on the side-table, and putting them hastily on, and going out with a stick and gruff voice, said, ‘What do you mean by coming here and trying to cheat my nephew? I’ll teach you not to do such things for the future,’ and he thrashed him soundly. The man went away, saying that he had been thrashed by the Archbishop of Armagh in person.”

“London, June 22.—Tea with Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who, talking of her youth, recounted how Washington Irving had taken her eleven nights consecutively to see Talma act, and of the acting of Madame Rachel; how, in the ‘Cinna’ of Corneille, she sat quietly in a chair whilst all the people were raging round her, and of the wonderful power with which she hissed out—

“Mr. and Mrs. Kendal were there, a pleasant handsome pair; and Madame Modjeska came in, and taking a live chameleon, which was clinging to the breast of Miss Thompson, her pet, posed with it perched on her finger, though it looked the very incarnation of devildom.”

“June 23.—Drew with Windsor and the Husseys at Ham House. Lady Huntingtower had said to us the other day, ‘You have heard about the poor Duke of Richmond?’ We thought it was the live Duke, and inquired anxiously after him, but she said, ‘No, it is the portrait at Ham: we can see nothing but the Duke’s legs now.’ And thus at Ham we saw it—the utter ruin of a glorious Vandyke. They had sent for a common upholsterer from Richmond to varnish it, and he had covered it with something which had annihilated it altogether.

“An American being urged to go to see the Park at mid-day as a typical London scene, returned saying, ‘I was disappointed, the attendance was so slim.’”

“July 5, 1882.—Dined with Miss Courtenay. Kinglake of the Crimea sat close to me—old now and very feeble, but apparently greatly beloved by those who know him well. Mr. Burton was on the other side, receiving congratulations on his purchases at the Hamilton sale. We had all been reading and generally enchanted with Mrs. Kemble’s ‘Later Reminiscences,’ and Mr. Reeve of the Edinburgh Review was delighted to have much to say of his personal remembrance of her, much that certainly was not favourable. She says little of the separation from her husband (Mr. Butler) in her book, but Mr. Reeve remembered her intensely overbearing manner to him. Once when he was travelling with them in Belgium, Mr. Butler, with great difficulty, procured a very beautiful bouquet for her for the evening. He gave it to her. ‘I have been all over the town, my dear, to get this bouquet for you,’ he said. She sniffed at it, said contemptuously, ‘There are no gardenias in this bouquet,’ and threw it to the back of the fire.

“‘One day,’ said Mr. Reeve, ‘I was talking to Mr. Butler at a party, when she came up with “Pearce, I want to go.”—“In a minute, my dear.” In another moment she came again with “Pearce, I want to go directly.”—“Very well, my dear,” and he prepared to order the carriage. I said, “It is cruel of you to take him away just now; we were having a very deep conversation,” and I shall never forget the contemptuous tone in which she said, “Deep, with—Pearce!”

“‘Mrs. Kemble always disliked those who were afraid of her, but she hated those who were not.

“‘She loved scenic effect, and so did her sister Adelaide, who was her superior in many ways. When their father took his leave of the stage, all the audience wept; but Fanny and Adelaide, who had the stage-box, leant forward as much as possible over the side and wept copiously with their pocket-handkerchiefs.

“‘No one could do the Semiramide now, but Adelaide was sublime in it. She was very grand in the Norma, but in the Semiramide no one ever came up to her. Passion she understood, but in softer and quieter parts she was a failure.’”

“July 10.—Luncheon in Sir Francis Seymour’s apartments at Kensington Palace to meet Don Carlos. He is an immense man, almost gigantic, and very handsome, and had a magnificent boar-hound with him—a very prince amongst dogs. He asked if I spoke Spanish. I said that I had spoken it in Spain, but was afraid of venturing upon it in London. So then he proposed Italian, in which it was easy to get on with him.”

“Chevening, July 15.—Yesterday I came here to a house where I have much memory of past kindness, and where I find the young Lord and Lady Stanhope eminently desirous of carrying it on. Lochiel and his Lady Margaret are here; she a daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, and most unusually natural and pleasant.”

“July 16.—After luncheon, we had a pleasant walk to Knockholt Beeches—Lady Northcote, the two Stanhope brothers, Mr. Banks Stanhope, Lady Margaret, and I. Afterwards, sitting on the stone platform in front of the house, Sir Stafford Northcote told us—

“‘The great A. B. was tremendously jostled the other day in going down to the House. A. B. didn’t like it. “Do you know who I am?” he said; “I am a Member of Parliament and I am Mr. A. B.”—“I don’t know about that,” said one of the roughs, “but I know that you’re a damned fool.”—“You’re drunk,” said A. B.; “you don’t know what you’re saying.”—“Well, perhaps I am rather drunk to-night,” said the man, “but I shall be sober to-morrow morning; but you’re a damned fool to-night, and you’ll be a damned fool to-morrow morning.”’

“July 18.—Dined with Lady Ossington, the most charming, kindest, and richest of old ladies, to meet the Duchess of Sermoneta. Lady Enfield was there, with white hair turned back high on her head, like a Sir Joshua in real life. Mr. Newton was very amusing with his riddles:—

“On the Greeks sending marble for a bust of Gladstone, he related the lines:—

In the beginning of September, my friend Harry Lee came to Holmhurst as usual for his autumn holidays, and, with the wish of giving him change and pleasure, I took him with me for a fortnight to Holland. We saw the whole of that little country, and enjoyed several of the places very much, especially the so-thoroughly Dutch Dort; quiet Alkmaar, with its charming old weigh-house; and Zwolle, with its fine old gateway. But the tour is not one which leaves much interest behind it. There is such a disadvantage in not being able to understand what people say, and all the Dutch we had anything to do with were so unaccommodating, so excessively grasping and avaricious. Besides, all my luggage, registered through to Brussels, disappeared and could not be traced, so that I had the odd experience of traversing a whole country with nothing more than a comb and a tooth-brush. Two months afterwards the luggage arrived quite safe at Holmhurst, covered with labels, quite intact, having made a long tour by itself quite in a different direction from the one we took, and without any explanation or any expense.[378]

“Babworth Hall, Notts, Oct. 7, 1882.—I have been spending four pleasant days with kind Mrs. Bridgeman Simpson, to meet old Lady Westminster,[380] who is the most winning, courteous, and charming of old ladies, finding something pleasant to say to every one, putting every one at their ease, and possessing that real dignity of simplicity which is so indescribably charming. On Wednesday I went with her to Clumber, where we saw the new and very ugly hall, with Italian artists putting down a mosaic pavement.

“Yesterday we went by appointment to Welbeck, arriving by the darksome tunnel, more than two miles long, upon which the late Duke spent £60,000, and £60,000 more apiece upon banking up (and spoiling) his sheet of water with brick walls and building a gigantic riding-school. The house itself stands well, considering the ugliness of the park, and is rather handsome. We were shown through a long suite of rooms containing a good many treasures, the most interesting being a glorious old chest of metal, in which the Bentincks, who came over with William III., brought over their jewels. In the last room we found Lady Bolsover, the Duke’s stepmother.

“The house, vast as it is, has no staircase worth speaking of. The late Duke lived almost entirely in a small suite of rooms in the old part of the house. He inherited the peculiarity of his mother, who would see no one, and he always hid himself. If he gave permission to any one to visit Welbeck, he always added, ‘But Mr. So-and-so will be good enough not to see me’ (if they chanced to meet). He drove out, but in a black coach like a hearse, drawn by four black horses, and with all the blinds down; and he walked out, but at night, with a woman, who was never to speak to him, and always to walk exactly forty yards in front, carrying a lanthorn. When he went to London, it was in a closed brougham, which was put on a railway truck, and which deposited him at his own house at Cavendish Square, his servants all being ordered out of the way: no one ever saw him go or arrive. When he needed a doctor, the doctor only came to the door, and asked questions through it of the valet, who was allowed to feel his pulse.

“The Duke’s mania for a hidden life made him build immense suites of rooms underground, only approachable by a common flight of steps leading to a long tunnel, down which the dinner is conveyed from the far-distant kitchen on a tramway. From a great library one enters a billiard-room capable of holding half-a-dozen billiard-tables. A third large room leads to an enormous ball-room, which can contain 2000 people. The approach to this from above is by means of a gigantic hydraulic drop, in which a carriage can be placed, or twenty persons can be accommodated—the guests being thus let down to the ball-room itself. A staircase through the ceiling of one of the rooms, which is drawn up by a windlass, leads hence to the old riding-school, which is lighted by 1000 jets of gas. Hence a tunnel, 200 yards long, leads to a quadrangular piece of ground, unbuilt upon, but excavated in preparation for a large range of bachelor’s rooms, smoking rooms, and nurseries, to cover four acres of ground. Another tunnel, three-quarters of a mile long, leads thence to the stables, cow-houses, and dairies, like a large village. At the Duke’s death there were ninety-four horses in the stables, only trained for exercise or feeding. Beyond the stables is a large riding-school, in which there are 8000 jets of gas, an exercising ground under glass, with a gallop on straw and sawdust for a quarter of a mile. Close by is an enormous garden, of which six acres are used for strawberry beds, every alternate row being glazed for forcing the plants. Alongside of this is a glazed wall a quarter of a mile long. The garden is about thirty acres in extent, and requires fifty-three men. In the late Duke’s time there were forty-five grooms and helpers in the stables. The cow-houses are palaces, with a covered strawyard attached, and are surrounded by hydraulic screens, which are let down or raised according to the wind. There were eighty keepers and underkeepers.

“All is vast, splendid, and utterly comfortless: one could imagine no more awful and ghastly fate than waking up one day and finding oneself Duke of Portland and master of Welbeck.

“Coming home through the tunnel, Mr. Watson told me the curious story of the Misses Offley of Norton Hall. These ladies (descended from King Offa) saw in a vision their only brother, who was with a tutor in Edinburgh, upon the ridge of the house. Dreadfully alarmed, and perfectly certain of what they had seen, they went to a neighbour, a Mr. Shore, and told him they were sure that their brother was dead. Utterly failing to reassure them, in order to comfort them, Mr. Shore undertook to ride to Edinburgh (it was before the time of railways), and find out the truth. As he was crossing the boundary of Yorkshire, he met the funeral of the young man, who was being brought back to be buried at his own home. However, he went on to Edinburgh to see the tutor, and then discovered that, in his illness, young Offley had been persuaded to make a will entirely in favour of the tutor and his wife. Mr. Shore at once said that he would give the tutor £20,000 if he would give up all his claims under this will, but the tutor refused. The next day Mr. Shore went back and offered £10,000, and it was taken. The property was then worth £10,000 a year, but is now worth £20,000 a year.

“Staying here with Lady Westminster is her friend Mrs. Hallyburton (née Owen, and first married to a Mr. Williams), who is the widow of Judge Hallyburton—‘Sam Slick.’”

Alas! whilst I was enjoying this Babworth visit, the greatest sorrow which still remained possible for me was preparing, and a few days later it fell. It would be difficult for any one who had not shared our life to understand how much my dearest old nurse, Mary Lea, was to me, or the many causes which, with each succeeding year, had drawn closer and closer the tender tie, as of mother and son, which existed between us. And since 1870 she had been more than ever dear to me—the one precious link with our past which no other knew: the only person to whom I could talk on all subjects with entire certainty of understanding and sympathy. Each year, too, had made her more beautiful in her old age, and there were none who visited Holmhurst and failed to carry away an attractive remembrance of the lovely old woman, with her pretty old-fashioned dress and snowy cap, set in the homely surroundings of her sitting-room, full of pictures and curiosities, or in the poultry-yard, which was her pride and joy, brimming over with quaint proverbs, wise sayings, and interesting memories.

My dear Lea had not forgotten any of the places she had seen, or any of the varied circumstances of her life; and these scenes and events formed a mental picture-gallery in the circle of her inner consciousness, where she could amuse herself for ever. Life was never monotonous to her; there was so much that was beautiful, so much that was good, so much that was even grand to recollect; and then the surroundings of the present were full of simple pleasures; her room furnished with treasured memorials of the long-ago; her farmyard, with its manifold life, recalling her girlhood in a Shropshire farmhouse; her many kindly thoughts and deeds towards her neighbours at the hospice or in the village, one or other of whom loved to come in and chat for an hour daily with the beautiful old woman who had so much of mild wisdom in her discourse; her many visitors of the higher class to see the house, in whose coming she recognised and welcomed a kind of homage to her beloved mistress, and to whom consequently she would often pour out the most precious of her recollections; the garden and fields, which brought fresh interest with each succeeding season; but most especially her master, her nursling, the child of her heart, whose every employment, or friendship, or amusement, or duty, or work, or honour, was more to her than anything else in the world.

In this year especially I had been much with her, and the elder and younger relation seemed almost obliterated in the intimacy of our friendship and communion. Daily I used to take a little walk with my sweet old nurse upon my arm, and the upper path leading to the little pool above the field will always be connected with her, walking thus, and recalling a thousand memories out of the rich past, which was common to us, and to us alone. Here I walked with her the day before I went to Babworth, and am thankful that I did not give up doing so because a young man was staying with me. She seemed even more calmly happy than usual that day. Autumn tints and tones were pervading everything, but when I spoke of our seeing the plants again in their full beauty in spring, she said sweetly, “Those who live till the spring will see them, dear sir.” There are some lines of Lewis Morris which recall what my dear nurse was at this time:—

“Oct. 11, 1882.—Yesterday two terrible telegrams met me when I went to my breakfast at the Athenæum, telling me that my dearest Lea was dangerously ill, and bidding me return at once. In half-an-hour I was in the train, Ronald Gower travelling with me to Hastings, and an agonising journey it was. I found the carriage at St. Leonards, having been waiting five hours, with a perfectly hopeless account.

“Yet I found my dearest old nurse better than I had hoped, able to be glad to see me, even, though very suffering, to tell me little things which had occurred during my week’s absence. But at night she grew much worse, and hour after hour I had the anguish of watching, with Harriet and Mrs. Peters, over terrible suffering, which we were unable to alleviate. God sends one no discipline so terrible as this. Happy indeed are those who have only to suffer themselves, not to witness the suffering of their dear ones.

“To-day she is weaker. Yesterday she spoke of ‘when I am better.’ To-day she speaks of ‘when I am gone.’

“I sit all day in her room, watching the beloved beautiful old face, fanning her, repeating words of encouragement and comfort to her; and she always has a smile for me.

“Outside the window the beautiful laburnum tree which she loves is shaking off its leaves and preparing for winter, and oh! when its golden blossoms come again, this dearest friend of my whole life will be away!”

“Thursday, Oct. 12.—Last night she slept quietly, and her two nurses by her. I went in and out continually, and she scarcely moved. In the morning she was better, and able to sit in the arm-chair near her bed. It was the day on which we always used to try to leave for Rome, and she spoke of it, and this drew her into many pleasant recollections, such as the dear Mother had on her last day here; of the anemones in the Villa Doria at Rome, and the especial corners in which the best were to be found; of the daisies in the Parco S. Gregorio, and of many happy hours spent in other favourite places. She also asked after all the different members of the family, and sent messages to some of them. In the afternoon she was so well that, by her wish, I went down to Hastings to see Ronald Gower, and when I came back, she liked to hear about it.

“But to-night (9 P.M.) she is weaker and the pain and wheezing have increased. I have just read to her, as usual, a litany for the night-watches and several other prayers. She said the ‘Amen’ to each most fervently, and repeated the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ after me. Afterwards I spoke of the comfort prayers and hymns were to the Mother in her illness: ‘Yes, her’s were prayers,’ she said.

“Then she said, ‘I did not think I should be taken away from you so soon as this.’ I said, ‘Perhaps, dear Pettie, it may still be God’s will that you may be raised up to us again, and this is what we must wish and try for.’—‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and I do try for it—too much perhaps, more than is right perhaps; and yet I am quite resigned either to go or stay: the Lord’s will, that is the best.’

“Then she said, ‘Open that top drawer and take out a box. There are some things in it I wish you to have, things connected with your family which you will value, and my large silver brooch; I wish you to keep that. And I would like you to keep the little bits of chaney that were my mother’s—the lions, and the little cups and saucers that are in your Mother’s room; she liked to see them, and you will: I do not wish them ever to leave this house.’

“‘Dearest Pettie,’ I said, ‘if it should be God’s will that you should not be given back to us, would you wish to be laid by Mother at Hurstmonceaux, or should you be taken to your own mother’s grave at Cheswardine? Whatever you wish shall be done.’ ‘If you please,’ she murmured, ‘Hurstmonceaux would be best. I have been always with you. All my own are passed away. You are more to me than any one else. I should wish to be laid near your dear Mother, and then you would be laid there too.’—‘Yes, dear, we should all be together,’ I said.

“Then she said, ‘You have been everything to me all your life: quite like my own child: all that a child of my own could have been.’

“She always smiles sweetly to see me near her; but she is weaker, and everything is difficult. As Aurora Leigh says—

“Oct. 14.—Two terrible nights have we passed in trying to alleviate my dearest Lea’s great sufferings, but last night especially it was anguish to hear her moans and to be able to do so little: but I flit in and out, and whether it is day or night, am seldom many minutes away from her, and I think that is a comfort.”

“Oct. 15.—Last night was better, but all to-day she has been terribly ill. It is such a struggle to breathe through her worn-out frame. I sit constantly by her side, and chafe her hands and bathe her forehead, and can be quite cheerful for her sake; and she smiles to see me always there whenever she wakes. ‘Oh, how good you are to me,’ she said to-day. ‘I cannot be good enough to you, my own dearest Pettie, to you who have always been so very good to me.’

“But I feel, though no one tells me so, that I am sitting in the shadow of Death.”

“Monday, Oct. 16.—The doctor says she is sinking. She suffers less to-day, but is overwhelmed by the pressure on the lungs. I sit there—feed her—watch her, and smile.... I can do it for her sake. There will be time enough for grief when she cannot be grieved by it.

“She is all thankfulness,—only afraid of wearing us all out. ‘Thank Thee, O Lord, for my good victuals,’ she said, after taking her glassful of milk.

“Last night, waking from her sleep, she said, ‘Oh, I thought I was away and so very happy, and now I am come back to all this.’”

“Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 17.—She is still here—still suffering. Oh, my poor darling! what anguish it is to see her, and how thankful I shall be to God now when He will set her free. One can bear to part with one’s beloved ones, but their suffering tears one to pieces. How truly Heine says, ‘Der Tod ist nichts; aber das Sterben ist eine schändliche Erfindung.’”

“Wednesday, Oct. 19.—Yesterday morning there was agonising pain for three hours and then a respite. At 12 A.M. Hubert Beaumont walked in, having come off at once on hearing a hopeless account. He was much broken down at seeing his old friend so ill, but full of kindness and help for me and all of us.... All afternoon she was worse. Two doctors came.... At night she was terribly worse. Oh, it was so hard to see her suffer,—so very, very hard. Soon after midnight I gave dose after dose of laudanum, and when she was still, lay down—sank down, utterly worn-out. At 3 A.M. I heard Harriet’s voice, ‘Aunt is gone.’ All was still then—the agony lived through, the fight fought. As I rushed into the room, the colour was fading out of my darling Pettie’s cheeks, but her face and hands were still warm. A wonderful look of rest was stealing over the beloved features. I knelt down and said the bidding prayer. Truly we ‘gave thanks’ that our dearest one was at rest. Yet I felt—oh, so stunned, so helpless! Dear Hubert was a great comfort.

“All day we have sobbed at intervals. Many touching notes have come in; but I have felt dead in body and mind.”

“Oct. 20.—My dearest Lea is laid in her coffin. It has been a day of bitter anguish. All have tried to console, but

“Oct. 21.—Hubert has been summoned away by his parents,—very miserable to go, poor boy. There has been a terrible storm all day, which has seemed more congenial than the lovely sunshine yesterday.

“In the evening Mrs. Peters had put lights in the room, and I went to look at my dearest Pettie in her coffin. The ‘afterglow’ had come on. All her old beauty had come back to her. There was not a wrinkle on her lovely dignified old face. Her snow-white hair just showed at the edge of her pretty little crimped cap: all was peace and repose. It comforted me to see her, and we surrounded her coffin with large branches of Michaelmas daisies, enlivened by sprays of fuchsia, and the autumn lilies which she loved.”

“Oct. 23.—In the morning I went into her room to see my dearest Pettie for the last time. Lady Darnley had sent a box of lovely flowers, and I laid them round her. The marvellous beauty of her countenance continued: it was the most sublime majesty of Death:—

“John [383] came in to see her too, but can think of nothing but his own future. That does not seem to occur to me—not yet: I can think of nothing but her wealthy past, so rich, so overflowing in deeds of love, in endearing ways which drew all hearts to her, in noble, simple trust and faith, in heart-whole devotion and self-abnegation for the Mother and me.

“At eleven I set off alone, in a little carriage, by the familiar lanes. It was the loveliest of autumnal days, and all was in its richest, most touching beauty: the Ashburnham woods; the long Boreham hill, with the group of weird pine-trees called ‘The Crooked Aunts;’ Sybil Filiol’s paved walk winding by the roadside; Windmill Hill; Lime Cross; Lime; Flower’s Green and the Mother’s little school; Hurstmonceaux Place; and then the ascent to the church through the deep hollow way overhung by old oaks.

“Soon after 2 P.M. the little procession appeared over the brow of the hill, the bearers, in white smock-frocks, walking by the carriages. The coffin was laden with flowers, wreaths sent by different friends, and a long garland of Michaelmas daisies and laurustinus falling over the side. I followed the coffin alone first, then all the servants from Holmhurst and many poor women from Lime Cross.

“The first part of the service was in the chancel amidst all the old family monuments. The grave was by my Mother’s side, in the same little garden enclosure. It was strange to feel that the next funeral there must be my own, and to look down upon her coffin on which my own will rest some day.

“After the others were gone I walked in the old deer-park. I felt as if I was a spirit haunting the place. All was peace and loveliness, but how great the change from the time when I was there so constantly! ‘On dépose fleur à fleur la couronne de la vie.’[384] All the familiar figures of my childhood are swept away—all the uncles and aunts, brothers and sister; all the old neighbours; nearly all the old friends; the dear Mother; Marcus Hare; Arthur and Mary Stanley; and now my own dear Lea: all the old homes too are broken up, pulled down, or deserted; only I and the ruins of the castle seem left.

“Holmhurst, Nov. 14.—The winds are howling round and I sit alone in my home. The silence is sometimes awful, for I never hear the human voice now, for my only attendant, the faithful Anne, who waits upon me, is stone-deaf, so that all communication with her is in writing.

“It may seem odd, but my dear Lea’s removal really makes a greater blank in my life than even the Mother left behind. My Mother had so long taken the child’s place to be loved and taken care of: Lea, to her last hour, took as much care of me as in the first year of my life. I have the piteous feeling that there is none now to whom I signify: it can really ‘matter’ to no one whether I live or die. My friends are very kind, and would be sorry to lose me, but in this rapid world-current a few days would see them well out of their grief. And my dearest Lea, who cared—who would have cared while life lasted, rests now under a white marble cross like my Mother’s, inscribed—

MARY LEA GIDMAN,
June 2, 1800: Oct. 19, 1882.
Through fifty-four years
Devoted, honoured, and beloved
In the Hare family.”

XXIII

IN THE FURROWS OF LIFE

“What used to be joy is joy no longer: but what is pain is easier because they have not to bear it.”—George Eliot.

“To live for the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone, that would be a right learning from her death, and a right honouring of her memory.”—Carlyle.

“DEC. 1882.—With what a numbed feeling of desolate sadness do I look back upon the last chapter. My home existence is so intensely changed by the blank which the dear old friend of my whole life has left. It was long before I could bear to go into her changed rooms, and I still wake nightly with the sad inward outcry, ‘Can it be—can it be? Is every one gone who shared our home life? Is there no one left who is associated with all our wealthy past?’ ‘Entbehren sollst du—sollst entbehren.’ And when my friends urge me to marry, I feel the utter desolateness of attempting to make new ties with any one who knows nothing and cares nothing of those with whom all my earlier life was bound up. I have happily still a great power of enjoyment when anything pleasant comes to me, but oh! how seldom it happens. Griefs and worries—griefs and worries come round with wheel-like recurrence. I often think of Aubrey de Vere’s lines:—

“Archbishop Tait, long a kind friend, is dead. I hear that at his funeral, in the beautiful churchyard at Addington, a little robin perched on an adjoining tombstone and poured forth a flood of song, apparently unconscious of all present. ‘How our father would have liked to have seen it,’ said one of the daughters.”

“Jan. 12, 1883.—Tea with Dowager Lady Donoughmore,[386] who was very pleasant. She described walking in Ireland with a stingy old gentleman. A beggar came up to them, and he said, ‘I have not got a penny to give you.’ The beggar retorted, ‘You’ve got an awful ugly face: I hope you may die soon, but I pity the worms that will have to eat you.’

“Lady Donoughmore, however, said that she had boundless experience of the natural poetry in the Irish peasantry. On receiving a shilling, an old woman said to her, ‘May ivery hair of yer honour’s head become a torch to guide yer sowle to heaven.’”

“June 19.—Dined with Lady Airlie, only meeting Mrs. Duncan Stewart and Lady De Clifford. Mrs. Stewart talked much of Mr. Carlyle.

“‘Mr. Hannay knew Carlyle very well, and often went to see him, but it was in his poorer days. One day when Mr. Hannay went to the house, he saw two gold sovereigns lying exposed in a little vase on the chimney-piece. He asked Carlyle what they were for. Carlyle looked—for him—embarrassed, but gave no definite answer. “Well, now, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Hannay, “neither you nor I are quite in a position to play ducks and drakes with sovereigns: what are these for?”—“Well,” said Carlyle, “the fact is, Leigh Hunt likes better to find them there than that I should give them to him.”

“‘I was sitting once by Mr. Bourton,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘and he was talking of Leigh Hunt. He said, “He is the only person, I believe, who, if he saw something yellow in the distance, and was told it was a buttercup, would be disappointed if he found it was only a guinea.”’

“Lady Airlie said she had known Leigh Hunt very well when she was a child. He had taken her into the garden, and talked to her, and asked her what she thought heaven would be like, and then he said, ‘I will tell you what I think it will be like: I think it will be like a most beautiful arbour all hung with creepers and flowers, and that one will be able to sit in it all day, and read a most interesting novel.’

“Of her early acquaintance with Washington Irving, Mrs. Stewart said, ‘It was at Havre. My guardian was consul there. People used to say, “Where is Harriet gone?” and he answered, “Oh, she is down at the end of the terrace, busy making Washington Irving believe he is God Almighty, and he is busy believing it.”’

“Mrs. Stewart told of Miss Ruth Paget, one of many sisters, who went down at night to the kitchen to let out her little dog for a minute, and found her brother Marco, who was a midshipman in the Mediterranean, sitting on the kitchen-table, swinging his legs, but pouring with wet. She said, ‘Good heavens, Marco, how did you come here?’ He looked at her, and only said, ‘Do not tell any one you have seen me.” She looked round for an instant to see if any one was coming, and when she turned, he was gone.

“Ghastly pale, she went upstairs. Her sisters said, ‘You look as if you had seen a ghost,’ and they tried to insist on her telling them what had happened to her. She put them off by complaining of headache and faintness; but she was terribly anxious.

“Three months afterwards she heard her brother was coming home, then that he had arrived at Portsmouth, then he came. The first time she was alone with him she said, ‘I must tell you something,’ and she told him how he had appeared to her, and then she said, ‘I wrote it down at the time, and here is the paper, with the date and the hour.’

“He looked shocked at first, and then said, that at that very moment, being absent from his ship without leave, his boat had been upset, and he had been as nearly drowned as possible—in fact, when he was taken out of the water, life was supposed to be extinct. His first fear on recovering was that his absence without leave would be detected by his accident and become his ruin, and his first words were, ‘Do not tell any one you have seen me.’”

“June 21.—At Madame du Quaire’s I met Oscar Wilde and Mrs. Stewart. He talked in a way intended to be very startling, but she startled him by saying quietly, ‘You poor dear foolish boy! how can you talk such nonsense?’ Mrs. M. L. had recently met this ‘type of an aesthetic age’ at a country house, and described his going out shooting in a black velvet dress with salmon-coloured stockings, and falling down when the gun went off, yet captivating all the ladies by his pleasant talk. One day he came down looking very pale. ‘I am afraid you are ill, Mr. Wilde,’ said one of the party. ‘No, not ill, only tired,’ he answered. ‘The fact is, I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday, and it was so ill, I have been sitting up with it all night.’ Oscar Wilde’s oddities would attract notice anywhere, but of course they do so ten times more in the plein midi of London society, where the smallest faults of manner, most of all of assumption, are detected and exposed at once.”

“July 2, 1883.—I have just heard again the ghost story so often told by Mrs. Thompson Hankey:

“Two beautiful but penniless sisters were taken out in London by an aunt. A young gentleman from the north, of very good family and fortune, fell in love with one of them, and proposed to her, but she was with difficulty persuaded to accept him, and afterwards could never be induced to fix a date for their marriage. The young man, who was very much in love, urged and urged, but, on one excuse or another, he was always put off. Whilst things were in this unsettled state, the young lady was invited to a ball. Her lover implored her not to go to it, and when she insisted, he made her promise not to dance any round dances, saying that if she did, he should believe she had ceased to care for him.

“The young lady went to the ball, and, as usual, all the young men gathered round her, trying to persuade her to dance. She refused any but square dances. At last, however, as a delightful valse was being played, and she was standing looking longingly on, she suddenly felt herself seized round the waist, and hurried into the dance. Not till she reached the end of the room, very angry, did she succeed in seeing with whom she had been forced to dance: it was with her own betrothed. Furious, she said she should never forgive him. But, as she spoke, he disappeared. She begged several young men to look for him, but he could not be found anywhere, and, to her astonishment, every one denied altogether having seen him. On reaching home, she found a telegram telling her of his death, and when the hours were compared, he was found to have died at the very moment when he had seized her for the dance.

“Catherine Vaughan has just been taken to see an old woman in Scotland, whose daughter was married last year. She asked if she was getting on well. ‘Aye, she’s gettin’ on varra weel, varra weel indeed. She’s got a pig, and she’s got a cock, and she’s got a son: it’s true that she hates her mon, but one must aye have ae thing.’”

“Charlotte Leycester is to be left in possession of my little Holmhurst whilst I am away, and has such complete enjoyment of it, that I shall have no sense of wasting my home by a long absence, as would otherwise be the case.”

During the summer of 1883, I left England to join my oft-times travelling companions, the Miss Hollands, for a tour in Russia. I did not greatly enjoy this tour, partly because I felt so terribly knowing almost nothing of the language of the country, not being able to read even the names of the streets. I also suffered from not having had time to teach myself anything of the country before I went there: for, after I came home, and tried to instruct my mind by every book I could get hold of about Russia, I found my travels had been much more interesting than, from the very intensity of my ignorance, I believed them to be at the time.

At Kieff I left my companions, and found my way home alone by Warsaw and by Cracow, with its curious monuments and odious Jew population. After the great discomforts of Russia, a very few days in Germany seemed very charming, and I was especially glad to see beautiful old Breslau, and afterwards Wilhelmshohe near Cassel, in a perfect conflagration of splendid autumnal tints, truly realising Hood’s lines—

“St. Petersburg, August 22, 1883.—A rest in the interesting group of North-German cities, Dantzic, Marienburg, Königsberg, prepared us for the thirty-six hours’ journey through monotonous fir-woods and cornfields, unvaried through 1000 miles, till two great purple domes rose on the horizon—St. Alexander Newski and the Cathedral of St. Isaac.

“It was difficult to believe we were in Europe on emerging from the station and seeing the endless droskies—sledges on wheels—drawn up, with their extraordinary-looking drivers, in long blue dressing-gowns (wadded like feather-beds, so as to make the wearer look like a huge pillow), with a girdle, and low cap. Then the gigantic streets, each about as broad as St. James’s Square, and the huge squares, in which the palaces, however vast, are so disproportioned to the immensity of space, that their architectural features are lost. Then the utter desolation, one carriage and two or three foot-passengers in the apparently boundless vistas. Altogether, St. Petersburg is quite the ugliest place I ever saw, even the Neva, huge as it is, so black and grim, and the smoke of the steamers giving the worst aspects of London. But yesterday evening we had a delightful drive of four hours on the islands in the Neva, which answer here to the Park, and are exquisitely varied—lovely winding alleys, bosquets of flowering trees, green meadows, little lakes, rushing brooks, every variety of cottage and villa and garden and bridge, at least twenty miles of them. Coming back, we stopped at the fortress-church to see the royal tombs—stately marble sarcophagi in groups; first Peter the Great and his family, then two groups of intermediate sovereigns, then the present family, surrounded (inside the church) by a grove of palms and laden with flowers. Close by is Peter the Great’s cottage, and the tiny early church in which he worshipped, and, at the former, the famous ‘icon’ which he carried in his wars, before which crowds of people were incessantly prostrating and kissing the pavement.”

“Sept. 4.—We returned last night from Finland, of which I am glad to have visited a specimen, though there is not much to see, except gloomy little lakes, flat country, hundreds of miles of monotonous forests of young firs and birch, and little wooden villages. All is very much like an inferior Sweden, and the people understand Swedish, and have the Swedish characteristics of honesty and civility, which, at so short a distance off, make them an extraordinary contrast to the Russians. Our journey was amusingly varied by endless changes of rail, steamer, walk, char-a-banc, as the country allowed. At Imatra, our destination, a lake tumbles into a river by curious rapids.”

“Moscow, Sept. 9.—We left St. Petersburg on Monday, and went to Novgorod the Great, one of the oldest cities in Russia, once enormous, but now dwindled to a large village, with a decaying kremlin and a wonderful cathedral like a mosque, a blaze of beautiful ancient colour within, quite splendid in its gold and silver decorations, and the shrines of sixteen famous saints (the Greek saints are most puzzling) who are buried there, and whose mummified hands, left outside their cerecloths, are exposed to the kisses of the faithful. A journey of nineteen hours’ rail brought us here on Thursday morning. The first impression of Moscow is disappointing—commonplace omnibuses at the station, ugly vulgar streets like the back-streets of Brighton, and, as the town is above twenty miles round and nine miles across, they seem endless. But you enter the Chinese town, in which we are now living, by gates in the strangest walls imaginable, and the street has all the crowd and clamour of Naples. Another series of very tall battlemented red walls and lofty gates announces the Kremlin. This is more striking than I expected—the three mosque-like cathedrals (there are five cathedrals and three hundred churches in Moscow), and the splendid view from the high terrace in front of them, which recalls that from the Pincio at Rome, only the Moskva is a very broad river, and every church has the strangest of towers—like bulbs, pine-apples, melons, fir-cones, gilt or blue or brightest green, covered with network, with stars, discs, moons, hung with chains like veils, every device that the wildest dream or maddest imagination can invent, and yet in this clear atmosphere of intense burning heat and with the arid low hills or burnt plains which surround the town, it all looks right. Inside, the cathedrals put all the churches in Italy and Spain to shame by their splendour, but one is sorry not to know more of their history. I can speak enough Russian now to get on humbly; but the alphabet beats me still: it is not only that there are so many letters, but that the old familiar forms of written letters mean something new.”

“Kieff, ‘The Holy City,’ Sept. 21.—We made excursions from Moscow to all the great monasteries. There are few other sights of importance, but these, in Russia, are quite unique—immense spaces surrounded by walls, towers, and gates, which have stood many a siege, and which are like the towns in old woodcuts, and contain gardens, cemeteries, cathedrals, usually six churches with gilt domes and minarets, besides accommodation for 600 or 800 monks and nuns, who have their wells, gardens, farms, &c. One of those which I thought most attractive was Novo Devichi, rising from an arid sandy plain close to the town, but full of lovely flowers, which a kind old prioress came and gave us handfuls of. Then we went to the New Jerusalem, where the famous Nikon lived and is buried—many hours jolting along a no-road through the forests in a rough tarantass, but a beautiful place when you get there. Nikon chose it because he thought it so like the real Jerusalem, and changed the name of its river to Jordan, and made a Kedron. It was a quiet countrified spot, and the only one I have seen which the Mother and Lea would have enjoyed in the old days, and there was a primitive inn with kindly, gentle people. We also went to the famous Troitsa, the home and grave of Philaret. In all these excursions, as everywhere else, we found the ‘difficulties’ of Russian travel entire imagination: nothing can be easier.

“Nevertheless, the journey to Kieff by a slow train was terrible, lasting two days and a night, and awfully hot—across a hideous brown steppe the whole way, with scarcely a tree to vary it. (There are forests till Moscow, only steppes afterwards.) I was ill and wretched enough before this interesting place rose on its low hills above the Dnieper.

“To-day, however, has quite satisfied me that it was worth while to come. It is a most unique and beautiful place, the vast town, or rather three great towns, so embosomed in trees and gardens, that the houses are almost lost. But the greatest charm lies in the constant view over the glorious Dnieper, and the immense aërial plain beyond, with its delicate pink lights and blue shadows. Then Kieff is the Mecca of Russia, full of tombs of saints and holy images, and, though this is no special season, the thousands and thousands of pilgrims are most extraordinary—in sheep-skins and goat-skins, in fur caps, high-peaked head-dresses and turbans; in azure blue, bright pink, or pale primrose colour. I never could have believed without seeing it the reverence of the Russian religion, and it has seemed the same everywhere and in all classes. The bowing and curvetting and crossing before the icons is most extraordinary, and still more so the three prostrations which all make on approaching any holy place, bending down and kissing the dust in a way worthy of an acrobat, though treated as a matter of course by the devotees themselves. But the intense expression of devotion borne by these pilgrims (who have often walked from Archangel!) is such as I have never seen on other faces, and some of the old men and women especially would make the grandest studies for pictures of saintly apostles and matrons. To see a smart young officer unhesitatingly prostrate himself and kiss the ground on sight of an icon (in the mud of this morning even), in the presence of equally smart companions, has something deeply touching in it, and one wonders if any young guardsman in England would do the same if and because he thought it right.”

“In the Warsaw train, Sept. 25.—In this smoothly gliding train, which takes one in fifty-four weary hours across the steppes, it is as easy to write as in the study at home. I should be most comfortable if it were not that my companion (in the compartment for two) is the most odious type of American I ever came across. ‘I guess you will not want to have the windows of this carriage opened till you get to Warsaw, because I will not submit to it: I am in my right, and I will not submit to it.’

“We were arrested again yesterday at Kieff, though then only by priests—veiled priests—for daring to sketch the outside of one of their sacred chapels; but after being hurried about from place to place for an hour, and shut up in a courtyard, with a wooden bench to sit upon, for another, we were regaled with a pile of beautiful grapes and apples, and sent about our business. This constant worrying when drawing has really made Russia very tiresome; but for those who do not want to draw, I do not see what difficulties travelling in the country can present, and Russians are always civil, even when arresting you.”

“Warsaw, Sept. 27.—We arrived at the junction station of Brest more than two hours late, for on some of the Russian lines no hours are obligatory, and you are quite at the mercy of conductors and their whims for spending ten, thirty, or even forty minutes in gossiping at side stations. So the Warsaw train had left Brest, and we had five hours to wait for another. Ill and wretched, I left the horrible room where a crowd of people were smoking, spitting, and smelling, and made my way to a sort of deserted public garden, where cows were browsing on the lilacs. Here, from mere want of something to do, I began to sketch some cottages and bushes, when I was suddenly seized by two soldiers and carried off to the guard-house. Here a very furious bombastical old major cross-examined me, and went into a passion over each sketch in my book, with volleys of questions about each, and then he sent me with a military escort to the station to fetch my passport. It was right, of course, and at last, after several hours, I was dismissed with ‘Maintenant c’est fini;’ but after a quadruple walk of two miles each way, and over such a pavement as only Russia can supply.

“I never was at Warsaw before, and should not care to stay. The Vistula divides the town, which is full of palaces and gardens, but has older quarters full of Jews, which are like the old streets of Paris. This afternoon I drove to the old Sobieski palace of Villanov. Two horses were necessary, for just outside this capital city the roads are like the roughest of ploughed fields.”

I spent the autumn of 1883 very quietly at Holmhurst, but paid some visits in the winter.

“Palace, Lichfield, Jan. 1, 1884.—After a pleasant Christmas at Kinmel, I came here yesterday to dear Augusta Maclagan. The immense quantity of work she does suits her, though it seems too much to those who do not know her. Town, Diocese, Chapter, and the society of the neighbourhood all work the willing horse alike. I cannot sufficiently admire the marvellous versatility of the Bishop, or his wonderful power of conversation, recalling that of Dean Alford in its simplicity and vivacity. He has led the most varied of lives, and has much of interest to tell of each part of it. He was for three years a soldier. When he was born, the whole house was disturbed by the most fearful row, and when they inquired what it was, the servant said, ‘Eh, it’s just Sandie and Nellie fighting over the bit bairnie.’ Sandie, who had been military servant to the father, an army doctor, said it must be brought up as a soldier. Nellie said, ‘Nay, it’s the seventh bairn, and if it’s a soldier, it must be the Lord’s soldier: the bairn must aye be a minister;’ and he was both. The Bishop is still passionately fond of riding and driving, and as soon as he gets out of Lichfield, mounts the box of his carriage and drives his own horses, ‘Pride’ and ‘Prejudice.’ He says people may consider it a terrible thing for a Bishop to be drawn hither and thither by these passions, but then it is assuredly a fine thing to have them well under control.

“The Lonsdales dined last night, and afterwards we sat up for a touching little midnight service in the palace chapel, in which the Bishop preached, but very briefly, saying just what I have so often felt, that it is not the expected, but the unexpected events which come with the New Year—that God’s hand is full of ‘surprises.’

“Augusta has written so admirable, so intensely interesting a Memoir of her dear mother, that I cannot say how delightful I find it, or how beautifully it portrays that lovely and lovable life from life to death. It is only in MS., though one of the best biographies I ever read—‘the history of a life, not a stuffed animal.’

“The cathedral is most uniform in its beauty, even the modern monuments so fine. Of the older ones, the most interesting is that of Bishop Hackett, who was appointed by Charles II. after the destruction caused by the Puritans. He found the church a ruin, and it is touching to hear how he called his choir and the one remaining canon into the only bit which had still a roof, and prayed that he might have life and energy to restore it. Going back to his palace, he harnessed his coach-horses to the first cart that drew materials for the cathedral, and, though his income was so small, he spent £8000 upon it.

“The statue of our Lord over the west front was put up by the present Bishop in the place of a statue of Charles II., which was due to a Mrs. Wilson. She was of an old Lichfield family, and married far beneath her, a mere mason; but she said to him, ‘Now you are a clever man: you know how to carve; make a good statue of his Majesty for the cathedral, and it will be heard of at court, and you will be knighted, and I shall die “my lady.”’ And all this actually happened. When the statue of Charles was being taken down, the present Dean gave a groan of ‘Poor King Charles!’—‘Why do you call him poor King Charles?’ said the Bishop. ‘Because he is being dethroned by a restoration.’

“Bishop Selwyn always desired that he might not be buried in the cathedral, so a little mortuary chapel on the outside was restored for him, and you look from the church through arches upon his beautiful sleeping figure by Adams. When the Maori chiefs were in England, they came down especially to see it, and gazed upon it with their eyes streaming with tears. ‘They have laid him on a New Zealand mat, as a chieftain should lie,’ they said.”

“Fawsley, Jan. 8, 1884.—I came here from Lichfield to find a very large party in this large and most comfortable house, with a hall of Henry VII.’s time. Sir Rainald Knightley, its owner, is a splendid type of an English gentleman, very conservative, very courteous, very clever, and devoted to country sports and interests, which alternate with the politics in which his more serious moments are spent. The only blemish on his perfectly happy married life with Miss Bowater, who enters into all his pursuits, whether duties or pleasures, politics, country business, hunting, &c., is that they have no children. He is surrounded by cousins—Charleses and Valentines—repeating in actual life the many Charleses and Valentines to whom there are monuments in the fine old church near the house. In the autumn, rheumatism takes him to Homburg, but he refuses to learn German, ‘the grinding gibberish of the garrulous Goth.’

“The parish has a population of fifty-eight, and there is only service once on Sundays, performed by the cousin who is in orders. It is alternately in the morning and afternoon, the difference being that the morning service begins at noon, and the afternoon service at a quarter past.

“Mrs. Charles Knightley drove me to Canons Ashby, the beautiful and romantic old place of the eccentric and impoverished Sir H. Dryden. I thought it looked like the background of a novel, and afterwards found that it was the background of—‘Sir Charles Grandison’!

“Lady Knightley took me to Shackborough—a pretty place. When Charles I. was going to the battle of Edgehill he met its proprietor of that day merrily hunting. He had never heard that there was a civil war going on, such was the paucity of political news! But he turned about and went with the king into the fight and was wounded there.

“At the beginning of this century, the daughter of the house became engaged to be married to an officer quartered at Weedon—a mésalliance which was greatly disapproved by her family. At last she was induced to break it off. But the officer persuaded her to grant him one last interview at the summer-house on the hill that he might give her back her letters. He gave her the letters with one hand, and with the other he shot her dead, and then shot himself.

“At Marston St. Lawrence, near this, is an old house, beautiful and moated. Here a Mrs. Blencowe was one day being dressed by her maid before the toilet-table. Suddenly she said, ‘Did you see anything’—‘Yes,’ said the maid. A hand had come out from behind the curtain. They had both seen it, and both screamed violently. Help came, and the room was searched, but no one was there.”

“Ickwellbury, Jan. 27.—A man here, being asked by Mrs. Harvey how he liked going to church, said, ‘Well, I like it very much: I goes to church, and I sits down, and I thinks o’ nowt.’”

“London, Feb. 23.—My dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart is dead. She never rallied from the sudden death of her son-in-law Mr. Rogerson. But she was able to see several people, to whom she spoke with that all-majestic charity which was the mainspring and keynote of her life. Her last words were ‘Higher, higher!’ and we may believe that she has passed into those higher regions where her thirst after life, not repose, meets its full fruition. I went to see her in the solemn peace of the newly dead, and last Thursday I saw her laid in a grave of flowers at Kensal Green, many faithful hearts mourning, many sad eyes weeping beside her coffin.[394]

“There were few equal to her. Mrs. Procter is most so. I met her the other day, and some one made her a pretty speech. She said, ‘When I was very young, Sydney Smith said to me, “My dear, do you like flattery?”—“Very much indeed,” I answered, “but I do not like it put on with a trowel.” What I really do like is—in the words of Sterne—a few delicate attentions, not so vague as to be bewildering, and not so pointed as to be embarrassing.’”

“Firle, Lewes, April 18, 1884.—I came here to find a party of twenty in the house, including Sir Rainald and Lady Knightley. It is a large house, like a French château, close under the downs, but as my kind but singular little host, Lord Gage, likes every window open in these bitter winds, the cold is ferocious. On Wednesday I got Lady Knightley to walk with me (the inhabitants of this place had never heard of it!) 2½ miles across the marshes to Laughton Place, the ancient and original residence of the Pelhams—a moated grange, having an old red brick tower with terra-cotta ornaments, and many other curious remains, looking—stranded in the desolate fen, and with an abundance of animal life—like an old Dutch picture.

“Yesterday I walked with Sir Rainald to Glynde. It is a curious old house, approached through a gateway and stableyard and by clipped yew hedges, having a pleasant view over upland country and high gardens. A fine black oak staircase leads to a noble gallery-room, with deep alcoves, so pleasantly furnished with fine pictures, &c., that, though suitable to an enormous party, a single individual would never feel solitary in it. Miss Brand did the honours of the many good portraits very pleasantly, and, before we left, Lady Hampden came in from walking, and I was very glad to see her in her country home, having so often been in her house in the palace at Westminster.”

Ill-health in June made a happy excuse for my spending a delightful month abroad. I saw first the group of towns around Laon, charming old-fashioned Noyon, beautiful Soissons, and Coucy with its grand castle. Then Alick Pitt met me at Thun, and we spent a delightful time, joining the Husseys of Scotney Castle at Mürren and Rosenlaui, sketching and flower-picking, and reawakening every slumbering sense of the delights of Switzerland.

“Pension Baumgarten, Thun, June 25, 1884.—You will be wishing to hear from this well-remembered place, where the mountains are quite as rugged and purple, the lake as limpid and still, the river as green and rushing, and the old town and castle as picturesque, as any youthful recollection could paint them. This pension, too, is perfectly delightful, with its coloured awnings over the wide terrace, its tubs of pomegranates and oleanders, its garden of roses, and its meadows behind, with the wooden châlets and the women making hay, and the delightful pathlets through the dark woods on the mountain-side.

“I had a calm crossing on Friday, and reached Laon by seven. On Saturday morning I saw the stately cathedral at St. Quentin, and spent the afternoon at Noyon, which has an exquisite cathedral, Calvin’s curious old house, and a most attractive little inn. Sunday I was at Coucy, where there is the finest ruined château in existence after Heidelberg, beautifully situated amongst wooded hills, in scenery so pretty, you would take it for the Vosges, not Picardy. Monday morning I spent at Soissons, with two fine cathedrals, one in ruins, and an interesting town, and then came on by night to Berne.

“The last night I was in London I dined with the Reptons to meet the Kildares—Lady Kildare quite the most beautiful creature I ever saw.”

“Oct. 10.—Since I returned from Switzerland, my home life has been quite happy and uneventful. Only ten days ago I had a telegram from ‘my Prince’ (of Sweden and Norway), asking me to come and spend Sunday afternoon and evening with him at Eastbourne, as he was only there for two days. He met me most cordially and affectionately, making me feel as if the seeming neglect of several years was only ‘royalty’s way,’ and pleasantly taking up all the dropped threads of life. We were several hours together, and while we were talking a sweet-faced young lady looked in. ‘I must come in: you are such a friend of the Prince: I have heard of you, too, all my life. I am so very glad to see you at last,’—and I felt at once that the Crown-Princess was a friend.

“She wanted to know what I thought of the Prince—the Prince wanted to know what I thought of her: I was glad to be able to answer both most satisfactorily.

“I saw her again at dinner, and she talked most delightfully, and was full of animation and interest. I came away with a happy feeling that my affectionate occupation of many months for the Prince had, after all, not been thrown away.”

“Highcliffe, Oct. 26, 1884.—Lady Waterford says that the father of that Thérèse Longworth who called herself Lady Avonmore was a young clerk at Bordeaux at the time of the Noyades. Two beautiful young girls were tied together, and were going to be drowned. Suddenly a poissarde, seized with compassion from their looks, jumped upon a barrel and shouted, ‘Are there no young men here who will save the lives of these two beautiful girls by marrying them?’ Longworth and another young fellow were looking out of a window at the time and heard it, and said to one another, ‘Shall we do it?’ It was rather a gulp, for they were both very young at the time; but they went down and said they would, and they were both married there and then, by joining hands after the fashion of the Commune. The daughter of one of those marriages was Thérèse Longworth.”

Early in October I paid a visit to my distant cousins, Mrs. Quin and her brother, Edmund Boyle, who were staying at Ramsgate. The health of Sir Moses Montefiore, at the great age of one hundred, was then a great topic of the place. Mrs. Quin said something to him about another year at his age being only a waiting time, when he answered sharply, “What do you mean by feeling old? I only feel forty.” He said no one had ever mentioned the name of Christ to him except one person, and that was Cardinal Antonelli!

“Ruxley Lodge, Oct. 30.—I am enjoying a pleasant visit to Lady Foley and her sons; only Lady Jane Repton here besides. It is a charming house, full of books and pictures, in a beautiful country, with fine views of Windsor and Claremont. Once there was an old priory here, but only the fishponds are left. We went to-day to see the tomb of Pamela, mother of my Uncle Fitzgerald, at Thames Ditton. It was brought there from Montmartre, where it was broken by a bomb in 1870. It is inscribed, ‘Pamela, Ladye Edward Fitzgerald, par son ami dévoué, L. L.;’ and no one now knows who L. L. was. Close by are the graves of her daughter, Lady Campbell, and several of her grand-daughters.

“The Foleys are said to descend from ‘Foley the Fiddler,’ a mechanic who determined to make his fortune by finding out the secret of making nails by machinery in Sweden. Up to that time the secret had been successfully kept: the ironfounders had shut every one out, and let no one see their process. But Foley the Fiddler, pretending to be half-witted, went and played in the neighbourhood of the manufactory. The Swedish workmen danced to his music, and eventually were so delighted with him that they could not resist taking him to play inside the factory. When he had been there some time, he fancied he had seen all he wanted, and went home. He set up ironworks on the plan of what he had seen, but when he came to completing them, found that, after all, he did not understand the process perfectly. He went back, and the Swedish workmen were quite delighted to find him again fiddling outside the factory—‘a daft fiddler’—and they brought him in, and he learnt all he wanted, and went home and made a great fortune.”

“Goldings, Herts, Nov. 20.—Isabel Smith says that a lady in Wales, a friend of Miss Frances Wynne, looked up suddenly one day after reading the obituary in the Times, and exclaimed, ‘Now, at last, my lips are unsealed.’ Then she told this:—

“One day she had been alone at her country-house in Wales, with her son and a friend of his. She had received all the money for her rents that day—a very large sum—and put it away in a strong box. Being asked, she said she did not mind the least having it in her room, and should sleep with the key under her pillow.

“When she had been in bed some time, she was aware that her door opened, and that a man in a cloak came into her room with a candle. He passed the candle before her face, but she lay with closed eyes, perfectly motionless. Then he felt for the key; he felt for a long time, but somehow he failed to find it. At last he went away.

“As soon as the door closed, she sprang out of bed, intending to go to her son’s room to warn him that a robber was in the house. But his room was a long way off, and she thought it would be better to go instead to the friend, whose room was nearer.

“As she opened the door suddenly, she saw a figure muffled up in a long cloak put down the candle. It was the same figure who had come into her room. She looked at him fixedly. ‘To-morrow at 9 A.M.,’ she said, ‘the dogcart will come to the door which was to have taken my strong box to the bank: you will go in that dogcart, and you will never enter my door again. If you never attempt to do this, I will never say a word on what has happened as long as you live.’ And she never did, even to her son.”

“Nov. 21.—We have spent the day at Knebworth, an interesting place, though full of shams—a sham old house, with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters, sham ancient portraits, &c. Lord Lytton, with his velvet collar and gold chains, recalled his father, who is represented on the walls, with his boots pointed like a needle, in a picture by Maclise. The ‘old’ rooms are chiefly modern in reality, but there is one really ancient bedroom—a room in which Queen Elizabeth once slept. Lady Lytton, beautiful, charming, and courteous, looked like a queen in the large saloons and galleries. We found Lady Marian Alford, Lady Colley—the pretty widow of Sir George—and Lady Paget, with her nice son Victor, amongst the guests.

“I wish one did not know that the real name of the Lyttons is Wiggett. William Wiggett took the name of Bulwer on his marriage with Sarah Bulwer in 1756, and his youngest son (the novelist) took the name of Lytton on succeeding to his mother’s property of Knebworth, she being one Elizabeth Warburton, whose very slight connection with the real Lytton family consisted in the fact that her grandfather, John Robinson was cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was great-nephew of a Sir William Lytton, who died childless in 1704.

“I have had the small trial of another ‘call’ of £300 on those unfortunate Electric Lights in which St. George Lane Fox involved me. I had saved up the money, so it was there, but it was provoking to have to pay what is almost certain to be lost, yet to be obliged to do so, as the only chance of seeing again any part of the £7000 which had gone before it. However, I am never more than very temporarily troubled by such things—there is no use. All I have ever made by my writings in fourteen very hard-worked years is gone now through St. G. Lane Fox—there is nothing else left to lose.”

“Thoresby Park, Dec. 12.—This has been a most delightful visit at one of the great houses I like the best. Its inmates are always so perfectly brimming with kindness, goodness, and simplicity, and every surrounding is so really handsome, even magnificent, without the slightest ostentation. I arrived with Lord and Lady Leitrim—he quite charming, so merry, pleasant, and natural, and she one of the delightful sisters of charming Lady Powerscourt. It has been a great pleasure to find the Boynes here, and Lady Newark, who is an absolute sunbeam in her husband’s home—perfect in her relation to every member of his family. I have been again to Welbeck and Clumber, only remarking fresh at the former a fine Sir Joshua of a Mr. Cleaver, an old man in the neighbourhood, dressed in grey, and the melancholy interesting portrait of Napoleon by Delaroche, given by the Duc de Coigny.

“A Mrs. Francklin (sister of Lord St. Vincent), staying here, says that a young man, going to stay with Millais, saw distinctly a hand and arm come out of the fireplace in his room, and do it repeatedly. At last he told Millais, who said it had often happened before, and they had the hearthstone taken up, and found the bodies of a woman and child.”

“Babworth, Dec. 14.—Mrs. Drummond Baring has been most agreeable in her talk of the society at Paris under the Empire, the soirées intimes, at which all etiquette was laid aside, and Prosper Merimée, Théophile Gautier, &c., were seen at their best. No one knew so much about the Empress as Merimée. He had known her well as a girl, and all the letters about the marriage had passed through his hands. Nothing could be more naïve than the Empress in her early married days. She would go shopping. She clapped her hands with delight at the opera-bouffe, and the Emperor took them and held them, to the great delight of the people, who applauded vehemently.

“In the last days at the Tuileries, all the court ladies were only occupied in packing up their own things; all deserted their mistress except Madame le Breton. She and the Empress stayed to the last. The Empress asked General Tronchin how long the palace could hold out. He said, ‘Certainly three days.’ It did not hold out three hours. They fled as the people entered, fled precipitately by the long galleries of the Louvre, once in agony finding a door locked and having to look for the key. The Empress had no bonnet. Madame le Breton, with a bit of lace, made something for her head. They reached the street and hailed a cab. ‘Eh! ma petite mère,’ said the driver, ‘il parait que nous nous sauvons: où est le papa donc?’ But he took them and did not recognise them. They went in the cab to the Boulevard Haussmann. Then they found that they had no money to pay it, and Madame le Breton took off one of her rings. ‘We have forgotten our money,’ she said, ‘but you see how suffering my friend is. I must take her on to the dentist, but I will leave this with you; give me your address and I will redeem it.’ And he let them go.

“They took a second cab to the house of Evans, the American dentist, and there found he was gone to his villa at Passy. They followed him there, but when they reached the villa, the servant said he was out, and positively refused to let them in. But Madame le Breton insisted—her friend was so terribly ill: Mr. Evans knew her very well: she was quite certain that he would see her: and at length she almost forced her way in, and, moreover, made the servant pay the cab. At last Mr. Evans came in. He had been to Paris, in terrible anxiety as to the fate of the Empress, knowing that the mob had broken into the Tuileries.

“Mrs. Baring said that when Plonplon, commonly called ‘Fatalité,’ was ill, the people said he was ‘Fat alité.’”

“Hickledon, Dec. 17.—No words can say how glad I am to be here with the dearest friend of my young life—dearer still, if possible, with all his six children around him, who are learning also to be fond of me. We walk and talk, and are perfectly happy together in everything.

“We have been to visit Barnborough Church. A man met a wild-cat in Bella Wood, some distance off. He and the cat fought all the way along the hillside, and they both fell down dead in this church porch.

“Yesterday we went to Sprotborough to visit old Miss Copley. It is a very pretty place, a handsome house on a terrace upon a wooded bank above the river. Sir Joseph Copley and his wife Lady Charlotte (Pelham) quarrelled early in their married life. He overheard her at Naples, through a thin wall of a room, telling a friend that he was mad, and he never forgave it. They were separated for some years, then they lived together again, but there was no cordiality. They were really Moyles. A Moyle married a Copley heiress, and the Copleys long ago had married the heiress of the Fitzwilliams, for Sprotborough was the old Fitzwilliam place, and many of the family are buried there in the church. The Copleys divided into two branches, of Sprotborough and Wadsworth, and it is a pretty story that when the Copley of Sprotborough had nothing but daughters, he left the estate to the Copley of Wadsworth, and then, when the Copley of Wadsworth had nothing but daughters, he left it back to the representative of the other branch. Not far from Sprotborough, Conisborough stands beautifully on the top of a wooded hill: in ‘Ivanhoe’ its castle is the place where Athelstan lies in state when supposed to be dead.

“The Bishop of Winchester told Charlie Wood that his predecessor, Bishop Wilberforce, had always very much wished to see a portrait at Wotton (the Evelyns’ place) of Mrs. Godolphin, whose life he had written whilst he was at Alverstoke. This wish he had often expressed; but Mr. Evelyn had not liked the Bishop, and he had never been invited.

“On the day on which the Bishop set off with Lord Granville to ride to ‘Freddie Leveson’s,’ Mr. Evelyn, his brother, and a doctor were sitting late in the dining-room at Wotton, when the brother exclaimed, ‘Why, there is the Bishop of Winchester looking in at the window.’ They all three then saw him distinctly. Then he seemed to go away towards some shrubs, and they thought he must have gone round to the door, and expected him to be announced. But he never came, and an hour after a servant brought in the news that he had been killed only two miles off.

“Mrs. George Portal of Burgclere told Charlie Wood that when Allan Herbert was so ill at Highclere—ill to death, it was supposed—the nurse, who was sitting up, saw an old lady come into the room when he was at the worst, gaze at him from the foot of the bed, and nod her head repeatedly. When he was better, and after he could be left, the housekeeper, wishing to give the nurse a little distraction, showed her through the rooms, and, in Lord Carnarvon’s sitting-room, the nurse suddenly pointed at the portrait over the chimney-piece and said, ‘That is the lady who came into the sick-room.’ The portrait was that of old Lady Carnarvon, Allan Herbert’s mother, and the servants well recollected her peculiar way of nodding her head repeatedly.

“Mrs. George Portal was niece of Lady Anne Townshend, who was also aunt of that young Lord George Osborne who was killed at Oxford when wrestling with Lord Downshire in 1831. On the day of his death, she saw him pass through the room; she called to him, and he did not answer; she rang the bell for the servant, who declared he had never entered the house, and then she wrote the fact of having seen him to her husband, who was absent. Next morning came a messenger to tell Lady Anne of the death of her nephew, with whom she had been very intimate, and to beg her to break it to her sister—his mother, the Duchess of Leeds. Years after, when Mrs. George Portal was sorting her aunt’s letters after her death, she found amongst them the very letter to her husband in which she told what she had seen.”

“Mount St. John, Dec. 20.—To-day was Lord Halifax’s birthday. The hounds met at Hickledon, wishing to do him honour, but it was almost too much for him. With me, I think it has been a pleasure to him to go back into old days, old memories, old sketch-books, &c. I cannot say how much I enjoyed my visit to the kind old man, as well as to my own dear Charlie—better, dearer, more charming than ever, and more in favour, one feels sure, with God as well as with man.

“Yet Charlie does not wish to die: his life here is so perfectly happy and useful, but he says that it must be ‘very unpleasant to God to feel that His children never wish to come home: he is sure he should feel it so with his children.’ He says he is quite certain what the pains of Purgatory will be—‘they will be the realising for the first time the love of God, and not being able to do anything for Him: this life is our only chance.’ He says he is ‘sure that the next life will be in a more beautiful world, like this, only glorified, and so much, oh! so much better in everything. “Such cats!” my Uncle Courtenay says, “such cats!”’

“Young Charlie came home yesterday, a most delightful boy, only less engaging perhaps than little Francis.[398] To me, these children of my dear brother-like friend are what no other children can ever be.

“This Mount St. John (where I am now visiting Mrs. J. Dundas, Charlie Wood’s sister) is a beautiful place, very high up in hills which are now snowy. There is a long chain of them, ending in Rolleston Scaur, where it is said that, in the earliest times of Christianity, the followers of the Druids met the first missionaries in a public discussion. The devil was disguised in the ranks of the former, who, for a long time, had the best of it; but, when Christian truth began to prevail, he was so disgusted that he flew away to the neighbouring isolated height of Hode’s Point, and a stone which stuck to his red-hot foot was deposited on its summit—a tangible proof of the story, as it is of a wholly different geological formation from its surroundings. The view from these hills is intensely beautiful, comprising York Minster in the hazy plain, and the many places which take their name from the god Thor—Thirkleby, Thirsk, &c.”

“Dec. 24.—Yesterday we spent at Newburgh, cordially received, and shown all over the house by Lady Julia Wombwell—a most simple, pleasant, winning person. There is the look of an old Dutch house externally, in the clock-tower, clipped yews, and formal water. Inside, the house is very uncomfortable and cold, and has no good staircase. Mary, Lady Falconberg, Cromwell’s daughter, is said to have rescued her father’s body from Westminster at the Restoration, and to have buried it here at the top of the stairs leading to the maids’ rooms. The family, however, prudently refuse to open ‘the tomb’ and see if there is anything inside. Two portraits are shown as those of Mary, Lady Falconberg, and there really is an old silver pen which belonged to her father. There is a beautiful Vandyke of a Bellasye in a red coat, and a good Romney of a lady. The church has an octagonal tower and some tombs of Falconbergs. At the end of the village is the house of Sterne, who was curate there, with an inscription.”

“Whitburn, Dec. 28.—Lizzie Williamson [399] says she wonders very much that, when our Saviour was on earth, no one thought of asking Him if people ill of hopeless and agonising complaints, idiots, cretins, &c., might not be put out of the way—‘the Bible would have been so much more useful if it had only given us a little information on these points.’

“I stayed a few hours in Durham as I passed through, and found what is so picturesque in summer unbearably black and dismal in winter. The present Dean (Lake), who has so spoilt the cathedral, is most unpopular. One day he had taken upon himself to lecture Mr. Greenwell, one of the minor canons, for doing his part in the service in thick laced boots. Greenwell was furious. Rushing out of the cathedral, he met Archdeacon Bland, the most polite and deliberate of men, and exclaimed, ‘I’ve been having the most odious time with the Dean, and I really think he must have got the devil in him.’—‘No, Mr. Greenwell, no, no, not that,’ said Archdeacon Bland in his quiet way; ‘he is only possessed by three imps: he is imperious, he is impetuous, and he is impertinent.’

“People are full of ‘The Unclassed,’ a powerful novel, though, as a very pretty young lady said to me the other day, ‘not at all the sort of book one would give to one’s mother to read!’

“Coming through Roker, I heard a woman say, ‘Wal, geese is geese, and ye canna mak um nought else.’ But some one else had this to report as a specimen Northumbrian sentence: ‘I left the door on the sneck, and, as I was ganging doun the sandy chare (lane), I met twa bairnies huggin a can o’ bumblekites, and a good few tykes were havin a reglar hubbledeshoo o’ a midden.’”

“Brancepeth Castle, Jan. 3, 1885.—Mr. Wharton dined. He said, ‘When I was at the little inn at Ayscliffe, I met a Mr. Bond, who told me a story about my friend Johnnie Greenwood of Swancliffe. Johnnie had to ride one night through a wood a mile long to the place he was going to. At the entrance of the wood a large black dog joined him, and pattered along by his side. He could not make out where it came from, but it never left him, and when the wood grew so dark that he could not see it, he still heard it pattering beside him. When he emerged from the wood, the dog had disappeared, and he could not tell where it had gone to. Well, Johnnie paid his visit, and set out to return the same way. At the entrance of the wood, the dog joined him, and pattered along beside him as before; but it never touched him, and he never spoke to it, and again, as he emerged from the wood, it ceased to be there.

“‘Years after, two condemned prisoners in York gaol told the chaplain that they had intended to rob and murder Johnnie that night in the wood, but that he had a large dog with him, and when they saw that, they felt that Johnnie and the dog together would be too much for them.’

“‘Now that is what I call a useful ghostly apparition,’ said Mr. Wharton.”

“London, Feb. 22, 1885.—At dinner at Miss Bromley’s I met the Misses Bryant, who live in 17 Somerset Street. On the ground-floor of the house is a large room said to be haunted, and in which such terrible noises are heard as prevent any one sleeping there. A man with a grey beard once committed suicide in that room. The other day some children, nephews and nieces of the Misses Bryant, came to spend the afternoon with them, and, to amuse them, one of the ladies got them to help her in arranging her garden upon the leads. While they were at work, the little boy looked over the parapet into the court below, and said, ‘Who is that old man with the grey beard who keeps looking at me out of that window? Oh! he is gone now, but he has put out his head and looked up at me several times.’ The window was that of ‘Greybeard’s room.’ Miss Bryant immediately ran down and asked the servants if any one with a grey beard had come into the house, but no one had entered the house at all, and ‘Greybeard’s room’ was locked up.”

“March 7.—Two days ago I dined with Lady Sarah Lindsay to meet Colonel Hugh Lindsay and Lady Jane. Colonel Lindsay was full of spiritualism and the wonderful discoveries this generation seems on the verge of. He had himself seen a large table, which had been first set in motion, after the hands which touched it were taken away, float up to the ceiling, remain there for some time over their heads, and then float down again. ‘The conjurors Maskelyne and Cook could not have done this; they might have raised the table (by wires), but it would not have floated.’

“Colonel Lindsay spoke much of the wonderful Providence which keeps down voracious animals. He said that the aphis (of the rose, &c.) reproduced itself in such intense multitudes, that, if not kept down by weather and other insects, it would, in ten days, have assumed proportions equal in volume to many thousand times the inhabitants of the earth, the whole air would be darkened, and every living thing upon earth would be utterly consumed by them!

“Lady Sarah told of her grandmother, old Lady Hardwicke,[400] with whom a young lady came to stay. They dined at three o’clock, but when the girl came down, she was dreadfully agitated, and looked as if she had seen a ghost. When Lady Hardwicke pressed her as to the reason, she, after a time, confessed that it was because there was a spirit in her room. It came to her lamenting its hard fate whilst she was dressing, and she was sure there had been a murder in that room. Lady Hardwicke said, ‘Well, my dear, to-morrow you must let me come and stay with you when you are dressing,’ and she did. Soon the girl said, ‘There—there it is!’ and Lady Hardwicke really did hear something. ‘Oh, listen!’ cried the girl. ‘Once I was hap-hap-hap-y, but now I am me-e-e-serable!’ a voice seemed to wail: it was the old kitchen jack!”

“March 19.—Edward Malet was married to Lady Ermyntrude Russell in Westminster Abbey at 4 P.M. Seldom was there a greater crowd in the streets near Westminster. I met Lady Jane Repton in the crush, and we made our way in together through the Deanery. The glorious building was crowded from end to end, and the music most beautiful. Perhaps the greatest of smaller features was Lady Ermyntrude’s dress, which the papers describe as ‘more pearly than pearl, and more snowy than snow.’”

“March 28.—Dining at Mrs. Quin’s, I met Mrs. Ward, who was very amusing.

“She described the airs of Frances-Anne, Lady Londonderry.[401] One day she was extremely irritated with her page, and sent him to Lord Londonderry with a note, in which she had written in pencil, ‘Flog this fellow well for me: he has been quite unendurable.’ But the page read the note on the way, and meeting one of the great magnificent flunkeys, six feet high, said, ‘Just oblige me by taking this note in to my lord: I am forced to do something else.’ The flunkey brought out the answer, and met the page, who took it in to his lady. She was rather surprised, for it was—‘I’m afraid.’ Mrs. Ward was in the house when this happened.

“Mrs. Ward recollected, in her own childhood, when she was not three years old, sitting on the floor in her mother’s sitting-room cutting up a newspaper with a pair of blunt scissors. A lady came in to see her mother, and brought with her two very fat children, with great round staring eyes. The children were told to sit down by her on the floor, and she was bidden to amuse them. It was impossible: they only stared in hopeless irresponsiveness. Soon her mother began to talk as loudly as she could. It was to drown the voice of her own little girl, whom she heard repeating aloud a verse of the psalm she had been learning that morning, ‘Eyes have they, but they see not: ears have they, but they hear not: neither speak they with their lips.’

“In the afternoon I went with a crowd to see Herkomer’s portrait of my friend Katharine Grant—a magnificent tour de force, white upon white.”

On the 1st of May 1885 I set off on the first of a series of excursions in France for literary purposes, oftentimes of dismal solitude, and always of weary hard work, though full of interest of their own. I found then, as I have always done, how different seeing a thing with intention is to ordinary sight-seeing. A dentist at Rome once said to me, “Mr. Hare, you do not brush your teeth.”—“Yes, indeed I do,” I answered, “every night and morning.”—“Ah! yes; you brush them from habit, but not from motive;” and I discovered the result from my many past tours in France had been just the same. As usual, I found that the ordinary English travellers, who are always occupied in playing at “follow my leader” all the time they are abroad, had missed the best part of France, and that the churches and abbeys of the Correze and Creuse—almost unknown hitherto—are absolutely glorious; and some places in that part of France—Rocamadour, for instance—worthy of being compared with the very finest scenes in Italy. I described much of this tour in a series of papers in the Art Journal, as well as in my books on France. In the central provinces the accommodation was very good in its way, and the food always excellent, but in some of the places in the Eastern Pyrenees the dirt was scarcely endurable. The excellent hotel at Montpelier came as a real respite. Whilst there, I made some acquaintance with a banker of the place, who had a poetic Ruskin-like way of describing the wildness of the Cevennes, the grey rocks, desolate scenery, long lines of russet landscape. This so took hold of me, that I went to Lodêve and engaged a carriage for several days to explore the Cevennes thoroughly. It was wild enough certainly and rather curious, but an unbroken monotone; every view, every rocky foreground, even each dreary ruinous village, repeated the last, and after eight or nine hours I was utterly wearied of it; thus it was an intense relief when my driver came in the evening, with no end of apologies, and said he had received a telegram, bidding him return at once to Lodêve; and I was free to jump into the first diligence and reach the nearest station. Railway then took me to Mende, an exceedingly beautiful place, and afterwards to Rodez. Hence I went south again by S. Antonin and Bruniquel, whence beautiful recollections of the spring verdure and clear river come back to me. I made a little tour afterwards to Luchon and other places in the Pyrenees which I had not seen before, and returned straight home from Bordeaux. During this two months’ tour I do not think I ever once saw an English person, even in the railway, and I made no acquaintances.

I found Lourdes entirely changed since I was there last by its enormous religious pilgrimages, and no doubt, whether from the healing waters or the power of faith, many wonderful cures had taken place. It was strange, on nearing the miraculous fountain, to read the inscription, “Ici les malades vont au pas,” &c. A story was told of an officer who had a wooden leg and came to the fountain. When he put in his legs (he put them both in, the wooden leg and the other), as he did so he uttered a little prayer—“Faites, Seigneur, O faites que mes jambes soient pareilles.” When he drew them out, they were both wooden legs!

“Châteauroux, May 6, 1885.—What weather! bitter north-east winds and torrents of rain ever since I landed in France.... I spent Sunday at Etampes, a little narrow town, one street wide and three miles long, with four churches of the utmost architectural importance.... Leaving Orleans, my ‘Untrodden France’ began, and very pleasantly, at pretty Vierzon on the rushing river Cher. There are rather oppressive moments of solitude, but in this awful weather I am especially glad not to have any grumblers against disagreeables which cannot be helped.”

“Argenton, May 8.—Yesterday I was called at five for an excursion of forty miles up the valley of the Creuse, but it rained in such torrents it was impossible. At eight it cleared a little, and I set off, and did it all, returning at eight, but it rained in a deluge more than half the time. There were, however, beautiful moments of sun-gleam, and the scenery very lovely. At Le Crozant, the great rendezvous of French artists, where a most charming old woman keeps a very primitive inn, it is even magnificent, finer than anything on Rhine or Moselle—stupendous rocks and a grand castle. Gargilesse, the place where Mme. George Sand lived so oddly, and wrote ‘Promenades autour de mon Village,’ is also a very curious and charming place, the village clustering around a romanesque church in the enceinte of a great ruined castle above the river.”

“Brive, May 15.—I feel like a child eating through a cake, feeling it a duty not to leave anything remarkable unseen in this part of France, so little known to the English. How unfairly those judge this country who measure France by what they see from the well-known railways to Strasbourg or Marseilles. Nothing can be more beautiful than these hills and valleys of the Creuse and Correze, nothing more rich than the forest-clad country, besides the interest of endless castles and later châteaux, of old towns where the greater proportion of the houses date from the thirteenth century, and of perfectly honest, primitive, and unspoilt people.

“I came to Limoges last Friday, and remained there five days, that is to say, was scarcely there at all, but returned to a good hotel there at night. I saw the great castle of Chalusset; the romanesque Abbey of Solignac; S. Junien, a most grand church; Le Dorat, almost as fine; Montmorillon, full of curiosities; and Chalus, where Richard Cœur de Lion was killed, and where, under the old castle he was besieging, the stone called Rocher de Malmont still rises in the water-meadows, upon which he was standing when the fatal arrow struck him.

“Then I came here, and am staying here in the same way, breakfasting daily at seven, off at half-past seven, and only returning to go to bed. All yesterday I was at the wonderful sanctuary of Rocamadour—the La Salette of these parts—a most curious place, beautiful exceedingly; indeed, though it sounds a very grand comparison, rather like—Tivoli! But it poured all day, with a bitter wind, and this has been the case every day, only this afternoon there have been lovely lights at the falls of Gimel in the exquisite mountain forests. I am so glad I have no companions: they would never have endured the discomfort. No words can say how tired I am every day, nor how wet, nor how dirty; but I shall be glad afterwards to have done it all.”

“Sarlat in the Dordogne, May 21.—We are still in swelching torrents ... but this is a pleasant little hotel in an old cathedral town, with marvellous streets of houses of fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The weather makes no end of hindrances and discomforts, yet in this tour, as in all others, I have found that expected misfortunes never happen: there are plenty of others, but what one looks for never comes, and I have gone on steadily, missing nothing of the plan marked out, only sometimes delayed. The people are beyond measure pleasant and kind, and the cheapness of everything is a perpetual amazement.”

“Carcassonne, May 28.—On Friday 23rd it poured in torrents, but I could not give in, so went by the earliest train as far into the hills as it penetrated, and then by omnibus to Souillac, one of the grand and glorious abbey churches, now parochial, which are so common in that part of France and nowhere else—full of colour and solemnity, though rugged to a degree, and into which you descend by long flights of steps.

“It poured in returning too, but I stopped at a wayside station, and a long walk through chalky mud and a ferry over the Dordogne took me to Fénelon, which is a noble old château splendidly placed on a peninsula looking down upon the meeting of many valleys and streams. It has always been kept up; its terraces were in luxuriant beauty of flowers, and the owner, Comte de Morville, was excessively civil in showing everything. I drew under an umbrella in torrents.

“Saturday I was up at five, and off by rail and road to Cadouin, another of those grand abbey churches, of the same character as the rest, but with the addition of a splendid gothic cloister. I arrived at nine, perished with wet and cold, but was resuscitated by the kind woman at the little inn, who made a hot fire on the great dogs of her hearth, and soon had hot coffee ready. It was, however, a long day, and I did not arrive till near midnight at Montpazier. This curious Bastide was built by Edward III. of England, and has never been touched since his time, and, whilst all is so changed in England, it was interesting to find in this remote French hill-country a town the same as when the Black Prince lived there, with old walls and gates, gothic house-windows, rectangular streets, and in the centre of all the market, surrounded by arcades like those at Padua, only here the arcades are so wide that you can drive in them. It was a quaint, charming place, and I stayed till Monday, spending Sunday in the magnificent old Château de Biron.

“Then, by Cahors, with its wonderful old bridge over the Lot, I came to Montpezat, a very simple place and primitive inn—wild open down, old church, arcaded streets, flowers, goats, and old women in white-winged caps. Late that night I reached Moissac, a place where there is a wonderful church and cloister, which has been extolled as one of the archaeological marvels of the world, but its describers have evidently never seen St. Junien, Le Dorat, Souillac, Cadouin.”

“Narbonne, June 4.—The wet weather has changed to intense heat. Saturday was an interesting day at Alet, a ruined cathedral, and pretty desolate place on the edge of the Eastern Pyrenees, with a very admirable old curé, with whom I made great friends. That afternoon brought me to Perpignan, an almost Spanish town on the frontier—filthily dirty, but I was obliged to stay there to see Prades, the fine lonely monastery of S. Michel de Cuxa, Amélie les Bains, and Arles-sur-Tech. The great excursion to the latter place was indeed a penance—ten hours in a jolting diligence, five each way, with burning sun and stifling dust, and four passengers forced into each place meant for three, so that any movement was impossible, and as the diligence started at five, one was breakfastless. However, all miseries have an end, and Aries had to be visited, for St. Abdon and St. Sennen are buried there; but oh! how glad I was I had no companion to suffer too! On the way here I saw Elne, most Spanish and picturesque, with perhaps the most beautiful cloister in the world. Yesterday too was an interesting day, spent entirely at the great convent of Fontefroide, in the mountains nine miles from hence, spared at the late suppression of monasteries on account of the beneficent and useful lives of its monks—of whom there are still more than fifty—the benefactors of the whole of this part of the country, not only in teaching and preaching, but by taking the lead in all industrial and agricultural work. They receive all strangers, and gave me an excellent luncheon, though, being Wednesday, they had only boiled beans for themselves. The mountains all round the monastery were ablaze with cistus—white, pink, and rose-coloured, with yellow salvia and honeysuckle in masses.”

“Lodéve, June 8.—From Montpelier I went to Aigues-Mortes, the old sea-town where St. Louis embarked for the Crusades, little altered since his time, unless, indeed, the mosquitoes are worse, for they are terrible.”

“Lexos, Aveyron, June 15.—From Rodez and its great cathedral, and Mareillac in the heart of the vine country, I had an excursion of transcendent beauty through the most exquisite mountain valleys and chestnut forests, by rocks and waterfalls, to Conques. I was taken there by a single line in Fergusson’s ‘Architecture’ comparing it with Souillac, which I had already seen, but found perhaps the most beautiful spot in France, and, in that desolation, a glorious romanesque abbey church, grand as a cathedral of the first rank, in which, owing to its lonely position, all the curious mediaeval treasures remain unspoilt. Here, and indeed everywhere, I found the greatest kindness from the charming well-to-do peasantry. Every one seems well off: every one full of courtesy and goodness; and though all the men in blouses expect to be treated as equals, they are indescribably pleasant.

“Anything so cheap as ‘Untravelled France’ it is impossible to imagine. Even at Mende, where it is quite a good hotel, prices were: room—very good, 1 fr., dinner 2 fr., breakfast 50 c., service 50 c., bougie never anything, and these are the usual prices.

“Nothing can describe what the delicious, sweetness of the acacias has been, so abundant in all these town-villages, and now it is giving way to that of the limes.

“This is a wooden inn of the humblest kind, close in the shadow of a great junction station, at which I am for convenience, but the pleasantness of the people gives it a charm. This solitary existence is a placid, peculiar halt in life.”

“July 25, 1885.—Mrs. Rogerson, working in the east end of London, met with a family of poor children—very hopelessly poor children—whom she knew, with a dog. She stopped and told them that, as they could not keep themselves, she wondered they could keep a dog. The eldest boy answered rather savagely, ‘Father bought it: father gave sixpence for the dog, and right well he did too, for the rats wos so many, they wos, they used to eat our toes at night, and the dog keeps them all off.’

“The Maharajah of Johore asked me to his ball. When he goes out to luncheon or dinner he sends on his own cook to prepare for him, taking with him, to kill on the spot, the chicken which his master is to eat. When the cook kills it he says a sort of little prayer—‘Dear little brother, forgive me for the pain I am going to inflict upon you: it will only be momentary, and it really cannot be helped.’”

“Campsea Ashe, Suffolk, August 22.—On the way here I saw Ipswich, its great feature being ‘the Ancient House,’ adorned outside with representations of the Seasons. Close to St. Peter’s Church is Wolsey’s Gate, covered with ivy, which led to his college. This place, which the William Lowthers have bought, in the flat corn-lands of Suffolk, has a fine old garden, with clipped yew hedges and long tanks like Wrest. It has been a most pleasant visit. I heard some one say once, ‘Mrs. Lowther is a most extraordinary woman: she never will let the grass grow under any one of her children’s feet even for a single instant;’ but it has made them all very agreeable, from the immense variety of occupations in which they are interested, and in which, consequently, they interest others. James Lowther, who is at home now, is certainly one of the pleasantest and best-informed young men of the day. He has just been very amusing about answers in Board Schools, telling, amongst others, of a child who was asked ‘If King Alfred had been alive now, what part would he have taken in politics?’ and replied, ‘If King Alfred had been alive now, he would have been far too old to have taken part in politics at all!’

“We had a pleasant picnic at Framlingham, a noble ruined castle, which, for Suffolk, stands almost on a height, and went to Sanbourn, the luxurious home of the rich family of Heywood, and to Glemham, where Lady North, mother of Lord Guildford, lives in a fine old house, which contains much good old furniture and china.

“We spent a long interesting day at the noble old moated house of Helmingham, where Lady Tollemache apologised amusingly for only having nine of her sons at home to assist her in doing the honours! It is a delightful place, with beautiful old gardens, and its inhabitants are delightful too. Lord Tollemache especially brims with goodness to all around him. He was very amusing in urging Miss Lowther, when she had as many sons as he has (!), to make their home pleasanter to them than any other place in the world, so that they should always prefer it to everything else. He showed us all his relics, especially his Anglo-Saxon MS. of the time of Alfred the Great, and several beautiful Bibles of the time of Edward I. There is a pretty picture of Mary Tudor as a child. Queen Elizabeth was at Helmingham, and stood godmother to a baby there, who lived to become Sir Lionel Tollemache: that baby is represented, with its three little sisters, in a curious picture in the hall.

“In the church is the tomb of Colonel Thomas Tollemache, who was distinguished in the wars of Queen Anne’s time. The Duke of Marlborough ordered him to attack Brest. There were reasons which made him very doubtful of success, and he represented to the Duke that the only chance of it lay in a surprise: still the Duke ordered him to attempt it. Brest was found thoroughly prepared, the hoped-for surprise was an utter failure, and Tollemache fell in the attack. The French Government had been forewarned, and it was afterwards found that it had been forewarned by Marlborough! When the Duc d’Aumale came to Helmingham, he said that the thing he was most anxious to see was the monument of this unfortunate officer, and that he had himself read, in the archives at Brest, the letter of the Duke of Marlborough warning the garrison of the coming attack.

“The last owner of Campsea Ashe, Mr. Shepherd, was the grandson of a gardener. The Mr. Shepherd who then owned Campsea adopted a nephew, a young Frere, grandfather of the well-known Sir Bartle. The nephew invited his friends to Campsea, and, after the fashion of the time, they sat up drinking. Very late, young Frere rang the bell and ordered another bottle of port. The butler, very cross, went up to his master’s room and woke him, saying that Mr. Frere wanted some more port and that he must have the key of the cellar. Old Mr. Shepherd, furious, gave the key, but next morning sent for a lawyer and disinherited his nephew, and, no one else being handy, and having a gardener he liked who bore his own name of Shepherd, he left him his fortune.”

“Holmhurst, August 23.—In returning from Campsea Ashe I spent some hours at Colchester, and saw its two abbeys and its castle—rather curious than beautiful.”

“Drayton House, Northamptonshire, Sept. 20.—I have been spending several days in this most pleasant old house, which is full of charm and interest—many-towered, with an entrance court, a deserted Georgian chapel, a grand hall full of fine pictures, a vaulted room dating from Edward III., cellars probably from Henry III., admirable buildings of Elizabeth and James I.

“The place belonged to the Greenes, who, with the Earl of Wiltshire, who married a daughter of the house, have grand tombs in the church. Then it passed to the Mordaunts, and was left by Lady Mary Mordaunt, the divorced wife of the Duke of Norfolk, to her second husband, Sir John Germaine, whose second wife, Lady Betty, left it to Lord George Sackville, from whom it descended to its present owner, sweet engaging Mrs. Sackville, who inherited it from her uncle, the last Duke of Dorset, and who has all the perfect simplicity of the truest high-breeding.

“The gardens are full of terraces, staircases, fountains, pleached walks, avenues, and leaden statues—beautiful exceedingly. There is a gallery of Mordaunt portraits in the house; in the old library at the top are no end of treasures, and out of it opens the Duchess of Norfolk’s boudoir, with old Japanese ornaments. Through a plank missing in the floor of an upper gallery you can look into quite a large room which no one has ever entered. Its windows are darkened by the overgrowth of the creepers outside, and the only object in it is a large box like a portmanteau. The Sackvilles have always lived here, yet not one of them has had the curiosity to descend into that room or to look into that portmanteau!

“I have been taken to see the curious old house of Lyveden—never finished—one of the three strange semi-religious erections of the Tresham of the Gunpowder Plot. This is supposed to be in honour of the Virgin, and is covered with the oddest devices, such as ‘the Seven Eyes of God,’ the money-bag of Judas, with the thirty pieces of silver round it, &c. The second of Tresham’s buildings is Rothwell townhall; the third a lodge at Rushton in honour of the Trinity, in which everything, down to the minutest ornament, is three-cornered.

“Then we have been to Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch’s great desolate house, which contains two cartoons attributed, without any cause, to Raffaelle. The house was built by the Duke of Montagu, who was ambassador to Louis XIV., and the king lent him a French architect and gardener. He made it as like a French château as possible. Then he told his friends that he must plant an avenue to drive to London by, and when they remonstrated that an immense part of the way to London did not belong to him, he said, ‘Well, at any rate I will have an avenue of the same length,’ and he planted seventy-two miles of it in his park. These trees, hemming in the view in all directions, make the place indescribably dull. Just outside the park is the pretty village of Geddington, with a fine old church and bridge, and a beautiful Eleanor cross with slender detached columns. We went on thence to tea at Warkton with Mrs. Bridges, wife of the clergyman, a real patrician Venetian beauty, who has set all Northamptonshire quarrelling as to whether the glorious colour of her hair can be real; but it is. Half of the church her husband serves is a mausoleum of the Dukes of Buccleuch, who have four large and magnificent monuments in it.

“The old Duchess of Buccleuch, a homely-looking person, was very fond of joining people who came to see the place and talking to them. One day she walked by a visitor and said, ‘You know, all this belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch.’—‘And pray, whom did he marry?’—‘ME!’”

“Cromer, Sept. 22.—I came yesterday to stay with the Lockers, who have lately taken the additional name of Lampson, with a fortune from her father, Sir Curtis Lampson. They are exceedingly happy together. ‘My winsome marrow,’ Mr. Locker has just said to his wife, ‘you know I never can go anywhere without you.’ In the evening, Mr. Locker was very pleasant in describing Rogers and his stories. Apropos of the dictum that the postscript of a well-told story is often its best feature, he told of Rogers describing a duel between a Frenchman and an Englishman, which was to be fought in the dark. The Englishman was a very humane man, and when it came to his turn to fire, fired up the chimney, that he might do his adversary no harm, but brought down the Frenchman, who had taken refuge there. ‘But when I tell that story in Paris,’ added Rogers, ‘it is the Englishman who is up the chimney.’

“He told of a Mr. Egerton who was with his regiment in Canada. Coming into the messroom one morning, he seemed much depressed, and being asked the reason, said he was troubled by an oddly vivid dream, in which he had seen his own coffin on the deck of a vessel, and in the dream had been even able to read the plate upon the coffin, which bore his name and the date June 16. He was so full of it, that the Colonel, to humour him, wrote down the circumstances and the date. This was in April. Afterwards he went to Upper Canada, where he was killed by Indians on the 16th of June, and his coffin was brought down the river as he had seen it. Mr. Locker told this story to Lord Algernon St. Maur, who said, ‘I can corroborate that story, for I was in the messroom when what you describe occurred.’

“Mr. Locker described Dickens’s way of telling stories. He heard him tell that of Lincoln’s dream, and of his describing the oppressive feeling he had, how he was ‘drifting, drifting, drifting,’ and how at that moment the members of council came in and he said, ‘Now we must go to business.’ It was on leaving that council that he was shot, so no one heard the end of that dream, or whether there would seem to be any forewarning in it.

“We have been to-day to Felbrigge, the fine old house of the Windhams, sold to a Norwich tradesman named Catton, whose daughters have adopted the older family as if it were their own, and are quite worthy of the old pictures, MSS., &c., all left in the house, nothing having been taken away when the place was given up. ‘Mr. Windham comes every night to look after his favourite books in the library,’ said Miss Catton; ‘he often comes, and he goes straight to the shelves where they are: we hear him moving the tables and chairs about: we never disturb him though, for we intend to be ghosts ourselves some day, and to come about the old place just as he does.’ In the hall there is a grand bust of the statesman by Nollekens. Formerly it was on his monument in the church, but after some years the family put a copy there, and moved the original into the house. The church, however, still retains the most glorious brasses. One is that of a lady in waiting who came over with Anne of Bohemia, and whose daughter was herself invited to share the throne. But the man she really married was one of the early owners of Felbrigge.”

“Sept. 24.—We have been with the Dick Gurneys in their fleet waggonette to Blickling, quite glorious, so perfect in colour, with an exquisite entrance, and a splendid herbaceous garden. In the church is the tomb which Lady Lothian has erected to her husband,[410] a most grand one, with the head of the reclining statue turned to one side, and the long beard drifted over the pillow.

“The innumerable Gurneys, Buxtons, and Hoares who populate Cromer come in and out of this house, as of each other’s, whenever they like, without ringing the bell.

“Last night Mrs. R. Hoare dined here. She says the people here always address their superiors in the third person, as in French. They always say ‘I’m very much fatagued,’ for bothered. ‘Well, Mrs. Smith, are you going to take the blue dress or the brown?’ she said when keeping a charity shop. ‘Why, ma’am, I’ve not fairly averdupoised,’ replied the woman; and it is a common expression for balancing.

“There are many remnants here in Cromer from Danish occupation. The ghosts, as in Denmark, are always without heads. There is great faith in the story of ‘Old Strop,’ a Danish dog who was washed ashore with the bodies of two Danish sailors, one of whom was buried at Overstrand and the other at Cromer. Every night the dog, headless, is believed to run from one grave to the other, and fishermen will always go round by the shore at night rather than by the shorter lane, which the dog is supposed to take.”

“Sept. 25.—Mrs. Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) is here, most charming and interesting, as I have always thought her. She describes Tennyson and Mrs. Kemble as the noblest man and woman she knows.

“Mrs. Kemble found, when in England, that her husband was going to take advantage of an American law which allowed him to obtain a divorce if she was away from him two years. For her children’s sake it was imperative that she should prevent this. She hurried back, and just arrived in time by two or three days. Afterwards she herself quietly obtained a divorce in some way which gave her the charge of her children.... One of her daughters is Mrs. Leigh, whose husband, the Vicar of St. Mary, Bryanston Square, she is always trying to persuade to go out to the family plantations in Georgia. The other, Sarah, is the wife of a merchant in New York, and a replica—a much feebler replica—of her mother.

“Now, Mrs. Kemble is generally to be found knitting by her fireside. One day Mrs. Ritchie took her little girl to see her. ‘Here I am,’ Mrs. Kemble said to the child, ‘an old woman who never allows another person to put in a word when she is talking; and now, what do you think of me?’ The little girl, who was shy, did not know what to say, and looked as if she was going to cry. Mrs. Ritchie, to fill up the gap, said, ‘Oh, she thinks, Mrs. Kemble, that no one could possibly wish to put in a word when they could listen to you.’ ‘Ma fille, ne dites pas des choses comme ça,’ cried Mrs. Kemble furiously; and then, more quietly, ‘You should not say such things before the child: it is not right to teach her to be artificial.’

“‘Right is right,’ she said one day, ‘and wrong is wrong, but God forbid that I should judge of another whether he is right or wrong.’

“‘One day,’ said Mrs. Ritchie, ‘I found Mrs. Kemble sitting by her fireside looking rather disconsolate, and asked her what she was doing. “Oh, I’m knocking my head against the wall, my dear; that man who was here was so dreadfully stupid, I’m obliged to knock it out of me.”’

“Mrs. Kemble was at an inn in Switzerland with a lady with whom she never made acquaintance. They were both reading ‘Middlemarch,’ and came down with their books into the public room, and were engrossed in them. But one day the lady was so enchanted with a passage in her volume that she burst out with, ‘Well, this woman is one of the noblest of authors: whatever the peculiarities of her views on life may be, I will never believe that the woman who can write thus can be other than one with the very noblest aims.’ Then Mrs. Kemble turned upon her furiously with, ‘Who are you that you should presume to dare to judge such a woman as George Eliot? how can you dare to judge her?’ and the lady jumped up, and, instead of being angry, embraced Mrs. Kemble upon the spot.

“For her own sharp sayings, Mrs. Kemble is repaid by her grandchildren. She wrote to one of her grandsons that she did not care for Wagner’s music, she could not understand what he meant by it. He answered, that a fly crawling up the wall of Cologne Cathedral might as well presume to judge of its architectural glories as she of Wagner! She did not seem to know whether to be angry or pleased at this.

“Dear Lady Marian Alford used to tell of her first meeting Mrs. Kemble at a garden-party. She had scarcely sat down by her when Mrs. Kemble said slowly, with her peculiar intonation and inflection upon each syllable—‘I do per-ceive a ... stink!’

“Being asked if she would employ Pakenham or M’Crackem as agent for sending her goods from Italy to England, Mrs. Kemble said, ‘Why, rather Pack’em than Crack’em, to be sure.’”

“Sept. 30.—A charming visit to the Delawarrs at Buckhurst. I had no idea there was such a beautiful place in Sussex, such moss-grown oaks and beeches; such deep ferny and heathy glens; such still pools, in which all the autumnal tints are reflected; such winding forest-paths, up and down and in and out of which Lady Delawarr has driven me with her two ponies tandem; an infantine Medway, nearly to the source of which the eldest boy, Cantilupe, rowed me through channels so narrow that one could touch the great water-plants on either side. Then the house has many delightful books and pictures, including two Sir Joshuas; and there are two other old houses, semi-deserted, but with grand castellated gateways, infinitely picturesque; and there is a monumental chapel, where a marble Duke and Duchess of Dorset kneel eternally by the tomb of the many children who died before them.

“The ‘company’ has been varied and amusing—Miss (Doll) Farquharson of Invercauld, a perfect Niagara of amusing Scottish anecdote; Mr. Broadley, of terrible review reputation; and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth, who has propounded many quaint riddles of his own invention.

“Miss Farquharson described a minister at Invercauld, who, wishing to flatter the family, stated in his sermon that the Farquharson tartan was one of the oldest dresses in the world, as it was evident that Joseph’s coat of many colours was made of it, ‘thereby giving mortal offence to the Duffs, who sat in the opposite pew.’

“When the minister was changed, Miss Farquharson asked an old woman if she liked the new one as well as the old. ‘Eh, I like him weel eneuch, but he’s na sae frolicsome in the pulpit.’

“I made great friends with all the family at Buckhurst, down to the little Margaret of three, who peoples all the forest with imaginary bears and elephants, and talks to them, and of her adventures with them, exactly as if they were realities. We picnicked on an island in the lake, dreadfully damp, but it was very merry and pleasant.”

“Burwarton, Shropshire, Oct. 23.—This is a beautiful place of Lord Boyne’s, high in the Clee hills, with glorious views of the Welsh and Malvern ranges, beyond exquisite wooded scenery. The house is modern, but has good pictures, several representing members of the Medmenham brotherhood, and one a Lady Paisley, an ancestress, who declared that she did not wish to go to heaven if poor people went there. Many pleasant people are here, especially a Mr. Bankes, who is very amusing about the primitive ways of the Isle of Purbeck. At one time the people of Corfe had been very good for some time, so that the lock-up had not been used, and the Mayor, one Robert Taylor, had filled it with his potatoes after they were dug up. But at last there was a man who was very naughty indeed, and he had to be put in the lock-up, though there was scarcely room for him even to stand in it, it was so full of the Mayor’s potatoes. Late that night, some people going past stumbled over a great heap lying in the middle of the road—quite a huge heap. It was the Mayor’s potatoes, which the prisoner had amused himself by throwing through the bars of the window: so then the Mayor was obliged to compromise matters, and to let his victim out on condition of his picking up all the potatoes and putting them back again.

“This Mayor, Robert Taylor, used to say, ‘I shall have to adjudicate upon such and such a case to-morrow.’ He kept a shop where he sold hats. One day he saw a neighbour walking by with a very smart shiny hat, and called out, ‘Thomas, good-day, Thomas; you’ve got a new hat, may I ask where you got it, Thomas?’—‘Well, I bought it at Wareham, Mr. Taylor.’—‘Oh, you bought it at Wareham, did you? Very good, Thomas.’ Some days afterwards Thomas was set upon by a man in a lonely road and very badly beaten, really very much hurt. He went to the Mayor and said, ‘Really, Mr. Taylor, I think I must take out a summons.’—‘A summons! must you, Thomas? Well, you may just go and take it out where you bought your hat.’

“The ignorance of the people in Purbeck is intense. A clergyman preached about Zachaeus climbing into the fig-tree, &c. An old widow woman, who had stayed at home, asked her son if he could tell her what the sermon was about. ‘Yes, that he could,’ he said, ‘for it was all about Jack Key (a bad character in the village), who had been up to summut, and was to have to give half of all his goods to the poor.’

“Here, at Burwarton, witchcraft is generally believed in. A tenant said the other day that his pig was bewitched by an old woman, and that it would certainly die, unless he could have her blood; by which he meant nothing murderous—a prick of a pin would do. Many of the neighbouring clergy are bad. At a small hill-parish near this an old woman asked the clergyman what he did for his rheumatism. ‘Well, I swear like hell,’ he said.”

“Oakley Park, Oct. 17.—A lovely place, with glorious old oaks mentioned in Domesday Book. Ludlow is only 2½ miles off. Its castle, which stands grandly opposite the entrance to the drive, is associated with Prince Arthur, ‘Comus’ was acted there, and it was thence that the Princes were taken to the Tower. It was also from Ludlow that the pilgrims came who were met in the Holy Land by St. John when he gave them the ring to take back to Edward the Confessor, and this story is represented on the windows of the grand old church. Stokesay, which we have been to sketch, is inimitably picturesque. Nothing can be kinder than my present hostess, Lady Mary Clive, so considerate of all that can interest or amuse one,[412] even whilst talking incessantly of her two hobbies—Conservatism and Church matters. In the latter she is just now in her glory, as the house is full of clergy for the Church Congress at Ludlow, where all the ecclesiastics in the county are delighting, like dogs, to bark and bite. There is table-d’hôte for them here at every meal, and the house is like a clerical hotel.”

“Nov. 22, 1885.—Mother’s birthday! on which for so many years we have been through the Catacombs (lighted up this one day of the year) to visit the grave of S. Cecilia. My pleasant holiday and happy visits are already becoming dreamlike, and it is as if my last time alone here going on still, as I sit in my hill-set solitude. The wind whistles in the fir-trees; a cow lows in the meadow for a lost calf; Rollo snorts with fat, but is always ready to play with Selma the cat, though greatly annoyed at her having given birth to a numerous progeny in his bed; new pigstyes are built, and a Lawsoniana hedge is planted round the little garden up the steps. ‘The Holmhurst muffin-bell,’ as St. Leonards calls it, already rung for a tea-party next Tuesday; and ‘the boys’ (now Heddie Williamson and Freddie Russell) are due for their half-holiday on Wednesday; George Jolliffe is coming to stay on the 4th; and for myself, there is constant work to be done on ‘Paris,’ where, as I labour down the highways, a thousand by-ways of interest and instruction are ever opening up.

“I have, however, a little disappointment in Smith and Elder’s account, nearly £300 to the bad again this year, and no gain whatever: so much for the supposed riches of ‘a very successful author.’

“Just now also I am being most tremendously bored with the visit of young ——, and am wondering if he will profit by one of George Washington’s admirable ‘Rules of Civility,’ which I am going to read aloud to him. ‘In the presence of others, sing not to yourself with a humming voice, nor drum with your fingers or feet.’”

“Powderham Castle, Nov. 14.—I have been spending a week with Charlie Halifax in this beautiful place, which recalls the Little Gidding of ‘John Inglesant’ in its intense, its real saintliness—in the constant chapel services with wonderful singing of the servants, in the commemorative hymns for such saints as Martin and Bricius, in the spirit of harmony and universal love, which rules everything. Lord Devon [413] is absolutely seraphic. Charlie says he knows only two perfect forms of happiness, reciting the Holy Office or attending the Board of Guardians. ‘I know one thing troubles you in respect of heaven,’ says Charlie, ‘it is, that there are no boards of guardians there; but, dearest Lord Devon, if they are quite essential to your happiness, I am sure that a board will be created in some planet, with celestial paupers for you to relieve.’

“When with the Halifaxes, I always become brimful of good intentions. But then something comes back to me that I once heard a Countess Zitchi say, ‘Moi, je suis tout-à-fait comme Jésus Christ, seulement il me manque—la conduite!’

“We have had a delightful twenty-seven miles’ excursion to the very curious old desolate house of Fulford and a picnic in its deserted deer-park. Another day, Charlie, his uncle Francis Grey, and I, went to Berry Head, a wild rock-girt promontory, with ruined walls of an old fortress, looking on the bay crowded with Brixham trawlers.”

The latter months of 1885 found me quietly at home, exceedingly busy over my work on France. As at all other times, except in fine summer weather, I was chiefly alone, save when on Sundays some of my young men friends—“the boys”—were generally at Holmhurst for two nights, being usually those whose whole life is spent in bearing—

for I have always felt how much, in similar circumstances, I should have cared myself to have a friend and a homelike little refuge to go to. Besides, “although in a very humble and apparently confined sphere of action, who can tell the effect which our influence or that of our conduct may have upon others, and its reaction throughout future ages?”[415]

In latter years I have had better “material” in this respect; but it must be allowed that, except in very rare cases, those I tried to be useful to in former days turned out very ill. Here are just a few instances:—

No. 1 was a gentleman once in a good position, who had fallen into extreme poverty. I gave up being in London, I gave up going abroad, I always went in an omnibus instead of a cab, always travelled second class instead of first, to have £50 a year to give to No. 1. But when I found that my poor gentleman always took a hansom even to cross Eaton Square, I drew in my purse-strings.

No. 2 seemed very different. Rudely nurtured, he minded no difficulties, and was willing to live hardly. He only cared for work, and his work was science. He threw his whole life into it, and seemed on the eve of great discoveries—in fact, he made them. But he had no one to help him to buy the patents that were necessary, and I spent £800 for this, and altogether many thousand pounds in his behalf. He was to have repaid this sum if he became successful in life, but he made a very large fortune, and “forgot to pay it.” Then, having lost his fortune again, his originality and cleverness took another direction: he suddenly turned Buddhist, cared for nothing but the divine essence, and went off to India to join a brotherhood in which, after years of prayer and fasting, he might hope to obtain the distinction of “a little yellow garment.” He wrote then that his religion itself would prevent his ever again forgetting that he owed me four thousand pounds with interest. Yet, after his return, he repudiated his debt altogether, and denied that he had even the slightest obligation to me. All I had spent was thrown away! No. 2 was an utter collapse.

No. 3 wanted to be married. He had led a wild life, and his marriage would “be the saving of him;” with his marriage a new page of his life would be turned over; but to enable the marriage to be, a loan of money was necessary. I sent the money, but the marriage never took place, and the loan was never returned. No. 3 vanished into chaos.

No. 4 was very engaging and I became very fond of him. He was perpetually at my home, where I always treated him as a younger brother, giving him money when I was away for whatever he wanted. When he wished to give a party to his friends in London, the food, the wine, the flowers, came from Holmhurst. He had to work hard in a public office, so every year I gave him money for the change of a Continental tour, and on one occasion, when he had no other companion, I took him myself, and showed him the whole of a foreign country. This went on for nine years. Then a circumstance occurred which made me feel that he, in his turn, might, not even for one day, but for one hour, be useful to me. Under these circumstances I asked a favour of him. “No,” it was refused at once, “it might not be to his advantage: it might even possibly be rather inconvenient.” No. 4 collapsed.

No. 5 was a very young and ingenuous boy. I met him first when he was at Oxford, when his family—country gentlefolk—were trying to compel him to take Orders. He confided to me his misery about it, and his utter unfitness. I backed him up in resisting. From that time I saw a great deal of him. He was very affectionate to me, and I grew very fond of him. His family, irritated at his opposition to taking Orders, refused to go on spending money upon his education. I continued it, or thought I did, by letter, sending him daily questions to answer by post, and receiving précis of History from him and correcting them. He was also very frequently at Holmhurst for a long time together, and had more of a real home there than with his own parents. Once, without my knowledge or that of his family, he went to London, and got into terribly bad companionship and disgracefully bad habits. He was plundered of all he possessed, and had to pawn his watch to get away. To prevent the discovery of this, which would have hopelessly estranged him from his family, I redeemed his valuables for a considerable sum. He then seemed penitent, promised amendment, and took refuge at Holmhurst again. About a year after I found him on the eve of wilfully making an acquaintance which was sure to cause his ruin. I pointed out to him the misery he was bringing upon himself, and he promised to give it up. Then I found that all the while he was promising to do nothing of the kind, he had been constantly writing to the person in question, with whom he had no previous acquaintance, making assignations for meetings, &c. From that time he got into one miserable scrape after another. He sank and sank. Whenever he has made a promise, he has always broken his word; nothing he says can be believed; his every act must be mistrusted.... Now, he has taken Holy Orders! This is the end of No. 5.

No. 6 was very dear to me. I had known him intimately from his earliest childhood. Exceedingly unprepossessing in appearance, he gave the most brilliant promise of a distinguished career. To me he showed the most unbounded affection and confidence, but he never told the truth. This led to a series of miserable deceptions which caused his expulsion from school and brought about his failure everywhere. Dreaded, mistrusted, he became alienated from his family, almost from his fellow-men. No opportunity of extravagant folly occurred but was greedily seized upon, to be followed by fresh falsehood. His whole life has been a sorrow to those who know him, and who think mournfully of its beautiful “might have been.”

I met No. 7 when he was eighteen. Of very lowly origin but gentle instincts, he had been turned adrift at seventeen upon London to earn his own living, and he seemed at first to be earning it bravely and honestly. He was clever and was anxious to improve himself, and he spent all his evenings in reading, and succeeded in teaching himself French. By his own unaided efforts he had really given himself an education. At first I used only to lend him books and do what I could to help his reading. Then I frequently invited him to Holmhurst, and paid for his coming there. He had a bad illness in London, when I went constantly to him in his miserable garret, and supplied all his little comforts. About a year after I first knew him, he yielded to a great temptation in misappropriating a large sum of money belonging to the firm he was serving, and spending it in a very disgraceful manner. It seemed as if he really did this under a diabolic influence, and as if he really believed that he should be able to replace the money before the theft was discovered. But the time drew very near when his accounts would be examined, and there was no chance—there never had been—that they would be found correct. Then the full agony of his position came upon him, and he confessed the whole to me and implored me to save him. The day before the examination of accounts I replaced the stolen money, and the defalcation was never discovered.

From this time he seemed to go on well, and I became much attached to him. Five times a year I paid his expenses to Holmhurst, to give him country air, treating him like my own son when he was with me. Then came a time when, after several years, he fell into feeble health, and had to leave his situation. I was then not perfectly satisfied with the way in which he was going on, and did not think him as frank and candid as he had been, but I took him home with me for a month to recruit. At Holmhurst he had every kindness and indulgence, and was received not only as an equal, but almost as a child of the house. At the end of a month, he told me that he had heard of some very suitable employment in London, and hoped that I would not object to his going to town to see about it. I said, “Certainly not; but what is the employment?” To my surprise, he said that he could not tell me then, but I should know later. I was more surprised because, when he left, he was so unusually affectionate—“I am very glad you are so fond of me, but I cannot imagine why you should show it especially to-day, as you are coming back in a few hours.” He never came back. It was many days before he wrote. Then I had a formal letter saying that, when he went up to London, he had been received into the Church of Rome at Brompton Oratory, and enclosing a list of his possessions left at Holmhurst, and directions for sending them. Since then he has sunk lower and lower. I have often heard of him, and always a worse account. He is utterly lost to me. That is the end of No. 7.

No. 8 was excessively good-looking, had pleasant manners, and was especially winning to ladies. I had known his family long ago, and his home, a very quiet rectory in a desolate fen district. When he was at Oxford, I found him, like No. 5, very unhappy at being expected to take Orders, for which he honestly felt himself unfitted, and I persuaded him to tell his father that it was impossible. Then, as he was penniless and had no prospects, it was necessary that a profession should be found for him, and I obtained a nomination for him for the Foreign Office from Lord Granville. He came to London to work for this, and he worked well. Feeling that it would be most undesirable for him to go on in London, especially to enter the Foreign Office, knowing no one in society, I took him out with me every day to parties, and introduced him everywhere, claiming all kindness for him as my intimate friend. His good looks and pleasing manners made him very welcome. But he fell in love with an Earl’s daughter. Strange to say, his suit was not rejected, though a probation of two years was required, during which he must begin to make an income. With this view, he abandoned all thought of the Foreign Office and took to the Stock Exchange. A week before the end of the two years’ probation, the lady, of her own accord, threw him over, but, as far as love went, her place was soon supplied. By this time, too, the young man had acquired l’habitude de société, had begun to despise his humble relations, to cut his old friends, and a shake of the Prince of Wales’s hand finally turned his head. He scarcely speaks to me now when we meet. He openly says that, as he has gained all he can from me, he naturally prefers “those who can be more useful” to him.

No. 9, poor fellow, was long a great anxiety to me. He was of good family. He fell often—fell into the most frightful vice and shame. He repented bitterly, and then fell again worse than before. But in one of his best and truest times of repentance, God saw that he was positively unable to cope with temptation, and he died—died most mercifully, full of faith, hope, and gratitude. This was the end of No. 9. Thinking of him has often brought to my mind Rossetti’s lines—

As I retrace here, on paper, the story of my failures, a sentence of Balzac comes into my mind: “Il vous arrivera souvent d’être utile aux autres, de leur rendre service, et vous en serez pen récompensé”; mais n’imitez pas ceux qui se plaignent des hommes et se vantent de ne trouver que des ingrats. N’est-ce pas se mettre sur un piédestal? puis n’est-il pas un peu niais d’avouer son peu de connaissance du monde?”[417]

And then Bunyan said in his last sermon (1692):—“Dost thou see a soul that has had the image of God in him? Love him: love him: say, This man must go to heaven some day. Do good to one another, and if any wrong you, pray to God to right you, and love the brotherhood.”

And there is a line of Tasso which comes back to me in all times of disappointment—

ERRATUM

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

BY

AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE
AUTHOR OF “MEMORIALS OF A QUIET LIFE.”
“THE STORY OF TWO NOBLE LIVES.”
ETC. ETC.

VOLUME VI

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1900
[All rights reserved]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. VI

XXIV

BEYOND THE TOP OF THE HILL

THERE is an old print at Holmhurst which represents life in its successive stages as the ascent and descent of a hill. At fifty the top of the hill is reached and the descent begins. I have passed the top, and every year must bring less power of work and action, though I scarcely feel older now than I did at five-and-twenty. But certain marks in the forehead show that age has left his card upon one; we do not know when he called, but the visit has been paid. Well, it is the more necessary to do all we can whilst power lasts, never talking, but acting, and recollecting that a duty once divined binds one from that moment; while as for the abuse, public and private, received for anything attempted out of the ordinary groove, we ought ever to follow the simple advice of Sœur Rosalie, “Faites le bien, et laissez dire.”

Certainly the longer one lives one feels how, of all shams, the religious sham is the worst—the man who talks “goody” without any heart to sympathise with sorrow or shame, and who thus can never help those who struggle sadly against vice and meanness, whilst tremulously aiming at a nobler life. The same, in a wider sense, is true of almost all sermons one hears—

So few clergymen feel what they say, that it only does harm. It was a saying of Pope Pius II., “Bad physicians kill the body, unskilful priests the soul.”

It ought not to be, but it certainly is true that the Church and Religion are two; and, apropos of sermons and religious discussions, another saying of Pope Pius often comes back to me, “The nature of God can be better grasped by believing than disputing.” “Let us not be the slaves of any human authority, but clear our way through all creeds and confessions to Thine own original revelation.” With Thomas Chalmers, can I not feel this?

I have endless compensations for a lonely life in my pretty little home, my sufficient means, my multitudes of friends. Besides, it is as Madame d’Houdetot wrote to Madame Necker, “Vous savez que le seul être malheureux est celui qui ne peut ni aimer, ni agir, ni mourir, et je suis bien loin de cette situation.” I often feel, however, that this book would give a very false idea of my life. I recount my many visits and what I hear there because it is amusing, and I leave unnoticed the months and months when nothing happens, and in which I am probably employed in quiet work at Holmhurst. With every one naturally it must be true that

“Jan. 9, 1886.—I am just come back from a very pleasant visit at Battle Abbey, where I met the Powerscourts, Lord and Lady George Campbell (she lovely and like a beautiful Gainsborough), Lord Hardinge and a very nice daughter, Lord Wolmer and Lady Maude, Sir Prescott Hewitt, a young Ryder, and Lady Dorothy Nevill. The latter was most amusing, and well understands the famous principle—‘Glissez, mortels, n’appuyez pas.’ She and the Duchess of Cleveland, who was in very good vein, were quite charming together.”

“Holmhurst, Feb. 20, 1886.—Do you know that, except for ten days, I have been at home just three months to-day, and nearly all the time quite alone. I cannot say how much I have enjoyed the quietude of study and communing with great and wise people through many books. There is certainly the greatest pleasure in thus acquiring new thoughts, and, in a small way, fresh knowledge: indeed, I always feel that to give myself up to overwork is quite as great a temptation to me as over-idleness to some people.

“Each different literary work I have had has seemed to me, at the time, more interesting and engrossing. The little accidental discoveries are so amusing. Amongst those of this week, who do you think invented a wheel-barrow?—Blaise Pascal.

“My diversion has been reading masses of old family letters, unearthed by Lady Hartopp. They are very curious, and a complete portrait of the family at the beginning of the century. My grandfather, Mr. Hare Naylor, must have been quite odious—so imperious and arrogant: Lady Jones, the incarnation of a rod in pickle, but with very fine qualities: great-uncle Robert, the rector, more of a rowdy farmer than anything else. Penelope Shipley (Mrs. Warren), a very fine unselfish creature: Dean Shipley, selfish and dictatorial: Francis Hare, a self-indulgent dandy: Julius, a miracle of boyish learning, talking like a Solon: Augustus (it must be allowed), very priggish, but very amiable: Marcus, indulged in everything by his aunts: the second Mrs. Hare Naylor, foolish and querulous, but by no means an unjust stepmother. The religious letters of consolation which the whole party write to one another when little Anna dies are so stilted as to be truly comic. What is touching is that over the harsh letters of her fierce elder sister, the beloved memory of the first Mrs. Hare Naylor ever broods as a softening influence: however much trouble the Hare brothers give her, no pains or expense are too great for them, because ‘they were hers.’”

On the 9th of February I went up to London for Miss Jolliffe’s wedding, and came in for—a revolution! On returning from the City, I found Trafalgar Square one mass of people, and many orators addressing them, but expected nothing more. Soon, however, a Socialist leader named Burns suggested a reign of terror and offered himself as captain. Thousands of men—well fed, well dressed, but still the scum of London—rushed down Pall-Mall, breaking windows as they went—a very carnival of outlawry. Their passions grew with their progress, and in St. James Street they wrecked the University Club, which had expelled Hyndman, one of their leaders, from its society. They seized certain carriages, turning out the ladies they contained, and stripped a footman of his livery. They pulled Lady Claude Hamilton out of her carriage and boxed her ears, but when, after this, she denounced them as dogs who ought to be flogged as curs, they applauded her courage, and let her go on. Breaking windows and wrecking many shops in Piccadilly, they entered the Park at Hyde Park Corner and left it at Stanhope Gate. Then they rushed on through South Audley Street, which they left much like Paris after the excesses of the Commune. How truly Milton said—

I went the next day to see Lady Foley, whose house in Grosvenor Square had been on their line of route. It had not only no pane of glass unbroken, but not even fragments of glass left, and stones heaped in the library enough to mend a good piece of road with. Lord Percy’s house, next door, was so ruined that they went away next day.

For the two following days London had indeed a miserable aspect—windows all broken, streets littered with fragments, shops shut, streets paraded constantly by bands of entirely victorious and triumphant ruffians, and shop-keepers, in some cases, guarding their property with revolvers.

The call for a fresh edition of my “Walks in Rome” made me suddenly determine to go to Italy at the end of February. At Florence I was the constant guest of the ever-kind Duchess Dowager of Sermoneta, with whom I made delightful excursions in the hills.

“Hotel Paoli, Florence, March 7, 1886.—France was covered with snow from end to end, yet next day we were speeding through lemon-groves laden with fruit, and carpeted with a blaze of iris and scarlet geranium in full flower. Here, after reading about the snowstorms in England, I am glad in the gardens of Arcetri to sit to draw in the shade of the cypresses, and all the hills are pink with almond-blossom. I spent one evening with the Duchess at Palazzo Torrigiani, alone with the family there, which is the most perfect type of a grand old Italian household, consisting of between eighty and ninety persons. The kind and charming old Marchesa Elisabetta has four sons, who have all married as soon as they came of age, yet none have gone farther than to an apartment of their own under the maternal roof, and eighteen children and grandchildren dine with her daily, besides other guests. The four daughters-in-law all live in the utmost harmony; the Marchesa Giulia, wife of the eldest son Pietro, and the Marchesa Margherita, who was a Malespina (which in Italy means great things), quietly giving precedence to the Marchesa Cristina, who is a princess (Scilla) by birth. All sat with work round a table, visitors dropped in, and it was most easy and pleasant.

“Another day, the Duchess, Miss Phillimore, and I went out by the steam-tram to spend a day at the Marchese della Stufa’s [421] old castle of Castagnolo. We had an amusing luncheon of Italian dishes, guitar music and singing, a walk to pick violets, with which the hedges are full, a visit to the green-houses and aviaries of rare birds, and we were taken back to the tram-line, where the station is built of sunflower-stalks, which are like bamboo in their qualities.”

I reached Rome on the 10th of March, warmly welcomed by a large circle of friends. In the hotel were Mrs. Tilt and Letitia Hibbert, very familiar to me in early days at Birtles, and with them and their very charming sister-in-law, Mrs. Frank Hibbert (née Cholmondeley), I made delightful excursions to familiar places—Tivoli, Frascati, Albano. Sir John Lumley was now reigning at the Embassy and making it delightful to his countrymen.

“Hotel d’Italie, Rome, March 17, 1886.—What lovely June weather this is, so very hot, so unspeakably beautiful.... I find an immense deal to do in correcting and writing, chiefly, however, in taking away from my ‘Walks in Rome,’ so very much is destroyed; indeed, Lanciani, the archaeologist in power, says, ‘If they go on like this for twenty years, there will be nothing left of older Rome but St Peter’s and the Coliseum—if those.’”

“March 21.—What expeditions we have had! On Monday we walked through the glen at Ariccia and round the glorious old woods of the Parco Chigi, full of cyclamen, cytisus, blue squills, green iris, and masses of dark violets. Then, whilst the others went on to the convent of Palazzuola, I sat to draw above the still lake, and, when they came back, we went to the grand pine-groves of the Villa Barberini, to Castel Gandolfo, and through the ilex galleries in time for the evening train.... I have dined out every day, just as in London.”

“March 31.—I wish I could transport you suddenly into the glorious radiance of this cloudless sunshine and deepest of blue skies. To me Rome has never seemed so delightful in climate as after three months of fog and sleet at Holmhurst.... Amid all the changes elsewhere, I can always turn with comfort to the Palatine, and have spent many happy mornings there amongst the gigantic ruins, and the groves of laurustinus and lentisc, and the huge fenochii, meditating on my past and its past.”

On April 22 I went to Perugia, finding in Brufani’s excellent hotel Mrs. Robert Drummond and her daughter, and two charming Americans, Miss Isabel and Miss Lorraine Wood, domesticated at Dresden. For the next fortnight we toured about together. As to some of the most restful and happiest days of my later years, I look back to the extreme comfort of Perugia, and the perfect view from the windows of my room, unspeakably glorious at all hours, but most of all when the rising sun was lighting up the tops of the distant mountains, whilst all the detail of the intermediate plain was lost in soft white haze. Equally delightful was the old-fashioned inn at Orvieto, and the drives into the hills and to Bagnorea and the Lago di Bolsena, returning in the carriage laden with branches of honeysuckle and masses of anemones, violets, cyclamen, and other spring flowers. From Siena, too, we made again the interesting excursions to Monte Oliveto and S. Gimignano.

Crossing the St. Gothard to Basle, I turned aside to visit the whole of the Jura country, greatly overrated, I thought, by former travellers. Burgundy was much more interesting, with its fine churches and its noble inhabited châteaux of Ancy le Franc and Tanlay. As I was dining in the tiny primitive inn at the latter, the tradesmen who held the minute shops in the village were disputing as to the superiority of their different trades. The carpenter certainly won the day by winding up with, “Et la Vierge s’est mariée avec un charpentier: elle était bien libre de son choix, et elle a choisi—un charpentier!” Nearly the whole of June I stayed in Paris, working at the archaeological details of the town for my book, and seeing no one.

“Montbard, May 23, 1886.—I wonder if my date conveys anything to you? I had determined to evade this place if it were possible, yet here I am for two days at the place so connected with the agonising anxiety of our last journey, where Mother in her illness was laid flat upon the railway platform, to find, when the train was gone, that the little hotel was closed, and where she was carried through the lanes to an old farmhouse. There the people were most kind to us, and she almost enjoyed it, and dear Lea was very happy, and of its inmates both were often so anxious to hear during the after-summer of the German invasion. The old host and hostess are dead now, and the two boys, whom I saw when I went to luncheon with Mme. de Montgolfier, are married, and have twelve children between them!”

“Sens, May 28.—The weather has changed to bitter wind, but it has seemed appropriate to the wild country of Avallon and Vezelay. Auxerre is very interesting and beautiful, especially the great abbey of S. Germain and the marvellously simple and pure cathedral. Old affection for Thomas à Becket took me thence, through the sweet acacia forests, to Pontigny, since which I have been very comfortable for two nights at a charming inn close under the shadow of this old archiepiscopal cathedral.”

“Hotel Noël Peter, Paris, June 6.—I am very glad to have accomplished a long-wished-for visit to the historic sites of Clairvaux and the Paraclete, though there is nothing whatever to see in either of them! How I have worked since I have been here! My book is written, but I have to go through every part of it on the spot. I breakfast at seven and work till eleven, then luncheon and work again till four o’clock, when I come in dead-tired, only to go out again to have food at a restaurant, and to bed at eight.”

“June 16.—Two desperately hard days at Versailles and two at the Louvre, looking over and collating. Certainly no place of residence need be cheaper than Paris. Life seems to cost nothing at all, a week here being equivalent to a day in London, or even at Rome. It is an oddly lonely life, as, except for ten minutes, I have seen no one to speak to since May 11: however, there would certainly have been no time for it.”

In July I was in London, and then at Buckhurst, in glorious summer weather, to meet Lord and Lady Lathom.

“August 13, 1886.—Two days ago Lady Ossington took me to Lady Evelyn Campbell’s wedding with James Baillie Hamilton in Henry VII.’s Chapel. They have married on his vocation, which played all the time of the ceremony, and on which their future depends for the bread and butter of life, at present supplied to them by America for looking after it. They have also a camp, in which they propose to train boys for hardships in the colonies, and the sweet little bride began her own hardships by having to walk two miles to this, through the wet grass and fern of a desolate moor, carrying in a basket the cold chicken and bread which her sisters had put up for her supper.

“I have been reminded how James Baillie Hamilton was at Harrow at Hayward’s house, which in my time used to be Harris’s, and to have then the reputation of being haunted. He told Catherine Vaughan that one night whilst he was there, Albert Grey, also a senior boy in the house, rushed into his room wild with horror, and said that when he was in bed he had seen by the moonlight a most terrible figure come in, a kind of nondescript, and that as it approached a chill as of death came over him. Eventually it had seemed to go into a corner of the room and disappear there. Something was arranged for Albert Grey for that night, and the friends never told at Harrow what had occurred. Years afterwards, at his camp, Baillie Hamilton met a boy called Anderson, who had been in Hayward’s house. He told how he and another boy slept in the same room. One night he heard his companion in an agonised tone say, ‘Oh, do light the candle: there is something most dreadful in the room.’ He lighted it, and found his friend sitting on the edge of his bed, trembling from head to foot. He said that the door had opened, and a horrible nondescript figure had come in, when the most terrible chill, as of death, had come over him. After a time, all seeming as usual, the boys put out the light. They had hardly done so, when Anderson himself saw the figure—the appalling figure, come towards him, and the same deathly icy chill seized him. They lighted the candle again, when the apparition vanished.

“One of the curates at Llandaff was going to the place where Miss Hayward, sister of the Harrow Master, lived, and Catherine asked him to inquire if she remembered the circumstance. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is exactly what happened; and that room is never used now.’

“On the evening of the wedding-day I went to Chichester, where the Bishop’s palace, venerable and grey, but buried in myrtles and coronillas, and radiant with brilliant flowers, lies close under the shadow of the beautiful cathedral spire. The Bishop (Durnford), at eighty-seven, is the very type of a christian scholar, perfectly charming in conversation, equally at home in classical and in French, English, and Italian reminiscence and quotation, and touchingly filled with a generous and kindly spirit to all he meets with. Circling around him were various relations, a brother-in-law—a pleasant old clergyman Mr. Keate, nieces, two sons, Dick and Walter, the latter the pleasantest and frankest of young Eton masters, and the daughter, Miss Durnford, who is mistress of the house, and whose active energy makes all right wherever she goes, and very cheerily right too. The profuse family use of adjectives and verbs, which they unearth for themselves, was very entertaining. ‘We seem to be going to have a regular Belshazzar,’ said Walter Durnford when something more than usual appeared for luncheon.

“There is much to interest in the palace, which has a charming early English chapel and a grand old kitchen. The cathedral retains the human interest of its old pavement and a few tombs, sadly mutilated or tinkered up: one of a Lady Arundel is very fine. There are curious paintings of Cadwallador and of Henry VIII. giving charters on one of the walls, by a painter of Henry VIII.’s time, who also decorated the ceiling of the very fine old dining-room in the palace. Round the town, much of the old wall remains, making a pleasant walk; but the most curious building is St. Mary’s Hospital, like a church, with a great single nave divided at the sides by chapels, which form the little two-roomed houses of ten old women, presented by the Bishop and custos, who live there rent-free in great comfort, with firing, and twelve shillings a week for their maintenance. At the end is the chapel, only separated from the rest by an old oak screen.

“With the Bishop and his party I went to Midhurst, a most attractive old town in lovely country, and we walked through an ancient wood above the Rother to the grand ruins of Cowdray, full of recollections of the Poyntz family, who, as its possessors, came in bitterly for the curse of sacrilege. When Mr. Poyntz went out in a boat at Bognor with his two sons, and the boat upset whilst Mrs. Poyntz was watching it from the hotel-window, the boys clung to the tail of their father’s coat as he held the side of the boat in the waves, and he—who could not swim—had the agony of feeling one after the other leave go and sink, without being able to help them. He himself was eventually saved by the boatmen. In the church of Easebourne, which stands in the park, near the fine old building called the Priory, is a touching tomb by Chantrey, erected to this Mr. and Mrs. Poyntz by their three daughters—Ladies Clinton, Exeter, and Spencer. As they were co-heiresses, Cowdray was obliged to be sold, and was bought by the Egmonts.”

“Highcliffe, August 25.—I arrived here for my usual happy summer week with Tina, Lady Waterford, who has been a curious contrast to the lady of the place, but in herself very pleasant. She described how Cromwell, determined to take ‘the golden vale of Tipperary,’ said he would take it ‘by Hook or by Crook’—the two villages on either side the river—and thence the proverb.

“There has been a bee-show on the lawn here, Mr. Bellairs and young Evan Maberly going amongst the bees, taking them up, and treating them just as they pleased; but it looked horrible when their hats were covered with a crawling mass, and bees were hanging to nose and ears.

“Lady Jane Ellice says that at Harewood there is one of the most splendid collections of china—quantities of it. Formerly it all used to be kept in the gallery in which the family live, on bureaux, tables, &c. One evening it was all left in its usual place, and the next morning the whole collection—everything—quite unbroken, was found on the ground. There was never the least explanation. The china has ever since been kept in cases.”

“Lychett Heath, Poole, August 30.—My visit at Highcliffe was a very happy one. ‘We have not had a single quarrel, scarcely even a dispute,’ said Lady Waterford when I came away.

“This is the beautiful house of the Eustace Cecils. The modern house is exquisitely placed amongst sandy, heathery hills, with a lovely view, across a rich wooded foreground, of the various reaches and windings of Poole harbour. I have had much pleasant talk with Lord Eustace, and like him immensely. We had a delightful excursion to-day, taking the train to Wool, and then driving in a car to Lulworth Cove, and walking up the fine wild hills, with noble sea-views, behind it. Then we went on to Lulworth Castle, stern and stately, quadrangular with round towers at the corners, standing on a terraced base, with beautiful park and woods around. We saw the pictures, a few good family portraits of the Welds, and Charles X.’s room which he inhabited when in exile.

“Thomas Weld of Lulworth, who took orders after the death of his wife, became a bishop, and finally (1830) a cardinal. As a layman he had been perfectly devoted to hunting, and, on establishing himself at Rome, the first thing he did was to procure a very nice horse and hunt vigorously. The Pope (Pius VIII.) sent for him and said, ‘Cardinals must not hunt.’ So, for his health’s sake, Cardinal Weld took to a vehement course of walking; but the Pope sent for him again and said, ‘Cardinals must not walk’—adding, ‘If it is necessary for your health that you should walk, there is a place outside the walls where cardinals do walk up and down; you can go there.’ But Cardinal Weld died of it.

“We had tea with the Bond family and the Misses Weld of Lulworth at Binden Abbey, a Cistercian ruin, of which little remains beyond foundations near some very curious fish-ponds.”

“August 31.—I should find it difficult to say how perfectly congenial I find Lord Eustace, or how much I could look upon him as a friend. In many ways he is like Charlie (Halifax), but is no ceremony-lover. No, he says he always admires Gallio—‘such an excellent straightforward man,’—and even agrees with him on the special occasion on which we hear of him.”

“Hardwick Hall, Suffolk, Sept. 17.—I have been spending several happy days with the Lowthers at Campsea Ashe, pleasant in every way, with much agreeable conversation. One day, when it turned on the origin of words, Mr. Lowther described how the expression of ‘never set the Thames on fire’ originated in the reproach to an unenthusiastic cook, who would never set her tamise on fire.

“We went to Aldeburgh, sailing in a yacht down an estuary to a point where the sea has eaten up what was once the site of a considerable town, of which only the picturesque ‘Moot Hall’ remains, stranded on the beach. It was a still, hot, glowing day, with a sea like that of the Ancient Mariner.

“Yesterday we went to an old house, Parham Hall, which is a poem in itself. In this flat country it stands in a wide moat, in a desolate grassy hollow, surrounded by old trees, the richly sculptured oriels and gables, grey, battered, and moss-grown, rising straight from the waters.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 26.—From Campsea Ashe I went to visit Gery Cullum, a friend I have long known, but never till lately been intimate with. One of his nieces met me at the station at Bury St. Edmunds, and brought me in a dogcart through that quaint town, past abbey gateways and the church where Mary, sister of Henry VIII., is buried, to the fine old house of Hardwick, which stands beyond a park well wooded with cedars and indigenous box, and which, with its bright flowers and sculptured terraces, well deserves the name of Allegro, as contrasted with Penseroso, the old neighbouring house of Rushbrooke.

“There is a great charm about the interior—not fine, but very large and most thoroughly comfortable—a small low hall with good portraits of James I. and Elizabeth as a child, &c.; a dining-room with family portraits; a library with curious MSS. The gardens are gorgeous in colour, and there are delightful walks beyond, with pines of all descriptions.

“The first day, knowing my love of being taken about, Gery arranged an excursion to Hengrave, a very fine old house, with an exceedingly rich front and stately garden, belonging to Lady Gage,[429] and close beside it a church filled with curious tombs.

“On Sunday we went to service at Hawsteads, where the church has fine old monuments of Drurys and Cullums, and we sat in a high James I. pew to listen to a ranting Irish preacher, who lost himself completely in the mazes of his own nonsense, and finally made us laugh by the emphasis with which he announced, ‘As it is written, my brethren, in the Duke of Bookeronomy,’ &c.

“On Monday we picnicked in the park of Penseroso, the old house of Rushbrooke, standing in a wide moat, into which a former mistress of the place, an unfaithful wife, was thrown by her husband, and upon which she is said to float nightly. Her picture hangs above the magnificent staircase, and the window whence she was thrown is pointed out at the end of a suite of desolate unfurnished rooms. The house belonged to Lord Jermyn, and, whatever his relation to Henrietta Maria may have been, two magnificent cabinets of hers are here, which Lord Bristol, to his despair, inadvertently sold, with the house, to its present possessors. Here also the church has fine tombs.

“Apropos of the dispersion of family relics, Gery told me how young Mrs. Le Strange of Hunstanton had inadvertently given away an old Persian carpet, an absolute rag, to an old woman in the village, regarding it as useless lumber. The next night she saw the most awful apparition, whom she recognised from a portrait as her husband’s grandmother, old Mrs. Styleman, looking most ferocious and diabolical. Soon an old neighbour called and said, ‘How could you venture to give away the famous carpet: you will have old Mrs. Styleman coming from the grave to remonstrate about it;’ and then it was explained that Mrs. Styleman, who had been a great heiress, and had possessed a number of beautiful things, had lived to see almost all of them dispersed and sold, owing to the extravagance of the family into which she married. At last only the carpet remained—at that time a thing of some value, and in her old age she said, ‘Now if ever you sell that, I swear before God that I will haunt you till it is replaced.’ Mrs. Le Strange bought back the carpet and laid it down in its former place, and old Mrs. Styleman has never appeared since.

“From Hardwick I went to Mrs. Robert Drummond in the lovely little black and white Upton Court of the fourteenth century, which she is renting near Eton. Over the entrance is the little figure of a monk, and in the wide porch rude old oak settees. It was a sanatorium of Merton Abbey, and the quaint old fish-tanks of the monks remain.

“We went to Ockwells, the desolate and decaying old house of the Norris’s, and finding the door off its hinges, entered, and went in and out of the deserted rooms, in one of which a coat of mail was hanging up.[430]

“And now I am at home again, furiously busy, alone, but never finding the day half long enough for all I have to do. ‘Rien ne vous serait plus laborieux qu’une grande oisiveté, si vous aviez le malheur d’y tomber. Dégouté premièrement des affaires, puis des plaisirs, vous seriez enfin dégouté de l’oisiveté elle-même.’ These are words of Louis XIV., admirable and worth thinking of.”

“Ickwellbury Oct. 14.—A visit to Mrs. Harvey. Parts of the house are said to date from Henry II. The Ickwell is the oak-well, a pretty bubbling spring in the garden.”

“Nov. 18.—An agreeable party at Worth (Mrs. Montefiore’s), the most luxurious of modern houses, where a bit of the Law in a little bottle is screwed upon the door of every bedroom. Mr. Algernon Tumour, who is here, stated, and considered he proved, that the average life of a five-pound note is only a single day.”

“London, Nov. 27.—Charlie Halifax says that a tenant of Carlo Milnes Gaskell (of Thornes) was found dead—murdered evidently—in one of his woods. A very bad character in the neighbourhood, who was known to hate the dead man, and who had been seen near the wood at the time of his death, was arrested and tried for the murder. All the evidence was against him, but he got off because, instead of measuring the footprints near the body and then the boots of the accused, the boots had been taken to the spot and fitted into the footprints, which allowed of its being said that they had been manufactured by pressing the boots into the soft earth. The man was always afterwards suspected of the murder, but he got work in a factory. If the subject was spoken of, he became very violent, and prayed that the devil might take him if he was guilty. One day, after he had been declaiming thus, he was caught by the mill machinery and torn to pieces. The iron claw which had caught him and pulled him in is that always known as ‘the Devil.’”

“London, Dec. 6.—Luncheon with Miss Seymour to meet Madame du Quaire,[431] who talked of the Praslin murder. She was with the old Duchesse de Grammont soon after, and Madame Alfred de Grammont was there. They began to discuss the division of money apportioned to different members of a family according to the French system, and they spoke of a member of the Praslin family whom they thought stingy. One of them added up her different expenses, ending with—‘et puis les dix-mille francs pour l’Angleterre.’ At this Madame Alfred, who is très-bête, suddenly broke in with,’ Avez vous été au Bois de Boulogne ce matin?’ ‘It was then,’ said Madame du Quaire, ‘that I first learnt that the Duc de Praslin was alive, and that they knew it.” The next day the Duc de Grammont came to call upon me, and I told him of the conversation, adding—“I know now that the Duke is alive.” He neither allowed it nor denied it. A few days after, however, the Duke came again and said, “J’ai une petite faveur à vous demander.” It was that I would never repeat to his mother what I had said to him: it might upset her. Of course I promised, but then I knew the Duke was alive.’

“‘The Duke did not wish to marry Mademoiselle de Luzy: that is an invention. He only murdered the Duchess because she was such a bore. He certainly did not wish to marry any one else.’

“Miss Seymour [432] said that the Queen of the Belgians, speaking of the Praslin murder to Mrs. Augustus Craven, said, ‘How dreadful to find one was being murdered by one’s husband: one could not even cry out.’

“Madame du Quaire was reminded of her friend Madame Solkoff, whose hair was quite snow-white whilst she was still quite young. ‘She was a Miss Childe, you know, a daughter of that Mrs. Childe who had a salon—un salon très répandu—at Paris. She eloped with a Polish Count, to whom her family objected most intensely, and she was disinherited. Very soon after her marriage it became known that it had turned out very ill, and that the young Countess was very unhappy. Eventually it became impossible for her to remain with her husband, and she went to live at Cracow with her mother-in-law, who had a very fine old palace there, and was very kind to her. She had a large apartment of her own in her mother-in-law’s house, her bedroom being approached through her sitting-room. She was still only twenty-two, when she was found one morning insensible on the floor of her sitting-room in her night-dress, and with the floor all around her saturated with blood from a terrible wound in her head. Her cabinets and jewel-cases were all broken open and rifled. The interrogatoire came, and she was examined. She said that in the night she heard a noise in her sitting-room, and going to see what it was, had found a man breaking open her drawers; that she had received a blow, and knew no more. It was in vain that she was questioned as to whom she had seen; she affirmed that she could not possibly tell who it was. But her hair was turned snow-white from that night. It was not till she knew he was dead that she allowed it was her husband she had seen.’

“Speaking of reading novels when young, Madame du Quaire said that she remembered at eleven years old reading ‘La Princesse de Babylone,’ and being found convulsed with laughter at the description of a dinner-party given by the Witch of Endor. She was described as having the guardianship of Nebuchadnezzar, who was browsing near her, and that at her party, ‘par délicatesse pour lui,’ she would allow nothing to appear which—in his unfortunate position—could wound his feelings—no beef, &c., &c.

“Madame du Quaire talked of the prevailing passion for Buddhism, and said, ‘I am not even going to attempt to believe in it, for it is not necessary to salvation: there is such a tremendous quantity that I am obliged to swallow, that I cannot possibly undertake anything—“che non e d’obligo” as the Italian priests say.’

“Madame du Quaire had met Lady Colin Campbell at dinner and sat opposite to her, but she did not know her. She could not help being attracted by the necklace she wore, it was so very extraordinary. After a time it seemed to be moving by itself. She fancied at first that this must be a delusion, but, putting up her glasses, she certainly saw the necklace writhing round Lady Colin’s throat. Seeing her astonished look, Lady Colin said, ‘Oh, I see you are looking at my snake: I always wear a live snake round my throat in hot weather: it keeps one’s neck so cool;’ and it really was a live snake.”

“Dec. 8.—Sat by Sir George Dasent at breakfast. A Mr. Frere passed through the room. ‘He comes from Roffham,’ said Sir G., ‘one of those places of which the name has such a rough East Anglian sound, and he is member of the family which possessed the Paston Letters without knowing it. There were six volumes of letters. Two of them were sent up, by request, for Queen Charlotte to look at, and they were lost. She was very accurate herself, that old woman, especially about things that were lent to her, and there is no doubt that she had given them to one of her ladies to return: anyhow they were lost. Afterwards, however, duplicate copies of many of the lost letters were found to be still in the possession of the family, and their existence quite disproved an assertion that the letters had been forgeries.

“‘They were wonderful people, those old Pastons. They used to thrash their daughters like anything if they did not behave themselves, and then, when they had flogged them well, they would say, “And now they must have silk dresses, rich, red, and beautiful!”’

“Dec. 9.—Dined with M. B., who told me of Lady Vane [433] being quite worn-out by the ghastly noises at their place in Cumberland: it was as if some one were always trying to climb up a disused chimney in the wall, and then falling violently down again. But lately, when Sir Henry Vane was away, she had the wall opened. Inside she found a wide and very lofty closet, narrowing into a funnel as it reached the roof, where it opened by a very small hole to the sky. In it were human bones, a broken water-bottle, and the cover of an old Bible, which bore a date. Lady Vane had the bones gathered up and put into a box, which was left in a corner of Sir Henry Vane’s room till his return.

“When Sir Henry Vane came home, he was exhausted by a long journey and went at once to rest. Lady Vane did not intend to tell him of her discovery till the next day. But suddenly, late in the afternoon, she heard a tremendous noise in her husband’s room. She rushed in, and found Sir Henry in a state of the greatest agitation. He said, ‘I have seen the most frightful apparition—a woman in that corner,’ pointing to where the box of bones had been deposited.

“From old family archives they found that, some years before, exactly at the date upon the Bible cover, a woman had been walled up in the house. She had made desperate efforts to escape up the funnel of the disused chimney, and had always fallen down again. Sir Henry and Lady Vane themselves buried the bones in the churchyard, and the house has been at peace ever since.”

“Thorncombe, Dec. 13.—Miss Montgomery is here, a lady of the most impassive countenance, though she is the authoress of ‘Misunderstood.’”

“Warwick Castle, Jan. 30, 1887.—A delightful visit to this beautiful place. I came off suddenly on a telegram from Lady Warwick,[434] and found several pleasant people, besides the family. More than ever have I been charmed by Lady Warwick, who has the rarest of all attractions—absolute simplicity, and ‘rien n’est difficile comme le simple,’ as Madame de Maintenon used to say. Then most glorious in position is the castle, with the river close underneath, so that the family feed the swans daily from the aërial balcony outside the breakfast-room window. Pilgrim-visitors constantly pour through the rooms with the pictures, of which the finest are a grand Morone, and a Raffaelle finished by Ghirlandajo. The visitors are conducted through the rooms by the housekeeper, who is a great character in her way. When the Prince of Wales was here, she showed him a relic which ‘belonged to King James III.’—‘Ah! the old Pretender,’ said the Prince. ‘We do not think so, your Royal Highness,’ she replied very stiffly. The pictures at Warwick are a real enjoyment, not only important and valuable, which is generally thought enough, but each individually lovely and suggestive. And the happy family life is perfection—such a sharing of interests, the hunting sons not entirely engrossed by it, and no single member of the family talking scandal or looking for motes in their neighbours’ eyes. The old town is charming, with the Leicester hospital, and the great church, chiefly renaissance, but with a fine gothic choir. One evening there was a dance, and after it Mrs. Bob Lyttelton (Miss Santley), who lives in the town, sang most gloriously.

“We have driven to see the exceedingly curious old house of Badeley Clinton, of which my distant cousin, Mr. Dering, has married the widowed owner. It is a most singular and poetical place, and there are many curious stories about it. Handsome, refined, and naturally, not affectedly, poetical and picturesque, Edward Dering is wonderfully suited to the place, and its very solitariness facilitates his leading a life there of almost mediaeval saintliness.”[435]

On the 26th of February 1887 I left England again for my French work, and spent a month in Paris at a primitive and economical inn in the Rue d’Amboise. Living here, I spent my days entirely amongst the historic quarters, seeing nothing of the Boulevards or Rue de Rivoli, but making great progress with a work—my “Paris”—which had no interruptions, and in which I became increasingly interested as I knew more of my subject. On the fine days of early March many excursions were very pleasant, involving long walks to the Abbaye du Val, Nogent les Vierges, &c. Unfortunately the weather changed before I set out on a tour through the Bourbonnais; and in Provence, where many long excursions were necessary, the mistral was quite terrific. Mounting into the wild fastnesses of the Maritime Alps above S. Maximin, to visit the cave in which the Magdalen is believed to have died, I caught a terrible chill, from which I was afterwards very ill at Manosque. But the kindly though rough proprietors of the inn—M. and Mme. Pascal—persuaded me to try the remedy of taking no nourishment whatever except hot tea, and letting nature lie absolutely at rest for forty-eight hours, and, as often since, I found this quite answer, though during that time I drove in an open carriage for eight hours to visit the Roman remains at Riez.

“Avignon, April 3, 1887.—It has been a suffering week, owing to the biting, rending, lacerating mistral, which has seemed perpetually to tear one’s vitals inside out, and to frizzle them afterwards. Thursday I went by rail to Montelimar, and then in a carriage with a horse which either galloped furiously or would not go at all, over the sixteen miles of mountain-road to Grignan, where Madame de Sévigné lived so much with her daughter, and where she died. It is a really grand and striking place—the immense château rising on a solitary rock, backed by a lovely mountain distance, and the town at its foot surrounded by cork forests. All was ruined at the Revolution, but the shell of the rich palace-castle remains—‘un château vraiment royal,’ as Madame de Sévigné calls it. In a solitary spot near is the cave, with old ilex-trees, where she used to sit, and, even with blinding dust and wind, the colouring was most beautiful.

“On Saturday, I had to spend five hours at Cavaillon, and wondered how to dispose of myself. But, on reaching the cathedral, the whole population was pouring in to take part in the funeral of a famous doctor who had been a great benefactor of the place. Every one there was presented by the family with a huge wax-candle, as long as a walking-stick, and asked to ‘assist.’ I had one, and walked and stood with my burning candle for two hours! It was a striking sight, thousands taking part, and the old bishop pronouncing the elegy of the deceased, whom he described as quite a saint. But oh! how it poured, and blew, and swelched, and how deep was the white mortar-mud of Provence!”

“Arles, April 13.—The visit to this place—perhaps more than any other connected with happy days of our long-ago travels, and which I have always avoided hitherto since I have been alone—has unexpectedly proved a great pleasure. And I am glad, now I have seen so much, that I still think Arles by far the most interesting place in the south of France, and the excursion to Montmajour and Les Baux, which I made again on Saturday, quite incomparable—the former, as far as I have seen the world, one of its most beautiful ruins, the latter so glorious as to scenery. Yesterday there was what the French call a bull-fight in the amphitheatre, but there is nothing terrible: no horses, only men enticing bulls with handkerchiefs, and when they run at them, vaulting like chamois over the barriers; while the arcades of Roman masonry are filled with vast multitudes, chiefly ‘belles Arlesiennes’ in their picturesque costume—a very fine sight.”

“Aix in Provence, April 15.—All Provence, as you perhaps know, is full of the same very early Church legend, that a number of the earliest Christians, escaping from Jerusalem after the Ascension, landed here on the coast and became the earliest missionaries of Gaul. Of these, Mary Salome and Mary Cleopas are supposed to have stayed at Les Saintes Maries in the Camargue, Lazarus to have gone to preach at Marseilles, Restitutus at S. Restitut, Maximin at S. Maximin; but Mary Magdalen went farther, spent years of penitence, and died in a cave at the top of the mountains, which is certainly one of the most curious places of pilgrimage in Europe. So it was to La Sainte Baume that I went yesterday, starting at 6 A.M. by rail to S. Maximin, and there engaging a carriage to Nant, where the road comes to an end. Thence it is an ascent of an hour and a half through the steep lonely rocky forest, covered with blue hepaticas, over stones, rocks, and quagmires. Near the top it began to hail and rain furiously, and the cold was most intense, snow still lying in great masses; but the cave is very curious, and the view magnificent over the lower mountains, beyond the masses of Alpine forest. How it poured! I sheltered at the worst times under some rocks, and got safely down to the sunlit valley about five, then had to wait at S. Maximin till nine o’clock for a train, and did not get back here till nearly one.”

“Grenoble, April 22.—On Wednesday evening, after returning from Briançon to Gap, I engaged a carriage thence to Corps, at the foot of the mountain of La Salette. It was supposed to be three hours’ drive, but took five and a half hours, and we did not arrive till nine o’clock, having spent the last two hours in pitch darkness, with a single lanthorn, driving along the edge of the most terrific precipices, with a driver who had never been there before! Still we arrived at last at the very miserable inn. On Thursday morning I set off early on foot to La Salette, three hours of weary steep ascent of the mountains, rather fine in their snowy solitudes, but affording just a slight panic to a solitary traveller owing to the bears which still prowl about there. In the latter part of the way the snow was above my waist, but a little gulley (turned into a watercourse from the meltings) was cut through it. When at length I reached the convent, I was received with great astonishment, as no one had visited those solitudes since April 6. All around, and up to the first floor of the building, was deep massy snow, not a rock to be seen. I was comfortably fed, however, and saw the strange place to which 15,000 pilgrims come annually. You know the story, how two children declared that the Virgin had appeared to them, and told them that the bad language of the neighbouring villages was so shocking that she could no longer restrain the avenging hand of her Son unless a church was built. You will remember how Madame de Trafford never varied in her account, that she was herself botanising in those mountains in one of her eccentric expeditions, and came suddenly out of a fog upon two children, to whom she spoke of the shocking language she had heard, saying it was sure to be punished, and why was there no church? &c.: then the fog became very thick again, and when it cleared, the children were gone.”

“Cambrai, April 30.—How I thought of you to-day when I was by the tomb of Fénelon, which has a striking statue. But how ugly, how treeless, how black with coal-dust is all this north-east of France. I always imagined the Ardennes were pretty, but the beauty is only in the Belgian part. Nothing can be more frightful than Sedan, Charleville, Mezières, Valenciennes, and this place is also hideous; though perhaps all has looked worse than usual under a black sky and incessant rain.

“On Thursday I saw Domremy, which is well worth a visit, and can be little altered from the time of Jeanne Darc. Seen across the flat meadows, backed by a low range of hills like Hawkestone, and with a winding stream (the infant Meuse) like the Terne, it is really a little like Stoke. The mere hamlet ends in the little church, hung all over inside, and very prettily, with wreaths and banners, sent from all quarters in honour of Jeanne; and close by is her quaint old cottage, carefully preserved, with some of its old beams, an ancient armoire, &c., and its original garden. It is now in the hands of Sisters of Charity, who manage an orphanage joining her garden and established to her memory.

“It is really a great reward for many misères de voyage that I have now seen almost everything in Eastern France, and may soon think of publishing that part of my work.”

During the latter part of this French tour I had an unpleasant adventure, which excited more attention than I ever anticipated at the time. On April 19 I had gone from Gap to visit Embrun, a curious little town in the Alpes Dauphinoises. I had not long left the station before I was aware that I was watched and followed wherever I went. However, at last I contrived to dodge my pursuer, and made, from behind a wall, the sketch of the cathedral which I wanted, and then had dinner at the hotel. When I was returning to the station, separated by a desolate plain from the town, I saw, by the faint waning light, the same figure following wherever I went. It was dark when the train by which I was to leave was to start. I had taken my place, and the train was already in motion, when it was stopped, and an official accompanied by a gendarme entered the carriage and demanded what I had been doing at Embrun. “Visiting the cathedral.” “Why should I visit the cathedral?” and so on, through a long series of questions of the same kind. My passport was demanded, and, though not usually considered necessary for English travellers, I happened to have one. It was, however, refused as an identification, not being dated in the present year. Fortunately, I recollected having in my pocket-book an order from the Préfet de la Seine authorising me to draw in all the palaces in Paris and elsewhere in France, and this was considered sufficient. The train was allowed to move on just as a crowd was collecting.

At Briançon (where I spent the following day), I carefully abstained from drawing, as it was a fortified town. But on April 23 I left the station at Vizille to visit the old château of the famous Lesdiguières, two miles distant. I had seen the château, and began to occupy the quarter of an hour which remained before the omnibus started for the station by sketching it from the village street, when I was pounced upon by a gendarme. “Who has authorised you to sketch the château of Vizille?”—“No one.”—“If you can draw this, you may also have drawn other places. You will go with me to the gendarmerie;” and I was marched through the long street of Vizille, followed by a crowd, and with the hand of the gendarme occasionally grasping me by the shoulder. At the gendarmerie a superior officer appeared, and, with the most extreme insolence of manner, demanded what I had been doing in France, &c. “What had I drawn?”—“Churches and mountains.”—“Ah! mountains! then it has been very easy for you to make a little mark in the drawing, known only to yourself, meaning here is a fortress, and there a fortress.”—“But I am an Englishman.”—“Oh, you are, are you? Then I am all the more glad that we have taken you, for we shall probably soon be at war with England, and then you will make your sketches useful to your Government; so you will consider yourself under arrest.” The letter of the Préfet de la Seine was treated as worthless because it had no seal. The passport was rejected altogether with contempt. After this, all further protestations and remonstrances were answered by an insolent shout of—“Taisez vous donc, vous êtes en état d’arrestation.”

Then the first gendarme was sent with me to the station, where my portmanteaux were opened and ransacked, the contents being tossed out upon the platform. Two suspicious articles were found. First, a slight sketch of the gorge at Sisteron (not the fort; the fort is on the other side of the rock), and, far worse, three volumes of the Guide Joanne for France. “What did I want with guidebooks?”—“To study the country.”—“Ah! that is just what I thought;” and all the officials of the station were called in to witness the discovery. The gendarme then declared that I must return with him and be locked up at Vizille, but a train coming up at that moment, I made a dash into it, and probably thinking a public scrimmage impolitic, the gendarme allowed the station-master to fasten my boxes and bring me a ticket. The gendarme then took his place opposite to me in a first-class carriage.

At 5 P.M. the train arrived at Grenoble. At the station the gendarme of Vizille summoned a gendarme of the town, and I was conducted as a prisoner by the two to the Hotel Monnet. The gendarme of Vizille then left me in care of the other, shut up in a room of the hotel, where the gendarme of Grenoble sat silent opposite to me till 6.30. I thought that then the other gendarme would come back from the Préfecture with an order that I was to be freed from further annoyance. Not a bit of it! He came back with an order that all my possessions were to be carefully ransacked, and all the contents of my boxes were turned out upon the floor. All suspected articles—all my sketches, manuscripts, letters, and all the volumes of the Guide Joanne were then put into my smallest portmanteau, which one of the gendarmes carried, and I was marched between the two to the old palace of the Dauphins, where the courts are. Here two clerks (or secretaries of the Préfecture) subjected me to a long examination—who I was, what was my employment, where I had been, &c. The English letters found in my blotting-book (ordinary family letters) were translated into French by a clerk who understood English. All my drawings (chiefly of church architecture) were examined in detail, and their objects inquired into. The terrible Guides Joanne were passed in review and, after an hour, I was told I was free, but without a single word of apology or regret. Indeed, I should not have got away then if at last one of the clerks had not said in his insolent manner, “Est que vous êtes donc un tel, qu’il n’y a une seule personne dans toute cette partie de la France qui peut répondre de vous?” And goaded to desperation I answered, “Well, yes, there is one person, it is a lady; she is only a few miles from here now (at Aix les Bains): it is the Queen of England.” On parting, the gendarme of Vizille was told in my presence that he had only done his duty in arresting me for having ventured to draw the Château of Lesdiguières; and he left, carrying off in his pocket (by accident no doubt) a sealed packet which he had taken from my dressing-case, saying, “Nous allons ouvrir ça devant ces messieurs, ça doit être des instruments pour tirer des plans.” I called the next day upon my examiners to ask them to obtain restitution of the packet, but they declined to take any trouble. One of their comrades, looking up from his writing, said insolently, “Puisque vous avez été arrêté hier, est-ce qu’on ne vous a encore condamné?”

I wrote this story in the train, and posted it at one of the stations to the editor of the Times, who inserted it in the paper, so that when I reached home I found England ringing with it, and a question asked in the House about it. I also complained to the Foreign Office, and Lord Salisbury sent me afterwards the French answer to the inquiries made. They allowed the facts of the examination, but denied that I had ever been arrested, though the leading feature through the whole had been that whenever I attempted to speak I had been silenced by a shout of “Taisez-vous donc; rappelez-vous donc que vous êtes en arrestation.” The sealed packet was never restored.

“Scotney, June 1, 1887.—We have been for the day at Glassenbury, the old moated house of Mr. Atkin Roberts, in a wooded hollow of the hills, surrounded by fine old trees, but of damp and dismal aspect. There is a lime avenue there, haunted by a lady—once Miss Roberts—who is always looking for her husband, for as she was riding away with him down the avenue on their wedding-day, he was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot. She never afterwards left the paternal home, where there are pictures of her, unmarried and as a widow. Some hundred years ago the last Roberts of Glassenbury had only daughters, and of these the last married the then Duke of St. Albans. The Duke was a gambler and a spendthrift, and sold all her fine things—her diamonds, her plate, her china; but she was determined that he should not make away the place, and that she would leave it to those who would take care of it; the question was—to whom?

“One day she had sent for a painter to come to Glassenbury to paint a coat of arms on her carriage, and, when she showed him the arms, he said, ‘Why, your Grace, those are the very arms I was employed to paint at a place in Ireland, to which I went quite by accident, having been shipwrecked on the coast close by.’ The Duchess inquired, and found that the people in Ireland, for whom he had painted the arms, were very distant relations, and she settled the property upon the Irish Colonel Roberts, who left it to the present owner, his nephew, formerly Atkin.

“Sir Arthur Birch, who has some high appointment at the Bank of England, has lately been at Scotney, full of a very singular circumstance. He had two clerks, an elderly Mr. Sperati and a Mr. Lutwich, and they were very intimate friends. One Whit-Monday evening, as he was sitting with his wife by the fire in his house in Burlington Gardens, Mr. Lutwich, with a very scared look, bade her mark the exact time, ‘for,’ said he, ‘I have just seen Sperati; he has just appeared in this room, as distinctly as I ever saw him in my life. He wore a very old coat of his, which I know quite well, and had a very peculiar silver-knobbed stick in his hand; I am certain he is dead, and I must go to his house and see.’

“But the wife urged him so much not to go then, and to wait till the next morning, that he assented.

“As he was on his way in the morning to Sperati’s house, he met Sperati’s brother, who said, ‘I was on my way to tell you sad news; my brother died last night at nine o’clock, very suddenly, of heart-disease.’ It was exactly the hour at which Mr. Lutwich had seen him.

“Mr. Lutwich went on to the house, and saw the butler, whom he knew well. He said, ‘I have an especial reason for asking about an old coat which I remember well, and which your master use to have—has he worn it lately?’—‘Well, it is strange you should ask about it, sir, because, though he has not worn it for some time, he had it on last night.’—‘And do you remember what stick he had in his hand?’—‘Yes, perfectly, sir, it is in the hall now,’ and it was the very stick with which he had appeared.

“Mrs. Papillon had been telling the Husseys of a very famous female mesmerist living in Park Street. Late one night this person had a visitor who urged her very much to consent to go at once to a mysterious patient, to whom she could only travel blindfolded. She hesitated for some time, but finally, being very much urged, she assented. A well-appointed carriage was at the door, in which she was driven to the railway. In the train she was blindfolded. Several hours were passed in travelling by train. Then she was taken out to a carriage and driven for some distance. On arriving at a house, she was led up a staircase and into a large room. As her bandage was removed, she saw two ladies in black just leaving the room. A gentleman was lying in bed, very dangerously ill of typhoid fever. She mesmerised him and he fell asleep. When he awoke, a great change for the better was perceptible. He said, ‘I feel better; I could drink a glass of beer.’ She said, ‘Give him the beer.’ He drank it, and fell into a restful, natural sleep.

“Then the lady was blindfolded again and conveyed back in the same way in which she came. When she reached her own house in Park Street, a cheque for a very large amount was left in her hands. The next day she read in the paper that the Prince of Wales—then most dangerously ill at Sandringham—had rallied, and fallen into a deep natural sleep from the moment of drinking a glass of beer.

“Mr. Hussey told me that an old Mr. and Mrs. Close of Nottingham were very rich and great misers, and they both made wills leaving all they possessed each to the other. However, as they died within a few hours of each other, that made very little difference to anybody.

“When the heirs-at-law arrived at Nottingham—young people full of spirits—they were greatly excited and brimming with curiosity. It was known that there were splendid diamonds, and that vast wealth of every kind existed, but at first nothing seemed to be forthcoming. Cupboards and drawers were ransacked in vain. Nothing particular was found.

“At last, in a room at the top of the house a great trunk was discovered. ‘Here,’ they said, ‘it all is; we shall find all the treasures now.’ But when the trunk was opened, the upper part was found to be full of nothing but scraps of human hair, as if for years the off-scourings of all the old hair-brushes had been collected; then below that was a layer of very dirty old curl-papers; and the bottom of the box was full of still more dirty old corsets of ladies’ dresses, and—the box was alive! When young Mrs. Close had dived into the box, she exclaimed, ‘What disgusting old creatures our relations must have been! This horrible mess might infest the whole house; we must have it burnt at once.’ So she had some men up, and the trunk carried down into the courtyard of the house, and a huge bonfire made there, and the trunk upset into it.

“As it was burning, she stood by, and heedlessly, with her stick, pulled one of the curl-papers towards her, and poked it open at her feet. It was a £50 note! In an agony, she scrimmaged at the fire, and raked out all she possibly could, but it was too late; most of the notes were burnt; she only saved about £800.

“Naturally her husband was furious, and of course he was very unjust. ‘Any one but you would have examined the box carefully; there never was such an idiot of a woman,’ &c. And every time he saw the burnt heap in the courtyard, he burst forth afresh. So she sent for the dustman round the corner, and had all the ashes carefully cleared away.

“Still nothing had been found of the diamonds. They had certainly existed; there were always the diamonds to fall back upon. But though they searched everywhere, nothing could be found of them. At last they asked the only old lady with whom Mrs. Close had visited if she knew of any one who could help them. ‘Yes, certainly,’ she said; ‘there’s old Betty Thompson at the almshouses, she was always in and out of the house as charwoman; she knew more of Mrs. Close and her ways than any one else.’ So away they went to the almshouses, and asked Betty Thompson. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘she knew very well that there were diamonds, very fine diamonds indeed, but small good they ever did to old Mrs. Close, for she always kept them sewn up and hidden away in her old stays.’

“The stays had all perished in the fire; the diamonds would not have burnt, but then the very ashes had been thrown away; there was no trace left of them. The bank-notes were all very old—the few that were saved—but they were quite good; but there was very little else left of the great inheritance.”

“Jermyn Street, June 16, 1887.—London is in gala costume, the streets flooded with flowers, and the West End thoroughfares lined by stands, with seats covered with red and gay awnings. I am perpetually thinking of what Arthur Stanley’s ecstasy would have been on looking forward to having so many kings and queens, besides no end of other royalty, in the Abbey at once. On Saturday I was at Osterley, where the gardens were quite lovely and delicious in the heat, and yesterday there was a pleasant party at Lord Beauchamp’s, with little comedies to amuse Princess Mary, who was exceedingly gracious and kind to me.

“Alas! we are expecting the news of Theodore Walrond’s death—a man apparently as healthy in body as in mind till his last illness set in, and quite universally beloved.”

“June 17.—Yesterday I had luncheon with Miss Geary at her very pretty house in Grosvenor Street, and met Lady Elgin and a charming, fresh, sensible Miss Boscawen. I dined at Lady Manners’, where I made rather friends with Lord Apsley: afterwards there was a large brilliant party at Mrs. Portman’s.

“To-day my two young American friends, Sands and Martin, gave a most pleasant luncheon. I sat by Lady Middleton, who talked charmingly and gratefully of the happiness of married life—the pleasure to a woman of entire self-renunciation: then of her own life, which she would not exchange for any in the world, though she has had to give up all her own inclinations, and to throw herself absolutely and entirely into the interests of hunting. She said she never allowed an ill word on the field, and if she heard one, rode even for miles till she caught up the culprit to say so.”

“June 19.—Lady Dorothy Nevill has been most funny about a burglary at Lady Orford’s. While the family were away, a man came to the door, who said he was sent to measure the dining-room chimney-piece, and asked the old woman who was taking care of the place to go up to the top of the house to get him a piece of tape for the purpose. When she came down, the man was gone, and so were two of the best pictures. ‘I could swear to the pictures anywhere,’ said the old woman afterwards, ‘for they were of members of the Orford family.’ ‘They were the Virgin Mary and St. Sebastian,’ added Lady Dorothy, ‘and I leave you to imagine how far they were ever likely to have been members of the Orford family!’

“At breakfast I sat by Sir George Dasent. I spoke of his wonderful memory. He said, ‘When I was a boy, my father saw me writing—writing with a pen was never a strong point with me—but still I was busy at it, and he asked me what I was doing. I said, “Writing down what I’ve read.”—“Don’t write it down, my boy,” he said; “carry it all in your head; it is much better,” and I have always done so.’

“He spoke of the folly of interfering in any street rows. ‘It had been a wet day, and you know when the pavement is wet—why I cannot tell—you can see much farther than at other times, and down the whole length of Eaton Place I saw a man knock a woman down; she got up, and he knocked her down again. He knocked her down several times running. At last I got up to him and said, “You villain, to knock a woman down like that; how can you dare to do it?”—“Now you just go along with you,” said the woman; “he only gave me what I deserved.”—“Oh, if you like being knocked down, it’s another matter,” I said.’

“‘One day in the street,’ he related, ‘I passed a party of Germans abusing each other with most outrageous language, and I said, “Remember there are police here as well as in Germany.” When I got near St Peter’s Church, I was aware that one of the Germans was following me, and he came up and said, “I am come to demand satisfaction.”—“Very well, you shall have satisfaction,” I said, and I beckoned a policeman from the other side of the street, who came across saying, “What can I do for you, sir?” for all the police know me. So I said, “You will just take this man up, and I will go with you and appear against him.” So we went on our way, the policeman, the German, and I. When we had gone some way, the policeman said, “It’s giving you a great deal of trouble, sir, isn’t it, to go to the police-station; couldn’t we manage it here?’ So I said, “Yes, perhaps we may as well try him here. If he kneels down in the gutter in the mud and prays for forgiveness, we will let him off.” So I said in German, “He (the policeman) says that if you kneel down in the gutter and beg for forgiveness, he will let you off.”—“May not I kneel on the pavement?” he said. “No, that will not do; you must kneel in the mud, with your hands up so. “So down in the mud he went and said, “I am very sorry for vat I have done,” and we let him go.’

“Chief-Justice Morris said he was sitting on the bench in Ireland, and after a case had been tried, he said to the jurymen, ‘Now, to consider this matter, you will retire to your accustomed place,’ and two-thirds of them went into the dock.

“Another time he said to a culprit, ‘I can produce five witnesses who saw you steal that cow.”—‘Yes,’ said the prisoner, ‘but I can produce five hundred who did not.’

“Sir George Dasent said he should not go to the Abbey on the Jubilee Day. His legs were so infirm now, that a touch would upset him, and, when once down, he could not get up again. He had once been knocked down by a newspaper—‘retributive, you might say.’”[449]

“June 20.—The streets are all hung with scarlet and blue draperies, and Waterloo Place is embowered in a succession of triumphal arches. The crowds are tremendous. The foot-passengers have already expelled the carriages from the principal thoroughfares, and two million more people are expected to arrive to-day.

“I dined last night with Charlie Halifax, meeting Lady Morton, the Arundel Mildmays, and Sir Hickman Bacon—a pale frail youth, so High-Church that he could not take part in any Jubilee gaieties whilst —— (one of their especial clergy) was imprisoned. Charlie was very funny in his tantrums against the bishops. ‘I hate them all except Lincoln, and—as cowards—I despise them.’ He said he would not go to the service in the Abbey, because he considers it desecrated by having seats erected over the altar!”

“June 21, 1887.—Nothing can have been more sublimely pathetic than the whole ceremony (of the Jubilee)—more inexpressibly touching and elevating. The Abbey, too, did not look spoilt: all the tiers of seats, all the galleries disappeared utterly: nothing was visible between the time-worn pillars and under the grey arches but the masses of people they contained.

“I went at 8 A.M. It was not a moment too soon. Cabs charged two pounds to the Abbey, but I walked very comfortably. The tickets had little maps of the Abbey, with the entrance for the bearer marked on each. Mine was by a door on the north-east behind St. Margaret’s, and there I waited, with a small crowd, till nine struck, and some iron gates were opened by the police, when we ran down an awned passage to where a staircase of rough timber led up by the great Norris tomb to our places.

as Goldsmith says. I would not have changed it with any other in the building. In the theatre it would have been the royal box—a little red gallery to hold four, over the tomb of Aylmer de Valence; in front of the gallery on the left of the sanctuary; close above the princesses of Austria, Spain, and Portugal; opposite the kings; with a view of the peers and peeresses in the right transept, and so near the Queen that one could see every play of her expression. My companions were a doctor of music in his red gown and two females of the middle class, who were very good-natured in lending me their glasses.

“The Abbey blazed with colour—crimson uniforms, smart ladies, ushers stiff with gold embroidery, yeomen of the guard in plumed helmets. Only, for another coronation, I would clothe the supporting pillars of the galleries with red cloth. The grey wooden supports looked cold, and their angular outlines drew attention to them amongst the rounded forms of the pillars, whereas the red seats and galleries disappeared altogether, or only served as admirable setting and background to the picture. The grand old tombs—Aylmer de Valence, Edmond Crouchback, Anne of Cleves—stood detached from the red, and in front of the altar the mosaic pavement of Henry III. was left exposed—not covered, like the rest of the floor, by red carpeting. Near the altar were two benches on each side—‘tabourets’—for queens and princesses in front, kings and princes behind. Farther back stood, on a daïs, the coronation chair, facing the altar, covered and hidden by red, and with the royal robe of state hanging over it and trailing down from the daïs on the side towards us: before it was a fald-stool and kneeling cushion.

“Every moment the vast edifice became more filled with colour, but the peers and peeresses arrived very gradually. Lady Exeter, beautiful still, sat long alone in the marchionesses’ seats, Lord and Lady Cross in the ministerial benches, and two or three duchesses in that appointed for them. Then the Argylls came in, he gorgeous in the uniform of—MacCallum More. Behind I recognised the Spencers, Powerscourts, Stanhopes, Charlie Halifax, and Lord Londonderry with the white ribbon of the Order of St. Patrick. The Lord Chancellor, preceded by mace and bag, now came in and took his place in the centre of the front row, with Lord and Lady Salisbury and the Duchess of Marlborough on his right hand. A figure which attracted more attention than any other was that of Maria, Lady Aylesbury, except her three Cambridge cousins and her two pages, the sole survivor of all those represented in the great picture of the Queen’s coronation.

“At 11.15 a burst of music announced the first procession, and Princess Frederica and the Tecks were conducted to the stalls, with two of the Edinburgh children, and three gorgeous Eastern princes [451] to the places immediately below us. Then the Queen of Hawaii, in a black dress covered with green embroidery, and with the famous yellow feathers only allowed to Sandwich Island royalty, was seated just opposite to us, with her princess-sister [452] (the heiress of the throne) in black velvet covered with orders, and with a great white ostrich fan:—not together, however, as every one was to sit according to rank, and an intermediate place after queens had to be reserved for the Duchess of Mecklenbourg-Strelitz.

“A long tension of waiting followed, but at twelve a rising of the white-robed choristers in their south-western gallery announced the second procession, and a flood of royalty poured in beneath us. Opposite sat the kings of Greece, Denmark (his father), the very handsome king of the Belgians, whose beard is beginning to turn grey, the king of Saxony, the Crown Princes of Austria, Portugal, Würtemburg, and Sweden, the Duc d’Aosta, and Prince George of Greece—a charming boy in a naval uniform. Beneath us were the Crown Princess of Portugal, Doña Eulalia of Spain, the hereditary Duchess of Mecklenbourg, and Princess Philip of Saxe-Coburg. One of these royal ladies—Doña Eulalia, I think—had a white lace mantilla instead of a bonnet, with very pretty effect. But really one of the finest features of the whole was the coming in of the Queen of the Belgians—so simple, royal, imperial—saluting everybody in comprehensive though slight inclination, infinitely graceful and regal in every attitude.

“At last a blaze of trumpets announced the Queen’s procession. It was headed by canons, the Bishop of London, the two Archbishops in most gorgeous copes, and the Dean of Westminster in a heavy old embroidered cope to his feet, which made him look like a figure risen from one of the old altar-tombs. Then—alone—serene—pale (not red)—beautifully dressed in something between a cap and bonnet of white lace and diamonds, but most becoming to her—perfectly self-possessed, full of the most gracious sweetness, lovely and lovable—the Queen! All the princesses in the choir, with the Queen of the Belgians at their head, curtseyed low as she took her place upon the throne, from which the long robe of state trailed so that it looked part of her dress.

“When she was seated in lonely splendour, the princes poured in upon her right, and the princesses on her left, and took their places on gilt chairs on either side—a little behind. The bevy of granddaughters, in white and pale blue, was very pretty—so many, all curtseying as they passed the Queen, and she smiling most sweetly and engagingly upon them with the most loving and motherly of looks.

“Then came the burst of the ‘Te Deum.’ The silver trumpets at St. Peter’s seemed as nothing to the trumpet-shout which gave effect to the exultant sentences, pealing triumphantly through the arches, and contrasting with the single voices of solitary choristers thrilling alone at intervals—voices far, far away, like the tenderest echo. The Queen did not shed a tear, and held a book all the time, but once sat down as if it was too much for her, and often looked round at the Crown Princess—who stood nearest, very sweet and sympathetic—with a look of ‘What this is to us!’ Princess Beatrice and the Grand Duchess Sergius cried the whole time.

“A striking figure throughout the entire service was the Crown Prince of Germany, especially when kneeling erect like a knight, in jackboots, but with folded hands and a simplicity of unwavering devotion.

“Very solemnly, audibly everywhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury read the prayers—the thanksgiving for all the mercies of the reign, the petition for eternal life. There was another psalm, sung most gloriously, then an anthem with a burst of trumpets in the ‘To be king for the Lord thy God.’ Lastly, the benediction, in which the Queen bent low, lower, lower, as the ‘Amen,’ sung over and over again, died away in vanishing cadences.

“When it was quite silent, in a great hush, she rose up, and a beautiful ray of sunshine shot through the stained windows and laid itself at her feet, and then passed on and gilded the head of the Prince of Wales.

“She beckoned to him afterwards, and he came and kissed her hand, but she kissed him twice most affectionately. Then came the Crown Prince and the Grand Duke of Hesse, who kissed her hands, and then the Duke of Connaught. When the Queen saw him, maternal feelings overcame those of royalty, and she embraced him fervently, and then, evidently fearing that the last two princes might be hurt, she called them back, and kissed them too, and so all the princes, who came in order. She was especially cordial to Prince Albert Victor, and heartily kissed Lord Lorne, who had bent down, as if he did not expect it.

“Meantime the Crown Princess stood by the step of the throne on the other side, and I think the most touching part of the whole was when she bent low to kiss her mother’s hand and was folded in a close embrace, and so all the daughters and the grand-daughters—such a galaxy of graceful girls—bent to kiss the hand, and were kissed in turn.

“Then the Queen went away, bowing all down the choir, and the flood of her youthful descendants ebbed after her.

“I felt I scarcely cared to see the procession afterwards, but it was very fine. How a past age is repeating itself! One sees this in comparing the newspaper accounts of the procession yesterday with the contemporary tracts about the entry of Queen Elizabeth, telling how ‘in all her passage she did show her most gracious love towards the people in general,’ and how the citizens, when they saw her, ‘took such comfort, that with tears they expressed the same.’ I am one of the 400 asked to meet the 100 royalties at the Foreign Office, but cannot manage arranging levée dress properly in time.”

“Nothing could exceed the orderliness, good-nature, and merriment of the immense crowd at the illuminations on the evening of the Jubilee day. I took Letitia Hibbert and her friend Miss Robertson to see the best from Hyde Park, and then along the Green Park, where movement was quite easy, and the effect of the houses bathed in a halo of coloured light very beautiful through the dark massy foliage.

“Yesterday I went at 3 P.M. to Hyde Park. A dense mass of people walled in the vast enclosed space, but all in the utmost good-humour, though many came forward with—‘Oh, do give me your ticket: oh, do now, just for once.’ Inside the outer barrier was a second, within which people walked, and whence they saw. I was indignant at first at not being admitted farther, but when I saw the Archbishop of Canterbury refused, was quite contented to share the fate of the first subject in the realm. However, eventually we were both passed into the immense space where the children were playing, not apparently the least over-done by the hot sun, or tired from having been on the move since 10 A.M., and having been provided, on arriving, with nothing but a bag containing a meat-pie, a bun (they say the buns would have reached from London to Brentford in a direct line), and an orange, with instructions to put the bag in their pockets when done with! Each of the 30,000 children also had a ‘Jubilee mug’ of Doulton ware. Every now and then volleys of tiny coloured balloons were sent up, like flights of bright birds floating away into the soft blue, and, as the royalties arrived, a great yellow balloon, with several people in its car, bore a huge ‘Victoria’ skywards.

“I found my cousin Lady Normanton lost, and stayed with her and a very pleasant ex-governess of Princess May, most indignant at her adored pupil having received no Order out of the numbers distributed. Between half-past four and five life-guards heralded a long procession of carriages, with the Indian princes, the foreign queens and kings, and our own royal family in force. A number of Eastern chieftains were riding six abreast, and very like Bluebeard one or two of them looked. Finally came the Queen, smiling, good and gracious beyond words, and with a wonderful reception everywhere. ‘I have made Socialist speeches for years,’ said one man, ‘and the last two days have shown me how useless they have been, and always must be in this country.’

“As the Queen passed up the green drive by which we were standing, all the 30,000 children sang ‘God save the Queen,’ and a thanksgiving hymn, which I think must have been, not for their tea (for they never had any), but for hers, which I hope she enjoyed out of the great fourgons we saw arriving, and must much have needed. All the royal ladies’-maids and other servants also passed by in carriages on their way to the station, by the Queen’s wish, that they should share in the sight.

“Having escorted Lady Normanton to the safe solitudes of Wilton Place, I rushed off to Windsor, arriving at nine. Certainly the grandeur of the London illuminations paled before the intense picturesqueness of those in the old royal city. I had no time to go to Eton, where the Queen had entered—like Queen Elizabeth—under an arch on the battlements of which Eton boys were lustily trumpeting. But the bridge, brilliant in electric light, also ended in an arch, kept dark itself, beyond which every house in the steep, sharply-winding street was seen adorned with its own varied devices of coloured light, from basement to attics, whilst the walls were hung with scarlet draperies, and brilliant banners of scarlet and gold waved across the roadway.

“I stayed on the bridge to see the thousand Eton boys cross, marching in detachments, with white and blue uniforms alternately, carrying their (then unlighted) torches, and then went after them to the castle, where I was one of the few admitted, and pushed on at once to the inner court under the Queen’s apartments.

“Most unspeakably weird, picturesque, inspiring, beautiful, and glorious was the sight, when, with a burst of drums and trumpets, the wonderful procession emerged under the old gate of Edward III., headed by a detachment of the Blues, then the boys, six abreast, carrying lighted torches, till hundreds upon hundreds had filed in, singing splendidly ‘God save the Queen.’ All the bigger boys formed into figures of blazing light in the great court, weaving designs of light in their march—‘Welcome,’ ‘Victoria,’ &c., in radiant blaze of moving living illumination; whilst the little boys, each carrying a coloured Chinese lantern on a wand, ascended in winding chains of light the staircases on the steep hill of the Round Tower opposite the Queen’s window, till the slope was covered with brilliancy and colour. The little boys sang very sweetly in the still night their song of welcome, and then all the mass of the boys below, raising their flaming torches high into the air, shouted with their whole hearts and lungs, ‘Rule Britannia!’

“It was an unspeakably transporting scene, and I am sure that the beloved figure in the white cap seated in the wide-open central window felt it so, and was most deeply moved by the sight and sound of so much loyal and youthful chivalry.

“Then, in a great hush, she almost astonished them by leaving her place and suddenly reappearing in the open air in the courtyard amongst them, and making them a queenly and tender little speech in her clear beautiful voice—‘I do thank you so very very much,’ &c.

“You may imagine the hurrahs which followed, the frantic emotion and applause whilst she called up and spoke to Lord Ampthill and one or two other boys whose parents had been especial friends.

“And then, in figures of light from their torches, as she reappeared at the window, the vast assembly formed the word ‘Good-night.’ Nothing could possibly have been more picturesquely pretty.

“Immediately afterwards the whole of the great central tower was flooded with red light, which seemed to turn it into blood, and I went with J. Dundas to the North Terrace, whence we looked down upon the fireworks—fire-fountains, comets, cascades of golden, sapphire, and amethyst rain.

“June 23, 1887.—Sat at breakfast by Sir George Dasent. ‘Did you ever know,’ he said, ‘the late old Bengal tiger at Asbburnham?[453] He asked me down there, and when I went he said, “You are here, sir, under false pretences. I have discovered that you are a member, sir, of that most disreputable society called the ‘Historic MSS. Commission:’ they are a society of ruffians, sir.”—“Surely, Lord Ashburnham, a great many eminent persons are members of that society,—Lord Salisbury, for instance, surely he is not a ruffian.”—“Yes, sir, he is a ruffian when he is acting for that society: and you, sir, you are a ruffian too—you tamper with title-deeds, sir,” and it was quite in vain to assure him that our society had no interest whatever in title-deeds of the last hundred years.

“‘I told Lady Ashburnham what he said, and she answered, “You must not mind: he is the most kind-hearted of men, but he has—his savage moments!”

“‘Afterwards he was very kind to me, and showed me all his treasures, especially his glorious Anglo-Saxon MSS.

“‘When I was at Hornby, I went up with the present Duchess of Leeds into a tower into which a former Duchess had carried a quantity of books, because, she said, “there were enough downstairs.” They had been taken up at haphazard, and some of them were of extraordinary value: there were wonderful editions of Aretino there, excessively improper, but nobody could read them. The tower had been open to the bats and owls, and when we took out the books, many of them were matted together in one solid mass: they bore the name of Hewit Osborne, the apprentice who jumped from London Bridge to save the life of his master’s daughter, and, afterwards marrying her, founded the family; he was a great Italian scholar.’”

“July 1.—Sir G. Dasent says that the late Queen of Sweden said to him that she could not imagine how it was that her eldest son had done all he could to alienate the affections of his people, and was adored, and the second all he could to conciliate them, and was detested. The eldest (the late King) was a Hercules. ‘His Majesty will rise at 3 A.M. to-morrow and will ride thirty miles (to Gripsholm), and wishes you to accompany him,’ was a frequent announcement to guests and courtiers; and when they reached Gripsholm, all was prepared for a great elk-hunt, and when that was finished, and they were gasping for rest, came the announcement, ‘His Majesty will rise at 2 A.M. to-morrow, and will ride forty miles,’ &c.

“Luncheon with Lady Stradbroke, who told me that as she was walking up Grosvenor Crescent during the illuminations, a group of country people were inspecting the devices. ‘Ah!’ she heard one of them explain, ‘V. R.—that’s for very respectable.’”

“July 3.—Yesterday was very hot—a hotter scirocco, said Roman Mr. Story, than any he had felt in Italy. There was a great volunteer review, which brought the usual picturesque procession of the Queen, with her glittering life-guards, through the Park.

“On Friday I went with Florentia Hughes to a great garden-party of the Baroness Coutts at Holly Lodge—a most lovely place, with steep hilly gardens and splendid herbaceous flowers.”

“July 6.—Yesterday I went with the Indian princes by special train to Woburn. Everything was arranged en grand seigneur—nothing to be paid anywhere—a train with saloon carriages, in which we floated into Bedfordshire without stopping, and thirty-two carriages, beautifully equipped, sent to meet us at the station. In one of these I drove through the lanes lined with dog-roses with Lord Normanby and Miss Grosvenor. ‘I am always mistaken for Princess Mary, so must keep up her character,’ said the latter, and bowed incessantly, right and left, to the village crowds, who were quite delighted with her. We had a long wait before luncheon, Europe and Asia separated by a great gulf which no one seemed able to bridge over. Lady Tavistock did her best, but the party hung fire, and, though a magnificent banquet, with all the gold plate displayed, took part of the time, there was not much to animate us, and we lounged on the lawn, tried to be agreeable and were not, and admired the beautiful Indians, with their gorgeous dresses and languid eyes, till another chain of carriages took us back through the Ampthill woods to another station.”

“July 7.—Miss Holford was married this afternoon to Mr. Benson at St. George’s before an immense crowd. There was a great breakfast afterwards—though so late—at Dorchester House, where all London flocked through the rooms to admire the presents, which were indescribably splendid. The scene on the beautiful white marble staircase was charming, especially when the bride went away, her father and mother leading her down on either side, and all the tiny bridesmaids and pages—nieces and nephews between six and seven—gambolling in front, with huge baskets of dark red roses. Above, under the circular arches, between the pillars of coloured marbles, and against a golden wall background, the overhanging galleries were filled with all the most beautiful women in London leaning over the balustrades.

“Dined at the Speaker’s—lovely lights sparkling along the shore, and the splash of the river and distant hum only making one feel more the silence of night. We sat out upon the haunted terrace afterwards—such stars, and a moon rising behind the towers of Lambeth.”

“June 30.—On Saturday I went to Osterley, meeting beautiful Lady Katherine Vane [454] with her brother and sister at the Victoria Station, and going down with them. Troops of people emerged from the train close to the gate in the park wall, and we all flocked together along the gravel walks through the hot meadows to the house, where the shade was very refreshing. Lady Jersey was receiving under the portico, and groups of Indian princes with their interpreters were busy over strawberries and cream in the corners of the great stone hall. I went, with several people who had an equally tender remembrance of the kind old Duchess of Cleveland, who lived there so long, to visit the little library where she always sat in winter—quite deserted now, and all the books sold—and then joined the many groups of people on the lawns and the green glade which ends in a porticoed summer-house like a Claude-Lorraine picture. Others went in a boat upon the lake. The Jerseys pressed me to stay to dinner with Lord and Lady Muncaster; so Lady M. and I both got a volume of a very dull novel, over which we had a pleasant rest when all the crowd were gone. Never were such airy people as the Jerseys, a line of six windows open on one side and two doors on the other all dinner-time. Lady Hilda Brodrick and one of Lady Jersey’s brothers were my neighbours, and very pleasant.

“On Sunday I had luncheon at Lord Breadalbane’s, to have a quiet sight of my Prince. It is a wonderful house—deeply coved ceilings with frescoes like those in an old Venetian palace, and wide spaces round the outside planted with groves of plane-trees. The Breadalbanes have thought it worth while to make a new dining-room (though sacrificing two old ceilings), as they have taken all the rest of the lease, after which the house reverts (it is Harcourt House) to the Harcourts of Nuneham. The Duchess of Roxburgh, an Indian prince, and several other ladies dropped in, so there were three tables for luncheon. In the middle, Lady Breadalbane [455] got up and went round to each table, almost to each guest, to see that they had all they could possibly want, and to say the pleasantest things to them in the prettiest way: she certainly is a queen of hostesses. Afterwards my Prince came to me, and we walked up and down upon the terrace. He was most affectionate, as he always is when we meet, and talked of all people and things as if we had never parted, but reproached me much with never coming to him in Norway, urging very much that I should write at any time, or even telegraph that I was coming for any length of stay. Some day, when I am free from my French work, I will go. He evidently wished that I should say something to Lady Breadalbane of the great difference her excessive kindness had made during all this visit to England, so I was very glad to do so. ‘We have done our best,’ she said, ‘and I am very glad it has gone off so well; but it has not been my doing, but all owing to those who have helped me.’ The Indian had brought a suit of flannels with him in a carpet-bag, and changed into them, and when my Prince went to get ready to play at tennis with him, I came away.

“On Monday (27th) we had our large drawing-party down the river. Meeting at Westminster Bridge, we all took tickets to ‘Cherry-Tree Yard’ at Rotherhithe. Just as we were going to embark, the ticket-man very good-naturedly emerged, and coming to me said, ‘I do not know if you are aware, sir, that you are taking all these ladies into a most rough and dangerous part of London.’ I said we were only going to draw at the wharf, when he was satisfied. But when we arrived, they would not let us stay on the wharf. A man said, ‘I know of a most respectable public-house where you can go: all the artists draw from thence.’ And there we all sat, in great shade and comfort, under a wide verandah, directly overhanging the river and overlooking the Pool, with all the fine shipping which comes up to that picturesque reach of the Thames—‘Dutch Crawls’ inclusive.

“I dined with the Eustace Cecils, meeting, amongst others, Professor and Mrs. Flower, of whom the former was holding Arthur Stanley’s hand when he died.

“At a quarter to five yesterday I went to Buckingham Palace—no string, no crowd, no difficulty. By my ticket I had to enter through the hall and rooms beyond it—the most picturesque way. The terrace was already full of people, but the space is so vast there never could be a crowd, and the scene was beautiful, looking down upon the sunlit lawns, the lake and fountain, and the thousands of gaily-dressed people—the splendid uniforms and lustrous robes and sparkling jewels of the Indians glistening amongst them. It was impossible to find any one one looked for, but one came upon hundreds of unexpected friends. Very few young men seemed to have been asked, but there were galaxies of pretty girls. One ancient Indian chief in white, with a flowing beard and a robe of cloth of gold over his shoulders, was told he might salute the Queen. He said he must do it after his fashion, which was to wipe the dust from her feet with his handkerchief, and then kiss it.

“The beloved Queen, though very hot and tired (she had been before to revisit her birthplace at Kensington), looked very sweet and smiling, and walked indefatigably from side to side of the long avenues of people, shaking hands with different ladies. There was the usual procession of princes and princesses, including the white-haired Duchess of Mecklenbourg and the ever-pretty group of Hesse princesses. The Princess Beatrice’s baby assisted at the party in her perambulator, pushed by a nurse in white. A good deal of my time was taken up by the Duchess of Cleveland insisting that she could have no refreshment but lemonade, and that being quite a quarter of a mile off; but I could not get it after all, through people ten deep in the refreshment tents. Some of the guests were rowed by the Queen’s boatmen in their gorgeous mediaeval costume upon the lake, with very pretty effect. The palace is very handsome on the garden side.”

“July 8, 1887.—I made rather friends at the Speaker’s with his eldest boy, Willie Peel, and walked about with him on the terrace. He is in all the first flush of people-seeing, and thinks everybody full of originality; yet how few ever say more than something they have heard or read long ago, and dug up out of some remote corner of their brain. He is, however, delightful, and being evidently ambitious, will some day be very distinguished, I should think.

“How often one wishes one could enter society again, with one’s past conversation like a white page, that where one could not say good of any one, one had always kept silence. I sympathise with General Gordon saying that one reason why he never desired to enter social life was the very great difficulty of knowing people and not discussing others.”

“July 9.—At Lambeth garden-party I sat with ——, whose marriage, an admirable one, was quelched by worldly motives on the other side, sadly, long ago. She spoke of the married happiness of her brilliant and popular namesake ‘Yes, life for her is always delightful now; but I—but I!’—‘Where do you live?’—‘I don’t live, I exist.’

“I sat at dinner by Lady C, a very singular religious ‘talker,’ who plunged at once into—‘I trust you are interested in the good work.’—‘What good work?’—‘Raising the classes,’ and so on, and so on, endless well-meant nonsense, in very grand expressions, till I longed to say to her, and did, in other words, what Madame de Sévigné said to some one, ‘Thicken me your religion a little; it is evaporating altogether by being subtilised.’ I tried to dwell upon the really higher life (for she had talked of her own neglected education), of teaching herself first as much as possible, that she might help herself to teach her young son. I suppose that, for her, would be the higher life. How much, in this generation, ‘religious people’ are apt to forget John Wyckliff’s motto, ‘He who liveth best, prayeth best.’”

“Sunday, July 10.—Sat in the afternoon in the garden at Lowther Lodge, seeing a long diorama of people drop in and have tea.

“Afterwards I ascended the great brick mansions close by to see Mrs. Procter (Barry Cornwall’s widow), who is not the least aged in mind, and apparently not in body. People thought she would be broken by her daughter’s death; but constitutions, especially of the old, seldom take any notice of heart-blows, though there is something touching in the way she speaks of her lost daughters as ‘my Edith,’ ‘my Adelaide.’ People call her ‘Our Lady of Bitterness,’ but her words have no touch of sharpness. No one is more agreeable still: no one has more boundless conversational powers: indeed, she often says of herself that ‘talking is meat, drink, and clothing’ to her. Her sense of humour is exquisite; she never speaks bad grammar herself, so she can never tolerate it in others. She wears a front of blonde cendré, and boldly speaks of it as a wig. Mr. Browning came in, and they were most amusing together. ‘My wife thought you would not perhaps like to meet Mr. Labouchere, Mrs. Procter?’ said Mr. Thompson of the Pall Mall Gazette, rather interrogatively. ‘Your wife was quite right: had I found, on coming to dine with you, that Mr. Labouchere was expected, I should have been compelled to ask you at once to call me a cab.’—‘Ah! Labby, Labby!—Hie, cabby, cabby!!’ cried Mr. Browning in the quaintest way.[456] Mr. Browning goes to see Mrs. Procter every Sunday afternoon, giving up all else for it.

“Mrs. Procter has the almost lost art of conversation in the fullest degree. Lord Houghton recollects how she was asked to meet Macaulay at one of Rogers’ breakfasts. Afterwards she said to Rogers, ‘But where was Macaulay?’—‘Why, he sat opposite to you!’—‘Was that him? Why, I always heard he was such a tremendous talker.’—‘So he is,’ said Rogers; ‘but you see I talked so much myself, I only left one opening, and that you took.’”

“July 11.—Dined with the Seymour Hughes’s, where General Higginson was full of indignation about the mismanagement of royal invitations—that it was impossible for the Lord Chamberlain to do it alone, but that he might have a committee—three or four men of the Kenneth Howard kind—who would see that the right people were asked. The Prince of Wales had said to one lady, ‘I did not see you at the garden-party,’ and she had answered, ‘No, I was not asked; but my dressmaker was.’”

“July 15.—Dined with Mrs. Portman—a very large party. She told me that, close to her country-house, a labourer had watched some boys bathing, and thought how delightful was the way in which they dived, floated, &c., and, though he could not swim, he determined that, on the very first chance, he would enjoy the same amusement. Soon after, he was sent to cut rushes with two other men. When his work was finished, he remembered his wish, and did not even wait to undress, but, pulling off his boots, jumped into the water with his clothes on. Soon he got into a hole and began to sink. He called for help, and another of the men jumped in, and was sucked into the hole also, and so the third. Mr. Fitzhardinge Portman came up when it was all over, and said, ‘I will ride on and break it to Mrs. W.,’ the wife of one of the men. As he reached the cottage, Mrs. W. came out to meet him and said, ‘I know what you have come to tell me, sir. Poor W. is dead.’—‘How can you know it?’—‘Why, sir, just now my little girl came running in all awestruck, and said that she had met a figure all in white in the wood-path down which she always ran to meet her father; and then I knew it was a warning.’

“There was a beautiful ball at Lowther Lodge—the Princess Christian there and the garden illuminated, and looking, in that dress, as big as the Green Park. I sat out with Lady Strathmore, full of all the discomforts of a great inheritance—such endless details to be filled up: such endless new responsibilities; and just what seems the wrong things always left away.

“I heard such a charming story of little Jane Smith the other day. Her nurse told her to say her prayers. She wouldn’t; she said God wouldn’t expect her to. ‘But He always expects it,’ said the nurse. ‘No, He doesn’t,’ replied little Jane, ‘for I told Him the other day I couldn’t say them, I was so sleepy, and He said, ‘Don’t mention it, Miss Smith.’”

“July 15.—Rain on St. Swithin’s Day. Lady Lyndhurst says, ‘Do you know that he was three times Lord Chancellor of England, and that the only man who has filled that office three times since was my lord.’

“Went to see Mrs. Ross,[457] a breeze from Castagnuolo in London. She was full of the enchantment of a visit to Lacaita at Leucaspide, and of a tour she had made to Otranto; to Lecce, where all the professors had met to receive ‘una donna molta istruita’ at the museum, where she had not known anything whatever of the subjects they discoursed upon, but, by judicious silence and an occasional ‘si,’ had now the highest opinions; to Manfredonia, where the inn is now kept by one Don Michele, to whom the would-be sojourners have to be formally presented, when he accepts or rejects them, with ‘mi piace’ or ‘non mi piace.’ On one of these excursions she heard the sound of an instrument hitherto unknown to her from a hollow below the road, and going down, found a boy playing on a long pipe of birch-bark. ‘Cosa è questo?’—‘Il fischio della primavera;’ and she bought it for ten centimes—the sweetest of music and of instruments; but it only lasts a week, and can only be obtained with the spring.

“Afterwards I sat with Miss Seymour, who talked of the political state of France, and of Kisseloff saying, ‘Ils se croient toujours malades quand ils n’ont pas la fièvre.’

“Then to Mrs. Liddell (of Christ-Church). Princess Christian had just been there for a committee for women’s work. Mrs. Liddell said she went about immensely amongst the poor of Windsor, and had a district. Once, when she went for a month to Berlin, she said to one of her poor women that she was going away, but that she would be well looked after, as she had got some one to take her place. ‘Yes, but it will not be the same to me; for I shall have no one to tell my troubles to.’

“Mrs. Liddell had some capital oil-portraits. She asked who I thought they were by. I supposed by young Richmond. ‘No; by my daughter Violet.’”

“July 16.—Luncheon with Lady Knightley and then to Osterley—a soft warm day; the flowers, from the long drought, quite magnificent under the dark cedars by the lake.

said old Lord Ebury, with whom I walked about, and who begged Miss Grosvenor not to leave him till she had found him an innamorata; which she eventually did in the person of Lady Balfour of Burleigh, very pretty in her attentions to the old man. Then the Duchess of Mecklenbourg came, and also sat under the trees. Lady Wynford brought Mr. Graham Vivian and me home, and I went to a Cinderella ball at Lady Guinness’s—quite splendid; and though it began at ten and ended at twelve, very crowded and successful, showing that the introduction of an earlier hour for balls would be perfectly easy.”

“July 17.—Met Mr. Reeve, the editor of the Quarterly. Mr. Tedder reminded me of Mark Pattison’s speaking (in the Academy) of ‘those old three-deckers—the Edinburgh and the Quarterly; the latter of which sets to sea under the guidance, apparently, of the Ancient Mariner.’

“I had luncheon yesterday with Mrs. Cyril Flower, the most amusingly decided of women, and met young Lady Wenlock, pining to return to India, where she enjoyed so much the languid life, or rather, as she called it, the time for thought which the heat gave her.

“A most pleasant dinner at Charlie Balfour’s, meeting a group of real friends—Guy Sebright and his nice wife, Basil Levett and his sweet Lady Margaret, and Sir John Maxwell, who is most simple, clever, and pleasant,—delightful to be with. Minnie Balfour was full of Mrs. Slingsby, whose curious old house in Yorkshire is so strangely haunted. One hot night, very late, when her husband was away, Mrs. Slingsby sat out on the terrace, and below her, in the park, saw the most brilliant light apparently burning on the grass. She went down to it, reached it, and it disappeared. Exactly that day year, she watched for it and saw it again. That time she went behind it, and saw it between herself and the house.

“Lady Heathcote Amaury, whom I took down to dinner, said, ‘You know young Lady Onslow was a daughter of Lord Gardner. She told me that her father rented a place called Chilton from Colonel ——. When he took it, Colonel —— said, “As you are taking the place for some time, I think perhaps it is my duty to tell you that the state bedroom is haunted. A young ancestor of mine, dressed in a blue coat and breeches, with a rose in his button-hole, comes in, arranges his hair at the mirror, looks at the occupant of the room, throws up the window, and vanishes through it. He does nobody any harm, and is excessively pleasant-looking, still I ought not to let you take the place without telling you.”

“‘Lord Gardner said he did not care a bit; but the state bedroom had very remarkable furniture,—a magnificent bed with curtains looped up by gilt cherubs, and, after Lady Gardner heard the story, she got leave to change the furniture, and the old hangings were carefully put away, and modern furniture used instead.

“‘Soon after some cousins of Lord Gardner, two ladies belonging to the elder branch of the family, came from Scotland to stay, and were put into that room. When they came down next morning, Lord Gardner asked the elder if she had rested well after her journey. She answered, “Yes, indeed, and I have had the most delightful dream: I dreamt that the room I was in was furnished in the most beautiful way, with gilt cupids, hangings, &c.,—and really what I dreamt was so charming that I longed for you some time to be able to furnish the room just in that way. And then—I seemed to be awake, but of course I could not have been—I saw a young man of most beautiful countenance come into the room, dressed in a blue coat, &c., which was quite in keeping with the room, and he went up to the glass and arranged his hair, then he looked at me with a charming expression upon his face, but just when he seemed going to speak, and I was longing to know what he would say, he threw open the window, and disappeared through it.”

“‘Lady Onslow said, “You may imagine the breathless interest with which we listened.”’

“July 17.—Supper at the Miss Hollands’. Met Mr. Turner, rather a remarkable American. The sight of white roses made him say, ‘A white rose comes home to me, Miss Holland, and I will tell you why. Many years ago, in Philadelphia, I met a party of cousins, and we all spent the evening together. A young cousin of mine—very pretty—was there, who was lately married, and I was very glad to see her, and we talked much together—so much together all evening that it was a matter of comment—of foolish comment. When we parted, she gave me a white rose, and she said, “You must keep that rose as long as we live.” I took the rose home and pressed it. From time to time I heard from her afterwards, but I never saw her, and I forgot the rose. Long afterwards I was in Philadelphia again, and in the evening, opening a book, something fell out on the floor: it was the white rose. I felt it an omen, and I said to myself, “It is long since I heard of her; something has happened. I will just go round to Uncle Joe’s and inquire.” I went, and found that Uncle Joe knew nothing; but whilst I was there the news arrived that she was dead.

“‘I believe in such things. I possess a looking-glass that I have long had in my keeping. One day, there seemed no reason why, I saw it slide from the table: it fell. The corner was broken off. I had it mended. Almost immediately a cable was brought in announcing the death of a near relation. Some time after it fell again. The other corner was broken off. I said, “What is going to happen now?” The next day I heard of the deaths of three intimate friends. So I said, “It will never do to go on like this,” and I had the glass sawn down, and so framed and padded with india-rubber at the back, that, if it fell, it was scarcely possible it could be broken. Well, that—stopped it.’

“Mr. Turner gave a very curious account of the early state of many American settlements—that the rivers or any running stream generally marked the track for civilisation. It was easier to make a path along them than anywhere else; a road followed, eventually a railway. Along one of these tracks, many years ago, came annually a venerable old man. People expected him—watched for his coming. He always came from the east, and he was never observed to return: yet he came again from the east in the following year. He was a kind of primitive missionary, bringing Bibles, which he cut up, leaving parts in the different houses he passed. Thus he would leave the Gospel of St. John one year, and the next would call for it, and leave the Acts in its place. He had a pocket-full of apple-seed, and wherever he stopped in the middle of the day, he made a hole with his stick, and dropped one of his seeds into it. People called him ‘Old John Apple-seed.’ Mr. Turner had seen many fine apple-trees along the banks of streams, of which it was remembered that they were planted by old John Apple-seed.

“Mr. Turner described how primitive many of the early lines of railway were, made at the rate of three miles a week. At Harrisburg several of these lines met, and it was a very dangerous point. A poor half-witted man found his vocation in life by joining trains at this point, and running in front screaming, ‘The engine is coming: the engine is coming.’ And thus he would run for miles, keeping just in front of the train, and if he saw a child, would seize it and throw it out of the way, and would often seize a woman by the shoulder, and would almost lift her off the line; but at last, after many years, whilst saving another, he was killed himself.”

“July 18.—A party at Lady Bantry’s, where Lady Helen Stewart recited a poem much like the above story. Dined with the Grants. Old Lady Frances Higginson [458] frightened a mincing curate out of his life who said to her, ‘Will you take some potatoes?’ by saying in her most abrupt way, ‘God bless my soul, aren’t you going to give me some?’”

“July 20.—At luncheon at the Higginsons’, I met the Storys from Rome, very happy in London, but ‘it is surely a bad arrangement of Nature,’ he said, ‘that one should have so many coats and only one body. I should like to have several—a body to work with; and a young smart body to go into society with; and the old body, which always sleeps so well, to go to bed with.’

“At luncheon at Lady Airlie’s I met Henry Cowper,[459] Mr. Morley, Lady Tweeddale, and Miss Betty Ponsonby. Henry Cowper talked of the friendship between Bright and Tuke. They had always been intimate. Then they loved the same woman. In his great friendship Tuke gave way, and the lady became the first Mrs. John Bright. Afterwards they were greater friends, and saw more of each other than ever: Bright would do anything for Tuke. But the conversation was chiefly about Gladstone, giving instances of his marvellous personal charm—of his way of telling things, bearing out Goethe’s words—

“Tea with Mrs. Ford—always interesting. She talked much of Dr. Morell Mackenzie—well known to her. When he arrived at Berlin, he found six great doctors waiting for him at the palace. They took him to a room filled with knives, &c. ‘What are these for?’—‘For your choice in operating upon the Crown Prince.’—‘But I can only operate upon him in one way, that is my own;’ and he explained it. Four of the doctors agreed with what he said, two violently opposed it. He was taken at once to Bismarck, who said, ‘Do not consult me: ask me as many questions as you like about la haute politique, but about this I can say nothing.’ Then he was taken to the Emperor, to whom he explained his views. The Emperor listened to all, and then only said quietly—turning to those who were with him—‘Let the Englishman act.’ He then went at once to the Crown Prince. He performed the operation with his own forceps, steeped in cocotine, which deadens, absolutely paralyses the throat, and seizing the wart, dragged—not cut—it out. It seemed like a terrible responsibility for England, as if the life of the Crown Prince was in its hands.

“Mr. Browning described how he had been asked to dinner by two elderly ladies—sisters. He did not know them, but it was very kind of them to ask him, and he went. He met a very singular party at their house—Gladstone, Mrs. Thistlethwayte, and others. Going down to dinner, the lady who fell to his share suddenly said to him, ‘You are a poet, aren’t you?’—‘Well, people are sometimes kind enough to say that I am.’—‘Oh, don’t mind my having mentioned it: you know Lord Byron was a poet!’

“Browning is unlike Tennyson; he does not write from inspiration, but by power of work. He says he sets himself a certain number of lines to write in a day, and he writes them. Sometimes he says, ‘To-morrow morning I will write a sonnet; and he writes it. Nevertheless he is always greater in aspiration than achievement. Mr. Carlyle could not bear his poems. ‘What did the fellow mean by leaving that cart-load of stones at my door?’ he said to Alfred Tennyson when Browning left one of his poems there.

“London is now always asking itself ‘What is the cause of this long drought?’—‘Because we have had fifty years’ rain (reign).’

“Went to the Halifax’s in the evening to meet the Indian princes, and then to Lady Lamington’s party, made exceedingly pretty by its arcaded garden on the roof.”

“Langleybury, August 2.—I am staying with Harry Loyd, who at twenty-six is certainly as near perfection as any one can possibly be in every relation of life—son, brother, friend, landlord, county magnate. His mother and four sisters live with him, and their hospitalities are boundless.”

“August 28.—Little Holmhurst has been full of summer guests—gentle Lady Donoughmore and Lady Margaret Hamilton, Lady Airlie and Lady Griselda Ogilvie, Basil Levett and his Lady Margaret, Lady Sherborne, and lastly George Jolliffe and Lady Bloomfield, the latter a constant ripple of interesting anecdote.”

“Tatton Park, Sept. 2, 1887.—The large party in this large pleasant hospitable house has included the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Benson, with their daughter—the ‘modest philosopher,’ as Miss Egerton aptly calls her. We have been to Manchester to see the exhibition of all the works of artists of Victoria’s reign—a very fine collection, from the vapid works of Etty and the hard commonplaceness of the earlier Landseers to the noble ‘Christ or Diana’ of Long, which struck most of us as the grandest and most expressive work amongst such multitudes. There is a curious contrast between the last and this Lady Egerton, who cannot enjoy life enough herself, or contribute enough to making it enjoyable for others.

“We have just been across the park to the old Hall, where a fine timber roof remains, very richly carved; and we have driven to Tabley and its old isleted hall in the lake, so mysteriously beautiful, which the family abandoned two hundred and fifty years ago, leaving all its contents in the deserted house, so that you still see the open spinnet with the mouldering keys, the lace half worked on the cushion, the flax half spun on the distaff in the little low rooms, with their carved furniture and fireplaces, opening, in two stories, around the great timbered hall.

“Raglan Somerset is here, unspeakably funny, so décousu in his conversation, which never stops for an instant. I like also Lord and Lady Rayleigh: he is learned, but perfectly simple, and she, née Balfour, is thoroughly pleasant and unsophisticated. Miss Mary Egerton, very handsome, with her grey hair and youthful animated countenance, is a delightful addition to the party. But the great, the real pleasure to me, has been finding Derek Keppel (Lord Bury’s second son and brother-in-law of the only daughter of the house) almost domesticated here: I like him so very much, certainly better than any one I know in the same degree. It is Sunday, and we have been to the new church at Aston, built by Lord and Lady Egerton without an architect, and so pleasant to look upon inside that an old man said, ‘Why, sir, one can be cheerful in it, even when one is saying one’s prayers.’”

“Woodlands, Glassbury, Sept. 7.—I came here through the lovely Church Stretton country, stopping at picturesque Shrewsbury on the way to stay with the Bishop of Lichfield and Augusta. Yesterday we went by rail through the beautiful but drippingly wet valleys to visit the Venables near Builth. Our host was the well-known and severe critic in the Saturday—a pleasant old man to visitors, but evidently awful to the younger members of his family.

“Augusta had many interesting reminiscences of Lord Beaconsfield. One day, at luncheon, she offered him the mustard. ‘I never take mustard,’ he replied in his sepulchral voice. ‘Oh, don’t you?’ she said airily. ‘No,’ he continued in solemnest tones. ‘There are three things I have never used: I have never touched mustard; I have never had a watch; and I have never made use of an umbrella.’—‘Well,’ said Augusta, ‘I can understand the mustard—that is a mere matter of taste; but surely going without the other things must have been sometimes rather inconvenient.’—‘And why should I want them?’ continued Disraeli more sepulchrally than ever. ‘I live under the shadow of Big Ben, and there is a clock in every room of the House of Commons, so that I cannot possibly require a watch; and as I always go about in a close carriage, I can never want an umbrella.’ Disraeli was always full of these small affectations.”

“Woodlands, Sept. 8.—This is a charming visit, and the place is delightful—close to the glistening Wye, with green hills—‘mountains’ in Welsh—folding around, exquisite in the soft haze of early morning.

“Augusta has been giving an interesting account of Champlatreux in France, belonging to the Duc d’Ayen, a representative of the De Noailles family. In the château is preserved the precious volume of the ‘Imitation of Christ,’ which the young Duchesse de Noailles used in the prison of the Luxembourg, where she devoted herself to keeping up the courage of her mother-in-law and daughter. When the three generations of the House of Noailles were summoned together to the scaffold, the Duchesse was reading aloud to her fellow-prisoners from the chapter of the ‘Chemin de la Croix.’ She turned down the page at that point and gave the book to one of her companions in prison, begging her, if she ever escaped, to convey it, as a memorial, to the De Noailles family.”

“Sept. 10.—Two pleasant days with Graham Loyd in his charming cottage at Sketty near Swansea, and a great cementing of friendship with him. The first day he took me by a terrible path overhanging an unprotected chasm opposite the Mumbles. All the population of Swansea seem to pour out to drink in the neighbourhood of the Mumbles. ‘You want to close the public-houses at Swansea, that men may get drunk at the Mumbles,’ said Judge Bradwin, in opposing the Sunday-closing movement. At the same time he said that he did not see any more reason why men should call beer a ‘pernicious liquor’ than that they should call water a ‘drowning fluid.’

“We have been to luncheon at Clyne, where Graham Vivian has an unkempt but beautiful place, full of fine Italian treasures, and have dined at Singleton with Lady Hussey Vivian.[460] Besides this, we have had a wonderful drive, by heath, sandhill, and precipice, through the strange district of Gower, where all the houses are whitewashed, and where there are constant wrecks on the rock-girt coast, though a great bell tolls eerily through the night on a sandbank, with the waves for its ringers.”

“Sept. 12.—Two days at the Deanery at Llandaff, where family furniture and pictures—familiar from Alderley, Norwich, Canterbury, Oxford days—give a homelike aspect.

“Kate said that when she was in Madeira last year, a Mr. Husband, a dentist from Hull, was staying in the same hotel. She had heard that he had seen a ghost there, and she asked him about it. It was only on being very much pressed that he told how that one night, when he was in his bed in the hotel, a young man in lawn-tennis dress came in, stood at the foot of the bed, and pointed with his finger at the pillow. Mr. H. was not frightened, only annoyed, and asked the young man what he wanted. He did not speak, and continued to point at the pillow. At last Mr. Husband was so irritated that he said, ‘Well, if you will neither speak nor go away, take that,’ and dealt him a blow, but his hand only seemed to sink into cold icy vapour, and the apparition vanished.

“Next day Mr. Husband told the landlord of the hotel what had happened, when he said, ‘Your story is very extraordinary, because a young man, who was staying here for some time, and was treated by a doctor for a very slight ailment, died in that bed under very suspicious circumstances; and, as long as he was about, that young man was never seen out of lawn-tennis dress.’

“Afterwards Mr. Husband heard of that young Mr. Hyndeman from other people in Madeira. They remembered him perfectly. He was very silent and shunned all society, and he was never out of lawn-tennis dress.”

“Sept. 16.—A happy visit at cheerful merry Hardwick, which unites the charms of an interesting house, of exquisite gardens, and most varied and amusing society. There is a curious picture there of Elizabeth Drury reclining on her side with her hand under her head, which perhaps led to the story that she died of a box on the ear. She was a great friend of Wotton and of Donne, who wrote verses to her, and also her epitaph.”

“Sept. 19.—A visit to the Ordes at Hopton, in the flat marshy country near Yarmouth—a happy united family, with a very beautiful eldest daughter, Evelyn. Hopton village is the Blunderstone of ‘David Copperfield.’ Charlie Orde took me to Caister, the grandest fragment of a castle I ever saw—so very lofty a tower rising abruptly from the edge of a very wide moat. On Sunday we saw the great low-lying lake of Flitton, which belongs to one of the Buxtons.”

“Sept. 22.—On Monday I went to Sculthorpe, near Fakenham, where I saw the site of the old manor-house, part of the property which came to Bishop Hare through his marriage with Mary-Margaret Alston. It has the odd name of Hos Tendis. Only the foundation-walls exist now, with remains of the moat, overhung with old apple-trees. The church is a very fine one, and the existing manor-house, Cranmer, is an exceedingly handsome, pleasant house inside. Sir Laurence Jones, who lives there, had brought out quantities of old Hare and Alston deeds to show me: it was odd to see them there, but they had been sold with the property.

“My kind host, the Rector, Herbert Jones, the squire’s uncle, was the picture of old-fashioned courtesy. His wife, a Gurney, sister of Mrs. Orde at Hopton, is well known for her archaeological writings. They took me, with their niece Miss Laura Troubridge and her betrothed, Adrian Hope, to the beautiful old brick and terra-cotta house of Wolterton, with a very fine gateway.

“Yesterday we went to Houghton, in a well-timbered park—a house full of stately magnificence. The present Lord Cholmondeley has sold many of its treasures, but, though much has been taken away, it is especially interesting because nothing has been added since the time of Sir Robert Walpole. George, Lord Walpole, destroyed the grand staircase of the house, so that you now have to enter through the basement, instead of in state by the grand hall on the first floor, where Sir Robert and his companions used to carouse, and where the chairs which they used still remain, with the rings in the ceiling which supported the scales for weighing deer. The pictures are interesting—Sir Robert over and over again, with his beloved first wife, Catherine Shorter, and his inferior second wife Maria Skerret; his daughter and heiress, who brought the place to the Cholmondeleys; and his sister Dorothy, who still walks as a ghost at Rainham, where she was the wife of Lord Townshend, who is said to have walled her up in a spot where bones have been found, supposed to be hers.

“In one of the drawing-rooms is a glorious picture of the Duchess of Ancaster, who was sent to bring Princess Charlotte of Mecklenbourg-Strelitz to England when she came to marry George III. ‘Pug, pug, pug!’ cried the people when they saw her appearance as she was entering London. ‘Vat is dat they do say—poog?’ said the Princess, ‘vat means poog?’—‘Oh, that means, God bless your Majesty,’ promptly replied the Duchess, without the slightest hesitation. The pictures which are not portraits are wretched, chiefly bad copies.

“In the grounds is the little garden of Catherine, Lady Walpole, which in her time was surrounded by a yew hedge. Now the yews have grown into tall trees and are interweaving overhead above the little grassy circle.

“I came last night to the Locker-Lampsons at Cromer, finding Julia, Lady Jersey, Brandling, Lady Kathleen Bligh, and Rollo Russell here. To-day we have been to Blickling, where we found Lady Lothian and Lady Pembroke walking in the radiantly beautiful garden of the grand old house. Lady Lothian showed it all delightfully—the staircase, with its carved figures on the banisters; the tapestried rooms; the long library with a very rich ceiling, the room itself in exquisite harmony with its ranges of wonderful old books. At tea in the dining-room Baroness Coutts appeared, and many other unexpected persons dropped in.”

“Salisbury, Sept. 28.—A very delightful visit to Canon Douglas Gordon [461] and Lady Ellen, full of old-fashioned peculiarities and brimming over with real excellence. One son, George, is at home, a successful young architect, and two daughters, of whom the eldest is a good artist. The Canon is interesting in his recollections—amongst many others, of the Queen Dowager, whom, as Rector of Stanmore, he saw constantly; and a portrait of her with the last words she ever wrote beneath it—her gift to him—hangs over the drawing-room chimney-piece. Near it is a very old oil-picture of Balmoral, interesting because the sight of that picture first decided the Queen to buy the place, which she had not then visited: it also shows how exactly her large modern house follows the main lines of the old Scotch castle.

“Canon Gordon says that instantly after the Queen Dowager’s death, when they were all in tears, and all the servants were waiting in the hall for the last news of their mistress, they were startled by a tremendous knocking at the door and a trumpet blowing, and three men entered with the announcement, ‘We are the royal embalmers, and we are come to perform our duty!’ They had actually been waiting outside—waiting for the first announcement of the death. In this case, however, they were sent away, as Queen Adelaide had left especial orders that her body was not to be embalmed.

“In the Canonry garden here is a fine mulberry-tree. The only fact remembered about the old Canon who planted it is that whilst it was being placed in the ground the cathedral bell rang for service, and the gardener said, ‘You’ll be late for church, sir: the bell is ringing.’ To which the Canon rejoined, ‘Church be d—d; but I’ll see this mulberry planted.’ A lesson to be careful of what one says.

“Yesterday I went to Wilton in the pony-carriage with Miss Gordon, who left me there. Lady Pembroke [462] soon came in in her riding-habit, and took me at once through the beautiful brilliant gardens ending in the old building still called ‘Holbein’s Porch,’ though it is now far away from the house to which it once belonged. Then we walked on the sunny lawns swept by the massy branches of grand old cedars and intersected by three rivers, over one of which is a beautiful Palladian bridge like that at Prior Park.

“Somehow Lady Pembroke is a person with whom one begins to talk intimately very soon, and her own conversation is most original and delightful. But she spoke much of her wish that religion was ‘not so very odd,’—of her intense craving to know something, anything tangible, about a future state. She had been seeing the Roman Mr. Story lately, who has been much amongst spiritualists, had heard speaking spirits, and had the very utmost faith in them. The spirits all confirmed faith in a future state. Once a bad spirit came; its language was perfectly horrible: in life it had been a pirate!

“Returning to the house, we saw the Vandykes, which are most glorious. There is a very curious contemporary picture of the coronation of Richard II. in the presence of his patron saints and of the heavenly host. Lady Pembroke talked on and on, and when I got up to go, kept me: but it was most interesting, and I would willingly have listened for many hours more. Eventually she went with me to the end of the grounds, and let me out at a postern-gate in the wall.

“To-day we have been to tea with the Pigott family, who live in George Herbert’s rectory (which he built) at Bemerton. It is a lovely spot, with the little church (vulgarised inside by glazed tiles), beneath the altar of which he is believed to rest. The garden reaches to the clear rushing Madder, full of trout and grayling, and has a beautiful view of the cathedral across the water-meadows. We saw the register with the notice of the burial of ‘Mr. George Herbert, Esquire, parson of this place,’[463] and his old study with its very thick walls: but he was only at Bemerton two years, leading a life ‘little less than sainted, though not exempt from passion and choler,’ as his brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, tells us in his memoirs. Americans come in crowds to see the place, and can often repeat half his poems. Mr. Pigott asked one of them to spend the night there, and in the morning inquired how he had slept. ‘Sleep,’ he said, ‘do you suppose I could sleep in George Herbert’s house? Why, I sat up all night thinking of him.’”[464]

“Oct. 2.—Again at Highcliffe with Lady Waterford, whose conversation is as charming as ever.

is a line of Shakspeare which seems ever to apply to her. Here are some fragments from her lips:—

“‘That is like the priest who, when he was remonstrated with for eating meat on Friday, said, “All flesh is grass.”

“‘When I was young, I delighted in Tittenhanger.[465] We used to post down from London—a most delightful drive then. I thought it all charming—the old house, and a wood with bluebells, and the Colne, a mere dull sluggish stream, I suppose, but it had frogs and bulrushes, and I found it enchanting. A few years ago I thought I would post down to Tittenhanger in the old way, but it was a street all the way to Barnet, and when the people saw the white horses and postillion in blue, they came crowding round; for, though it was only my little maid Boardman and me, they thought, “Now we shall see them: now we shall see the newly-married pair.”

“The Duc d’Aumale is married. He married Mademoiselle Clinchamps, who was lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Salerno, the Duchesse d’Aumale’s mother. She does the honours of his house, but it is a sort of morganatic marriage.... Madame Adelaide was married too to one of the generals.... I remember the Aumales riding through the green avenues near Ossington; Mary Boyle was with them. She was a most excellent horsewoman, but a great gust of wind came, and the whole edifice of her chignon was blown off before she could stop it. The little Prince de Condé was very young then, and he was riding with her. He picked it up and said, “I will keep it in my pocket, and then, when we reach Thoresby, you can go away quietly and get it put on;” and so she did. That young Condé used to say, “I am not le grand Condé; I am le petit Condé.” ... Madame de Genlis used to write to Louis Philippe—“Sire et cher enfant.”

“‘That Lord Shrewsbury [466] you were speaking of received Henri V. at Alton Towers—received him as king of France, and dressed up all the people of the different lodges to represent the different nations of Europe giving him welcome. It was he who made the beautiful gardens. There is a bust of him there, and inscribed beneath it—“He made the desert to smile.” “And I don’t wonder at it,” said Lady Marian (Alford) when she saw the bust: he was so comically hideous.’”

Whilst I was away on my visits, I had left my dear old cousin Charlotte Leycester provided with companions at Holmhurst during the annual summer visit of several months, which had never failed since my mother’s death. I felt that thus my mother’s home, thus her own especial room, were fulfilling what she would most have wished for them. And (though, unlike my gentle mother, Calvinistic, vehement, with a habit of constantly “improving the occasion,” and utterly intolerant still of all that did not agree with her in religious matters), the beloved and beautiful old cousin, at nearly ninety, was this year more than ever occupied by plans and thoughts for the good of all around her, more full of spiritual meditation herself, lifting her own heart and mind into celestial dwelling-places. For her truly one might say, “The poetry of earth is never dead,” and I often found that I knew little of the natural charms of my own little home till she had shown them. “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee” is a verse of Job for which she had a constant application, and the shrubs and flowers—at Holmhurst always planted in the same places—were intimate and familiar friends to her—

Sunday was always her great delight—a Sunday to be dealt with as John Knox would have used it, and a church service freed from anything of ritual, but with an extempore preacher if possible. She felt, “I always like my victuals hot when I can get them,” as an old woman said in reference to her preacher. Latterly, however, Charlotte Leycester was scarcely able to hear sermons, though, as she wrote to me during my last absence,—“I always enjoy the sermon, though I do not hear it; for, as our old friend George Herbert says, ‘God takes a text, and preaches patience,’ and I can generally catch all texts quoted, which helps me to follow the drift, like finding one stone after another in crossing a current.”

When turned to her reminiscences of the past, her conversation was often very interesting. I remember her telling me this summer of her visit to Paris in 1827, and going to the Royal Chapel, into which came the king, Louis XVIII., and the Duchess d’Angoulême with full evening dress in the morning and feathers on her head. When the king entered, a great picture of our Lord hung opposite where he was to sit, to which the master of the ceremonies seemed to introduce him—“Le roi.” “At Rosny, a beautiful old château with chestnut avenues, to which we drove out one October evening after dining at Mantes, we saw the Duchesse de Berri. Most amusing the travelling then was, with the postillions in blue and in great jack-boots, into which they had to be lifted, with the blowing of their horns at every village we passed through.”

A few days after I reached home, two more volumes of mine were published, “Paris” and “Days near Paris.” They had been the engrossing work of the last two years. My hourly thought had been for them, and I had taken all the pains I could with them. I knew their faults, and know them still; but all the same I am conscious, and I am sure it is not conceit, that no better general books on those subjects have ever been written,—certainly in French there is nothing of the kind. I suppose it is one of the penalties of a lonely life, of having no near belongings, that it seemed—perhaps a little bathos as regarded the subjects which had filled one’s life—that no one spoke of them; that day after day passed on, and no one ever mentioned their existence. And then came a Review—a leading article indeed—in the Athenæum, not of mere abuse of the books, though no words were strong enough for that, but of such bitter personal malignity against myself, as gave one the shuddering conviction that one must indeed have an enemy as virulent as he was unscrupulous. “Turn author,” says Gray, “and straightway you expose yourself to pit, boxes, and gallery: any coxcomb in the world may come in and hiss if he pleases; ay, and what is almost as bad, clap too, and you cannot hinder him.” Most of the Reviews of my books have been unfavourable, but the books have always contrived to outlive them; and generally, when they have been found fault with, I have felt almost grateful for such lessons of humility, and have longed to say with Goethe, “Pray continue to make me acquainted with my own work.” Even honest reviewers, however, seldom read beyond the first chapter of a book; that they usually read, and occasionally criticise; but even then the tendency to save themselves trouble generally causes a great deal of copying. I have always found that a first Review has influenced all the others except the very best. The excessive injustice and untruthfulness this time made me understand the pain which Chatterton felt, especially when it was said that the hundred and forty-seven quotations, which I had been at such pains to find for my “Versailles,” were “all taken second-hand from Dussieux’ History” of that palace, though I am assured that not one (!!) of them is to be found there, except the few taken from S. Simon, the especial historian of Versailles, to which any one writing about it would naturally apply.

and though serious disappointments are always a most bitter medicine, life becomes much the same again after they are once swallowed and assimilated. I know they must be good for one, like all the other humiliations of—is it?—yes, I suppose in a right spirit it may be, le chemin de la croix. Still I often wonder whether the writer of such an article, when he knows it is false and unjust, as this writer must have done, does it with pleasure in taking away an author’s innocent enjoyment in the birth of his book-child. In most cases of personal injustice and injury, I am sure that it answers to take some secret opportunity of doing something very kind towards the aggressor—it “takes out the taste;” but when the intentional injury is anonymous, one is deprived of even this consolation. Yet, to a certain extent, an inner consciousness of high aims and disinterested intentions may raise a screen against the base scurrilousness with which every one is assailed at some time in their lives. Fortunately, also, I have never quite—though very nearly—had to put in practice the maxim that—

It is curious, certainly, how one has only to turn to the pages of a book which collects Reviews of past authors, like “Alibone’s Dictionary,” to find plentiful consolation. I chanced to open it on Thackeray, and found the Edinburgh Review, after abusing “Esmond” in the most contemptuous tones, saying patronisingly, “If Esmond had been confined within as short limits, it might have taken rank with the ‘Defence of Natural Society,’ but a parody three volumes long becomes tiresome.” The same Edinburgh Review advised Byron to abandon poetry and apply his talents to some better use; and declared Coleridge’s “Christabel” to be “a thing utterly destitute of value.” I think it is Montaigne who says, “Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit à la gloire.”

XXV

IN PLEASURE AND PAIN

“Thoresby, Oct. 20, 1887.—A visit here has been charming—its inmates all so filled with kindness and goodness of every description, and Lady Manvers so very agreeable—‘une conversation si nourrie.” Nothing could exceed the dying splendour of the autumnal tints in the forest, of which we saw a great deal, as we sat out through the whole of each morning drawing amongst the tall golden bracken, over which the great antlers of a stag were now and then uplifted. My companions were Lady Mary Pierrepont, very pretty and charming, and Mrs. Trebeck, daughter and sister of a Bishop Wordsworth, who is here with her husband, Canon Trebeck of Southwell, a very singular and admirable muscular Christian. They have asked me to visit them. The first day of my visit I was delighted to meet Lord and Lady Montagu, unusually pleasant people, with a very nice daughter.”

“Southwell, Oct. 21.—Lord Manvers—kindest of hosts—sent me here, fourteen miles. It is a tiny town clustered around its—chiefly Norman—minster. The beautiful chapter-house has a wreathed door, before which Ruskin stood for an hour when he was here, motionless in rapt contemplation. On one of the old Norman pillars on the right of the nave are remains of a fresco of the Annunciation, evidently painted over an altar of the Virgin: on the other side are traces of a very early organ. In the graveyard is the tomb of Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke’s father. The Sub-dean and his wife are the centre around which the whole little place revolves with its society and charities. The Bishop, who lives in the country, seems rather to despise Southwell and to wish his cathedral had been at Nottingham.

“We went from Thoresby to Rufford,[469] a curious old low-lying house containing much fine tapestry, but where the old furniture is greatly made up. The house has an obstreperous ghost, that especially haunted the room which Augustus Lumley chose as his own, and frightened his pug-dog out of its wits; for beyond that room is a little chamber in which a girl was once shut up and starved to death; but since some bones have been found under one of the passages and received christian burial, the ghost has been laid. There is a portrait of a boy who was taken as a baby from gipsies and brought up in the house, but who disappeared after he grew up and never was heard of again: it was supposed that the impulse was too strong, and that he rejoined the tribe he came from.”

“Raby Castle, Oct. 25.—The Duchess of Cleveland has been describing Lord Crawford’s interview with a famous clairvoyant. Lord Crawford saw the medium go and hold his head in the fire: the flames played round him and he was quite unhurt. Then the medium said he could make Lord Crawford impervious to fire: ‘Would he like it?’ He said ‘yes,’ and the medium took a large live coal from the fire and put it on the palm of one of his hands, which was entirely unhurt, though the coal was left upon it, and Lord Crawford was told to light his cigar at it, which he did. The clairvoyant then said, ‘Your other hand is not impervious: touch the coal with it,’ and he touched the coal which lay in the palm of his left hand, and one of the fingers of his right hand bears the marks of it still.”

“Oct. 26.—It has been a great pleasure during this visit that the Duke [470] has come in each morning for talk, generally more or less narrative—in which he rises suddenly from his chair, walks rapidly backwards and forwards to the fire, and then sits down again, always with his sharp fiery restless look; but all he says most interesting. To-day he told of his father’s early life,—sent to Oxford with a tutor, Mr. Lipscombe, then abroad for three years, spent chiefly at Orleans learning French with John, Duke of Bedford (the father of Lord Russell). The Duke of Dorset was ambassador then, and took the two young men to Versailles, where they played billiards with Marie Antoinette. The French aristocracy were quite unconscious then of the coming danger, and would not believe in the serious state of politics. The Duc de Bouillon was the great person, and they stayed with him in the country. They went on to Rome, where Cardinal York was then living. They went to his weekly receptions, where he was always treated as royalty. ‘The Duchesse d’Albanie gave my father a ring,’ said the Duke, ‘but after my father’s death it was stolen from the Duchess Elisabeth by her maid. All young men stayed abroad their three years at that time, and so did my father, then as soon as he came home he was married to my mother, who was the Duke of Bolton’s daughter.

“‘For myself, I went to Paris at eighteen in diplomacy, and was there for many years. I spoke French better than English, and lived entirely in French society. Thiers I knew intimately in all the different phases of his life. He was said to have had an intrigue with Madame Dombes. I don’t know how that may have been, but he married her daughter, and she made him a very good wife. He always began his writing at six, when he had a cup of coffee, and he wrote on—no one being allowed to disturb him—till 12 A.M., which was the hour of déjeûner, and it was this which enabled him to write his histories; when he was in office he had not time. He and Guizot were always rivals.

“‘I was in Paris in Louis Philippe’s time, but not under the Restoration. Many of the Dames de la Cour of the older time, however, were still in Paris, and had salons—Madame de Noailles, &c. I used to see much of Princess Charlotte de Rohan, who had been privately married to the Duc d’Enghien, and whose excitement was great when Louis Philippe was appointed. I was at Marienbad when the news of that revolution came, and posted back to Paris at once: we expected great difficulty on the way, but there was none. I saw the barricades, however, in the early émeute of Louis Philippe’s time, and the people with their passions roused, and the gamins who used to come under the windows of the Palais Royal and call for the king till he came out and made them a bow: it was the regular thing that was done.

“‘I was at Paris when the Duc de Bourbon hung himself. Cuvier and another great naturalist were sent down to examine into it, and they both said he must have done it himself; but the Legitimists declared it was an arrangement between the Orleanists and Madame de Feuchères, who shared his property between them.

“‘I was at Coppet with Auguste de Staël a few years after Madame de Staël died: he asked Sismondi to meet me there and several others. Old Madame Necker—Madame de Staël’s mother—had a very remarkable salon in Paris: her daughter was Duchesse de Broglie and her grand-daughter married the Comte d’Haussonville, whom I knew very well: but, oh! it is more than half a century ago now that I was at Coppet.’

“Oct. 27.—Mrs. Forester, wife of the Duke’s nephew, who is here, has told me much that is curious.

“‘An old Mrs. Sauchiehall, unfortunately dead now, told Lady Vane that when she was a girl at Doncaster, at a famous school of that time, she made a very intimate friendship with two other girls, and when they parted, they made each other a solemn vow that if either of the three were in any real trouble in after life, the others would do all they could to help her.

“They parted, and Mrs. Sauchiehall married in Cumberland—married twice, and became a second time a widow. Life had seemed constantly to drift her away from her old friends. At last, at Marienbad, she met one of them, then Mrs. A., and spent some weeks there with her, renewing all their old intimacy.

“Mrs. A. told her that she had always continued to be on terms of the most extreme intimacy with their third friend—Lady B. Her own story had been a very sad one. She had been left a widow with several children, and almost in a state of destitution. In all her troubles, she had continued to confide in Lady B., who never lost sight of her. At one time especially, Lady B. was perplexed as to how she could help her, and spoke of it to her husband, who said, ‘Well, there is at least one thing I could do for her: there is that old place of ours in Dorsetshire, where nobody lives. It is all being kept up for nothing, so if Mrs. A. likes to go and inhabit it, she is quite welcome; only, you know, she ought to be told that it is said to be haunted.’

“Lady B. made the proposal to Mrs. A., who was enchanted, and she moved at once with her children to the house in Dorsetshire, where she seemed to find a refuge from her troubles and every comfort. She asked the servants whom she found in the house about the ghosts, and they said, ‘Oh yes, the great hall and the rooms beyond it are said to be haunted, but we never go there, and the ghosts never come to our part of the house, so we are never troubled by them in the least.’ For several years Mrs. A. lived most happily in the old house, and nothing happened.

“At last, on one of her children’s birthdays, she invited some children from the neighbourhood to come and play with her own children, who begged that, after tea, they might all go and play hide-and-seek in the great disused hall. The children had finished their games, and Mrs. A. was alone in the hall setting things to rights afterwards, about 8 P.M. in the evening, with an unlighted candle in her hand, when she heard some one call out loudly, ‘Bring me a light! bring me a light!’ Then, almost immediately, the door from the inner passage leading to the farther rooms opened, and a lady rushed in, beautifully dressed in white, but with all her dress in flames. She ran across the hall screaming ‘She’s done it! she’s done it!’ and vanished through a door on the other side. Mrs. A. instantly lighted her candle, and ran with it up the passage from which the lady had emerged, but she found all the doors locked. The next night, at exactly the same hour, she came again to the hall, and exactly the same thing happened. She then wrote to Lady B. that she should be obliged to leave the place, unless Lord B. could explain the mystery.

“Lord B. then said that an ancestress of his—a widowed Lady B.—had an only son, who fell in love with the charming daughter of a neighbouring clergyman. The young lady was lovely, fascinating, and very well educated, but the mother regarded it as a mésalliance and would not hear of it. The young man, who was a very dutiful son, consented to gratify his mother by waiting, and went abroad for two years. After that time, as their attachment was unbroken, and he was of age, he married the young lady.

“It was with joyful surprise that the young married pair received a very kind letter from the mother, saying that as all was now settled, she should make a point of welcoming the bride as her daughter, and always living happily with her afterwards. They went home to the mother at the old house which Lord B. had lent to Mrs. A., and were most kindly received. All seemed perfectly smooth. At last a day came on which the mother had invited an immense party to be introduced to and do honour to the bride. The evening arrived, and the young lady was already dressed, when her mother-in-law came into the room, kissed her affectionately, and then said to her son, ‘Now that she is indeed my daughter, I am going to fetch the family diamonds, that I may have the pleasure of decorating her with them myself.’ The diamonds spoken of were really the property of the son, but he had never liked to irritate his mother by claiming them, and rejoiced that his wife should accept them from her.

“The mother then went to fetch the diamonds, the son lighting her. As they were coming back, they heard the voice of the young lady calling to her husband to bring her a light. ‘Oh, I will take it to her,’ cried the mother suddenly, and snatched the candle out of his hand. In another instant the girl rushed by with her white dress enveloped in flames, screaming ‘She’s done it! she’s done it!’ The mother confessed that her hate and jealousy had been too much for her.

“Another curious story, told by Mrs. Sauchiehall to Lady Vane, was that of a young lady, a great Cumberland heiress, who was engaged to be married, but who pined away from some mysterious and causeless illness. As there was no definite reason for her being ill, so nothing seemed to do her any good, but she wasted constantly, and at last she died. After her death, her old nurse, who had been her devoted attendant, rather surprised those who knew her by insisting upon leaving the place and moving to the south of England. A cousin succeeded to the property, but did not prosper. His wife died, then his children, one after another. A ghostly appearance also frequently took place, and was especially seen by a little boy, the son of the house. At last the whole family became extinct, and quite passed away out of Cumberland memory.

“Many, many years afterwards, Mrs. Sauchiehall was herself at Richmond in Surrey, when she heard that a very old woman, a native of Cumberland, was dying in the workhouse—dying, apparently, with some secret upon her mind, which she could not bring herself to confess, but which never allowed her to rest. ‘Well,’ said Mrs. Sauchiehall to her informant, ‘I am a Cumberland woman myself; I will see what I can do.’ She went to the workhouse, and soon found that the old woman had been the nurse of the young heiress who had died so long before, and heard her confess that she had accepted a large bribe from the cousin who succeeded, to poison her by slow degrees. The bribe had done her no good. She had married, all her children had died, her husband had gambled away her money, and she herself had come to die in the workhouse.

“Mrs. Forester told me of a girl who had gone to a famous school at Brighton. She was allowed to study after hours to fit her for the place of a pupil-teacher, which she wanted to get. After some time, she looked so pale and thin, that the mistress thought she was over-worked and called in a doctor. He asked her many questions, and at last ‘if she ever saw any strange visions.’ This she could conscientiously say she did not. On learning this, the doctor said that being the case, it could do her no harm to continue her studies, but that if she ever fancied she saw anything unusual, it would be a sign that her brain was overworked, and she must give up her studies at once.

“It was very soon after this that one night she distinctly heard the door of her room, which was behind a screen at the foot of her bed, open and shut again. She got up and went to the door, but it was closed, and when she opened it, there was no one there. This happened several times. At last she locked the door. Still it happened again. That night, however, she assured herself that the delusion came from being over-tired, and by sheer force of will she went to sleep.

“The next night, however, the same thing happened, and she again locked the door. Happening to look up soon after, she saw something hanging over the screen in front of her. It was a hand—an attenuated human hand. It remained there some time, then it disappeared.

“The girl then felt that she must lessen her studies, but, for fear they should be stopped altogether, she said nothing, whilst at the school, of what she had seen. Soon after this, however, she went home to the old aunt who had brought her up, and who was in very poor circumstances. She was almost surprised at the extreme and anxious tenderness with which she was received. After tea she said, ‘Auntie, I have a curious little story I want to tell you,’ and she told her what she had seen. The aunt said, ‘My love, you have unconsciously made easier for me the task of telling you some very sad news; I did not know how to break it to you, but Edward’ (the young man to whom the girl was engaged) ‘is dead; he died the night you saw the hand.’

“Mrs. Forester told this story to Lord Rayleigh, who said, ‘That is a very simple and explicable story: it is a case of telepathy.’

“The Duchess of Cleveland says that when the Sultan was at Buckingham Palace, one of his servants offended him, and he condemned him to death. The Sultan was informed that he could not execute him in this country; then he said he should do it on board his own ship. One of his wives also is said to have been executed whilst he was here, ‘because, poor thing, she had been so dreadfully sea-sick, that it was quite disgusting,’ and she is said to be buried in the palace garden.

“‘Mr. Lowell asserted to me,’ said the Duchess, ‘that there were no really old families in England. “Surely the Nevilles?” I protested. The next morning Lowell said, “I’ve been thinking that I am descended myself from the Nevilles, but I never thought it worth while before to inquire about it.”’

“‘Some one went,’ said the Duchess, ‘to inquire after the health of Madame Brunnow. “Oh,” said the servant, “she will never be any better.” The inquirer was admitted afterwards to see Baron Brunnow, to whom he said, “I am so grieved to hear from your servant that Madame Brunnow is never likely to be any better.” “Did he really say that?” said Baron Brunnow. “Oh, the faithfulness of these English servants! The fact is, Madame Brunnow really died three days ago; but the servant knows that it was not at all convenient that she should die before the reception of the Duke of Edinburgh is over, so—for inquirers—she is still only very ill.”’”

“Raby Castle, Oct. 28.—A pleasant Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson—neighbours—came to stay yesterday. He told me a very remarkable story.

“One day last year, Mr. Gurdon, an excellent Catholic priest belonging to a mission in the East End of London, had come in from his labours dreadfully wet and tired, and rejoicing in the prospect of a quiet evening, when the bell rung, and he was told that a lady wanted to see him on most urgent business. He said to a friend who was with him, how sincerely he dreaded being called out again into the wet that night, and how he hoped that the visit meant nothing of the kind; but he admitted the lady. She was a remarkably sweet, gentle-looking person, who told him that there was a case in most urgent need of his immediate ministrations at No. 24 in a street near, and she implored him to come at once, saying that she would wait to point out the house to him. So he only stayed to change his wet things, and then prepared to follow the lady. He took with him the Host, which he wore against his breast, holding, as is the custom, his hand over it. It is not considered right for a priest carrying the Host to engage in conversation, so Mr. Gurdon did not speak to the lady on the way to the house, but she walked a little way in front of him. At last she stopped, pointed to a house, and said, ‘This, Father, is No. 24.’ Then she passed on and left him.

“Mr. Gurdon rang the bell, and when the servant came, asked who it was who was seriously ill in the house. The servant looked much surprised and said there was no illness there at all. Much astonished, Mr. Gurdon said he thought the servant must be mistaken, that he had been summoned to the house to a case in most urgent need. The servant insisted that there was no illness; but Mr. Gurdon would not go away without seeing the owner of the house, and was shown up to a sitting-room, where he found the master of the house, a pleasant-looking young man of about five-and-twenty. To him Mr. Gurdon told how he had been brought there, and the young man assured him that there must be some mistake—there was certainly no illness in the house; and to satisfy Mr. Gurdon, he sent down to his servants, and ascertained that they were all perfectly well.

“A tea-supper was upon the table, and very cordially and kindly the young man asked Mr. Gurdon to sit down to it with him. He pressed it, so they had tea together and much pleasant conversation. Eventually the young man said, ‘I also am a Catholic,’ adding, in an ingenuous way, ‘but I fear you would think a very bad one;’ and he explained that the sacraments and confession had long been practically unknown to him. ‘As long as my dear mother lived,’ he said, ‘it was different: but she died three years ago, and since her death I have paid no attention to religion.’ And he described the careless life he had been leading.

“Very earnestly and openly Mr. Gurdon talked with him, urging him to amend his ways, to go back to his old serious life. At first he urged it for his mother’s sake, then from higher motives. He seemed to make an impression, and the young man was touched by what he said, and said no one had spoken to him thus since his mother died. At last Mr. Gurdon said, ‘Why should you not begin a new life now? I might hear your confession, and then be able to give you absolution this very evening. But I should not wish you to decide this hurriedly: let me leave you for an hour—let me leave you perfectly alone for that time—you will then be able to think over your confession, and decide what you ought to tell me.’ The young man consented, but urged Mr. Gurdon not to leave the house again in the rain: there were a fire and lights in the library, would not Mr. Gurdon wait there?

“Mr. Gurdon willingly went to spend the time in the library, where two candles were lighted on the chimney-piece. Between these he placed the Host. Then he occupied himself by examining the pictures in the room. There were many fine engravings, and there was also the crayon portrait of a lady which struck him very much. He seemed to remember the original quite well, and yet he could not recall where he had seen her. On going back to the other room, he told the young man how very much he had been struck by the picture. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘that is the portrait of my dear mother, and it is indeed the greatest comfort I have, it is so very like her.’ At that moment Mr. Gurdon suddenly recollected where he had seen the lady: she it was who had come to fetch him to the house.

“Mr. Gurdon heard the young man’s confession and gave him absolution; he seemed to be in the most serious and earnest frame of mind. He could not receive the sacrament, because it must be taken fasting, so the evening meal they had had made it impossible. But it was arranged that he should come to the chapel at eight o’clock the next morning, and that he should receive it then. Mr. Gurdon went home most deeply interested in the case, and truly thankful for having been led to it; but when morning came, and the service took place in the chapel, to his bitter disappointment the young man was not there. He feared that he had relapsed altogether, but he could not leave him thus, and as soon as the service was over he hastened to his house. When he reached it, the blinds were all down. The old female servant who opened the door was in floods of tears: her master had died in his sleep.

“On the last evening of his life his mother had brought Father Gurdon to him.”

“Muncaster Castle, Oct. 30.—What a gloriously beautiful place this is!—an ascent from the station, and then a descent through massy woods, till the castle appears—infinitely picturesque in outline and in its red and grey colouring—on the edge of a gorge, wooded on both sides, and which now has every tint, from the dark blue-green of the hollies and the russet of dead fern, through crimson, scarlet, orange, to the faintest primrose colour of the fading chestnut leaves. Then behind are the finest of Cumbrian mountains, and in front terraced gardens, and the not far distant sea. The interior has almost an equal charm, in the thick velvet-pile carpets of the long passages hung with portraits, the fine collection of books in the (too dark) octagonal library, and the low hall, which has an organ, flowers, and books, and is the common sitting-room. I sleep in ‘the ghost-room,’ and in a red silk bed used by Henry VI. when he was here, and when he gave ‘the luck of Muncaster’ to the family—an old Venetian glass bowl, from which every child of the house has been christened since. Once it was thrown from an upper window: the owners never had the courage to hunt for and examine it, and it remained buried in the earth for some years: then it was dug up quite uninjured.

“We have driven up Eskdale—a delightfully wild mountain glen, with a clear, tossing river, and dark mountains of jagged outline, covered with brown bracken wherever a turfy space is left between the rocks.

“My host—‘Josceline’—is geniality itself, and very amusing, and Lady Muncaster excessively pleasant. Only her sister, pretty Lady Kilmarnock, is here with her little Ivan, and two young ladies, Miss Rhoda Lestrange and Miss Winifred Yorke,[471] whom her friends call ‘Frivolina.’ The Muncasters have lived here for six hundred years; then they came from Pennington, where a mound still exists which was crowned by their residence in ancient British times.”

“Alnwick Castle, Nov. 4.—Yesterday I left Muncaster at eight, and had two hours in the middle of the day to wait at Carlisle. Whilst I was sauntering round the cathedral, one of the Canons came up to me, introduced himself as a college acquaintance—son of Richmond the artist—and asked me to luncheon. He also showed me the cathedral, ‘restored’ out of much interest, with a miserable modern reredos and other rubbish, but with two fine old tombs, and the modern monuments of Paley and Law. Below the great east window Sir Walter Scott was married. A noble fragment remains of a beautiful renaissance screen, and at the back of the stalls are very curious early pictures of the lives of S. Anthony, S. Augustine, &c. Close to the cathedral is the Fratry—the refectory of the abbey—now used for lectures. Carlisle is a black and truly uninviting place.

“Lady Airlie and Lady Griselda Ogilvy were at the station, and I travelled with them as far as Naworth. On arriving here, it was pleasant to be met by the cordial welcome of Duchess Eleanor, always most genial and kind. The actual Duchess [472] did not appear till dinner, when she was wheeled into the room in a chair, very sweet and attractive-looking, but very fragile. The Duke [473] looks wiry, refined, rather bored, and some people would find him very alarming. Lord and Lady Percy seem to be two of the most silent people in the world—she pretty still in spite of her ten children. There are also here pleasant little Lady Constance Campbell, Miss Ellison, who goes about with Duchess Eleanor, and Lady Emma and Miss M’Neile—the former a violent Radical, who went to bed at once when the Primrose League became the topic of conversation. We played at whist in the evening, but it was broken at ten by going to prayers, which the Duke reads in the chapel. It is the only time I have seen evening prayers in any country-house for the last fifteen years.

“This morning Duchess Eleanor showed me the rooms—the magnificent Italian rooms, which owe their glory to her husband, Duke Algernon, who, when remonstrated with for thus changing a mediaeval fortress, said, ‘Would you wish us only to sit on benches upon a floor strewn with rushes?’ He purchased the whole of the great Camuccini collection at Rome, because of his great wish to have one single picture, which they would not sell separately. It is the so-called ‘Feast of the Gods’ by Gian Bellini, with a landscape by Titian. Other noble pictures involved in the purchase are a Crucifixion by Guido, singularly dark for the master; a splendid portrait attributed to Andrea del Sarto, but more like Franciabigio; and a little Raffaelle of SS. Mary Magdalen and Catherine. Bought from the Manfrini Palace at Venice are two noble works of Pordenone—one of them the picture of the father, mother, and son mentioned by Byron (in ‘Beppo’). From the Davenport collection are portions of a grand fresco of the ‘Salutation,’ by Sebastian del Piombo, once in S. Maria della Pace at Rome. The magnificent decorations of the rooms are by Canina. But the most lasting attraction of the castle is the library, with the really splendid collection of books formed by Duke Algernon.

“The Percies are Irvingites now, as well as the Duke and Duchess. Her father, Mr. Drummond, was ‘one of the twelve apostles,’ in whose time it is a tenet of faith that the Lord must return. Now only one ‘apostle’ is alive, and when he dies what will happen? Meantime, though a very old man, he is hard at work beating up recruits and inciting proselytism. The family go to the church here, but then the vicar of Alnwick is also an Irvingite. All the gibberish which the Irvingites talk when seized by the spirit is taken down and treasured up as ‘prophecy.’”

“Nov. 5.—This Irvingite family is constantly waiting and looking out for the millennium: it is terribly anxious work. But their faith is most simple and touching. When one of the Percy boys was very ill, they had him anointed with oil; after that he recovered. ‘We had no doubt it would be so,’ said Lady Percy, ‘no doubt whatever.’ After the anointing, the friends of a patient have altogether done with human agency, and leave everything in the Divine hands. It is curious to hear members of this family say casually—‘The angel was here on Monday, and will be here again on Friday.’

“I have had an interesting hour with the Duchess in her own sitting-room, where she showed me all the treasures in her cabinet—two miniatures of Elizabeth, contemporary, for they are painted without any shadow, which she forbade, upon her face, and two others, evidently painted afterwards, and naturally much more becoming; a miniature of Mary Queen of Scots painted in prison, with the fat face and thick neck which want of exercise caused in one used to so much riding; some of the hair of Charles I., cut off by Sir Henry Halford when the king’s coffin was opened at Windsor; miniatures of James I., Anne of Denmark, and three of their children; the splendid ‘George’ of the fifth Earl of Northumberland, made with the blue enamel which is now a lost art; one of the amber snuff-boxes which Queen Charlotte had constructed in Germany for her ladies, with her miniature on the outside, her dog inside the lid, and her monkey at the bottom of the box; the pencil-case of Lord Chesterfield, with a diamond at the end, being the pencil mentioned by Pope. Not less interesting is a little (Dutch) silver woman, which runs by clockwork, because it was the means of saving all the family plate. For when burglars broke into Sion, it scampered about the floor when they were going to pack it up, which made them think the plate was possessed, and they took to flight, leaving all their booty behind, with the baskets in which they had intended to carry it off.”

“Nov. 6.—All this morning I was left to ‘browse in the library,’ as Dr. Johnson expresses it. In the afternoon I had a walk with the Duke and Percy to Alnwick Abbey—utterly unknown to history, and with only the ruin of its fine gateway standing, yet which must have been one of the most important buildings in the North of England. Its substructions were sought and dug for in exact accordance with the rules laid down for building a Premonstratensian abbey, and so they were found. The church must have been grand as any cathedral.”

“Holmhurst, Nov. 27, 1887.—I am greatly enjoying a little solitude in this time so congenial for hard work, when all nature seems wrapped in a swampy mist-cloud. There are great improvements in the garden. Along that little upper walk to the field, where the frames were, is now a rockery with rare heaths, and behind it a bed of kalmias, and then the cypress hedge of my especial little garden. Rock and fern are also put on the steep descent to the pond, opposite the line of tree-fuchsias.

“I wonder if you remember hearing of the extraordinary visitation of crickets on the night of (my mother’s death) Nov. 12-13, seventeen years ago—the uproar, like the sea in a storm, all night, scarcely allowing a voice to be heard: then heard no more till the night, twelve years after, in which dear Lea passed away. I was so struck by coming across an allusion to it when reading the last chapter of Ecclesiastes as the lesson in church last Sunday—‘And the grasshopper shall become a burden, because man goeth to his long home.’”

“Dec. 24.—The dreary Christmas season of damp and dyspepsia, bills and bother, is less odious than usual this year, as the day itself is swallowed up in Sunday. I have, however, also had a real pleasure in a present from the Duchess of Cleveland of her Life of Everard Primrose, only printed for his friends. It is most beautifully, touchingly, really nobly done, and the most perfect memorial of a high-minded single-hearted young man’s life. I think I never read so perfect a biography. The story is entirely told in Everard’s own admirable letters, but the Duchess has not shrunk from her own part, and the little touches from her own life, the Duke’s, &c., are indescribably simple, graceful, and sincere. The book gives one a far higher opinion of her (of Everard I had always the very highest), and makes one regret many hasty judgments. I have been quite engrossed with the book, so perfectly delightful is it.”

After a busy six weeks of work, I spent the New Year again at Cobham, always charming in its quiet home life, but was glad to return soon again to work.

“Holmhurst, Feb. 10, 1888.—The news of Lady Marian Alford’s sudden death removes from the cycle of life one whom I had felt to be a true friend for more than thirty years. Our meetings were at long intervals, but when we met, it was as more than mere acquaintances. With a grace which was all her own, she often unfolded beautiful chapters in her own life to me, and she was one of the very few persons who have read in manuscript much of these written volumes of my past. She was a perfect grande dame, unable to harbour an ignoble thought, incapable of a small action. Regal, imperious, and extravagant,[474] she was generous, kind, and personally most unselfish, and, had the real greatness and goodness that was in her been regulated and disciplined by the circumstances of her early life, she would have been one of the noblest women of her century. Alas! only yesterday she was! How soon one has to school oneself to say ‘would have been.’ Thus, however, it will certainly be with oneself. The day after one dies people will say—and how few with even a pang—‘He would: he might have been.’”

“March 14.—Met Lady Fergusson Davy (née Fortescue). She told me that when Lady Hills Johnes, the friend of Thirlwall, was twenty-four, she was once in society with the late Lord Lytton, who was talking of second-sight, and of his own power of seeing the future of those he was with. She urged him very much to tell her future, but he was very unwilling to do so. Still she urged it so much that at last he did. He did it after the manner of the Chaldees—told it to her, and wrote it down at the same time in hieroglyphics. He said, ‘You will have a very great sorrow, which will shake your faith in man: then you will have another even greater sorrow, which will come to you through an old and trusted servant: you will marry late in life a king among men, and the close of your existence will be cloudlessly happy.’ All the first part of the prophecy has come true—the breaking off of her first engagement; the terrible murder of her father by his servant; her marriage with Sir James Hills; all that remains now is happiness.”

“Holmhurst, May 14.—I have just returned from an interesting month in London, seeing many people delightfully and making some pleasant new acquaintance. At Lady Delawarr’s I was presented to the young Duchess of Mecklenbourg, very pretty and full of life and animation. No one else came up to talk to her, and I was left to make conversation from five till a quarter to seven! by which time I think we had both exhausted all possible topics, though she was very charming. At last she said, ‘I always go at six to read to the Duchess of Cambridge.’—‘Well, ma’am,’ I answered, ‘you will certainly be terribly late to-day.’—‘What very odd things you do say to me!’ she said. The next day I sent her my ‘Walks in London,’ and as her speaking of the Duchess of Cambridge convinced me of her identity, I directed to the ‘Hereditary Grand Duchess of Mecklenbourg-Strelitz.’ The next time I saw her I had found out, and said, ‘I am sorry, ma’am, that I have made three mistakes in one line in directing to you—that you are not ‘Hereditary,’ not ‘Grand,’ and not ‘Strelitz;’ for she was the Duchess Paul of Mecklenbourg-Schwerin; but she laughed heartily.

“In going to London, I first saw, on a placard at the station, that Matthew Arnold was dead. It seemed to carry away a whole joyous part of life in a moment—for I have known Matthew Arnold ever since I remember anything, though I did not know till I lost him that his happy personality and cordial welcome had made a real difference to me for years, especially in the rooms of the Athenaeum, where I have spent so much time of late years. He had an evergreen youth, and died young at sixty-six, and he was so impregnated with social tact and courtesy, as well as with intellectual buoyancy, that he was beyond all men liveable with. Herman Merivale has written some lines which seem to express what I shall always remember—

“All who knew Matthew Arnold well loved him, though ‘the Apostle of Moderation in Criticism’ would certainly have been shocked by some of the fulsome articles which have followed his death; and I doubt of any of his writings surviving his generation, especially his refined and delicate verses, which surely lack the fire of a poet whose work is to be eternal. I went on April 19, with Montagu Wood, to his funeral in the graveyard of the ancient church at Laleham, where his father was vicar before he went to Rugby, and where his children are buried. It was a day of pitiless rain, which pelted upon the widow and sisters and crowd of mourners round the grave, and on the piles of exquisite flowers beneath which his coffin was hidden. As Alfred Austin says in a beautiful article upon him, ‘Wherever he lies, there will be a Campo-Santo.’ I was glad in going down to the funeral to make friends with Edward Arnold, a charming fellow, who is the present editor of Murray’s Magazine.

“At dinner at the Miss Monks’ I was interested to find myself sitting next to Lady Sawle, who told me that she was niece of the Rose Aylmer who was the love of Landor’s youth. It was on her that he wrote the lines which Archbishop Trench declared to be better than many an epic, and which Charles Lamb said he lived upon for a fortnight. Lady Sawle was herself one of the three Roses to whom Landor afterwards addressed a poem, the third Rose being her mother. She described the death, when she was at Rome, of Miss Bathurst—beautiful, radiant, and a splendid horsewoman, riding along the narrow path between the Acqua Acetosa and the Ponte Molle. The horse suddenly slipped backwards into the Tiber. She called out to Lord Aylmer, ‘Uncle, save me!’ but he could not swim, nor could any of the gentlemen or the groom who was present. Another groom, who was a good swimmer, had been sent back to Rome with a restive horse. She sank in her long blue habit, and her body was never found. All Rome mourned ‘La bella Inglesa,’ and the little party of friends, closely united and present at her death, dispersed sadly. One of them alone, Mr. Charles Mills (of the Villa Mills), returned to Rome in the autumn. As he was about to enter the city, he sent his carriage on to the gate from the Ponte Molle, and walked slowly along the Tiber bank by what had been the scene of the accident six months before. As he walked, he saw two peasants on the other side of the river catch at something which looked like a piece of blue cloth on the mud, and pass on. A sudden impulse seized him, and he got some men to come at once with spades and dig there in the Tiber bank. There Miss Bathurst was found as if she were embalmed, in her blue riding-habit, perfectly beautiful, and with her long hair over her shoulders. There was only one little mark of a wound in her forehead. For a minute she was visible in all her loveliness—a minute only. She was buried in the English cemetery.”[475]

On 28th May 1888 I went abroad to my French work, feeling as usual greatly depressed at leaving home and going off into solitude, but soon able to throw myself vigorously into all the interests of my foreign life and its work. How full each week seemed!—the two first alone amongst quiet villages and churches in Picardy and afterwards in Auvergne, and many others after my friend Hugh Bryans joined me at wild S. Flour, in the hill country of Auvergne, at beautiful Obazine, and at Rocamadour again, then at beautiful S. Emilion, in wandering amongst the innumerable historic relics of La Vendée; lastly by the Loire and its surroundings. Three places especially come back to me with pleasant memories—the home-like inn at S. Emilion, its beautiful old buildings radiant with the blossom of pinks and valerian, and the sunset walks on its old walls looking into the vineyards and cornfields:—the little fishing port of Le Croisic, with its gay boats, its snow-white houses, and its windy surroundings:—and charming Clisson, with its pleasant inn and its balconies overhung with roses and wistaria. Hugh was a capital companion, and full of interest in what he saw, though—like so many at twenty-four—he pretended to hate all the historic detail. However, I am sure my endless archaeological inquiries must have sorely tried his patience, and he was always unweariedly good to me.

“Beauvais, June 1, 1888.—A number of friends wrote urging me to give up what was ‘entirely an imaginary duty.’ However, I felt it was a duty to finish what I had worked at so long, though perhaps it had not been a duty to begin it; and so, much as I hated coming, I am here! It is no use thinking of all one has left, and there is a great deal in what one has, most of all le grand air for hours and hours, and the marvellous light and shade, which is in itself such a beauty in this pellucid atmosphere. Then the peasants in Western France are delightful, and I have not much fear of being taken up here; and I come so well primed and informed that I know exactly what to look for everywhere, and where to find it, and almost what to say about it.

“I left dear Holmhurst at 6.30 P.M. and at 2.30 A.M. was carrying my own portmanteau down the desolate moonlit streets of Abbeville, where the old town struck me more than ever, such a complete change from England, and so romantically picturesque.”

“Clermont Ferrand, June 9.—Oh, it has been so hot! Never in my life have I been so grilled, roasted, boiled, and melted down; and it has been hard having to work on all day, whatever the intense exhaustion from the heat. But I have kept up to exactly the tale of work measured out for each day before I left home.”

“Le Puy, June 13.—We had an exquisite journey on Tuesday by rail down the valley of the Alagnon to Neussargues, the quantity of old castles on the rocky hills as striking as those on the Rhine were forty years ago, and the mountain flowers lovely. Then we drove up through the cool forests to the high plateau which is under snow nine months of the year, and which was quite chilly even now. Here, in the evening, we reached the old episcopal town of S. Flour, on a great basaltic rock, the most wonderfully placed of all French cities, and much recalling Orvieto. Everything seemed to belong to another world. From my window I could throw anything sheer down the most tremendous of quite perpendicular precipices, and the view was magnificent. The house had been in the same family for four hundred years, and the landlady showed with pride the dark passage where her ancestor intercepted the Protestants when they were trying to take the city by stealth, the stone on which they were beheaded, and the drain by which their blood flowed away. The other side of the house opened into a great square, with the cathedral standing amongst trees as in an English close, and houses with sixteenth-century colonnades. I saw the huge modern viaduct bridge of Garrabit, most extraordinary certainly, but though much more interesting to most people, less so to me than the glorious views of S. Flour itself, on its black and orange rocks, backed by the great purple towers of the cathedral.”

“S. Nectaire le Haut, June 28.—It was dark and raining in torrents before we arrived here, and the driver suddenly announced not only that he had lost his way, but that one of our wheels was likely to come off! We were skirting a precipice by a rocky road without any parapet, and at last, by holding the carriage lamps low, found that we had somehow got into a very ancient churchyard, where stone coffins were strewn all about. At last we knocked up a woman at a farmhouse, who guided us back to the hotel, which we had long passed in the dark. This is an enchanting place, beautifully situated in a wooded gorge below the old romanesque church, where the Sunday congregation—from many far-away villages—winding up the hill with baskets of food for the day, has been most picturesque. There are lovely walks in all directions, and Switzerland at its best never had more beautiful flowers, fields covered with lilies, orchis, narcissus, globe ranunculus, pansies, pinks, &c.”

“Le Croisic, July 17.—At this little fishing-town there is no fine scenery, but it is most artistically lovely, with wide views over the grey reaches of sea and yellow sandy flats to the soft hills, and endless fishing-boats with red sails and nets.

“Yesterday we spent the day at La Guerande, a little unaltered mediaeval town above the salt-flats; a very superior Winchelsea, described in Balzac’s wonderful novel of ‘Beatrix.’”

I returned to England on August 7th, just in time to attend Alwyne Greville’s wedding in London. In September I paid the Eustace Cecils a visit, and then went to the Spencer Smiths at Kingston near Wareham.

“Sept. 17.—It was a great pleasure to find Sir Howard and Lady Elphinstone at the Eustace Cecils’. I like them both so very much. They say the Queen is much occupied in learning Hindustanee and speaks it now quite well—a great delight to her Indian subjects. She has three Indian servants in constant attendance, and converses fluently with them. This afternoon has been delightful, with Mrs. Spencer Smith and her children, at St. Alban’s (St. Aldhelm’s) Head. In the little hollow with stone cottages on the way thither a boy opened a gate for us whose name was Sagittary Clump. The name came from his parents’ lodger, but it must have had its origin in Sagittarius. Mrs. Spencer Smith spoke to the boy’s father about his daughter’s misconduct. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said; ‘I’d given her her documents,’ meaning that he had spoken to her seriously: Shakspeare uses ‘documents’ in the same sense. Walking up the hill, we were terribly bitten by harvest-bugs, which little Michael Smith poetically called ‘Ces petites bêtes rouges dans les fleurs bleues’ (harebells). Close to the coastguard station, near the edge of the cliff, is a tiny chapel, perfectly square, supported by a single pillar, and with only one wee romanesque window, so that almost all the light comes from the open door: however, there is only service here in summer. A monk of Sherborne Abbey was always kept here to toll a bell to warn off ships, whilst he prayed for the shipwrecked. Seven little children aged from three to four came up to us while we were drawing. ‘We be going to throw ourselves over the cliff, we be: we be going to smash ourselves quite up, we be,’ the little monsters announced to their mothers, as they all seven marched away arm-in-arm to the edge of the cliff. Then ‘little sister’ made ‘Ernest’ sit down upon a thistle, at which ‘Ernest’ roared; and finally the mother caught up Ernest and carried it off, ‘little sister’ whacking its little naked behind with a stick all the way as they went. Then a young Palgrave appeared, who took the Spencer Smith children down to a wreck in Chapman’s (Shipman’s) Bay, to their great delight. There were seven parrots saved from that ship, but one was lost which was prepared for death by being able to say the Lord’s Prayer straight through. We went afterwards to the desolate village of Worth, where, in the wind-stricken rectory, the clergyman and his wife see no one for five months of the year, and have to shout into each other’s ears to be audible in the roaring winter blast. The church has a Saxon arch, and in its graveyard two stone sarcophagi, one that of a child-abbot, with an incised crosier lying upon it; also the gravestone, of Mr. ‘Jessy,’ ‘who, by his great courage, innoculated his wife and two sons from the (cow)’—sic. He rode up to London with saddle-bags to give his experience to the Government. The Dorsetshire here is pure Anglo-Saxon: King Alfred spoke Dorsetshire. The people are very long-lived; at Steeple in Purbeck there have only been four rectors since the time of Charles I. Three Messrs. Bond have lasted 160 years, and an old Mrs. Ross of 101 drives up this hill in a dogcart to visit her old servant of ninety-four in the village. In church the clerk said ‘Stand in a wee (awe) and sin not!’”

“Cadland, Sept. 21.—This comfortable house stands in a park, which is a piece of enclosed forest full of noble oaks and hollies, with glints of blue sea and shipping between. The passages are entirely clothed with fine prints and drawings, and in the rooms are many fine portraits, especially that by Zoffany of the Drummond who founded the Bank. The collection of autographs is priceless, and includes many by early kings of France, letters of Marie Antoinette, a charming one of the little Dauphin, and the execution-warrant of Madame du Barry. Amongst the drawings is the touching sketch which Severn made ‘to keep himself awake’ sitting by the death-bed of Keats.... We have driven to ‘the Cottage,’ a charming house where Lady Elizabeth Drummond lived, in woods of ilex and fir above the Solent.... The company has included Valletort; Harry Forster, a very good-looking fellow; Robert Scott, Lord Montagu’s second son; and Christopher Walsh, a very nice son of Lord Ormathwayte.”

“Malshanger, Sept. 25.—I came here on the 22nd to visit Mr. Wyndham Portal, and (in her grandmotherhood) his most beautiful as well as charming wife. After luncheon we drove to the Vyne, admirable in the rich colour of its old red brick and grey copings, and greatly beloved by Horace Walpole, who used to stay there with his friend John Chute, to whom he gave many pictures, and whose ‘Chutehood’—depression of spirits and gout—he often deplored. It was to him that Gray wrote ‘suavissime Chuti.’ The house has always been cared for and never allowed to ‘run down,’ and there is much of interest in its fine old rooms, especially in its two stories of ‘gallery,’ lined with busts and portraits. Four of these were brought hither by Lady Dacre of Hurstmonceaux, upon her second marriage with Challoner Chute of the Vyne, and include a portrait of Chrysogona Baker, afterwards Lady Dacre; of the widow of the Lord Dacre who was executed, with his picture hanging behind her, and two of the Chute Lady Dacre herself, one of them copied from a picture now at Belhus, the place of the Lennards. The present owner of the Vyne, who married Miss Eleanor Portal, showed it all admirably, and has written a capital book on the place.[480] He educates his own beautiful boys, making scholars of them before they are ten years old.

“This district—‘Portalia,’ as people call it—is quite peopled with Portals and their connections. They were a French Protestant family, greatly persecuted under Louis XIV., when they took refuge at La Cavalerie in the Larzac. Jean François de Portal escaped to Holland, and his eight children, concealed in barrels and smuggled out of the kingdom by faithful nurses, reached England. The eldest of these became tutor to George III., and the second, Henri, obtained the monopoly of the manufacture of bank-notes, which the family have enjoyed ever since. The last Portal left his vast landed estates to his eldest son, Melville, and his mills to his second son, Wyndham: now the land is only a burden, but, police-guarded, the mills at Laverstoke constantly increase in value, and turn out daily 50,000 Bank of England notes, 12,000 Indian notes, and 100,000 postal orders. By the process of one beautiful machine, the linen rags (nothing but new rags of the best linen being used) are reduced to pulp, the pulp is flattened into paper, stamped, drained, dried, and behold! before it leaves the machine, a bank-note ready for the printer. All the machinery is turned by the transparent Teste, which is full of trout almost up to its source. The workmen, who live in comfortable cottages near the mills and receive high wages, are hereditary, and always fulfil their quota of duty from father to son. Mr. Portal throws open his fine gardens here every Saturday to the people of Basingstoke, who play tennis and generally enjoy themselves, and do no harm whatever.”

“Ford Castle, Northumberland, Nov. 23.—I set out to come here on Wednesday evening, after attending Miss Higginson’s wedding at Marlow. When we—two other guests, Mr. and Mrs. Bellairs, and I—reached the desolate station amongst the bleak moorlands, we found only one little gig in waiting, and no chance of anything else. Mrs. B. and I struggled into it, and came through the howling raging storm for seven miles here; Mr. B. walked; but our reception in these fine old rooms made us forget all else, and to-day has been like all days at Ford and Highcliffe—drawing, reading aloud with talking at intervals, and walks in the glen and gardens.”

“Nov. 26.—A delightful walk, combating with the wind, to the Devil’s rocks, ‘where,’ say the Northumbrians, ‘the devil hanged his grandmother.’ Mr. Neville (the rector) dined. He says the old rectory here was haunted. His sister came to stay with him in the spare room that looked out on the castle. The second day she said very quietly but firmly that she could not sleep in that room again; another must be given her or she must leave. Then she described that, on two successive nights, the curtain of her bed had been drawn, and a strange voice had distinctly said to her, ‘This is not a spare room.’

“‘I belong to the Neville-Rolfes of Hitcham in Norfolk. After my cousin, Charles Neville-Rolfe, who was beloved by every one, died, his boxes were all found to be fastened with letter-locks, and the family were a long time before they were able to get them undone, as he had not left the clue. My cousins suggested to me afterwards that I should ask Crisp the carpenter how he had discovered it at last; so, as I was rubbing an inscription on a stone in the church, I got him to come and move part of a pew which covered it, and I asked him about it. He said, “Whilst we were puzzling over those locks, I heard in a dream the voice of Mr. Charles, and he said, ‘Crisp, come and walk and talk,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir, gladly;’ and then he turned to me and said, ‘Crisp, guess!’—and I woke, and ‘guess’ was the word we wanted.” I told my cousins afterwards what Crisp had told me, and they said, “Yes, but the really curious part was that only three letters were wanted. Crisp thought ‘guess’ was spelt ‘ges,’ still we acted on what he said, and it was right.’”

“Lady Waterford says—‘My maid is very good, very good: her only fault is that she has three hands, she has a right hand and a left hand, and a little behind-hand.’

“‘My grandfather was both at Trafalgar and Waterloo, for he was wounded as a middy at Trafalgar, and then went into the army. It was odd when, long afterwards, some one said about Trafalgar, “It was so and so” and he said, “No, it was not, for I was there,” and that the conversation then went on to Waterloo, “It was so and so.”—“No, I beg your pardon, but I was there.”

“‘Afterwards he fell in love with Miss Mackenzie, one of two heiress sisters. He had nothing to marry upon, and the father forbade him the house, but he was allowed one interview, and in that he found out that the butler was just leaving, and the family would be wanting another. He dressed up and came and applied for the place. He got it, and it was three weeks before he was found out, and then Mr. Mackenzie allowed that he was too much for him, and allowed that he should marry his daughter. But he insisted that my grandfather should leave the army. “Very well,” he said, “if you like I will go into the Church.” So that was agreed to, and in time he became a Canon. He was as earnest in the Church as everywhere else. Soon after his appointment to a country living, as he was crossing some fields on a Sunday, he found a number of miners crowding round some prize-fighters. “Come,” he said, “I can’t have this: I shall not allow this.” “But you can’t prevent it,” they cried. “Can’t prevent it! you’ll soon see if I can’t fight for my God as well as for my king: I’ll fight you all in turn,” and he polished off the two strongest miners in fair fight, and then the others were so pleased, they chaired him, and carried him through the village to his church, which they filled from that time forward.’

“Most delightful and full of holiest teaching have been the many quiet hours I have spent with the lady of the castle. There is a sentence of Confucius which says—‘If you would escape vexation, reprove yourself liberally and others sparingly.’ It is exactly her case. And there is another sentence of Confucius which applies to her—‘The wise have no doubts, the virtuous no sorrows, the brave no fears.’ Being here so quietly, I have seen even more of her than on other visits, and more than ever has she seemed to be a fountain of original, interesting, noble, and elevating words and thoughts. She is wonderfully well now, and able to walk, and take all her old energetic interest in the place and people, and oh! how we have talked!”

“Littlecote, Wilts, Dec. 3.—A charming visit to this beautiful old house, which mostly dates from Henry VII., and has a noble hall hung with armour and the yellow jerkins of the Commonwealth, a long gallery filled with fine Popham portraits, and a charming old pleasaunce with bowling-green and long grass walks. I sleep in the ghost-room, and just outside my door is the ante-chapel where Wild Darrell roasted the baby as described in the notes to ‘Rokeby,’ but the grandfather of the present possessor was so bored by inquiring visitors that he burnt the old hangings of the bed by which the nurse identified the room of the crime, and the bed itself, with much other old furniture, was sold to provide the fortunes of the younger children in the present generation. Nothing can be more delightfully comfortable, however, than the house as it now is, and my young host—Frank Popham—is most pleasant and genial. It has been a great pleasure to find Lady Sherborne domesticated here, and to listen once more on a Sunday evening to her exquisite singing of ‘Oh rest in the Lord’—so delicate and touching in its faintly vanishing cadences as to draw tears from her audience. Very pleasant too has it been to meet charming Mrs. Howard of Greystoke and her daughter again.”

“Dec. 11.—My old cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Thurlow, who had often invited me before to their house of Baynards, wrote that this week was my last chance of going, as Baynards was just sold, so I have been for one night. The house is partly modern, but the place was an ancient royal residence, and was part of the dower of Katherine Parr. A pretty statue of Edward VI. was discovered there walled up, and Margaret Roper lived there afterwards, and long kept her father’s head in a box, which still exists at the foot of the staircase. There are also numbers of fine portraits, the dressing-box and travelling trunk of Elizabeth, and I slept in a magnificent old tapestried room and in Henry VIII.’s bed.

“Mrs. Thurlow says that Cardinal Wiseman went to dine with some friends of hers. It was a Friday, but they had quite forgotten to provide a fast-day dinner. However, he was quite equal to the occasion, for he stretched out his hands in benediction over the table and said, ‘I pronounce all this to be fish,’ and forthwith enjoyed all the good things heartily.”

“Dec. 12.—Henry Lyte says that Porson was told to write a Latin theme as to whether Brutus did well or not in killing Cæsar—‘Si bene fecit aut male fecit.’ He wrote—‘Non bene fecit, nee male fecit, sed interfecit.’

“The Stuart Exhibition is most indescribably interesting. A glorious Vandyke hangs there representing Henrietta Maria in radiant youth and happiness, with husband and children. Close by hangs the most touching portrait in the gallery—Henrietta Maria, the same person exactly, with the same curls, only grey, the same features sunken and worn by sorrow, in her old age at Chaillot, by Le Fevre.”[481]

“Cobham, Jan. 3, 1889.—Drove with Lady Kathleen Bligh, Lady Mary, and Lady Lurgan to Rochester to see the interesting old hospice for ‘six poor travellers, not rogues or proctors,’ where that number are still daily received and cared for. They are given half a loaf, boiled beef, and porter for supper, have six small clean comfortable rooms lighted by a street gas-lamp outside, and are sent away with fourpence each in the morning. On Christmas Day a lady sends the travellers of the day some tobacco, a pipe, and a sixpence each, and quaint are their letters of thanks. ‘May you live for ever and a day after,’ was the good wish of one of them this year.

“Lord Darnley went himself into the village of Cobham to engage lodgings at a poor woman’s cottage for a man who wanted to come there. Lady Kathleen went to see the poor woman afterwards, and found her greatly delighted. ‘As soon as my Lord was gone,’ she said, ‘up I went to my room, and down upon my knees I dropped to return thanks to the Almighty, because the Lord above, and the Lord below, were working together for my good.’”

“Jan. 10.—To tea with Mrs. Humphry Ward, almost a celebrity now as authoress of ‘Robert Elsmere,’ at her house in Russell Square. She said it tried her somewhat to receive from an American ‘Whiteley’ his circular with—‘for economy in literature we defy anything to beat our Elsmere at six cents.’”

On Shrove Tuesday, March 6, I left home for the south, and spent a fortnight at Mentone in the Hotel d’Italie, which I remembered—one of the few houses then existing—as the residence of Mrs. Usborne when we were living close by in 1869-70. My cousin Florentia Hughes was at Mentone with her youngest daughter, and we had many pleasant excursions together. In the hotel were Lord Northbrook and his daughter, with whom I dined several times, meeting the excessively entertaining Lord Alington and his pleasant daughters. On the 22nd I reached Rome, where I spent six weeks in the Hotel d’Italie, seeing many friends, correcting my “Walks in Rome,” and drawing a great deal.

“April 7.—On Friday I went with some friends to Albano, and, whilst they drove to Neni, drew in the glen at Ariccia, and never was I so tormented by children as by a beautiful little cowherd—Amalia Maria—who, on my refusing her demand for soldi, vowed she would ‘lead me a life,’ which she did by fetching six other little demons worse than herself, when they all joined hands and danced round me and my campstool, kicking and screaming with all their might. Then they fetched a black pecorello, and having tried to make it eat my paints, danced again, the pecorello, held by a string, prancing behind them. Happily at last the cow which Amalia Maria was supposed to be chaperoning made its escape over a hedge, and whilst she was pursuing it over the country, I fled, and joined my companions at a little caffè, where we had a delicious luncheon of excellent bread, hard-boiled eggs—painted purple for Lent—and sparkling Aleatico, for fourpence a head. Afterwards we sat to draw, looking down upon that loveliest of lakes and woods full of cyclamens and anemones.

“The crowds in the Roman galleries are endless. Whole families arrive together, every member of them carrying a campstool, and they will sit down opposite each of the statues in turn, and move onwards gradually, whilst the father reads aloud from a guidebook, and they all drink it in. He often begins the description at the wrong end, but they do not find it out, and ... it does not signify! An American, a Mrs. Ruggles, coming to the Apollo Belvidere, said, ‘Is that the Apollo Belvidere?’—‘Yes, that’s the Apollo Belvidere.’—‘Well, then, if that’s the Apollo Belvidere, I don’t think much of him: give me Ruggles.’”

“April 18.—Caught in tremendous rain and hail near a warehouse at the back of the Palatine, and took refuge under a rude porch with a number of peasants and was kept there an hour. One of the men described his life as a soldier when his battalion was sent against the brigands near Pescara. Of these, the famous Angelo Maria was so horrible a monster, that his own mother determined to rid the world of such a fiend and to deliver him up. He discovered this, seized his mother, laid her on a table, ripped her up, and taking out her steaming heart—ate it! Words cannot describe the horrible gestures with which the peasant told this story, or the dramatic power with which he described the sister seeing the terrible scene through a chink in the door, and coming afterwards to the guard-house, saying that she wished to betray her brother. ‘Oh,’ said the officer, ‘you need not suppose that we trust you; this is a trap you have laid for us.’—‘Yesterday,’ she answered, ‘I might have laid a trap, but I had not then seen that monster eat my mother’s heart.’ And he was taken.

“But Capolo Roscia was worse. He came one night to a masseria. The doors were barred, but he forced his way in with his band. The head of the farm hid himself in the straw, but he was found and dragged out. All the men in the masseria, eighteen in number, were brought out and made to sit in a row. ‘Now you must all be shaved,’ said Capolo Roscia, and he cut all their eighteen heads off and put them in a basket.

“‘Oh, in that time when we were brigand-hunting we did not stop much to inquire how far they were guilty. “A ginocchio: avete cinque minuti,” we shouted to a peasant if we caught him. “Oh, ma signori, signori!” he would say. “A ginocchio! Un minuto, due, tre, cinque—bo-o-o-ah!” and he was done for; for he had given the brigands provisions, and so he was as bad as themselves. Even with i sindaci, well, we often did the same; but—we got rid of the brigands.’”

“Easter Sunday, April 21.—To St. Peter’s. The service was under the dome, but the group around the shrine would not call up even a reminiscence of the glorious services under the Papacy. The relics were shown afterwards from a high gallery—the spear-head of Longinus, the bit of the true cross, the napkin of Veronica, to the sight of which seven thousand years’ indulgence is attached. I gazed hard, but could only see its glittering frame, nor could any other member of the congregation see any more.”

After leaving Rome, I spent ten days with a pleasant party of friends at beautiful Perugia, and then went on to Venice, where I saw much of Ainslie Bean, who took me in his gondola to many places I wanted to see, and much also of the Comte and Comtesse de Lützow, on the eve then of the great but still unforeseen sorrow of losing the dear daughter Maude who was the sunshine of their lives. I was at the Pension Anglaise, crowded with lively, kindly ultra-English people, whose mistakes were amusing. “Gesu-Maria!” suddenly exclaimed the gondolier on narrowly escaping a concussion at a sharp corner. “Why on earth does he say ‘Je suis marié’?” said a Mrs. R. Afterwards I had a week’s hard work in intense heat in Eastern France, and reached home on May 27.

“Holmhurst, May 27, 1889.—How quiet it is here! how shady! how thankful I am to be back! The heat yesterday at Amiens was appalling, but I reached the green retreat this morning at nine, a telegram announcing my advent having only been delivered five minutes before, so that I had the amusement of seeing Holmhurst as I had never done before, in complete un-dress.... I never saw such foliage. Charles II. might easily hide this year in any of the oak trees.”

“July 16.—Dined at Lord Chetwynd’s, taking down a Mrs. Severn. She talked of the difficulties of faith; of the comfort she had received from Farrar’s ‘Justice and Mercy;’ of the simple impossibility of eternal punishment; of the verse ‘The Lord shall save all men, especially such as are of the household of faith,’ as especially indicating gradations of happiness in a future state.”

“July 18.—With troops of the London ‘world’ to a garden-party at Hatfield to meet the Shah of Persia (Nasr-ed-Din), who looks most savage and unimpressionable. He is, however, preferred to his servants, who give themselves endless airs, refusing the rooms prepared for them, &c., and their hosts are afraid to complain of them to the Shah, for fear he should cut off their heads! He is a true Eastern potentate in his consideration for himself and himself only: is most unconcernedly late whenever he chooses: utterly ignores every one he does not want to speak to: amuses himself with monkeyish and often dirty tricks: sacrifices a cock to the rising sun, and wipes his wet hands on the coat-tails of the gentleman next him without compunction. He expressed his wonder that Lord Salisbury did not take a new wife, though he gave Lady Salisbury a magnificent jewelled order. He knows no English and very few words of French, but when the Baroness Coutts, as the great benefactress of her country, was presented to him by the Prince of Wales, he looked in her face and exclaimed, ‘Quelle horreur!’”

“July 22.—A wonderful speech (at the Aberdeens’) on Christian work from the Bishop of Ripon (Boyd Carpenter)—eloquent, elevating, touching beyond description. He pictured the system of work going on through all creation—some one resting under a tree as under an object in repose, and then, if the senses could be quickened, hearing the pulse, the ever-labouring pulse which sends the sap through its every fibre: of how fallacious is the ordinary view of God as a sovereign in contemplative repose—how inconsistent with the description given us, ‘My Father worketh and I work:’ of the way in which every practical worker might be a particle of the Spirit of God: of the way in which the Christian life of every individual might radiate on others and permeate their existence, like the halos—unseen by the wearers—on the brows of saints: of the way in which the impression of a visit carried away from each country-house might influence a life, and the duty of leaving the right impression—never by ‘religious talking,’ but by loving action: that the usual saying was ‘Omnia vincit labor,’ but a truer one would be ‘Laborem vincit amor.’”

“Holmhurst, August 15, 1889.—I wish you were here this morning. A delicate haze softens the view of the distant sea, sprinkled over with vessels, and the castle-rock rises up pink-grey against it. Far overhead, the softest of white clouds float in the blue ether. In the meadows, where the cows are ringing their Swiss bells, the old oak-trees are throwing long deep shadows across lawns of the most emerald green, and the flower-beds and the terrace borders are brimming with the most brilliant flowers, over which whole battalions of butterflies and bees are floating and buzzing; the little pathlet at the side winds with enticing shadows under the beech-trees, whilst the white marble Venetian well, covered with delicate sculpture of vines and pomegranates, standing on the little grassy platform, makes a point of refinement which accentuates the whole. Selma steals lazily round the corner to see if she can catch a bird, but finds it quite too hot for the exertion; and Rollo raises himself now and then carelessly to snap at a fly. The doves are cooing on the ledge of the roof, and the pigeons are collecting on the smokeless chimneys. Upstairs Mrs. Whitford and Anne are dusting and laughing over their work, with the windows wide open above the ivied verandah, and Rogers is planting out a box of sweet-scented tobacco-plants which has come by the post.

“Such is little Holmhurst on an August morning. You would be amused with my hearing the other day that one of the servants had said, ‘Our master’s a gentleman as knows his place,’ which meant that I never find fault with an under-servant except through an upper, or cast even the faintest shadow upon an upper-servant if an under-servant is present. After all, it is only another form of Landor’s observation—‘The spider is a gentleman, for he takes his fly in secret.’”

“St. Michael’s Mount, Sept. 7, 1889.—This is a wonderful and delightful place. It was nearly 10 P.M. when I reached the Marazion station. The day had been very hot, and the evening lights and reflections perfectly lovely; but night had quite closed in. Lord St. Levan’s carriage met me at the station, and stopped at the head of a staircase leading to the sea, where four sturdy boatmen took possession of me and my things, and rowed away on a waveless sea, following up the long stream of brilliant light which fell from one of the upper windows of the castle on the sacred mount, grim and black in the still night. An old man with a lanthorn met me at the landing-place, and guided me up a steep pathlet in the rocks. At the door a maid received me, for the family were all at dinner, but I found a pleasant meal ready for me in a small sitting-room, and then was ushered in to the large party—Lord and Lady St. Levan, six daughters, a son, a niece—Lady Agnes Townshend, Hugh Amherst, two Misses Tyssen Amherst, Mr. and Lady Harriet Cavendish, Miss Hill Trevor, Mr. Stewart, a young Manners, and Mrs. and Miss Lowther. With the latter I have spent many pleasant mornings in drawing on the rock (really improving greatly, I think, in knowledge of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of everything), whilst the whole family has gone out fishing, and most glorious are the subjects. Mrs. Lowther’s enthusiastic energy makes her a first-rate companion. ‘Elle est au-dessus de l’ennui et de l’oisiveté, deux vilaines bêtes,’ as Madame de Sévigné would have said.

“It is a life apart. The chapel-bell rings at nine, and I always meet Mrs. Lowther on the staircase hurrying up to the service, which is reached by an open-air walk at the top of everything. Then, before breakfast in the ‘Chevy Chase Hall’ (surrounded by old stucco hunting scenes), we linger on the grand platform, looking down into the chrysoprase waves with sea-birds floating over them, and across to the mainland with its various bays, and its fleeting golden lights and purple shadows.

“On Friday we went a long drive, passing St. Buryan’s, one of the three parishes of the Deanery of St. Levan. A Mr. Stanhope was long the rector here, having also a rich living, where he resided, in Essex. At St. Buryan’s he kept a curate, to whom it was only necessary to give a very small stipend indeed, because he was—a harmless maniac! He used to be fastened to the altar-rail by a long chain, which allowed him to reach either the altar or the reading-desk. When once there, he was quite sane enough to go through the service perfectly! On week-day evenings he earned his subsistence by playing the fiddle at village taverns; but he continued to be the officiating clergyman of St. Buryan’s till his death in 1808.

“This truly aquatic family bathe together from a raft at 7 A.M. most mornings. To-day they were all rowed in their scanty bathing costumes, looking like Charon’s souls being ferried to purgatory, into the little port, and there (at twelve mid-day) one after the other took a header into the sea, and swam—many of the guests with them—to the main-shore at Marazion, to the great astonishment of the natives on the beach there. The parents followed or accompanied their mermaid-daughters in safety-boats, but instead of being anxious about those who became exhausted, encouraged them to hold on. George Manners was almost choked by a butterfly flying down his throat, mistaking his head for an unexpected islet.

“The place is beyond everything poetical: even I have been unable to refrain from some verses, which I send you.

“St. Michael’s Mount, Sept. 7, 1889.—I have enjoyed my visit here extremely, and, difficult as it was to manage coming, it is more difficult to get away, from the extreme kindness and genuine hospitality of Lord and Lady St. Levan, who would like one to stay months. I think I never saw such excellent people, or a happier, more united family; and being very well off, their kindnesses to rich and poor cannot be calculated. Then it is indeed the most delightful of homes, so healthy in its pure air of mingled sea and mountain exhilaration, so glorious in its views over land and water, with every atmospheric effect which Nature, never the same, can paint upon both. Looking down from the ramparts into the deep clear chrysoprase water is in itself a delight, and watching the fish rising and leaping with sparkling showers, and the great white seagulls swooping down upon them. No wonder the sons of the house, devoted to sport of every kind, think there is nothing to compare to the fishing excursions round their home. But there is unspeakable grandeur, too, when the sacred Mount is enveloped in sea-fog, shrouding it from all sign of the mainland and everything else, and when nothing is heard but the distant booming of the waves far down below. This is the one great house of England, I suppose, which is approached by no road whatever, for even the pathlet which winds among the cliffs and low wind-blown bushes of the island is lost where it crosses the turfy slopes which intervene here and there. The castle is in seven stories (of which I inhabit the second); many of the rooms are walled with rock, and in one of the narrow passages it is known that a number of skeletons—naughty nuns, I suppose—are walled up. I never saw a place where so much of daily life was in the open air.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 19.—From the Mount I went to visit the Tremaynes in the Vale of Tavistock. It was an exquisite still evening when I arrived at Sydenham, and it is a beautiful drive through a richly-wooded valley, till a sharp turn brings one to the old bridge over the clear tossing Lyd, on the other side of which rises the noble old manor-house, only separated from the road by ‘the green court’ with a wrought iron gate. By this gate, as I drove up, stood, with her daughter, Mrs. Tremayne, her exquisite profile, quite white, like a Greek gem, relieved against the dark yew foliage: it is a picture that remains with one. We had tea in the old panelled hall, surrounded by four fine Chinese dogs.

“It would be difficult to over-praise the sweet seclusion of the spot, the constant merry ripple of the sparkling river, the deep shade of the tall trees, the old-fashioned gardens of splendid herbaceous flowers, the charming old rooms and staircase, in which—even in this desolate place—the two powdered footmen do not look out of keeping. But the great charm lies in the family itself—in the ever-genial, courteous, sweet-tempered father—the perfectly beautiful and dignified but simple mother—the daughters and the only son.

“A relic in the house is the ‘tongue-token,’ only given during the Civil Wars to the most faithful friends of the King and Queen,—a little gold medal which could be concealed under the tongue. In this case it was given to the Tremayne of the day, because, at imminent risk to himself, he rode to announce to the King at Oxford the birth of the Princess Henrietta at Exeter.

“We went several excursions: to the fine old gateway of Bradstone; to the Kellys of Kelly, who have a most admirable collection of Alpine plants, growing upon little but old mortar; to the Duke of Bedford’s house of Ensleigh, beautiful in hilly woods feathering down to a river; and to Launceston, a dull place, where the castle recalls that of Gisors.

“From Sydenham I went to see the Elphinstones [484] at their beautiful Government House at Plymouth, and on the same evening to Whiteway, where I paid a delightful visit to the dear Dowager Lady Morley, who is still as genially kind and as sharply truth-exacting as ever. It was comically characteristic that when the foolish Bishop of Exeter (Bickersteth) came over to Whiteway, Lady Morley, with innocent pride, showed him the improvements she had made. ‘You should not take a sinful pride in your possessions,’ said the Bishop; ‘all God’s works are beautiful, and all these are the works of God.’—‘That is all very well,’ answered Lady Morley, ‘but I made this walk.’ It was sad to see Lady Katherine, the companion of many happy mountain excursions long ago, laid up as a permanent invalid; but she is indescribably brave and cheerful.

“A child at Whiteway, being asked where the eggs were laid, answered, ‘On an average.’—‘What do you mean? who told you so?’—‘Father; he said the hens laid, on an average, twenty eggs a day.’

“With the Lowthers and Listers we one day met the Halifaxes and their two eldest children at Bovey, and we all went a delightful excursion over Dartmoor to several of the great tors, which rise above the russet wastes of moor, like castles in the south of France, and to Tecket Falls, near which Lord Devon has a cottage. Hence, after ascending through the mazes of a wood, Charlie H. insisted on our being taken blindfold till we reached ‘Exclamation Point,’ where the present Archbishop of Canterbury had fallen on his knees from the beauty of the view. We did not return till eight, when the Halifaxes stayed to dine, and went home at eleven, walking miles over the moors by night in true Charlie Halifax fashion.

“Endless was the amusing talk of Devonshire quaintnesses. ‘How did you break your arm?’ said Lady Katherine to an old woman. ‘Well, ‘twere all along of gathering apples; ‘twere first the apples and then the fall: I were like Eve, I reckon.’ ‘Blow your nose,’ she said to a child. ‘Yes, mum, but her won’t bide blowed.’”

“Holmhurst, Nov. 1889.—I have been far too long without writing, life ripples by so quickly: it seems every day more different from the years before I was grown up, when all was so long.... My ‘outing’ to the North was very enjoyable. I was nearly a week at Tatton, where the host and hostess were boundlessly kind. The party there had admirable elements—Lord Savile, Lord and Lady Knutsford, Lord and Lady Jersey, Lord and Lady Waldegrave, Lord and Lady Amherst, Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller, Mr. and Mrs. Piers Warburton, Mrs. Percy Mitford, Mrs. Legh of Lyme, Sir Charles Grant, and Dick Bagot. We were all taken to see the Ship Canal in a royal way, with special trains, luncheon sent on, and tea at the mouth of the Canal in ‘Bridgewater House,’ where the old Duke of Bridgewater spent his later years, and where his picture still presides in the seldom-used dining-room.

“I left with Mrs. Legh, whose ponies met us at the Disley station, and took us a wild drive over moor and fen, rock and fell—a drive of glorious views, but no road whatever—before returning to Lyme. Lady Lovelace came in the evening and was most agreeable, especially in her reminiscences of India and Lady Canning. With her and Mrs. Legh I went to draw the old hall at Marple, an interesting house of the Usherwoods, who inherited it from the Bradshaws: the regicide’s chamber has its original furniture and tapestry.

“Next, I went to Ingmire, a fine old place of Mrs. Upton Cottrell-Dormer, beautifully situated amongst the Westmoreland fells, though geographically in Yorkshire. John Way, the vicar of Henbury, was there, who said that when the boys in his school were reading of Jezebel, how she ‘painted her face, tired her head,’ &c., he asked, ‘Why do you suppose she did that?’—‘She wanted to get married,’ promptly answered a boy—true, probably, too. He described how his great-grandfather, Sir Roger Hill, and his son lay dying at Denham at the same time. It was of the most vital importance to the son’s wife to keep her husband alive beyond his father, just sufficient time to enable him to sign a will, and this she did by killing one pigeon after another, keeping his feet immersed in the body of the hot steaming bird, and, as soon as it chilled, changing it for another. The pigeons conquered, and the Hedgeley property was left away to the son’s widow. The Denham property went to the daughter, Mrs. Lockey, whose daughter Abigail married Mr. Way, and was mother of Benjamin Way and Lady Sheffield.

“From Ingmire I went to Muncaster, which I thought even more beautiful and delightful than before. With Lady Muncaster and Lady Kilmarnock I had one lovely day at Wastwater—glorious in the last coruscations of Nature. The Bishop of Carlisle had just been at Muncaster, who said that a boy in a Board-school examination, being asked one of the foolish Catechism questions of ‘Why is a boy baptized when by reason of his tender age?’ &c., wrote, ‘Why indeed?’

“Another child in a higher class, being asked to define faith, said it was ‘the power of believing absolutely what was utterly incredible.’”

“Bramfield House, Hertford, Nov. 27, 1889.—Lady Bloomfield is very comfortably established here in a good house of Abel Smith’s, near a pretty little church and village, and in the midst of the amiable Smith colony. She finds no end of good works to do, and really is beyond measure kind, in addition to a thousand other unostentatious goodnesses, in filling her extra rooms with homeless and feeble gentlefolk needing help, kindness, and temporary home. We went through Panshanger yesterday, but I do not admire this cabbage-tree district, all so prosperously unpicturesque.

“You must buy, you really must, ‘John Smith on Church Reform.’ It is by no means the dull book it sounds. You will delight in it, and will present it to Mr. Neville, as I shall to our little clergyman, who is becoming quite as like naughty Rome as he dares, but is a good little man all the same.”

In quoting so constantly from journal and letters, I do not think I have mentioned how much poverty had been pressing upon me in the last few years. Not only had Messrs. Daldy and Virtue, representing my first publishers, ceased to pay even the interest of their large debt, or paid it most irregularly, but under my second set of publishers I had made nothing whatever during the seven years I had been with them. Their accounts showed that 28,000 of my books had been sold in the time, but the innumerable percentages, &c., had swallowed up the whole of the profits, leaving me nothing but the loss of money expended on woodcuts, &c.

Whilst I was at Muncaster, however, Mrs. Arthur Severn came to the castle, and told me how Mr. Ruskin also had made nothing by his books in the hands of my then publishers, but that they had brought him in a good income since they were removed to the hands of Mr. Allen of Orpington. To his hands, therefore, I soon after removed all my books. I had no complaint of unfairness to make against those I had lately employed; they only acted according to their agreements and their usual method, which I had long hoped against hope might eventually result to my advantage: and they behaved very handsomely about parting with the books, though it must have been both a loss and disappointment to them.

“Campsea Ashe High House, Dec. 27, 1889.—We have had a very pleasant merry week in this most kindly and happy of family homes, not going out much, but the days full of intellectual interest, the evenings of games, acting, &c. The party has been the two really charming Miss Farquhars, their brother Ernest, pretty, attractive Miss Theresa Lister, Lady Cecily Clifton, Captain Sydney, Kenneth and Miss Matheson, James Lowther, young Brooke—a pleasant clever little county magnate, delightful Jack Cator and his remarkably nice sister, a young Macgregor in the Guards, and to-day the Anstruther Thompsons, the Edmund Fanes, Miss Mullholland, and a young Burroughs have come. Last night we acted a play, ‘The Bilious Husband,’ before a large audience of neighbours. Can you fancy me as Captain Marmaduke Mynch of the Royal Berkshire Plungers? Then there was ‘Barnum’s Show’—Miss Matheson as a mermaid, myself as a dwarf, Miss Lowther as the tattooed woman, Miss Farquhar the fat woman, Brooke a Zulu, Ernest Farquhar an Arab, and Mr. Lowther as ‘The Bearded Lady!’ Another day I dressed up and came in as an old aunt of the family—being the first scene of the word Antidote, for which we made a little story. I have liked my frivolous week very much, but it is enough, and I shall be glad to go back to my solitary work at Holmhurst on Monday.

“Kenneth Matheson very kindly said, ‘I know you will consider it sacrilege my pressing you to come to Highcliffe whilst I am its tenant’—which I allowed to be the case!

“I was very glad to hear of Lady Ossington’s will—just like an echo from the generosity, justice, and beneficence of her life.”

From Christmas 1889-90 people were already beginning to talk a great deal about the “Influenza epidemic” which was spreading over Europe, and was like a malarial fever. I was in London for a few hours on January 11, and bringing it back to Holmhurst with me, was very ill for nearly a month, but with the comfort of being in my own home, and, to me, the great comfort of being alone. In illness I quite feel the extreme blessing of religion—not the religion worried and touzled by a thousand million vagaries of personality, but the simple main facts, in which I believe so fully. I find some lines of Elizabeth Trench which exactly express what I feel myself:—

“When all fails, and to stand firm seems impossible, stand on the wood of the Cross; it will float with you,” said Queen Marie Leczinska.

“The Mercy of God—all is included in that word Mercy,” was a saying of the Mère Angelique.

Yet I find it very difficult to endure any other religious book than the Bible itself: all are so self-asserting, so self-seeking; and hymns, with one or two sublime exceptions, are either abjectly foolish or full of the self, even if it be the religious self, of man.

“Feb. 13, 1890.—In December my old servant Joe Cornford died, who had been all my lifetime in the family service. For several years he had been too old and infirm to do any work, but, when he was well enough, he made a pretence of picking up a leaf or two, and received his wages all the same. If it had not been for his grumbling old wife, it would have been a pleasure to see him slowly dragging himself about the walks, but her temper was a trial! He was worse for some time. One day I went in to the lodge to see him after breakfast, and at that moment he suddenly died! Again, as often before, I felt the wonderful power of the great mystery of death, actually seeing life ebb downwards: the forehead become white and waxen, then the cheeks, then the whole being. How I was reminded of the lines of Caroline Bowles (Mrs. Southey):—

“I was at his funeral some days afterwards, the poor old man carried to the grave by our workmen, and followed by seventeen of his descendants, children and grandchildren. He has left me a chair which came out of Hurstmonceaux Castle.”

“Feb. 26, 1890.—Went to see Lady De Ros,[485] aged ninety-five. She brought out for me her greatest treasure, a beautifully printed Church of England Prayer-book in Spanish. It belonged to the great Duke of Ormonde, and descended from him to Lady Eleanor Butler, by whom and Miss Ponsonby—‘ladies of Llangollen’—it was given to the Duke of Wellington as a boy. He taught himself Spanish by following its services, as he himself says in an inscription on the fly-leaf. In his old age, when Lady De Ros was with him at Strathfieldsaye, she found it in the library, and told him what a valuable book she thought it. ‘Then, if you think it such a valuable thing, I will give it you, my dear.’—‘So, as Douro and Charles were just coming, I took my book away at once,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘for fear they should stop me.’ Some years afterwards the Duke asked Lady De Ros to lend him the book to show to some great librarian. She let it go, but made it a condition that, before it was returned, the Duke should write its history in the book with his own hands; and this he did.

“Lady De Ros also showed me a brush of hogs’-bristles, mounted in ebony, and with a silver plate. And she told how, when she was hunting wild boars with the Duke on Mont St. Jean near Cambrai, an immense boar sprang out of the thicket close by her. The Duke speared it. It was a horrid sight and she shrank from it. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Duke, ‘you must not mind it, for I am prouder of having killed that boar than of the battle of Waterloo.’

“Lady De Ros was very full of her dispute with Sir William Fraser about the house in which the ball was given at Brussels by her father, the Duke of Richmond, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. She was quite certain of her facts, and that the house was now gone. She had been living in the house itself, in the Rue de la Blanchisserie (‘where the Duke would direct to me “in the wash-house“‘), and cited as a proof that the ball was given in her own house, the fact that her youngest sister, who had been sent to bed, stole out, and watched the company arrive through the banisters. ‘I believe Sir William Fraser asserts,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘that I am confused and doting now through my great age, but you know very old people remember the long-ago as if it was to-day, and that is the case with me. In 1860 I went back to see Brussels, and I could not find our house then; the whole street was swept away. At last, as I was walking up and down, I was attracted by the name on a pastry-cook’s shop: it was a name I remembered in that long-ago time. So I went in and asked if they knew anything of our house. “Oh, a house in the Rue de la Blanchisserie,” they said; “it has been pulled down years and years ago.”’

XXVI

AT HOME AND ABROAD

WHEN my friend George Jolliffe had passed his diplomatic examination, I promised him that I would go out and pay him a month’s visit wherever he was sent to. Thus I came to set out for Constantinople on April 10, 1890. The faithful Hugh Bryans went with me. At Vienna I spent several days with the Lützows, who showed me the sights in the most agreeable way. The town was full of grand-dukes or exiled princes—Cumberland, Parma, Tuscany, &c., all very rich and adding to its prosperity.

“British Embassy, Constantinople, April 22, 1890.—We came straight through from Vienna, through the strange unknown country. There were vast plains of corn till Belgrade, a poor town hanging shaggy on the hillside: then we entered low wooded hills like the Sabina. In the Servian villages of rude huts and ruder fences we could see the swarming people, men and women in loose folds of white linen, the former with the air of princes. All seemed remote and unreal, and the shadows, as in Syrian clearness, fell pure blue upon the dusty hills. By the second morning we were passing through Roumelia. All had become poorer. The villages, of wretched huts, stood in wattled enclosures of thorns, inside which all the domestic animals are driven. Now, the men were seen in crimson and green, with magnificent mahogany-coloured faces beneath their turbans, and the women, all closely veiled, moved like masses of dark drapery; a little mosque appeared, with a delicate and refined minaret; a little fountain-cistern with a gothic arch in a grove of thorns; marshes with storks; plains with buffaloes.

“About 3 P.M. the lovely Sea of Marmora gleamed upon the right, with a variety of inlet bays of solitary beauty, and, in the distance, the aërial mountains of Asia. Then a succession of battlemented towers rose on the left from the untrodden plain—the walls of Stamboul! Through these the train passes. We were far from the station still, but what a change from our two days’ desolation! We rushed across many shabby courts, paved either with mud or rough stones. The old houses, with their projecting lattices, were veiled in a web of flowering wistaria, and shaded by pink Judas-trees in fullest bloom. Then above us rose the mosques with their slender minarets and huge storm-blasted cypresses. St. Sophia itself, Achmet, Suleiman, Mahmoud were passed, with many a strange gothic fountain or decorated cistern, before we reached the shed-like station, where George was a most welcome sight, armed with an Embassy cavass to extricate us from the mass of yelping, screaming natives.

“Off we went across the creaking, rocking, timber bridge over the Golden Horn, thronged by the strangest of multitudes. Then up the steep street of Galata, where the lattices project till they almost obliterate the sky, and the pavement is made of rough stones set edgeways, up which the horses scrambled like cats. A road succeeded, a dusty deep-rutted track, overlooking an old burial-ground without barriers, where, amid the immemorial cypresses, thousands of battered tombstones remain, neglected, ruined, but never wilfully destroyed; and so we reached the handsome palace of the Embassy, with its delightful garden, overlooking the valley of the Golden Horn.

“I have been here two days now, and cannot say how delightful I find it to be with George, with whom every thought may be exchanged. I live in the room of an absent attaché, and the life is like that of a college. Unfortunately, on the first afternoon I caught a dreadful chill in the boat, and have been very ill ever since, though I dragged myself out yesterday to take advantage of a rarely procured permit to see the famous church of St. Irene, where the Council of Constantinople was held, and where the Christian emperors, Constantine, Arcadius, &c., repose, some of them in grand porphyry sarcophagi. I went with two clergymen, friends of Arthur Stanley, Canon Farrar of Durham, and Dr. Livingstone, who had been to every other scene of a General Council: this was the last!”

“April 27.—I have been suffering terribly from rheumatic fever, but am better to-day, and have been to St. Sophia. The carriage stopped at an obscure door on the N.W., where the cavass took off his boots and fetched some of the Turkish guardians of holiness, who, for a very large consideration of baksheesh, put slippers over ours. Then we passed the curtain, and found ourselves at once at the northern extremity of the great western narthex, like that of St. Mark’s at Venice on a huge scale, and—almost immediately—from a side-door, in the church itself.

“It is so unspeakably, overwhelmingly, indescribably, entrancingly, bewilderingly glorious, words can give no idea of it.

“Of the immense space—a St. Mark’s lifted into the heavens, soaring far above in the mystic involutions of its entwining arches and the delicate nuances of its grey-golden colouring, never sufficiently defined to be obtrusive in any special point, only melting and harmonising into a whole as tender and glorious as the hues on a dove’s back. So also in the architectural details; all the walls, all the chapels are filled with the most exquisite and graceful sculptured ornament, but the grand impression of space is never lessened by any single object leaving its own identity upon the vision, till the gaze rests far above upon the pendentives of the mightiest dome, where float the four huge prophetic seraphim [486] with their many wings folded in repose—with twain they covered their breasts, with twain they covered their feet, and with twain they did fly.

“Close to the entrance was a vast fountain gurgling, rushing, spouting—a fountain of ablutions. Far towards the east, and beneath the two floating green banners of the Prophet, was the mimber or pulpit of Friday prayer, and near it a platform for the choir, who face, not the east, but the Kibla, the holy house of Mecca. Under the shadowy arches are the cup and cradle of Jesus of Bethlehem, revered as a great teacher, the latter a hollowed block of red marble; the ‘sweating column,’ the ‘shining stone,’ and the ‘cold window,’ fresh with the north wind, where the Sheik Shemseddin, the companion of Mahomet II. (the Conqueror), expounded the Koran. We may also see the pillar on which Mahomet the Conqueror left the mark of his bloody hand; for through the church itself, and the crowds of clergy and virgins who had taken refuge there, he rode, exclaiming ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ and ordaining the violation of sanctuary. Here and there, but lost in the extreme immensity, are chapels or refuges where groups of men, or of veiled women apart from them, seem to hold little services, with private litanies of their own. In some of these, solitary individuals, wrapped in devotion or penance, were perpetually smiting the earth with their foreheads: in one an old man was shouting, yelling, screaming portions of the Koran, flinging the words with savagest ferocity amongst groups of squatters in fezes and turbans, who received them quite unconcerned.

“The columns in the church make up the mystic number of forty, typical to the Eastern mind of all pomp and splendour. The cupola is inscribed ‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth!’ On its Rhodian tiles are written ‘God hath founded it, and it will not be overthrown: God will support it in the blush of the dawn.’ Nothing probably remains of the fourth-century church of Constantine, but the present church is chiefly that of Justinian, who employed a hundred architects, each with a hundred masons under him, of whom five thousand worked on the right, and five thousand on the left, according to the advice given to the emperor by an angel. The church itself is under the guardianship of an angel, who appeared to a boy watching the tools of lazy masons, and bade him hurry them back to their work, saying he would guard his charge till he came back. But the boy never came back, for the emperor intercepted him, and sent him off, well provided for, to the Cyclades, that the angel might be obliged to watch for ever.

“Our driver stuck his cigarette behind his ear and took us to the Hippodrome, where we saw the great obelisk, raised by Theodosius on a base with curious reliefs: and the brazen serpents supposed to have been brought from Delphi, or the remains of them, for the Sultan Murad broke off one of their heads. Along the side of the square runs the screen of the Mosque of Ahmed (the state church), enclosing its vast dusty court, old elm-trees, cloister, and a fountain, around which were groups of people washing, dressing, and being shaved before entering the sanctuary.

“We drove by the tomb of the Sultan Mahmoud the Reformer, where we stared through a metal screen at his sarcophagus, to the finest of the great mosques or djami, the glorious Suleimanyeh, which Solyman the Magnificent intended to surpass St. Sophia. On its giant dome is the truly catholic inscription (Sura xxiv. 36), ‘God is the light of heaven and earth. His light is in the windows on the wall, in which a lamp burns covered with glass. The glass shines like a star, the lamp is lit with the oil of a blessed tree. No Eastern, no Western oil; it shines for whoever wills it.’ On the ever-clean matted floor of this mosque of glorious proportions numbers of barefooted children were sporting as in a playground, and very pretty and graceful were the interlacing groups which they made. The ecclesiastical revenue of Suleimanyeh is 300,000 piastres. Behind is a curious burial-ground, crowded with tombs, chiefly of women, marked by a sculptured rose, whilst the headstones of the men are crowned by a turban or fez. In two great sepulchral chapels or turbé lie Solyman the Magnificent and his immediate family and successors. The sarcophagi are covered with splendid embroideries and delicate muslins, those of the sultans being often shrouded by their favourite wives with their shawls—most precious of their possessions. At their heads are their tall white turbans, with bunches of peacocks’ feathers on either side. The famous Roxolana lies amongst the group of ladies.

“But all through the streets of Stamboul the greatest feature is the little burial-grounds, with their closely packed tombs and their huge cypresses or tamarind trees, which always give them picturesqueness, between the houses, at the angles of the streets, everywhere—the dead forced, as it were, into the very life of the living, and never to be forgotten for a moment.

“The next great feature—and an odious one—is the swarms of dogs, like little foxes, which lie about everywhere in the sun, encumbering the footways, and refusing to move for any one. They are the friends of cats, but if a strange dog enters their quarter, they demolish him at once. They never bite a human being, at least they have never been known to bite more than one, and that was—the Russian ambassador! Successive travellers have given the idea that they are scavengers, but it is quite false: a man goes round at night with a cart and takes everything undesirable away. All night the air resounds with the yells of the dogs. The English doctor is obliged to poison them by hundreds near the hospital, or all the patients would die of the noise.

“We ended our first eventful drive at the Mosque of Bajazet, where the court was now turned into a bazaar, and round the central fountain glowed a moving mass of colour—white turbans, green turbans of Mecca, pilgrims, negroes, Armenians, robed women in shot violet silk. Overhead a perfect roar of wings indicated that the sacred pigeons of the mosque were moving in vast battalions from one part to another. At the many-coloured stalls, the beads—especially the green beads—were quite irresistible. In the turbé of Bajazet, under the head of the Sultan, is a brick made of all the dust collected off his clothes and shoes during his lifetime: his mother and his two daughters lie beside him.

“It is a great pleasure having Gerard Lowther here; and the other attachés, Finlay and Tower, are charming.”

“May 12.—As I have felt stronger, each day here has been more full of interest. On alternate mornings I stay quietly in the Embassy garden or the adjoining cemeteries and have luncheon with my kind hosts, with whom I have several times been out afterwards to the bazaars, steep, rugged, stony lanes, arched overhead, and a blaze of colour from their shops and costumes. Here we have been served with cups of coffee in the inner den of Marchetto, the tradesman of ‘Paul Patoff,’[487] whilst going through the wearisome routine of bargaining for old silver, weighing and reweighing, and only discovering one had concluded a purchase when one had utterly despaired of it. How forcibly the truth of that verse of Proverbs strikes one here—‘It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer, but when he goeth his way, he boasteth thereof.’ The whole bazaar seems like an inextricable web to outsiders, yet any one or anything can be found there in ten minutes by one who knows the place; and, amid all the bustle and confusion, one sees many a charming picture of an old Turk with snowy beard and robes, sitting cross-legged at an angle of his counter, poring over an ancient parchment Koran, and as utterly absorbed in it as if he were in the Great Desert. How the names Aladdin, Mustapha, Scheherazade, Zobeide, recalled the large edition of the ‘Arabian Nights’ which was at Hurstmonceaux Rectory in my childhood.

“On other days I have gone off immediately after breakfast with a cavass from the Embassy—Dimitri—as my guard, making much use of the trams, from which one sees so much that is curious, and in which one has so many experiences of Turkish life, from the ladies like bundles of green, brown, or shot silk, who are huddled behind the curtain at the end of the carriage, to the child-pasha well provided with copper coins to quiet the numerous clamourers for baksheesh. Thus I have twice reached Yedi Kouli, the Seven Towers, where the triple walls of the town make their farthest angle close to the Sea of Marmora—bluest of blue waters melting into chrysoprase-green near the shore. Here I was drawing an old gate in pencil in my little book, heedless of an old Turk who had been cursing the ‘christian dog’ as a breaker of the second commandment, when suddenly, with a spring, he flew upon me, and in an instant his long talons would have torn out my eyes, if Dimitri, throwing himself upon him, had not hurled him on his back in the gutter, after which he got up, and went away quite quietly. Another day, after we had made the circuit of the wonderful walls, I was sitting to draw in the middle of the white dusty road near the Adrianople gate, and Dimitri had fallen asleep on a tombstone a few steps behind me, when suddenly he called out with a rueful voice that he had been robbed, plundered of his watch and chain, whilst I, rather more in evidence in the sunshine, had escaped. It is near this gate, the Polyandria of the Greeks, that we saw the curious mosque, once a church covered with mosaics like St. Mark’s, and still retaining many of them. One was shown as the Virgin waiting for her Teskerei, or passport, to go into Egypt!

“All around the walls are tombs: the woods are filled, the hillsides are powdered, with them. The woods are all of cypress, which is supposed to neutralise effluvia. When a death occurs, a body is hurried to the grave as soon as possible, for the soul is always in torment, it is believed, between the death and burial. Little parcels of food are laid in holes by the side of the grave, and large headstones are always erected, stones on which the angels Nebir and Munkir sit to judge the souls of the dead. We saw many touching little funerals—young girls being carried to the grave without any coffin or shroud. The blocks of stone on the road date from the time of Justinian. At an angle of the cemetery opposite the gate of Silivri a row of head-stones marks the graves of the heads of Ali Pacha (de Tébelin) and his four sons, cut off in 1827. Close to this a lane turns off through the tombs and cypresses to the monastery of Baloukli. Here, from a courtyard, filled, like everything else, with tombs, we descended a staircase at the head of which an old priest was squatting as guardian of a number of huge brass alms-dishes. In the subterranean chapel below are more alms-dishes, and a fountain with the ‘miraculous fish,’ black on one side, red on the other. On the 29th of May 1455, a monk was engaged in frying them, when a man rushed in and announced the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. ‘I shall believe it,’ said the monk, ‘when these fish leap out of the frying-pan,’ and they leapt out immediately, and have remained half-cooked to this day! At the little restaurant close to the monastery, shaded by pink Judas-trees and strewn with white sand, we had our luncheon, bread, pilaf, galetta, hard eggs, wine, and syrup of roses.

“Beyond the Adrianople Gate the walls and cemetery descend together to Eyoub, a hamlet at the head of the Golden Horn, with a very sacred mosque, which heretics are not allowed to enter, as it contains the sword of Mahomet, with which the Sultan girds himself on the day of his installation, and in its court, shaded by noble plane-trees, the tomb of Eyoub, standard-bearer of the Prophet, near whose resting-place are grouped a number of royal turbé, those of the Valide Sultana, mother of Selim III., and of Hussein Pacha being the most remarkable. We made a separate excursion hither, finding the rugged streets round the mosque occupied by the gay booths of a fair shaded by banksia roses in full bloom, and the keeper of the sanctuary standing at the gate with a drawn sword to prevent the entrance of the giaours. But we wandered behind, by the steep ascent between the eternal burial-grounds, where there was a grand view down the Golden Horn between the old cypresses, all the mosques of Stamboul embossed upon an aërial sunset sky.

“On May 3 we met a large party at Dolma Baghtché, one of the great palaces which are memorials of the extravagance of Abdul Medjid. The rooms are those in which his son, the savage Abdul Aziz, used to throw everything that came to hand at those who offended him. They are only used by the present Sultan for the great reception of Beiram, when all the great dignitaries of the empire flock to kiss the hem of his garment. The palace is vast, but decorated like a French café, with glass banisters to the staircase and numbers of fifth-rate pictures: nothing but the hall is worth seeing. Close by is the mosque of Abdul Medjid, with two slender minarets, and beyond it the palace of Teheragan-Sérai, where the ex-Sultan Murad is kept a prisoner, no one being allowed to linger either on the road or in a boat in front of the building. The existing Sultan goes to see him sometimes, but asserts ‘My brother and every one belonging to him are quite perfectly mad.’

“We all went by carriage with an order to the Seraï or Seraglio near St. Sophia, which occupies at least two-thirds of the ancient Byzantium, selected by Constantine for his capital. By an unkempt ascent we reach the Bab-el-Sélam, or Gate of Safety, which had doors on either side, and in the intermediate space of which high officials condemned by the Divan were executed. Passing an avenue of cypresses, we reached a second gate, the Bab Seadet, or Gate of Happiness, guarded by white eunuchs. It was here that the sultans used to give up their unpopular ministers to the popular fury; that Murad III. gave up his favourite falconer, Mehemet, to be cut to pieces before his eyes; that Mahomet III. gave up his three chief eunuchs, and Murad IV. his grand-vizier Hafiz, who was killed by seventeen wounds. Many old aunts and cousins of sultans still reside in the inner apartments, guarded by numbers of eunuchs, the historic criminal figures of Turkish history, whose existence is expressly condemned by the Koran, and who are generally bought or stolen as children from Syria or Abyssinia. Without name, family, or sex, they often marry, and even have harems for the sake of feminine friendship.

“The treasury is full of boundless barbaric treasures, uncut emeralds, &c., and much fine armour and china. The finest single object is the throne of Selim I., taken from the Shah of Persia, of green enamel studded with pearls and rubies. In the Salle du Divan is the curious bed where the sultans received ambassadors, though they only saw him through the window. We also saw the glorious Bagdad mosque lined with blue Persian tiles, built by the Sultan Amurath in remembrance of one he had known at Bagdad. In the garden is the famous cage where, from the time of Mahomet IV., sultans shut up princes who rebelled against them: Abdul Aziz was confined there from his deposition to his death. Afterwards, I sat with Sir George Bowen on the terrace, which has an exquisite view up the Bosphorus, while immediately below us ran the railway line, which suggests the fall of Turkey. We were served with sweetmeats of rose-leaves, and coffee in golden cups studded with diamonds, by an attendant who bore an embroidered cloth upon his shoulder to conceal the empty cups which had been used by Christians, and were therefore unclean. This would sound hospitable on the part of the Sultan if one forgot to mention that we had each had to pay about fifteen francs to enter the palace, and that there were about thirty of us.

“Another day we went to the mosque of Selimyeh, beautifully situated, and afterwards I sat to draw under a bower of banksia roses, surrounded by a marvellous group of Turkish figures, in the Saddlers’ Bazaar (serra-jobane-jamissi). Here the people were good to us, as there are so many Christians in that quarter of the town, but generally the natives never cease cursing those who are breaking the second commandment by making a likeness of something in heaven or earth. In the courtyard of Suleimanyeh I was less fortunate: a number of soldiers crowded in front, wholly obstructing all view, and on Dimitri remonstrating, their officer came up quite furious, with ‘My men shall stand where they like, and if they wish to hide the man’s view they shall certainly do so.’ Twice I have toiled to the distant mosque of Mehmedyé, for Mahomet the Conqueror built it on the site of the famous church of the Holy Apostles, founded by Constantine the Great, and where he was buried with eleven other emperors. A dial over a gate near this is inscribed (from the Koran), ‘Didst thou not see thy Lord, how He extended thy shadow?’ On some of these excursions it has been most difficult to procure anything whatever for luncheon, for it is the fast of Ramazan, when no good Turk allows any food whatever to pass his lips between sunrise and sunset, on the approach of which he will begin to hold in his hands the viands which he will devour the very instant the gun fires. Wine at all times is described as ‘the father of all abominations,’ yet Solyman the Great, who burnt all the vessels laden with wine in the port, himself died drunk: Murad IV., who cut off the head of any one who smelt of wine, was a regular drunkard: Bajazet I. and II. both drank, and to Selim II. was given the surname of ‘mesth’—the drunkard: so much for the far-famed Turkish consistency.

“We went to the evening service at St. Sophia, three white-turbaned figures receiving us in the dark at a postern door, and—after exacting ten francs apiece—conducting us by a winding stair to the broad gallery, far beneath which the great chandeliers gleamed like flower-beds over the immense grey space, intersected by long lines of black figures—all males, for women are soulless—bending, curvetting, prostrating symmetrically like corn in a wind, and with the same kind of rush and rustle. It is a curious but monotonous sight, a repetition of the same movement over and over again, and the shrill harsh cry of the swaying and falling lines, even more discordant in its echo by the choir, soon grates upon one: especially as the priests never cease whispering and worrying for extra baksheesh.

“After waiting one morning for a weary time with an order at the ‘Selamlik,’ we saw the Sultan go to the Yildis mosque. The coachman was gorgeous in his golden livery, but the ‘Sultan of Sultans, the King of Kings,’ was a piteous sight, a mixture of boredom and terror. Cringing cowardice prevents his going to Stamboul more than one day in the year, and this occurred lately. It is a great day for the court ladies, who are all allowed to accompany him in three hundred carriages, and avenge themselves for veiled faces by exhibiting their bare arms covered with bracelets and as much else as they dare. Mahomet says, ‘He who espouses only one wife is praiseworthy,’ and now it is considered indiscreet to have more than four legitimate wives, who are all equal, and who have each their own dowry and servants. Women are generally well treated here now, a divorce is easy, and each wife has a right to a separate room, and may even exact a separate house, if she cannot get on with the other wives.

“Almost every night through the streets there is a rush of the Talumbodgi or firemen—half-naked savages with primitive engines, who scurry to save the valuables of burning houses, not for the owners, but for themselves, so that they are far more dreaded than the flames. In recent conflagrations in Galata and Pera it is certain that the fire began in three or four places at the same moment; for when a street in Constantinople is wholly bad or unsafe, the authorities do not scruple to set fire to it, regardless of the consequences, though the people are such fatalists that they will not leave their dwellings till the last moment, and then fly, leaving everything behind them.”

“May 22.—I write during a quiet day with George at the Embassy, after my return from Broussa, where I have been spending a week.... It was a voyage of five hours in a steamer crowded with Turks on their carpets, sleeping, praying, or reciting the Koran, and at the ends of the vessel knots, lumps, and clusters of women. Outside Seraglio Point the view of Stamboul is very fine, St. Sophia and the Achmet mosque rising above the old sea-walls, and the gardens lovely with rich green and pink Judas bloom. We passed the islands—Antigone, where Sir H. Bulwer lived with the Greek princess, and Prinkapo, to which the Empress Irene was banished, and where she is buried. After two hours it became very rough, and all were sick, especially a number of Turkish officers, who up to that time had been eating voraciously. So it was indeed a relief when we entered the comparatively calm bay of Mudania, with its glorious leaping ‘multitudinous seas’ of sapphire and chrysoprase waves, amid which endless dolphins—true clowns of the sea—were tumbling and sporting.

“At Mudania a horde of half-naked savages leaped on board to seize our luggage, and a hand-to-hand fight ensued, during which we had to scale the bulwarks of the vessel to reach the pier. Then came a scramble and a bargaining for carriages, but at last we were off and up the hills, where boys were selling piles of cherries for half a piastre (1¼ d.) on the ascent. In the valley beyond, we came up with a knot of carriages in a desolate place, the inmates standing in the road round one whose wheel was coming off. It had contained two ladies, and I took up one of them, who turned out to be Miss Holmes, sister of the librarian at Windsor. Very lovely was the ascent to Broussa, through the rich green walnut-woods and by rushing streams, to the exquisite chain of mosques and minarets under the lower slopes of Olympus. At the table-d’hôte we had the British Consul, who stated that he ‘was not at all gone on mosques;’ he had been seventeen years in Constantinople and had seen nothing but St. Sophia—‘what on earth was the good?’ The hotel was delightful, and nothing could be more exquisite than the view from my window, whence I watched the long lines of camels following the inevitable donkey, and the handsome population, arrayed in every colour of the rainbow as to male turbans and girdles and the loose robes women are arrayed in. Thence also, I constantly heard, from the mosque of Murad, the shrill voice ‘La Ilah il Allah vè Mohammed resoul Allah,’ calling the people to prayer.

“On the first day I joined Miss Holmes and her friend Miss Bacon on a long excursion through the town, going first to the famous Green Mosque (Yéchil-Djami), which stands on a platform with old trees and a glorious view over the plain. We were not allowed to enter at once; it was the service for women, who are permitted this mosque only. ‘Priest very old and well covered up: it must be so,’ said the dragoman; ‘it is necessary to guard their moralities: just let them a little loose, and it is a very bad job.’

“Close by is a beautiful turbé with an entrance worthy of the Alhambra, and lovely tiles and jewelled glass within. Beneath the dome lies the sarcophagus of Mahomet I., with those of his son, his six daughters, and their nurse—the last very plain, but close to the royal coffins. In the centre of the mosque itself is a beautiful fountain, which freshens the air with a rush of falling waters: around are inscriptions—‘God is love,’ ‘Mahomet is the prophet of God,’ and the names of the six caliphs who were the companions of Mahomet. The mimber here is only ascended by the Sheik el Islam himself, when he gives the blessing with the Koran. As an interior, Oulou-Djami, the great mosque in the centre of the town, has even more perfect proportions—a perfection of interlacing architecture inclining to gothic, forming twenty-four cupolas, and centering in the great dome above a splashing fountain. Outside this mosque, facing the street, a bay-tree overshadows the tomb of a sainted dervish: sick people hang bits of their clothes around it, and think that, with them, they leave their ailments there. Oulou-Djami stands on the edge of the vast bazaar, where splendid Eastern dresses are seen in perfection: the perfectly fitting jackets and breeches of the men, of richest embroidered stuff, never costing less than from £3 to £10, so that one wondered at their not minding the frequent torrents of rain; but it is all ‘kismet.’ When at home these glorious-looking Turks do nothing, for there is nothing to do: if a house takes fire, they do not care—there is nothing to burn but a few divans: perhaps the owner takes his clothes with him when he escapes—there is nothing else to take. They rise early and have a cup of coffee, at ten they breakfast, at six is dinner, at eight they go to bed: a few possible visits are the only variety of the day.

“It was a delightful drive to the Citadel, where all the space not occupied by wonderful old buildings is shaded by the most magnificent planes and cypresses, watered by crystal streams, which have their source here. The tombs of the first Osmanli princes, Osman and Orchan, are here, restored after an earthquake. On the tomb of Osman lies the order of the Osmanlieh: two of his sons and fourteen of his daughters surround him. A more curious family burial-place is that of Mouradié, a green enclosure, bright with fountains and roses, and containing a whole succession of venerable turbé of the family of Murad I. and Mehemet II., chiefly murdered victims. Amongst the latter, the tomb of the hero-prince Djem is especially rich and striking. The grave of Murad, by his own desire, is left open to the rain of heaven, and is covered with sickly grass. Of the early Broussa Sultans, several—being sons of fathers of eighteen and mothers of sixteen—were generals of armies and governors of provinces at fourteen, and their enormous families were due to the fact that they continued to have children from sixteen to seventy.

“We drove on to another noble mosque at Tchékirgué, about two miles from Broussa, with more tombs and relics. Amongst the latter is shown a prayer, inscribed on wood and enclosed in a bottle. ‘When the bottle breaks, Broussa will become christian,’ is the tradition—suggesting an easy and cheap enterprise for missionaries. In front of this mosque (Ghazy-Hounkiar) is a fountain surrounded by cold and hot springs alternately, and a little below the village, on the edge of the valley, are the picturesque old domed baths, the strong sulphuric springs of which are famous throughout Turkey. All around Broussa is rich soil and vegetation; hollyhocks grow wild along the hedges: it is a glorious climate: only justice and government are needed.

“I am sorry to go away without seeing more of the Bosphorus, but I have just been to Therapia, where the villeggiatura life in summer must be delightful.”

“May 23.—My last hours at Constantinople were spent in an expedition with the Whites in their picturesque state barge to the Sweet Waters of Europe. I believe I have said nothing of Sir William White, though he is the ambassador in whose house I have been living so long. His simple manners are full of bluff humour. He is said to understand the Turk perfectly, and rose entirely by his own merits, with the help of a lucky appointment to the Conference of 1876-77.”

“Ober-Ammergau, June 2.—We have seen the Passion-Play. It is a day to have lived for: nothing can be more sublimely devotional, more indescribably pathetic.

“Our journey from Constantinople was accomplished very easily. We stayed to see Buda-Pesth, a very handsome modern city, and then had two days of perfect enjoyment at Halstadt and the exquisite Gosau Lake. On Friday night we slept at Oberau, and drove here early on Saturday morning, finding the Lowthers at once in the village street, and spending most of that day in drawing with them. We went at once to the house of the Burgomaster to inquire where we were billeted. All the material part of life is most comfortably and economically arranged for visitors. I am quartered with St. Thomas, and all through the day one meets peasants with long hair, recalling Biblical figures. The Burgomaster’s beautiful daughter is the Virgin Mary. In a gracious and touching spirit of unselfish love all these villagers live together for mutual help and comfort. They have been trained under their late pastor, Aloys Daisemberger, to regard the Passions-Spiel, which is the great event of their quiet lives, not only as a religious service of thanksgiving to which every talent and energy must be contributed for the glory of God, and a manifestation of gratitude for His preservation of them, but they are also taught to look upon it as an instrument which God’s grace has placed in their hands for the calling back of Europe to Christianity, through the dark mists of infidelity which have been creeping over it in the nineteenth century. And truly in this the actual visit to Ober-Ammergau may be as full of teaching as the great representation itself—the simple contact with such men as ‘Christus Maier,’[488] as he is called, whose life’s work is ‘to endeavour to do God’s will aufs innersten, and to be helpful to those around him.’ Here, in Ober-Ammergau—perhaps here alone—religion takes no heed of Roman Catholic or Protestant vagaries; the will of God, the example of Christ, those are the only guidance of life. In the five sermons of Daisemberger preparatory to the Passion-Play of 1871,[489] there is not a single word which indicates Romanism. ‘Look, O disciples of Christ,’ says Daisemberger to his people; ‘see your Master, how gentle, how kind He is, how mild in His intercourse with those around Him, how full of heartiest sympathy for their joys and sorrows. Then can you, in your intercourse with those around you, be grumbling, rough, discourteous, self-asserting, repellent, and wanting in sympathy? Oh no! you could never endure to be so unlike your Master.’

“It is a beautiful place, a high upland mountain valley, covered with rich pastures and enamelled with flowers. A long street, or rather road, lined by comfortable detached timber houses, leads to the handsome church, around which the older part of the village groups itself above the clear rushing Ammer, and is highly picturesque. Beyond the village, in the meadows overlooked by the peak of the Kofel, is the theatre where the great drama of the Passion is enacted, which, ever since 1634, has commemorated every tenth year the then deliverance of Ammergau from the plague which was devastating the neighbouring villages.

“All through Friday it was curious to meet a succession of London acquaintances, and most unexpected ones, but from all being here with one object, no one was uncongenial. And all is so perfectly managed, there is no fuss or hurry; comfortable accommodation, good seats, excellent food are provided for all who are permitted to come, for the visitors for every performance are limited to the 2000 for whom there is room; no unexpected persons, no excursionists are ever admitted. No thought of gain has ever the slightest influence upon the villagers, and the prices are only such as pay what is absolutely due.

“Yesterday morning, I imagine, no visitor could sleep after four, when their peasant hosts began to tramp overhead and clatter down their narrow oak staircases. Then, after an excellent breakfast of hot coffee, cream, eggs, and toast, many visitors and all the people of Ober-Ammergau hurried to the six-o’clock service in the church, where all the five hundred actors knelt with their pastor in silent prayer, and many of them received the Sacrament. At eight all were comfortably placed in their seats in the open-air theatre, and the soft wild music of Schutzgeister, which seems to come from behind the hills, preluded the performance.

“One might be seated in the Piazza del Popolo at Rome with one’s back to the gate. There is the same vast intervening space, and the same three branching streets (the central closed by an inner theatre for tableaux), with marked buildings at the entrance. Only here those buildings are the houses of Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate, and the streets are those of Jerusalem, lined with Eastern houses, domes, and here and there a palm-tree, and they melt far away into lovely ethereal mountain distances, the real mountains of the Bavarian Alps. The performance begins when the spirit-chorus of eighteen persons, male and female, in many-coloured tunics and mantles, advance in stately lines from either side of the stage, and in a chaunt, weird but most distinctly audible, explain what is coming, and urge those present to receive it in a humble spirit of reverence and adoration of God. Then, on the central stage, begin the strange series of types and antitypes, and, as the veil falls the second time, the vast Hosanna-procession of five hundred men, women, and children, singing, shouting, and strewing palm-branches, appears down the distant streets, and, as it draws nearer, and the mountains resound with jubilant shouts and the whole air is ablaze with life and colour, the serene, rapt, stately figure of the Christus, riding upon the ass, but even then spiritualised into absolute sublimity by the sense of his divine mission, comes for the first time before us. Afterwards, through the long eight hours of thrilling tension which follow, overshadowing the endless, almost wearisome, series of Old Testament scenes, drawing every heart and eye nearer to himself through the agony of the trial, the cross-bearing, the crucifixion, does that sublime figure become more familiar; never again can the thought of the God-man be severed from it. And in the great drama itself one sees all the rest, but one feels with, one lives for, the Christ alone; and the dignity of his lofty patience, unmoved from the holy calm which pervades his whole being even when four hundred savage Jews are shouting and jibing round in clamorous eagerness for his death, must be present with one through life.

“I cannot tell it all. Words fail and emotions are too much. Through that long day—oh! is it that day alone?—one knows how to live with, to suffer with Christ: one is raised above earth and its surroundings: one dies with Him to sin and suffering: one is raised with Him into heavenly places. After some hours, England is forgotten, Germany is forgotten. You are a Jew. Jerusalem is your home: all, all your interests are centred there: nothing earthly is of the very least importance to you except the great tragedy that is being enacted before your eyes. It is perhaps the humanity of Christ which is brought most forcibly before you; but oh! how divinely human, how humanly divine!

“Could one wonder that Mr. Vanderbilt, the American millionaire, said that he owed everything—everything for this world and the next—to Ober-Ammergau? it had unveiled and explained religion for him: it had made the Bible a living reality.

“I think of the Old Testament scenes, the Fall of the Manna is the most beautiful. More than four hundred Israelites, including a hundred and fifty children, are seen—groups of the most exquisite and harmonious colour—with Moses and Aaron in the desert; and between you and them, and amongst and around them, falls mysteriously the soft vaporous manna; whilst the chorus in sweet, wild, lingering monotone chaunt the beautiful hymn beginning—

“Of the New Testament scenes, the leave-taking with the family of Bethany is perhaps the most pathetic. It is an exquisite sunset scene. Huge olive-trees stretch their gnarled boughs overhead and are embossed against the amber sky, in the distance the village of Bethany stands out in the soft blue mists of evening. Through the sunset comes the Christ in lingering last words with the sisters and Lazarus, and there, under the old trees, is their last farewell, touching indescribably, after which the weeping family return to Bethany, and he goes away, a solitary figure upon the burnt hills in the twilight, to his death at Jerusalem.

“At Ober-Ammergau one for the first time realises the many phases of the trial—in the house of Caiaphas, of Annas, of Pilate, of Caiaphas again, of Pilate again; and all is terribly real—the three crosses, for instance, so really heavy, that none but a very strong man can support them. One thinks better of Pilate after the performance, through which one has watched his struggles—his weary, hopeless struggles to save the life of Christ. Almost every act, nearly every word, is directly taken from the Gospel history. Amongst the few touches added is that of Mary the mother, accidentally arriving at Jerusalem, meeting the other Marys in one of the side streets and talking of the condemnation of a Galilean which has just taken place. Then, as the street opens, suddenly seeing the cross-bearing in the distance, and thrilling the whole audience with anguish in her cry of ‘It is my son: it is Jesus!’ The Last Supper is an exact reproduction of Leonardo’s fresco, and many of the other scenes follow the great masters.

“How thrilling were the words, how almost more thrilling were the silences, of Christ.[490]

“The evening shadows are beginning to fall as we see Christ raised on the cross. He hangs there for twenty minutes, and most indescribably sublime are the words given from thence. When all is over, it is so real, you think that this time death must really have taken place. The three crosses, the bound thieves, the fainting women, the mounted centurion, the soldiers drawing lots, all seem to belong to real events, enacted, not acted. The deposition of the dead Christ on the white sheet is a vast Rubens picture.[491]

“The resurrection is more theatrical, but in the final scene, where the perfect figure of the spiritual Christ is seen for the last time, he goes far away with his disciples and the Marys, and then, upon Olivet, in the midst of the group relieved against the golden sunset, he solemnly blesses his beloved ones, and whilst you gaze rapt, seems to be raised a little, and then you look for him and he is not.

“Each one of the four thousand spectators then sits in a vast sense of loneliness amid the silent Bavarian hills. The long tension is over. The day is lived out. The Master we have followed we can follow no longer with material sight. He has suffered, died, and risen from the grave, and is no longer with us: in the heavens alone can we hope to behold Him as He is.”

After leaving Ober-Ammergau, Hugh Bryans and I went with the Lowthers and Mrs. Ridley to Rothenburg, still an unaltered diminutive mediaeval city, and the most interesting place in Germany. Then I paid a delightful visit to my dear Bunsen friends at Carlsruhe and Herrenalb, and on our way back to England we saw the marvellous Schloss Eltz, going thither in a bullock-cart up the bed of the river from the attractive little inn at Moselkern, kept by a very old man and woman, sitting upon the very border-land of heaven.

During the varied occupations of this summer of 1890 I was asked to write biographies of several members of my family for the “Dictionary of National Biography,” and did so. My articles appeared, but greatly altered. The editor had a perfect right to condense them at his pleasure, but I was astonished to find additions. Bishop Hare was saddled with a third son, Richard Hare, “an apothecary of Winchester,” who was the father of James Hare, afterwards called the “Hare with many friends.” This son of my great-great-grandfather is entirely imaginary; our family was never in the remotest degree related to Richard or James Hare. It gave one a terrible impression of how the veracity and usefulness of a work of really national importance might be spoilt by the conceited ignorance of an editor; and to add such trash to an article published with the signature of another was as unjustifiable as it was abominable.

“Woodbastwick Hall, August 6, 1890.—I have enjoyed a visit at Cobham very much. We had only the usual circle of guests, but summer days in that beautiful place are a delicious halt in life. Thence I went to Osterley, which looked bewitching, with its swans floating in sunshine beyond the shade of the old cedars. Those radiant gardens will now bloom through five years unseen, for Lord Jersey has accepted the Governorship of New South Wales, which can only be from a sense of duty, as it is an immense self-sacrifice, though he and Lady Jersey can never fail anywhere to be a centre of all that is most interesting and useful. To English society her absence will be a terrible loss, as, with the utmost simplicity of high breeding, she is the one person left in England who is capable of holding a salon and keeping it filled, to the advantage—in every best sense—of all who enter it. Nothing can be more charming than the relation of Lord and Lady Jersey to their children, and the fact that the latter were always of the party, yet never in its way, was the greatest testimony to their up-bringing. The weather was really hot enough for the luxury of open windows everywhere and for sitting out all day. The party was a most pleasant one—M. de Staël, the Russian Ambassador; Lady Crawford, still lovely as daylight, and her nice daughter Lady Evelyn; Lady Galloway, brimming with cleverness; M. de Montholon, French Minister at Athens; Mr. and Mrs. Frank Parker, most amusing and cheery; Sir Philip Currie, General Fielding, &c. Everything was most unostentatiously sumptuous and most enjoyable. On Monday we were sent in three carriages to Richmond, where we saw Sir Francis Cooke’s collections, very curious and worth seeing as it is, but which, if his pictures deserved the names they bear, would be one of the finest galleries in the world. Then, after a luxurious luncheon at the ‘Star and Garter,’ we went on to Ham House, where Lady Huntingtower showed the curiosities, including all the old dresses kept in a chest in the long gallery. Finally, I told the Jersey children—splendid audience—a long story in a glade of the Osterley garden, where the scene might have recalled the ‘Decameron.’ I was very sorry to leave these kind friends, and to know it would be so long before I saw them again.

“I came here with the Lowthers, finding kind Mrs. Cator surrounded by three sons and eight daughters. This is a luxurious modern house, replacing one which was burnt. Only a lawn and trees separate it from the Norfolk Broads, and we have floated down the Bere in a delightful sailing-boat, through the huge thirsty water-plants, to the weird remains of St. Benet in the Holme, of which the Bishops of Norwich are still titular Abbots.”

“Sept. 6.—I have enjoyed a visit to Holmbury (Mr. Leveson Gower’s), now let to Mr. Knowles of the Nineteenth Century—a lovely place with a delightful view over Surrey plains. I like its homelike character better than the larger place of Mr. Ralli, whither we went yesterday to a garden-party. Mr. Knowles is most delightful company, full of pertinent and never impertinent questions. He has talked much of Tennyson, with whom his family are very intimate, and who used often to stay with him when he first married and lived on Clapham Common. Tennyson speaks every thought without respect of persons. ‘What fish is this?’ (at dinner).—‘Whiting.’—‘Yes, the meanest fish there is.’ Yet his kindness of heart is such, that when his partridge was afterwards given him almost raw, he ate steadily through it, for fear his hostess might be vexed.

“After dinner Tennyson will sit smoking his pipe by the chimney-corner. That is his great time for inspiration, but he will seldom write anything down. ‘Thousands of lines just float up this chimney,’ he said one day. Sometimes he will go into the drawing-room and recite something he has just composed. Some of these poems Mr. Knowles has written down. If asked to repeat them again, Tennyson can never do it in the same way, something is always altered or forgotten: so hundreds of his poems are lost. One day lately, when he was unusually melancholy, his nurse, whom he greatly likes (he always has a nurse now), took him to task. ‘Mr. Tennyson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for grumbling in this way: you ought to be expressing your gratitude for your recovery from your bad illness by giving us something—by giving it to the world.’ And he took her reproof very well, and went away to his own room, and in half-an-hour had written his lines ‘Crossing the Bar,’ which he gave to her.

“Tennyson was very rude to Mrs. Brotherton, a neighbour at Freshwater. The next day he came to her house with a great cabbage under each arm. ‘I heard you liked these, so I brought them.’ It was his idea of a peace-offering.

“My ‘France’ is just appearing, under the guardianship of Ruskin’s friend Allen. I think it is good. I have certainly worked hard at it. The woodcuts are beautifully engraved, and with the letterpress I have even more than usual followed Arthur Young’s advice to authors—‘To expunge as readily as to compose.’”

“Oct. 14, 1890.—I went on the 27th to Worth, the ultra-luxurious house of the Montefiores, where the servants have their own billiard-tables, ballroom, theatre, and pianofortes, and are arrogant and presumptuous in proportion. It was a pleasure to drive over to the picturesque old manor-house of Gravetye, which belongs to Mr. W. Robinson, who wrote ‘The English Flower-Garden;’ but except the thickets of Michaelmas daisies, I was disappointed in his flowers, for he only attempts those which belong to the naturally existing soil. A far more beautiful garden is that of Mrs. Rate at Milton Court, near Dorking, whither I went afterwards. John Evelyn’s own house of Wotton is much altered, but this, which was the dower-house of the Evelyns, remains as it was in his time, and most lovely are the ranges of brilliant old-fashioned flowers relieved against the yew-hedges. Mrs. Rate took me a long drive over the back of Leith Hill, with views of unspeakable beauty: abroad, there is nothing like such radiance and wealth of woodland, such exquisite delicacy of misty distance. I was put down at the station on my way to Highcliffe, to which I hastened in answer to an unusually urgent and affectionate invitation from its dear lady, bidding me on no account to miss coming at that time; at another time it might not be possible. I found the dear Lady Waterford sadly ailing, but I hope I was able to be useful to her during some days of extreme quietude and much reading aloud. She had lately been to the Queen at Osborne, crossing the Solent in the Elfin, seated between the two great bags—‘as big as large arm-chairs’—containing the Queen’s letters for the day. ‘The Queen would have my drawings in. It was dreadful! for you know how a big portfolio slides off the table, and the Queen looked at them all so closely, and I was afraid the portfolio would slip and catch hold of her nose, and then I should have been sent to the Tower or something. There was one of the drawings she liked so much that I gave it to her. It was of Time with his scythe over his shoulder. A quantity of little children were gambolling and sporting in front and beckoning him onwards, but behind were a number of old people trying to hold him back; for one wanted to go on with his book, another to finish a drawing, and so on, and so they were clinging to his skirts as he was striding away.’

“Lady Waterford cannot understand the physical signs of age which seem to be suddenly attacking her: yet spiritually she is more than ever living in Eternity’s sunrise. Truly those who have lived much at Highcliffe or Ford can never ‘think this life a low and poor place in which to seek the Divine Master walking to and fro.’[492]

“I felt sadder than usual in leaving Highcliffe this time, as if it might be a last visit, yet it is difficult to imagine life without what has given its greatest interest and charm. The dear lady was down before I came away, though it was very early, and I retain a beautiful picture of her standing in the conservatory under the great brugmantia laden with its orange flowers. She came with me through the rooms, and I looked back at her, and found her still looking after me, and so, somehow walked away sadly down the dewy lanes to the station, with a desolate feeling that I might see her no more.

“I went on to Babraham (the Adeanes’), whence I drove with Charlie to spend the afternoon at Audley End—what a magnificent place! Afterwards I had two days at pleasant, merry Hardwick.”

“Nov. 10, 1890.—On October 20 I went to Tatton, meeting a large and pleasant party for the week, and one sees every one there to perfection, Lady Egerton knowing so well how to unlock a portal of communication—often of friendship—with just the right key. Truly, indeed, might Lady Egerton say—

The country is black but always interesting. Little Knutsford was sanded all over in patterns (as in India) for a wedding: it is a custom which dates from King Alfred, who met a wedding-party as he was passing through the town and threw down some sand, saying that he hoped the descendants of the marriage might be as numerous as its grains. The patterns of sand—flowers, love-knots, &c.—are made through the spout of a teapot. One day the conversation fell upon the little hamlet of Flash in the Cheshire hills. Pedlars from Manchester used to waste their time there in drinking on their way to London, whence the term ‘flash-goods!’ We drove to Holford Hall, passing on the outskirts of Tabley many of the brown many-horned sheep, which are said to have descended from some washed ashore from the Armada. I was glad to go again with Lady Egerton to Arley, where the beautiful gardens, really modern, have all the picturesqueness of antiquity. It is typical of the kindness which old Mr. Warburton shows in everything that all round the roads on his estate he leaves open spaces with plenty of brambles for blackberry gatherers.

“Lord Donington told Lady Egerton that when he went to live where he does now, his two young boys were taught by an admirable English governess. One day, having observed the housekeeper carefully locking the door of a spare bedroom, she casually said, ‘Do you always keep the doors of the unused bedrooms locked?’—‘No,’ said the housekeeper, ‘only this one;’ and she invited the governess to look into it, saying that there was a mystery about it. Some one always seemed to come to sleep there, whom she could not imagine, and she believed some trick was being played upon her. As an experiment, she said she would be very much obliged if the governess would take away the key after the room was locked, and keep it till the following morning. The next day they went together to the room, which showed every appearance of having been slept in, yet the window was carefully fastened inside, and there was no other possible entrance.

“Some time after, a young man came to shoot with the boys, and was put into that room. In the morning he came down with a very scared look, and said he was very sorry, but he must leave. Being much pressed, he allowed that he had been dreadfully frightened. He had kept his candle by his bed to finish a book he had been reading, and, looking up, he saw an old man sitting by the fire, who eventually rose, came, looked into the bed, and seeing him there, walked away. ‘And,’ said the visitor, ‘that is the man!’ pointing to a picture on the wall of an ancestor who had died centuries before.

“Amongst the guests at Tatton were a Mr. and Mrs. Crum, most delightful people. He had made a fortune as a manufacturer, and they now live at Broxton Old Hall, a dower-house and beautiful old black and white manor of Sir Philip Egerton’s, whither I went to visit them. Thence I saw Mr. Wolley Dodd’s wonderful garden, the most interesting herbaceous collection in England. Mr. Wolley, well known as an Eton master, married Miss Dodd, the heiress of Edge, and of a family which has lived there from Saxon times, and of which a member was knighted at Agincourt; and he has turned a farmyard, a quarry, a pond, a wood, &c., into the most astonishing of gardens, in which each genus of plants is provided with the exact soil it loves best, and grows as it never does elsewhere. Near Edge we saw the noble old black and white house of Carden. We also saw the once splendid church of Malpas, utterly ruined by its so-called ‘restoration’ under a Chester architect named Douglas—old pavements, old pews ruthlessly destroyed, and a vestry by Vanbrugh only spared for want of funds to pull it down. A miserable window commemorates Reginald Heber, once rector, and a lime avenue leads to his rectory. I was several days at Drayton as I returned—most beautiful and interesting.

“C. writes to me for advice, but I feel more and more diffident about giving any. I found such a capital bit about this in a novel called ‘Margaret Maliphant,’ the other day. The old servant Deborah says, ‘What you think’s the right way most times turns out to be the wrong way; and when you make folks turn to the right when they was minded to turn to the left, it’s most like the left would have been the best way for them to travel after all. I’ve done advisin’ long ago; for it’s a queer tract of country here below, and every one has to take their own chance in the long-run.’

“How tiresome the shibboleth which many clergymen talk in church is! Mr. —— has been dwelling upon the exceeding sinfulness of sin. We may find a meaning for this, but is it in fact different from the beautifulness of beauty, which we should call nonsense?”

“Nov. 30, 1890.—I had a pleasant visit at St. Audries, Sir A. Acland Hood’s beautiful place. It is a red sandstone house, enfolded amongst green hills, chiefly covered with golden or russet woods or rich growth of arbutus, and in front is the sea. In the morning-room are Turner’s water-colour pictures of Sussex (including one of Hurstmonceaux), executed for Mr. Fuller of Rosehill, of whom, with two other fortunes, Lady Hood was the heiress. In a corner of the hall are baby-clothes of three boys beneath the portrait of another remote ancestor, Edward Palmer of Ightham Mote. One Whitsunday morning a servant came in and said, ‘Sir, your lady has presented you with a son.’—‘The most joyful news you could have brought me!’ said Mr. Palmer. The following Sunday the servant came again: ‘Sir, your lady has presented you with another son.’—‘Oh, God bless my soul! you don’t say so?’ exclaimed Mr. Palmer. But the third Sunday the servant came in with ‘Sir, your lady has presented you with another son.’ It seemed quite too much; but the babies all lived, and grew up to be very distinguished men, being all knighted for their valour by Henry VIII.[494] I was delightfully taken about—to Crowcombe, where the Carew heiress has married Cranmer Trollope, and where there are noble Vandykes and a fine Titian portrait: to Quantockshead, with a delightful old hall and carved chimney-pieces: and to Nettlecombe, where the old hall of the Catholic Sir Alfred Trevelyan nestles close to the parish church. Sir Alfred described how the ‘church restorers’ at Bideford had turned all that was worth having out of the church. A figure of a man was bought by an old woman, but she thought it was too undressed and kept it—in bed! There it was found with its head comfortably laid on the pillow, a figure of St. John Baptist. The old woman had some notion of its value, as she asked £600 for it; but it was well worth that, as it was a priceless Donatello!

“All about this neighbourhood it is the same thing. Sir A. Hood had been to see a friend of his, and remarked, ‘What a pretty and peculiar flower-stand you have.’—‘Yes,’ said the friend, ‘and an interesting one too, for it is the font of Ongar church, in which Gunthran the Dane was baptized, and by which King Alfred stood as his sponsor.’

“Mr. W. Neville, who was one of the guests at St. Audries, had been to hear Dr. Parker, of the Congregational Hall, preach. He began his sermon by saying, ‘My brethren, I have received a letter from a gentleman saying that he intends to be present to-day and to make a philosophical analysis of my discourse to you. I am sure you will all sympathise with me in the embarrassment and nervousness which I must experience on such an occasion, though certainly I may derive some little comfort from the fact that my correspondent spells “philosophical” with an f.’

“Mr. Neville told me that he had asked a boy in his parish what was the difference between the head and the stomach. ‘The head has brains in it, if the owner has any,’ replied the boy; ‘the stomach has bowels; they are five—a-e-i-o-u.’

“It was only a drive from St. Audries to Dunster, where I spent three days, and which is, as Charlie Halifax has often described it, quite the most beautiful place in the south of England. It is an old castle, of which the earlier parts are of Edward I., on a great height, rising from glorious evergreen woods, with a view of the sea on one side and russet moorland on the other: in the depth, on one side, a tossing crystalline river and old pointed bridge; on the other, the town with its ancient market-house and glorious church. I slept in ‘King Charles’s Room,’ in a great carved bed. The cottages in the villages around are covered with myrtle, coronilla, and geranium.

“Mrs. Stucley, one of the Fanes of Clovelly, was at St. Audries. She told me that one Sunday their clergyman preached entirely on Thermopylae, and wound up by saying that the Spartans were much the bravest men that ever lived; that there was never any battle like Thermopylae. Afterwards, at luncheon, Colonel Stucley said he did not agree with what the preacher had said, for all the Thespians perished, whilst the Spartans survived: had the Thespians survived, they might have proved as good as their rivals.

“Three weeks afterwards the clergyman surprised the Stucleys by saying, ‘Well, my case is proved. I’ve the opinion of the greatest Greek scholar of the age—Mr. Gladstone—that it is as I stated it, that the Spartans were the bravest.’ He had actually written to Mr. Gladstone, and produced the answer.

“Afterwards Mrs. Stucley was dining out in London, and went down with Mr. Godley, one of Gladstone’s secretaries. She said, ‘I am afraid my name may not be unknown to you?’—‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Thermopylae,’ and went on to tell that when one of the secretaries opened the letter, they all discussed the question, and not being able to agree, took it in to Mr. Gladstone, who was so excited by it that he left his finance and all else, and walked about for three hours talking of nothing but Thermopylae.

“Except the Lefevres and Brasseys, I think my Dunster visit is the only time I have ever stayed in a Radical house; but its mistress, Mrs. Luttrell, with the support of her own family twelve miles off, holds out as a Conservative.

“From Somersetshire I went to Hatfield, arriving just after sunset. You could only just see the red colouring on the majestic old house, but all the windows blazed and glittered with light through the dark walls; the Golden Gallery with its hundreds of electric lamps was like a Venetian illumination. The many guests coming and going, the curiously varied names inscribed upon the bedroom doors, give the effect of having all the elements of society compressed under one roof. It was pleasant to meet Lady Lytton, beautiful still, and with all the charm of the most high-bred refinement. Another guest was Count Herbert Bismarck. Lady Salisbury had spoken of him as a fallen power, greatly broken by his fall, and so had enlisted our sympathies for him, but he quenched them by his loud authoritative manner, flinging every sentence from him with defiant self-assertion. He was especially opinionated about Henry VIII.’s wives, utterly refusing to allow that Anne of Cleves did not precede Anne Boleyn. He is a colossal man and a great eater, and would always fill two glasses of wine at once, to have one in reserve. At dinner he was rather amusing about the inefficiency of doctors, and said that the only time when cause follows effect was when a doctor follows the funeral of his patient. Lord Selborne, who was sitting near, spoke of Baron Munchausen, how he took the whole College of Physicians up in his balloon, and kept them there a month, and then, when he sent them down again out of pity for their patients, found all their patients had got quite well in their absence, but that all the undertakers were ruined.

“The life of a Prime Minister’s family is certainly no sinecure. Lady Salisbury and her daughter have constantly to go off to found or open charities of every description. Lord Salisbury is occupied with his secretaries to the very last moment before breakfast and luncheon, into which he walks stooping, with hands folded behind him, and a deeply meditative countenance, and by his side the great boar-hound called ‘Pharaoh’—‘because he will not let the people go;’ but when once seated as a host, he wakes up into the most interesting and animated conversation.

“How cold it is! but, as Mr. Bennett has been saying in Curzon Street Chapel, ‘Winter is like the pause of the instrument; not the paralysis, but the preparation of Nature.’ These sermons at Curzon Street are one of the greatest interests of London now. Last Sunday’s was on ‘anonymous sins.’ ‘How many there are,’ said the preacher, ‘even in fashionable life, who say, “Lord, I will follow Thee, I mean to follow Thee ... but ...;”’ and proceeded to describe how ‘the future of the world depends upon its unknown saints.’ Very different are these from the nonsensical sermons one often hears about ‘the awful circumstances of the times,’ interlarded with prophetic texts.

“There has been a long and amusing Review of my ‘France’ in the Speaker, reproaching me with my Roman Catholic tendencies, as evinced in the length of my account of Ars and its Curé, the writer being evidently unconscious that for every English traveller who lingers at Lyons, at least a hundred (Catholics) turn aside to Ars. This Review is noticed in an American paper, which says, ‘As a matter of fact, Mr. Hare is a well-known Low Church clergyman, who poses at clerical meetings as an advanced Evangelical!’ The other Reviews seem to have been mostly written by men who knew nothing of the subject, and who have not taken the trouble to know more of the book than, at most, the first chapter. One of them asserts that ‘the illustrations, said to be taken from original sketches, are evidently all from photographs’ (!); but ‘j’ai pour principe que le radotage des sots ne tire pas à conséquence,’ as Ernest Renan says.”

“Dec. 7, 1890.—I have had an interesting visit to the De Capel Brookes in the old grey Tudor house of Great Oakley Hall in Northamptonshire. Thence I saw two of the finest houses in England. Rushton (Mr. Clarke Thornhill’s) is a great Tudor house with a screen like that of a Genoese palace. In the garden is ‘Dryden’s Walk,’ and the three-cornered lodge built by Richard Tresham (with Lyveden and the town-hall of Rothwell) as a strange votive offering to propitiate the Trinity for success in the enterprise of the Gunpowder Plot. Rockingham is even more interesting. Once the hunting-palace of King John, it was inhabited ever afterwards by the English kings till the time of Henry VII., since which the Watsons have possessed it. The position is splendid, with a wide view of map-like Northamptonshire country, and it is approached by a gateway between noble Plantagenet towers. All additions have been made in the best taste, and the great drawing-room is magnificent. King John’s treasure-chest remains in the hall. There is a noble Sir Joshua, and a most beautiful Angelica Kauffmann, probably her finest work. Other interesting pictures came to the Watsons through marriages, many of Lord Strafford and his surroundings through the marriage of his daughter with Lord Rockingham; those of Henry Pelham, the Duke of Newcastle, &c., through the daughter of the former.

“How interesting is the Parnell crisis! At Miss Seymour’s I met a Countess Ziski, who talked of how curious it was that abroad, if a woman misconducts herself, she is boycotted, but no notice is taken of the misconduct of the man: here, if a woman misconducts herself, an easy-going society makes excuses for her, but the man is cashiered for ever.

“The Dean of Chester says that a friend of his was once baptizing a child of six. All went well, till it came to making the sign of the cross, when the child exclaimed, ‘If you do that again, I’ll hit yer in the eye.’ At a recent Board-school examination ‘Education’ was defined as ‘that which enables you to despise the opinions of others, and conduces to situations of considerable emolument.’ I think it was Miss Cobbe who defined ‘Conscience’ as ‘that which supplies you with an excellent motive for doing that which you desire to do, and which fills you with self-satisfaction when you have done it.’”

“Llandaff, Dec. 18, 1890.—I was a week at Ammerdown, meeting Lord and Lady Temple, the Phelips’s of Montacute, and a charming Miss Devereux, Lord Hereford’s daughter.... The Dean of —— had been out with a shooting party in the neighbourhood. ‘I hope you sent some pheasants the Dean’s way,’ said the owner of the ground to a keeper. ‘Oh yes, that I have, and his holiness has been pepperin’ away as stiff as a biscuit.’

“Here at Llandaff it has been interesting to meet Mr. Herbert Ward of the African Stanley rearguard, a most frank, simple, and evidently most truthful fellow, who speaks with great moderation of the leader of the expedition, to whom they owed so much of suffering, misery, death, and slander.

“Honingham, Norfolk, January 8, 1891.—I enjoyed my Christmas visit to the Lowthers, though it was rather spoilt by what novelists would call the incipient agonies of a cold, which has about attained its perfection now, and I am glad to be in this warm house of the hospitable Ailwyn Fellowes’s, where I am well looked after.

“I heard such a capital story of Bishop Magee the other day. He was in a carriage on the Great Western with two young clergymen, one of whom began, and went on violently abusing the Bishop of Peterborough by name, without observing who he was. At Swindon the Bishop got out to have some soup. When he was gone, the other curate said, ‘How could you go on like that? couldn’t you see that was the Bishop of Peterborough?’—‘Why didn’t you stop me?’—‘Well, I did all I could; I’m sure I kicked you hard enough.’—‘What can I do?’—‘Well, if I was you, I should apologise.’ So, when the Bishop came back, the young man said, ‘I’m very sorry, my Lord, to have said all I did in your presence. I am sure I had not an idea who you were, and if there is anything you especially objected to, I should be very glad to withdraw it and apologise.’—‘Well,’ said the Bishop, ‘there was one thing, there certainly was one thing which annoyed me very much: you would call me Majee; now my name is Magee!”

Alas! the shadows which I had observed during my last visit to my dear friend Lady Waterford were now gathering very thickly around her. She had failed rapidly from the time of her removal from Highcliffe to her Northumbrian home, and was no longer able to answer me; but I still wrote to her.

“Athenaeum Club, March 1, 1891.—I am thankful still to hear of you from many common friends, and quite satisfied without hearing from yourself, and rejoice to think of you as able to enjoy drives. I think you will often find out, by carriage, points which will be almost new to you, and I can imagine how lovely the effects must have been in the hazy hollows of the Cheviots in these last days, when even here sunshine has broken through the fog in which London was shrouded for a week. It is Sunday, and I am just going to Curzon Street Chapel. I would not miss one of Mr. Bennett’s sermons on any account.... The one which struck me most was on the brief text ‘Nothing but leaves!’—so many bear those, quite a great growth of them, and no more: I am sure I do.”

“March 16.—Two days ago I ran in from this Club to luncheon at the Brownlows’ close by, and had such a pleasant visit.

“I went first into the large room they call the library on the ground floor—the most enchanting of rooms, hung all round with noble Italian pictures, some of them bequeathed by Miss Talbot, and bright with many flowers; some of your prettiest drawings on the table; Westminster Abbey, faint, grey, and impressive, beyond the leafless trees outside the window. Here I found Lord Pembroke, always as genial, pleasant, and charming as he is handsome.

“The staircase is quite beautiful, chiefly designed by Lord Brownlow, but partly taken from the old palace-inn at Parma, with friezes and alcoves, and lighted by a copy of Michelangelo’s lanthorn. In the wide gallery above we found Lady Brownlow. Her two sisters came in, and then we had luncheon.

“Afterwards we went to the pretty little sitting-room, full of beautiful things, which is called Lady Lothian’s. What an attractive group the sisters made—the pale, spiritual, abstracted Lady Lothian, the very type of refined gentleness: Lady Brownlow, with her noble Bronzino-like head and colouring, and the figure of a classic caryatide: Lady Pembroke, less interesting at first, but so intensely grande dame; and then the two husbands leaning over them, on such happy, devoted terms with all three, were such noble specimens of humanity. The conversation there is delightful—so un-Londony, so original, so high-minded and high-meaning.

“To-day I have been to Edward Clifford’s studio to see his drawings and his Burne-Jones’s—all of the usual lean, limp, scared-woman kind. What was more interesting was the handsome, radiant, bright-eyed elderly woman who was looking over the drawings: it was the famous Madame Novikoff. I had much talk with her, and found her most simple and attractive, and not the least an alarming person.”

It was on the day after writing this that I first truly realised that my dearest Lady’s illness must be fatal. Our Lady was told that it must be so, that the end might come any day, any hour. At first she shed a few natural tears, and said, “I thought I should have lived to seventy-seven, as my mother did,” and then added sweetly, “But why should I mind, since God so wills it? tell me how it will be.”—“Perhaps in your chair, just as you are sitting now.”—“Oh, that will be well—so quiet, so well.” One day soon afterwards she wished to go out into the garden when it was not thought good for her. “Perhaps you might die when you are out.”—“And why should it not be like that? If God called me in the garden, it would be as well as in any other place.” I could not go to Ford, because Lady Waterford was not allowed to see any one unnecessarily, but for many weeks succeeding my whole heart was there with the faithful friend, the kind sympathiser, the constant correspondent of thirty years. One heard of the gradual increase of the disease: of her laying aside all painting and writing: of her reading prayers to her servants for the last time; but still talking in her wise and beautiful way of all things “lovely and of good report,” laughing brightly over old recollections: then of her lying constantly on a sofa, always rejoicing to see those she loved, but mistaking her younger relations for their mothers, dear to her in the long ago. Often also others, those dearest to her, who had gone before, appeared to be present with her as angel ministrants to cheer and comfort. The sweet face of old Lady Stuart, her mother, seemed visibly present: she imagined her old governess to be in the house, and bade Miss Lindsay to be sure to arrange for the drives which she knew the old lady liked. Through the flowers upon her table she constantly saw her sister Charlotte, Lady Canning, in all her loveliness. Her sense of the companionship of this beloved sister was so vivid, and she spoke of her so often, that at last one of those present thought it necessary to say to her, “Dear lady, Lady Canning died very many years ago.” “Oh, did she? How delightful! then I shall soon be able to talk to her. I see her now, but soon we shall talk as we used to do.” One evening there was a beautiful sunset. Our dear Lady sat watching it. “It is like the coming of the Lord,” she said. Surely the watchers at Ford realised General Gordon’s words—“Any one to whom God gives to be much with Him, cannot even suffer a pang at the approach of death. For what is death to a believer? It is a closer approach to Him whom, even through the veil, he is ever with.”

Mr. Neville, the rector of Ford, prayed with her daily. “How I wish that others might have the solace this is to me,” she said, with her peculiar emphasis on the word “solace.”

Lady Brownlow was with her three days, and was her last visitor: she came away saying it had been like being in a beautiful church, so pervading was the sense of holiness. “Oh, darling Adelaide! goodness and beauty, beauty and goodness: those are ever the great things!” were our dear Lady’s last words to her, as she took her hands and gazed at her earnestly. They were very characteristic.

“April 12, 1891.—How often my thoughts go to Ford, and how well I can imagine all that surrounds you there—the snowy Cheviots, that pretty little garden in the bastion tower, the warm bright library; most of all the constant care of Miss Thompson and Miss Lindsay. I am so glad I know it so well, and have so many memories of happy visits—in the old castle, in the cottage with dear Lady Stuart, in the renewed castle since. I seem to see you this bright Sunday morning, and hope it is as bright with you. Inwardly I am sure the sun is shining, and that the Saviour you have loved so well is very near you in hours of weakness. I often wish I could do something—anything—for you, but I can only think of you with ever-grateful love, and pray that all may be peaceful and smooth with you.

“Lady Bloomfield is feeling the loss of her old friend Mrs. Hogg,[495] but she had the most gentle and peaceful end, just talking to her sister and daughter very calmly and quietly without any pain or fear, and then falling sweetly asleep and not waking....

“‘The Blessed Trinity have you in his keeping,’ as Margaret Paston wrote in 1461.”

“April 26.—Another week of bitter cold and biting winds, and I fear you will have been the worse for them. Your state of suspension from so much that you used to be able to do so constantly recalls that of my dearest mother—in winter—for many years; but when the limbs seemed least helpful, and eyes and hands least active, all happy memories of her wealthy past seemed brighter to her, and she was always able to find comfort in the feeling that ‘they also serve who only stand and wait.’ ... I know that, to the weakest, Christ can give such blessed assurance of His love, that in the joy of it all pain and fear are unfelt and vanish. Oh, would that I could do anything for you, but you know how much I always am your most affectionate and grateful

This letter was read to our Lady: then I was told to write no more. The end was very near, and each hour became filled with a tensity of waiting for the silent summons. There were none of the ordinary signs of an illness. Our Lady suffered no pain at all, scarcely even discomfort. Her former beauty returned to her, only in a more majestic form, the signs of age seeming to be smoothed away, except in the grey hair half hidden by soft lace. She rarely spoke, and noticed little except the beauty of the flowers by which she was surrounded. But when she did speak, those with her knew that, with entire and humblest prostration of self at the foot of the Cross, her faith and hope had never been brighter. She looked beyond the snowy hills into a sky of unearthly beauty. And so, peacefully, radiantly, our dearest Lady fell into the ever-smiling unconsciousness, in which, on May 11th, she passed away from us to join the beloved and honoured who are at rest with Christ. As I think of her, some lines come back to me which I read to her on my last morning at Ford:—

I should have gone to Ford afterwards, but our Lady only died on Monday, and it was late on Wednesday night before I heard that she was to be buried on Thursday afternoon, so to arrive in time was impossible. Miss Lindsay wrote to me how her coffin was carried on the shoulders of her own labourers to the churchyard, how all the village and all her tenantry came to her funeral, with the few intimate friends within reach, and how Helmore’s music was sung. It was well the end was at Ford. Highcliffe is a rapidly changing place, and it has already passed to comparative strangers; but at Ford she will always be the Lady Waterford, “the good, the dear Lady Waterford.”

There our Lady rests, within view of her own Cheviots, surrounded by the affectionate Border people, to whom their “Border Queen” was their greatest pride and interest and joy. An aching void will remain in our hearts through life, but it is only for our poor selves. When one thinks of her, earth fades and vanishes, and if—when one is alone—one allows oneself to think, to dwell upon all the glory of what she was, an all-pervading sense of peace and holiness comes upon one, and one seems, for the moment, almost to pass into the Land of Beulah—into the higher life, without worry or vexation, where she is.

When her things were being distributed, the distributors were surprised to hear that “the odd man” most earnestly begged for something: it was for her old sealskin jacket. It was thought a most singular request at first, but he urged it very much: he should “treasure the jacket as long as ever he lived.”

He had been walking by her donkey-chair in the road, when they found a female tramp lying in the ditch, very ill indeed. Lady Waterford got out of her chair and made the man help her to lift the poor woman into it. Then she took off her own jacket, and put it upon the sick woman, and walked home by the side of the chair, tending and comforting her all the way. “But it was not my Lady’s putting her jacket on the woman that I cared about,” said the man, “but that she did not consider her jacket the least polluted by having been worn by the tramp; she wore it herself afterwards as if nothing had happened.”

XXVII

SOCIAL REMINISCENCES

“Holmhurst, August 1891.—I enjoyed my months in London at the time, yet was very glad to come away. It is a terrible waste of life. The size and lateness of dinners have killed society. Scarcely any one says anything worth hearing, and if any one does, nobody listens.

“‘Que de bonnes choses vont tous les jours mourir dans l’oreille d’un sot,’ was always a true saying of Fontenelle, but is less true now than formerly—there are so few bonnes choses.

“People love talking, but not talk. Dinners are rather display than hospitality, supplying abundance of sumptuous viands, but no esprit. I heard pleasanter conversation in one quiet luncheon at the Speaker’s from his delightful family than at a hundred parties: as a social art it is extinct. One never hears such conversationalists as gathered round my aunt Mrs. Stanley’s homely table long ago, or as, in later times, round Arthur Stanley, Mrs. Grote, Madame Mohl, the first Lady Carnarvon, Lord Houghton, Lady Margaret Beaumont. The dinners, in food sense, have never any attraction to me. L. and I dined out together at —— and I think it was an even match which of us suffered most, L. or myself: myself, because the dinner was too good; L., because it was not good enough.

“From what I hear from the East End, the scandal of Tranby Croft seems to be acting as the affaire du collier did in France in preparing the way for a revolution. But the West End goes on as if nothing had happened. I saw the Emperor (of Germany) several times, a fat young man with a bright good-humoured face, though apparently never free from the oppression of his own importance, as well as of the importance of his dress, which he changes very often in the day. And I went, one glorious afternoon, when the limes were in blossom, with several thousand other people to Hatfield to meet the Prince of Naples, whose intelligence (especially on subjects connected with Natural History) seems to have pleased everybody. He is very small, but has none of the aggressive ugliness of his father and grandfather. One day I went to luncheon with Miss Rhoda Broughton, who is seen at her very best in her little house at Richmond, most attractive in its old prints and furniture and lovely river view. Then I spent a Sunday with my cousin Theresa Earle in her pretty Surrey home, and wound up the season by meeting a large party at Cobham.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 2, 1891.—You will imagine how your birthday makes me think of you, and how much I give thanks for the blessing which your love and kindness has been to us for so many years. I like to think of you on your peaceful sofa, and I know you are like John Wilson Croker, who, when some one remarked in his presence that death was an awful thing, said, ‘I do not feel it so. The same Hand which took care of me when I came into this world will take care of me when I go out of it.’”

“Holmhurst, Oct. 1891.—I have returned from my autumn visits, which have been delightful. The Watsons, who live at Rockingham, the old royal palace of the Midlands, are well worthy of its noble rooms and its brilliant gardens, relieved against the quaintest of yew hedges.

“At Hovingham, in Yorkshire, I found Mrs. Lowther, and we sketched together very happily. It is an unusual great house, approached through a riding-school and a sculpture gallery, which contains a huge work of Giovanni da Bologna and the loveliest little Greek statue in England. Genial Sir William Worsley, the adopted uncle of all the nicest young ladies in the county, is a centre of love and goodness, and his saint-like wife, crippled and utterly motionless from chronic rheumatism, is the sunshine of all around her. Most quaint are some of the old-fashioned dependants. The old coachman seriously asked his master, ‘Is it true, Sir William, that Baron Rothschild was refused when he offered to pay the whole of the natural debt if he might drive eight horses like the Queen, instead of seven horses and a mule?’

“We saw Gilling, the fine old Fairfax castle, and spent a delicious day at Rievaulx. Sir William has oratorios(!) annually performed in his riding-school.

“I arrived at Bishopthorpe the day before the Archbishop’s enthronement, and found a large party of relations assembling; but it would be difficult to crowd the house, as there are forty bedrooms and the dining-room is huge. The palace lies low, and out of the dining-room window you could very nearly fish in the Ouse, which often floods the cellars, the only part remaining of the original house of Walter de Gray. The rococo gateway is imposed by guidebooks upon the uninitiated as that of Wolsey’s palace at Cawood: perhaps a few of its ornaments came from thence. The ceremony in the Minster was very imposing, the more so as a military escort was given to the Archbishop, as having been an old soldier. Most moving was his address upon the responsibilities, and what he felt to be the duties, of his office. The ebb and flow of processional music was beautiful, as the long stream of choristers and clergy flowed in and out of the Minster. The Archbishop’s brothers—one of them, Sir Douglas-Maclagan, being eighty—made a very remarkable group.

“Most happy and interesting were my four succeeding days at Hickleton, where I met one of the familiar circles of people I always connect with Charlie Halifax—Lady Ernestine Edgecumbe, Lady Morton, Canon and Lady Caroline Courtenay, the Haygarths. More characteristic still of the host was the presence of a nun in full canonicals—Sister Caroline—‘this religious,’ as Charlie called her—who appeared at meals, though only to partake of a rabbit’s diet. In the churchyard a great crucifix, twelve feet high, is being erected, and the people of Doncaster do not come out to stone it; on the contrary, the crucifix and its adjuncts attract large congregations of pitmen, who would not go to church at all otherwise; and the neighbourhood is beginning to wonder how long the Church of England can dare to deny its Lord by condemning the crucifix, the vacant cross being but the frame of the picture with the portrait left out, and in itself an eloquent protest against the omission. Another smaller crucifix commemorates the three dear boys who have ‘gone home.’ The shadow of their great loss here is ever present, but it is truly a sanctified grief: their memory is kept ever fresh and the thought of them sunny, and thus they still seem to have their part—invisible—in the daily life, upon which their beautiful pictured semblances look down from the walls of their home. Only a deep sudden sigh from the father now and then recalls all he has undergone. The short morning services in the house-chapel, with its huge crucifix from Ober-Ammergau, where the household sing in parts, are very touching. Still more so are the Sunday services in the beautiful church, close to the house, the low mass, then the full surpliced choir and the blazing lights, and the holy rood above the reredos glittering through them in a golden glamour. In the darker aisle where we sat were the sleeping alabaster figures of the late Lord and Lady Halifax upon their great altar-tomb, and near me the dearest friend of my long-ago was kneeling—a stainless knight—in a rapt devotion which seemed to carry him far into the unseen. I could only feel, as Inglesant at Little Gidding, the presence of a peace and glory utterly unearthly, and as if there—as nowhere else—Heaven took possession of one and entered into one’s soul.

“A journey through the Fen country took me to Campsea Ashe, where the artistic party collected in the pleasant Lowther home spent a most pleasant week in drawing—studying—by the silent moats of old-timbered houses—Parham, Seckford, and Otley. We went also to the attractive old town of Woodbridge, where Percy Fitzgerald lived, who wrote so many capital articles. A characteristic story told of him is that he once spent the evening in the company of a bore who buzzed on incessantly about this lord and that till he could bear it no longer and left the room, but as he did so, opened the door once more, and, putting in his head, said, ‘I knew a lord once, but he’s dead!’

“I was at Felixstowe for a day afterwards, and made acquaintance—friends, I hope—with Felix Cobbold, a most attractive fellow, with a delightful house, and a garden close above the sea, which truly makes ‘the desert smile’ in that most hideous of all sea-places. Then I was a night at the Palace at Norwich, full of childish reminiscence to me, and most stately and beautiful it all looked—the smooth lawns and bright flowers, the grand grey cathedral and soaring spire, the old chapel and ruin; only the palace itself has had all the picturesqueness washed out of it. Its geography is entirely altered, but it was delightful to recognise old nooks and corners, and I almost seemed to see my Mother sitting by the old-fashioned chimney-piece in the Abbey-room. I spent a delightful evening with the Bishop (Pelham), who poured out a rich store of anecdote and recollection for hours. He spoke much of Manning, whom he had known most intimately—how his characteristic had always been his ambition. He wanted in early life to have gone into Parliament; then, when that failed, he wished to have entered diplomacy; then his father’s bank broke, and he was obliged to go into the Church. ‘Your uncle Julius and he,’ said the Bishop, ‘were once with my brother (Lord Chichester), and Manning had been holding forth upon the celibacy of the clergy. “At least you will agree with me,” he said, turning to my brother, “that celibacy is the holier state.” “Then of course you think,” said my brother, “that matrimony is a less holy state than celibacy.” And he started, with a reminiscence of his own happy married life, and said, “Oh no!”’

“The Bishop talked much of Jenny Lind’s visit to Norwich when he was here with the Stanleys; how the Duke of Cambridge had spoken to her of the wonderful enjoyment her noble gift of voice must be, and how she had answered, ‘I do enjoy it, and I thank God for giving it to me, and I feel that in return I ought to use it first for His glory, and then for the raising of my profession.’ When her great concert took place, Mr. Thompson, a Norwich doctor, who had the management of the town charities, ventured to put the best of the workhouse school-girls under the orchestra, where no one could see them, whilst they could hear everything. But Jenny was sometimes greatly overcome at the end of one of her own songs, and it was so then, and when her song was over, she retired to her own room; but, to reach it, she had to pass under the orchestra, and there she saw a number of girls in tears, and asked who they were. Mr. Thompson came to explain with some diffidence, for he did not know how she would take it; but she was much interested, and asked, ‘Is there any one of your charities especially to which I could be of any use?’ And he thought a minute and said, ‘What we really want is a children’s hospital; there has never been one in Norwich.’—‘Then that is just what I will give a concert for,’ said Jenny Lind; and of course every one was delighted, and so the hospital was started. Afterwards she sent down some one incognito to see how it was managed, and the report was so favourable that she said she would give another concert, and that set it up altogether. It is now the ‘Jenny Lind Hospital.’

“Talking of the late event at York led to the Bishop’s saying, ‘I heard a fine thing of Archbishop Musgrave. I was not meant to hear it, though. I was at Bishopthorpe to preach a consecration sermon for the Bishop of Ripon. It was before I was a bishop myself, and I knew nothing about precedence, and did not take my proper place in the procession as was intended, though I was all ready, and I let them all pass out before me. Only the Archbishop and Mrs. Musgrave remained. The Archbishop had had a stroke of apoplexy then, from which he was only just recovering, and it was his first appearance since, and they were all very anxious about him. Just as they were leaving the house, the Archbishop said to his wife, “My dear, take this key: it will unlock that box, in which you will find a commission ready signed and sealed for the three bishops present to take my place if anything happens to me during the service: whatever happens to me, the service must not be stopped.” And they went on quietly to the church. I did not know which to admire most, the Archbishop for making the speech, or Mrs. Musgrave’s perfect calmness in hearing it and in taking the key. I spoke of it to Mrs. Bickersteth (the Bishop of Ripon’s wife) afterwards, and she said, “That explains what the Archbishop said to me last night—‘I am afraid you may be anxious about the service to-morrow: set yourself quite at rest: everything is quite settled, so that, whatever happens to me, the ceremony of to-morrow will be carried out.’”

“The Lowthers joined me at Norwich, and we went together to Woodbastwick, and for a delightful visit to the Locker-Lampsons at Cromer. What an enchanting place it is! All the society meets on the beach. Two bathing-machines were drawn up side by side, and their inmates were in the sea. ‘I hope you will kindly consider this as a visit,’ said one of them to his neighbour, with his head just above the water. ‘Oh, certainly,’ said the neighbour, ‘and I hope you will kindly consider this as a visit returned.’

“Mr. Locker is delightful. He says, ‘I suppose what makes a bore is a man’s perpetually harping upon one subject, not knowing what details to leave out, and insisting upon making his voice heard at unsuitable times. But certainly a bore is a bore in accordance with what he is talking about: if, for instance, a man went on talking for hours of my “Lyra Elegantiarum,” I should never think him a bore.’ ‘My dear,’ he says to Mrs. Locker-Lampson, ‘are you not sometimes of rather too rigid a disposition? You know, at railway stations you often point out to me a man as eternally damned because he wears trousers with rather a broad check, and has an unusually large cigar in his mouth.’

“In Lady Buxton’s pretty house are a whole gallery of Richmond portraits—a stately full-length of (her aunt) Mrs. Fry, most speaking likenesses of her benignant father, her beautiful mother, of Sarah and Anna Gurney, the ‘Cottage Ladies’—of her father-in-law, Sir Fowell of the Slave Trade—of her sons and brothers-in-law. Yellow tulips, like those at Florence, grow wild in her fields in abundance, and the cows eat them.”

“Hotel d’Italie, Rome, March 30, 1892.—I think you will have wondered what has become of me, and that you will like to know.

“I have been abroad since November 16, beginning by a week at Paris with George Jolliffe, who was very ill then, and a month spent at Cannes in visits to the De Wesselows, old friends of my Hurstmonceaux childhood; and to my old schoolfellow Fred Walker and his nice wife, one of the few people I know who have seen two separate and undoubted ghosts with their own eyes. How civilised and be-villa’d Cannes is now, almost the least pretentious house remaining in it being the little Villa Nevada, where the Duke of Albany died, which was close to us, and which was so often visited by ‘Madame d’Angleterre,’ as the people of Cannes call our Queen. My ever-kindest of hosts were more people-seeking than place-seeing. We had one delightful picnic, however, at the old deserted villa of Castellaras, looking upon the blue gorge of the Saut de Loup. A little suspicion of earthquake remained in the air from the alarm of the last shock, when my friends’ native housemaid had refused to leave the window, saying, ‘Puisque le dernier jour est arrivé, je veux avoir les yeux partout, pour voir ce que se passe!’ Here at Rome there was a smart shock this spring. Our old friend Miss Garden asked her ‘donna’ if she was frightened. ‘Oh yes,’ she said; ‘I felt the two walls of my little room press in upon my bed. I knew what it was. But I could not remember which was the right saint to pray to in an earthquake. So I just prayed to my own grandmother, for she was the best person I ever knew, and immediately I heard the voice of my grandmother, who said, “Don’t be frightened; it will all pass; no harm will come to you.” So then I was quite calm and satisfied.’ Might not this incident account for many stories of Catholic saints?

“I spent a week at Bordighera. Such varied points for walks! villages like Sasso, which are just bright bits of umber colour amongst the tender grey olives; little painted towns amongst the orange-gardens, like Dolceacqua, with its pointed bridge and blue river and great deserted palace of the Dorias. George Macdonald, a most grand old patriarch to look upon, is king of the place. He writes constantly, and never leaves the house, except to see a neighbour in need of help or comfort. One after another of his delicate daughters has faded away, but his sons seem strong and well, and there are several adopted children in the house, half in and half out of the family, but all calling Mrs. Macdonald ‘Mama.’ It is a very unusual household, but ruled in a spirit of love which is most beautiful. I dined with them, the dining-table placed across one end of the vast common sitting-room. On Sunday evenings he gives a sort of Bible lecture, which all the sojourners in Bordighera may attend.

“Then I was a month in a palatial hotel at S. Remo, and greatly enjoyed bright winter days of quiet drawing in its ravines with their high-striding bridges, by its torrents full of Titanic boulders, or on its pathlets winding through vine and fig gardens or along precipitous crags; most of all in a delicious palm-shaded cove by the sea, where I spent whole days alone with the great chrysoprase waves breaking over the rocks in showers of crystal spray. With a charming Mrs. Rycroft and her pleasant Eton boys, I made longer excursions to Ceriano and Badalucco, very curious places surrounded by high mountains, with deep gorges, old bridges, and waterfalls.

“But it is in changed, spoilt Rome that I have spent the last two months. All picturesqueness is now washed out of the place, so that people who have any interest about them now usually give it only a glance and pass on. It has been delightful for me, however, that Miss Hosmer is settled in this hotel, and that we dine together daily at a little round table, where she is a constant coruscation of wit and wisdom. All day she is shut up in her studio, which is closed to all the world, but she cannot have a dull time, by the stories she has to tell of the workmen and models who are her only companions. Here are a few of them, only they sound nothing without her twinkling eyes and capital manner of telling:—

“‘Minicuccia was an excellent model, but very jealous. “Have you seen Rosa? What fine arms she has!” I said to her one day. “I have seen Rosaccia” she replied, “and I should have thought, Signorina, that a lady of your taste would have known better than to admire her arms. What are they in comparison with really fine arms—with mine, for instance?”

“‘One day Minicuccia was at a café, and some one admired the legs of another model. Forthwith she gathered up her petticoats, and danced with her legs perfectly bare all about the place. She was not a bad woman; on the contrary, she was a very moral one, and there was never a word against her, but she wanted to show what fine legs were. The police, however, heard of that escapade, and she was put in prison for a month afterwards for such an offence against the decenza pubblica. Poor Minicuccia!

“‘Then there was Nana, whom Lady Marian (Alford) painted so often, and whom she was so fond of. She was a magnificent woman. Dear Lady Marian used to say, “I would give anything to be able to come into a room with the grace and dignity of Nana.” Her dignity was natural to her. Another model once said to me, “I met that Nanaccia; she was walking down the Via Sistina as if it all belonged to her.”

“‘There was a very nice boy-model I had, Fortunato he was called. He is dead now—died of consumption, for he was always delicate. One day he said to me, “Last Sunday, Signorina, I went to the garden of the Cappuccini, and it is such a garden!—quite full of fruit, the most beautiful fruit. And the Fathers are so kind; they said I might eat as much as ever I liked; only think of that, Signorina!”—“Well, that was kind indeed; but what sort of fruit was it?”—“O, cipolle and lettuge,[499] Signorina—most delicious fruit.”

“‘Marietta was another model who came to me, a large handsome woman. One day I said to her, “Now, Marietta, I want you to look sad—tutta dolorosa.”—“What! lagrime, Signorina?”—“No,” I said, “only look sad; but if I wanted lagrime, could I have them too?”—“Sì, Signora: basta pensare a quel calzolajo chi m’a fatto pagare sette lire in vece di cinque, et piango subito.”[500]

“‘Marietta had a brother who managed her little business for her. I asked her if it would not be very easy for him to misappropriate a scudo now and then. “Facile sì,” she said, “essendo fratello.”

“‘Mariuccia lived to be old, and many is the dinner and paolo I have given her; but when she was fifteen or so, she was the model for Mr. Gibson’s ‘Psyche borne by the Zephyrs.’ She was always a wonderful model: no one could act or stand as she did.

“‘Then there was that woman who had the drunken husband, who used to beat her. One night he came in late and fell down dead drunk across the bed. She took her needle and thread, and sewed him up in the sheets so that he could not move, and then she took a stick, and beat him so that he died of it: she was imprisoned for some years for that, though.

“‘I asked one of the workmen what he did when every one was away. “Why, Signorina, I have the studio to clean out.”—“Well, I suppose that takes you half-an-hour; and what do you do then?”—“Ma, Signorina, sto a sedere.”—“And after your dinner, what do you do then?”—“Sto ancora a sedere, Signorina.”—“Well, and in the evening?”—“Ma, Signorina, continuo di stare a sedere.”

“‘My man Gigi came to me the other day and said, “I went to the Acqua Acetosa [501] last Sunday, Signorina, and I liked the water so much, I drank no less than twenty fiaschi of it.”—“Well,” I said, “Gigi, that was a good deal; I’ll get twenty fiaschi of it, and put twenty scudi down by them, and then, if you can drink them all off, you shall have the scudi.”—“Well, Signorina, perhaps I did exaggerate a little: now I come to think it over, perhaps it was ten fiaschi I drank.”—“Well, do it again before me, and you shall have ten scudi.” “Now, Signorina, you know I like to be precise, perhaps it was six fiaschi I drank.”—“Well, do it again and you shall have six scudi.”—“Well, I suppose it really was two fiaschi.”—“Oh, I could drink that myself!”’

“You may imagine how entertaining stories like these—traits from the life around one—make our little dinners, and afterwards we often go into the Storys’ apartment close by, where the easy intellectual pleasant talk and fun are always reviving. Besides, it amuses Mrs. Story, who is most sadly ailing now, though her cheerfulness is an example. She says she comforts her sleepless nights by the old distich—

“Nothing can describe the charm of Mr. Story’s natural bubble of fun and wit, or the merry twinkle which often comes into his eye, even now, at moments when his wife’s illness does not make him too anxious.[502] He and Miss Hosmer are capital together. It is difficult to say what are their ‘projecting peculiarities,’ as Dr. Chalmers would have called them, they have so many; but they are all of a perfectly delightful kind.

“‘Well, what’s the news, Harriet?’ he said as we went in to-night. ‘Why, that I am going to be married.’—‘What! to the Pope?’—‘Yes, only I didn’t want it to get out till he announced it himself.’

“‘An American was looking at my statue of Canidia the other day,’ said Mr. Story, and exclaimed—“Ah! Dante, I suppose, or is it—Savonarola?” Another man who came to my studio said, “Mr. Story, have you baptized your statue?”—“Why, yes,” I said; “generally we think of the name first, and then we set to work in accordance with it.”—“Well,” he said, “there’s some as doos, and there’s some as doosn’t.”’

“Mrs Story was very amusing about an Italian who wanted a portrait of his father very much, and came to an artist she knew and asked him to paint it. The artist asked, ‘But when can I see your father?’—‘Oh, you can’t see him: he’s dead.’—‘But how can I paint him, then?’—‘Well, I can describe him, and he was very like me: I think you can paint him very well.’ So the artist painted away, according to the description, as well as he could. When he had finished the portrait he sent for the son, anxious to see if he would find any likeness. The son rushed up to the picture, knelt down by it, was bathed in tears, and sobbed out, ‘O padre mio, quanto avete sofferto, o quanto siete cambiato: O non l’aveva mai riconosciuto.’

“Mr. Story says that when Othello was performed at Rome, he saw it with an Italian friend, who said afterwards, ‘Convengo che ci sono qualche belle concette in questa dramma, ma fare tanto disturbo per un fazzoletto non mi conviene.’

“Miss Hosmer told of a countryman who was asked what he thought of a train, for he had just seen one for the first time—seen it as it was entering a tunnel. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was just a black monster with a goggle eye, and when it saw me, it gave a horrible shriek and ran into its hole.’

“I should like you to have heard Miss Hosmer’s recollections of Kestner, whose name was so familiar to me in old Bunsen days. He died soon after she first came to Rome, but she recollects him as always wearing his old red studio cap. He knew he was dying, and when it was very near the end, he said to those who were with him, ‘Now, my dear friends, it is a very sad experience to see a person die: I must beg you to leave me: it is my great wish to be alone, and you may come back in two hours.’ They came back in two hours, and found him lying peacefully dead. That is a beautiful story, I think. It was Kestner who, priding himself very much on his good English, said to Lord Houghton, ‘Allow me to present to you my knee-pot (nipote).’

“Outside the charmed circle of Palazzo Barberini there is little now at Rome but the most inferior American society. ‘We must stop at Milan, you know, going back; there is a picture there by a man called Leonard Vinchey we must be sure to see,’ said a neighbour at the hotel luncheon. And, ‘Mr. Brown, sir, how’s Mrs. Brown’?—‘Well, she’s slim but round’ (meaning weak but about): this is the sort of thing one hears.

“In this hotel is the intelligent Indian Princess Tanjore, with whom I have spent several evenings very pleasantly. Her ‘lady’ is Miss Blyth, sister of the Bishop of Jerusalem, and authoress of that capital novel ‘Antoinette.’

“Dear old Miss Garden, whom you will remember hearing of as the kindest and most original of Scottish ladies, still lives at 64 Via Sistina. ‘How did you manage to boil the eggs so well, Maria, when you can’t tell the clock?’ said Miss Garden to her old donna, ‘for the eggs are just perfect.’—‘Why, I’ll tell you how it is,’ said Maria: ‘a lady I lived with showed me how to do it. I just put them into the water, and then I say thirty-three Credos, and then I know that they’re done.’

“With Miss Garden and Mrs. Ramsay I went one day to the curious little early christian cemetery of S. Generosa, a lovely spot, where marble slabs covering the graves of martyrs under Diocletian are still seen in a little hollow surrounded by wild roses and fenochii.

“My room in this hotel looks out on the Barberini gardens, and the splash of its fountain is an enjoyment. Its being lighted by electricity for the King’s visit the other day was a type of the times, rather a contrast to twenty years ago, when there were torches on every step of the great staircase to welcome even a cardinal, and when not only the staircase, but the whole street as far as S. Teresa, was hung with tapestries for the Prince’s funeral.

“On Ash-Wednesday I went, as I have always done here, to the ‘stations’ on the Aventine. It is still a thoroughly Roman scene. Before one reaches S. Sabina, one is assailed by the chorus of old lady beggars seated in a double avenue of armchairs leading up to the door, with ‘Datemi qualche cosa, signore, per l’amore della Madonna, datemi qual’co;’ and behind them kneel the old men—‘Poveri, poveretti cieci, signore,’ in brown gowns and with arms stretched out alla maniera di S. Francesco. Spread with box is the church itself, with its doors wide open to the cloistered porch and the sacred orange-tree [504] seen in the sunny garden beyond. The Abbot is standing there, and has his hand kissed by all the monks who arrive for the stations, till a cardinal appears, after which he takes the lower place and is quite deserted. Then we all hurry on to S. Alessio and its crypt, and then to the Priorato garden, where, by old custom, we look through the keyhole of the door, and see St. Peter’s down a beautiful avenue of bays.

“The passage of the Pope to the Sistine on his coronation anniversary was a very fine sight. Borne along in his golden chair, with the white peacock fans waving in front of him, and wearing his triple crown, Leo XIII. looked dying, but gave his benediction with the most serene majesty, sinking back between each effort upon his cushions, as if the end had indeed come. Only his eyes lived, and lived only in his office; otherwise his perfectly spiritualised countenance seemed utterly unconscious of the thundering evvivas with which he was greeted, and which rose into a perfect roar as he was carried into the Sala Regia. The potency of ‘Orders’ here is so great, that my Swedish decoration not only gave me the best place, but I took in two young men as my chaplain and equerry! After the Pope had entered the Sistine, we sat in great comfort in the Sala Regia till he returned, and then, as there was no one between us and the procession, we saw all the individual faces of the old cardinals—how few of them the same now as those I remember in the processions of Pius IX.

“There are no evvivas now for the comparatively young king with the white hair and the ever-tragic countenance: the taxes are too great. I believe that he can read, if no one else can, the handwriting on the wall which foretells the doom of his southern kingdom. And yet personally no one could be braver or more royal, and, where they detest the king, the people honour the man. ‘Your king is at that house which has fallen down, helping with his own hands to dig out that old man who is buried: he won’t leave till the old man is safe,’ said Mrs. Story to her Italian maid Margherita. ‘Si, Signora, casa di Savoia manca qualche volta di testa, mai di cuore;’ and it is quite true. All one hears of the King’s self-abnegation is so fine. He used to be quite devoted to smoking, but he was ill, and one day his physician told him that it was extremely deleterious to him. He instantly took his cigar out of his mouth, threw it into the back of the fire, and has never smoked again.

“The Pope’s secretary has just died of the influenza. Leo XIII. was much attached to him, and is greatly distressed by his death. There is something touching in the newspaper account of the Pope’s having refused to eat, and his attendants having had to use qualche dolce violenze to make him do it.

“We have had two months of rain, only four fine days last week, in which I went to the Crimera, to Fidenae, to Ostia, and to a touching and beautiful Mass in the heart of the Catacomb of S. Praetextatus, where the martyrs’ hymn was sung by a full choir upon their graves, its cadences swelling through the subterranean church and dying away down the endless rude passages, so long their refuge, and at last their place of death.

“And now I must stop. I am just come up from luncheon. ‘Wal, I guess I’m stuffed, but I’m not appeased,’ said my neighbour as we came out; and she was con rispetto parlando, as they say here—a lady.”

“Rome, April 26, 1892.—How I wish you were here: how you would enjoy it, though there is little to admire now in this much-changed Rome beyond the extreme loveliness of the spring, with its Judas and May flowers, and the golden broom of the Campagna. I have just been, with my old friends Mrs. Ramsay and Miss Garden, to the Villa Doria to pick anemones. There were thousands of them, and the ladies gathered them in like a harvest. Their servant was told off to look after the violets. Their late man, Francesco, said his was usually a very light place—‘ma nella primavera, al tempo dei violette, e duro veramente.’

“I have seen little of the Easter ceremonies. On Holy Thursday I went to St. Peter’s, and watched in the immense crowd for the extinction of the last candle and beginning of the Miserere; but all the effect was lost and the music inaudible from the incessant moving and talking. Afterwards there was a fine scene at the blessing of the altar in the already dark church—the procession, with lights, moving up and down the altar-steps, and then kneeling all along the central aisle, whilst the relics were exhibited from the brilliantly lighted gallery.

“Fifty-eight artisans and schoolmasters from the Toynbee Hall Institute, with some of their wives, have been in Rome for the Easter holidays. On Thursday I took them all over the Palatine, finding them most delightful companions, and the most informed and interested audience I have ever known. So since that I have been with them to the Appian Way, and Miss Fleetwood Wilson kindly invited the whole party to tea at the old Palazzo Mattei, unaltered through three hundred years. I made friends with many of the party individually, and think that for really good, intelligent, high-minded society, one should frequent the East End.

“What struck me most of all was the absence amongst them of the scandal-talk which in our own society is so prevalent. ‘Consider how cheap a kindness it is not to speak ill: it only requires silence,’ is an exhortation of Bishop Tillotson. They remember this; we don’t.

“Do you recollect the pretty Miss Cators? With them and some pleasant Americans, and Lanciani the famous archaeologist, I have been up Monte Cavi. Lanciani was most delightful, and told us about everything in a way which had all the enthusiasm and colour without the dry bones of archaeology, and oh! what lilies, violets, cyclamen, narcissus, covered the woods. Another day he lectured on old Fidenae, standing aloft on the ancient citadel, with all his listeners in groups on the turf around him, and afterwards they all had luncheon—still in scattered groups: it was like the pictures of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

“It has been a great pleasure to see a good deal of ‘Mark Twain’ (Mr. Samuel Clemens) and his most charming wife. He is a wiry, thin old man, with abundant grey hair, full round the head, like an Italian zazzara. He speaks very slowly, dragging his words and sentences laboriously, and is long in warming up, and when he does, he walks about the room whilst he makes all his utterances, which have additional drollery from the slowness with which they are given. He began life as a wharfinger, throwing parcels into barges, and as he threw them the overseer called out ‘Mark one, Mark twain,’ and the chime of the words struck him, and he took the name. Speaking of the Catacombs he said, ‘I might have hooked the bone of a saint and carried it off in my carpet-sack, but then I might get caught with it at the frontier. I should not like to get caught with a thing like that; I would rather it were something else.’ ‘That story by Symonds,’ he said, ‘of a crucifix which contained a dagger, reminds me of the State of Maine. Spirits were strictly forbidden there, but pocket-testaments became very abundant. They contained two or three leaves, then there was a whisky flask. Now with one of those crucifixes and one of these pocket-testaments, one might cope with the worst society in the world.’

“‘My man George has made his fortune,’ said Mark Twain. ‘He used to bet on revivals, then he took to betting on horses: he understands it all round, and he has made a good thing of it.

“‘One night when I came home unawares, I found the house-door open. After going in and poking round, I rang up George. “Well,” I said, “George, you’ve been here probably some hours with the house-door undone.”—“Good heavens!” he cried, striking his forehead, and rushed up the stairs five steps at a time. When he came down I said, “Why, George, what was the matter?”—“The matter! why, that the house-door was left open, and that there were fifteen hundred dollars between my mattresses.”’

“Mrs. Clemens spoke to George one day about his answering ‘Not at home’ when she did not want to see visitors. In England it is understood, but in quiet places in America it is not: it is a lie. And Mrs. Clemens said, ‘George, you really should not say what you know is not true; you should say I’m engaged or that I beg to be excused.’ George came close up to her and said, ‘Mrs. Clemens, if I did not lie, you’d not be able to keep house a month.’

“A rival to Mark Twain, or rather one who draws him out capitally, is an American Miss Page, a very handsome elderly woman like an ancient Juno. She said yesterday, ‘I must be going home soon to see all the coloured friends and relations. Aunt Maria was groaning very much one day, so I asked her if she had found religion. She said, “No, but she was on the anxious bench.” A few days after she had “found religion,” and I asked her about it. “Why,” she said, “I got religion, and when I found that I’d got religion, I just did make the chignots (chignons) fly. And so we did all; we danced so hard that Uncle Adam had to be sent right away the next day to bring them all home in a wheelbarrow.”

“‘My cousin was begged of by a woman one night,” said Miss Page. ‘She was very violent, and she said, “You must give me money, you shall, or I’ll say you’re Jack the Ripper.” He went close up to her, and in sepulchral accents whispered “I am!” and the woman ran off as hard as she could.’

“There are other friends I must tell you about. At No. 38 Gregoriana, in a delightfully home-like apartment with a view of St. Peter’s, live Miss Leigh Smith and her friend Miss Blyth. The former is a sister of Madame Bodichon, who was such an admirable artist, and is of a most serene, noble, and beautiful countenance, but perhaps severe: the latter is gentleness and sweetness itself, though she is less striking in appearance. Every one likes them both, but every one loves Miss Blyth. They are known as ‘Justitia’ and ‘Misericordia.’

“Another person of interest, another American, who has come to Rome to visit Miss Hosmer, is Mrs. Powers. She is charming. She said this to me to-day: ‘I took a young lady with me on a Mississippi steamer. She was very pretty and attractive. On the deck she sat by an old lady, who looked at her and ejaculated “Married?”—“No.” “Engaged?”—“No.” Just then her husband came up, and she said to him, “Here’s a young lady who says she’s not married and not engaged: how’s that?” He looked her all over and said, “Guess the pattern don’t take.”’

“And now, that you may be introduced to all my present society, Miss Hosmer is going to give you one of her dinner enliveners. ‘An American came in one day with, “Have you heard this extraordinary news from England?”—“No; what?”—“Why, about the Archbishop of Canterbury.”—“No; what about him?” “Why, about his having refused to bury a waiter at the Langham Hotel.”—“No; what a proud contemptuous priest he must be; but what possible reason could he give for refusing to bury the waiter?”—“Why, that he was not dead.”

“‘That’s a good catch,’ says Miss Hosmer, who is talking to you; ‘and now I’ll give you another. A young man—a very charming young man—was engaged to be married, and he went down from London for the wedding to the place where his bride lived, full of the brightest hopes and expectations, and in his pocket he carried the ring with which he was going to marry his love. But alas! when he reached his destination, his love had changed her mind, thought better of it, would not marry him at all. So he came away very miserable, and he thought he would go and hide his sorrows in a little fishing-village, where he had often been in happier days; he really could not face the world yet. And as soon as he arrived at the village, he went out in a boat, and took the ring from his pocket, and threw it far out to sea. Next day a remarkably fine fish was brought to table, and when it was opened, what do you think they found?—“Why, the ring,” of course you will say, as I did—No, a fishbone.’ A most provoking story!

“There are two Misses Feuchtwanger in the hotel, kindest of elderly American ladies, full of funny reminiscence. ‘Mrs. Broadhurst,’ said one of them, ‘liked nothing so much as going to dine with her old “Black Mammy;” it was the thing she liked best: and so, through a long course of years, she heard Black Mammy’s old husband say grace, and the words he used were always the same. “Beautiful mansions, we thee redorable, many sensations, Amen.” The sound meant a whole world to him.’

“Rome, April 27.—All the features of this Roman spring have been American. Mrs. Lee was in this hotel. ‘I was just raised in the South,’ she said, ‘and I’m a Southerner to the backbone. Some one wanted to be complimentary, and wrote of me in a newspaper as one raised in the lap of luxury, but I was just raised in the lap of an old nigger.’ She was very full of having been to the masquerade ball at La Scala. ‘It was awfully indecent. I could not have let my daughter go, but for me it did not matter; so I just went, and stayed to the end, for I thought some one might come along and say, “Ah! you don’t know about that, because it happened after you left,” so I thought I’d just see what was indecent for once; it might be my only chance; and I made quite sure nothing should happen after I left.’

“‘Don’t you know,’ she says, ‘that we call a story we have heard before “a chestnut”? Why, in America the smart young men used to wear a little bell on their watch-chains, and if they heard a story too often, they rung it to show the story was stale. That was the chestnut-bell.’

“Perhaps the most interesting American here is the Bishop of Nova Scotia. ‘“I’ve captured a church,” said a young American parson to me. “Captured a church! what in the world do you mean?”—“Why, I went into a church where the boys (soldiers) go, and I was asked to take the service. Soon the boys came in, and I saw that there was going to be a row. A lot of them sat down by the door, and as soon as I began to preach, one of them crowed like a cock. I said, ‘Just crow again, will you; I’m not ready for you yet.’ So he crowed again. Then I said, ‘Now, if you crow again, I’ll just fix up your beak to the anvil of God’s righteousness, and I’ll beat out your brains with the sledge-hammer of the wrath of God. Now, crow again, if you dare,’ and he did not crow any more, so I captured the church.”

“‘I would not give five cents to hear what Bob Ingleson considers to be the faults of Moses, but I’d give every cent I possess to know what Moses thinks of the faults of Bob Ingleson.

“‘I asked somebody if he thought my sermon was too low or too high, and he said “Neither, but I thought it was too long.”’

“I always dine at a little table with Miss Hosmer, where I am sure her fun and wit are more nourishing than all the rest of the viands put together. She says, ‘Our real name is Osmer, but our country people could never manage a name like that, so we voluntarily added the H. Generally, provided we are born somehow, we never care who our fathers and mothers were; but I did, and I had an uncle who found out that we were descended from a robber chieftain on the Rhine. Afterwards, in Turner’s “History of the Anglo-Saxons,” I found that the robber chief Osmer was one of the sons of Ida, king of Northumberland, and Ida claimed descent from Odin, so it is from Odin that I descend.’

“‘I promised to tell you about the siege of Rome,’ said Miss Hosmer the other day. ‘All that year we knew it was coming, and at last it came. The Italians had 70,000 men, and the Pope had only 11,000, so of course all effectual resistance was out of the question; but it was necessary to make a semblance of defence, to show that the Romans only gave in to force. September came, and the forestieri who remained in Rome were all urged to leave, but Miss Brewster and I elected to stay. We were not likely to have another chance of seeing a bombardment, so we just hung an American flag out of our windows; that we were told we must do, as it might be necessary to protect us from pillage. All the other forestieri left, and most of the Roman aristocracy. In the last days, when the Sardinians were just going to enter, there was a solemn Mass in St. Peter’s for the Pope, to implore protection for him against his enemies. I went with Miss Brewster. It was the most striking sight I ever saw. Every corner of the vast church was filled. Every one was in black—every one except the Pope in his white robes, and when he appeared, a universal wail echoed through the church. It was not a silent cry; it was the wail of thousands. There was not a dry eye in the church. The Pope passed close to me. His face was as white as his dress, and down his face the large tears kept rolling, and all his clergy, in black, were crying too. Oh, it was a terrible sight. I am not a Catholic, I am much the contrary, but I sobbed; every one did. Well, the Pope passed into the chapel where he was to say Mass, and he said it, and he walked back again; but he was still crying. It was very piteous, and when we went out into the piazza, there was Monte Mario white with the tents of the Italians, waiting, like vultures, to descend. It was uncertain, for the last few days, by which gate they would enter. It was thought it would be by the Porta Angelica, then by the Porta del Popolo; finally, it was by the Porta Pia.

“‘We were told that there would be no bombardment, but at five in the morning we were waked by the cannon, and they went on till ten. Shells came flying over our house, and one of them struck the church near us, and carried part of it away. At ten there seemed to be a cessation, so I sallied out as far as the Quattro Fontane, with my man Pietro behind me. When I got into the Via Pia (now Venti Settembre), I heard a cry of “In dietro! in dietro!” and the people ran. I thought I might as well get out of the way too, but indeed, any way, I was carried back by the crowd. I heard what I thought was a scampering of feet behind me, and when I reached the Quattro Fontane, I looked back, and seeing a man I knew, I said, “Why, what is the matter with you?” for he was covered with blood, and he said, “Why, Signorina, did not you know that a shell burst close behind you, and it has carried off several of my fingers, Signorina?” So I just took him into my house and gave him some wine, and bound his hand up as well as I could, and then sent him on to a surgeon. Then I went up to Rossetti’s house beyond the Cappuccini, because I thought from his loggia I should be able to see all that was to be seen; but as soon as we reached the roof a musket-ball grazed my face, and others were playing round us, so I said, “We had better get out of this,” and we went down.

“‘After the firing finally stopped, we went to Porta Pia to see the damage. The house which is now the British Embassy was completely riddled. Six dead Zouaves were lying in the Villa Napoleone opposite, and though the statues of S. Peter and S. Paul, which you will remember at the gate, were otherwise intact, both their heads were lying at their feet.

“‘At four, we went out again to see the Italian troops march into the city. There was no enthusiasm whatever. The troops divided, some going by S. Niccola, others by the Quattro Fontane, to their different barracks.’

“No one who did not know the ‘has been’ can believe how the sights of the Rome of our former days have dwindled away. All is now vulgarity and tinsel: the calm majesty of the Rome of our former winters is gone for ever.”

“Cadenabbia, May 13.—At Florence, I went with the Duchess of Sermoneta and Lady Shrewsbury to spend an evening with the grand old family of Torrigiani, in the palace where the four sons, their wives, and children innumerable, live with their charming mother, the Marchesa Elisabetta, in perfect harmony and love; and another day went out to Poggio Gherardo, a grand fortified villa, approached through half-a-mile of roses, where the Ross’s now live. Then I was half a day at Padua, visiting it as a tourist after many years, with my own book as a guide, and a most delightful book I thought it!

“At Venice, I went to see ‘Pen Browning’ at the Palazzo Rezzonico, his most beautiful old palace, full of memorials of Pope Clement XIII. The son Browning has no likeness to either father or mother: he has worked hard, both as painter and sculptor, and has a good portrait as well as a bust of his father, from his own hands. There were many relics of his parents and their friends, amongst them a sketch by Rossetti of Tennyson reading one of his own poems to them, with an inscription by Mrs. Browning. ‘Pen’ was going off to his house at Asolo, a place which his father first brought into notice when he walked there and wrote ‘Pippa Passes.’

“Calling on a Mrs. Bronson in a neighbouring house, I met a young lady with fluffy hair, a Countess Mocenigo. ‘My dear, how many Doges had you in your family?’ said Mrs. B. ‘Seven,’ she answered, and there really were seven Doges of the name Mocenigo, besides all those from whom she was descended by the different marriages of her ancestors.

“Venice is still as full of odd stories as when my sister went to a party there, and was surprised because the oddly dressed old lady by her side never answered when she spoke, and then found she was made of wax. Most of the company were, being ancestors present thus in the family life of the present. Recently a lady named Berthold has lived at Venice who was of marvellous beauty and charm. All the society flocked to her parties. One evening she invited all her friends as usual. They found the palace splendidly lighted, and listened to the most exquisite music. At the close of the evening, curtains which concealed a platform at the end of the principal room were drawn aside, and within, the beautiful hostess was seen, seated on a throne, and sparkling with jewels, in all her resplendent loveliness. And then, as she waved a farewell to all present, the curtains were suddenly drawn, and she disappeared for ever. No human eye has seen her since. She had observed signs, unperceived by others, that her beauty was beginning to wane!

“In the hotel was a charming old lady who had just come back from Japan, and who was arrayed in a thick quilted and embroidered dress, presented to her by a Japanese lady. Her name, American fashion, was Mrs. Mary Ridge Perkins. Her husband had sent her abroad, as she said, ‘with a big letter of credit.’ ‘Mary, you may just go and do the honours of the old country alone.’ She hates English aristocrats, but was ameliorated towards Lord Digby, with whom she travelled back from Japan. He pressed her to come and see him in London—‘Not if you have your paint on.’ She has no children of her own, but, in the war, she and her husband adopted no less than thirty, who were rendered homeless. They all call her ‘Auntie Perkins,’ but their children call her grandmother. All the thirty are married now, and Mrs. Perkins never intends to leave her own home again, except to visit them. She came down to the gondola to see me off to the station with no bonnet on her aureole of short white curls, and I was touched by her parting benediction: ‘May your life always be happy, for you have always made others happy.’

“Here, at pleasant Cadenabbia, I have been glad to fall in with Lord and Lady Ripon. He said, ‘Do you know that you have been the cause of my buying a property in Italy?’ It was in consequence of the sentence in my ‘Cities of Central Italy’ beseeching some Roman Catholic nobleman to save such a sacred and historic place, that he had bought S. Chiara’s convent of S. Damiano near Assisi, giving its use to the monks on the sole condition that it was never to be ‘restored.’

“An odd thing has happened to me here, almost like a slight shadow on the path. I met —— who lives here, and whom I used to know very well, and went up to meet him with pleasure, and he cut me dead! I have not an idea why, and he will give no explanation. ‘Il faut apprendre de la vie à souffrir la vie.’

“The Archbishop of York and Augusta are at Cadenabbia, and have taken me across the lake in their little boat to tea with Charlie Dalison on that lovely terrace of Villa Serbelloni.”

XXVIII

A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

THE summer of 1892 was full of quiet pleasures. Visits to Cobham, Chevening, and to Mrs. Rycroft at Everlands, leave little to be remembered except the pleasant parties and the extreme kindness of hosts and hostesses everywhere. I am indeed glad that my visiting-lines are cast in such pleasant places, that I so seldom have to consort with the drearier part of human nature—the “Hem-haw, really, you don’t say so” sort of people. In these houses, where the conversation is perfectly charming, yet where no evil is spoken of any one or by any one, one sees truly how a christian spirit will christianise everything it touches, and one learns—as, indeed, when does one not learn?—that the best shield against slander is to live so that nobody may believe it.

In September I was at gloriously picturesque Montacute in Somersetshire, a noble house of yellow grey stone, where all the surroundings, terraces, vases, flowers, chime into the most harmonious whole. With its charming owner, Mrs. Phelips, I made an excursion to Ford, a grand old abbey altered into a luxurious dwelling-house by Inigo Jones, and where Time has blended the new work with the old, till they are equally picturesque. The great hall has its gothic roof of abbatial times, and in the stately saloon are noble Mortlake tapestries, said to have been presented by Charles I. to his Chancellor, but more probably the gift of Anne. Then I was with Lord Zouche, a pleasant friend of late times, at his fine old haunted house and ferny deer-park at Parham, meeting, with others, Lord Robert Bruce, called “the King of Hayling Island,” where he lives and brims over with fun and anecdote. I saw from Parham the new castle at Arundel, magnificently uncomfortable and containing little of interest. But there was something touching in looking into the open grave in which Cardinal Howard was to be laid in a few days, and remembering the different phases in which I had known him well—as the smartest of young Guardsmen, as a priest, where he seemed so unnatural, and finally as Cardinal. The recollection came back of how, when the other cardinals were shuffling along St. Peter’s, Cardinal Howard marched along in stately complacency, holding back his train on one side as a lady does her dress. “E troppo soldato,” said the other cardinals.

At Petworth I saw the magnificent Vandykes, Turners, and Reynoldses in the waste of its dreary saloons. Then with Mary Hare I went to Woolbeding, a drive through loveliest lanes, across an open common covered with fern turned brown by the early frost, and then down an avenue of magnificent Scotch firs, to where lines of gorgeous flowers led up to the house, like a French château with high roof and dormer windows. I had always wished to see its charming owner, Lady Lanerton, who was just what I expected—a beautiful old lady, quite unable from rheumatism to move out of the chair in which, put upon wheels, she can be taken to the services in the little church in the garden, filled with memorials of those she has loved and outlived. In her face was the satisfied and restful expression of one waiting in grateful patience and humblest hope upon the borderland. She seemed to say, what I have just read as amongst Mrs. Stowe’s last words, “I feel about all things now as I do about the things that happen in a hotel after my trunk is packed to go home. I may be vexed and annoyed—but what of it? I am going home soon.” In the garden, amongst the splendid profusion of old-fashioned flowers, I was glad to find Lady Bagot, linked with many memories of my long ago.

“Nov. 1.—I have had an interesting and most pleasant visit to Sir John Lubbock, one of the most delightful of men, so entirely captivating in his simplicity of true wisdom, that no one could fail to be fond of him. His home of High Elms, near Orpington, is a beautiful place, quite near London, but with glorious woods and an entirely country aspect. Professor Forster and many other clever men were there, all far too learned for me, but I did not even try to ‘live up to them,’ and so enjoyed myself thoroughly. I went on from High Elms to Sir George Higginson’s at Great Marlow, and he—a very dear old friend—with all the manly straightforwardness of a splendid soldier and the chivalry of the most refined gentleness, is almost as attractive as Sir John, doing far more than many cleverer people to make life pleasant, and verifying Madame Swetchine’s words, ‘C’est par l’esprit qu’on s’amuse, c’est par le cœur qu’on ne s’ennuie pas.’ Thence, I was taken to see my Dashwood cousins at West Wycombe House, which is full of curious pictures and furniture, recalling a French château of the beginning of the eighteenth century, even in the peculiarly refined and delicate loveliness of its chatelaine.”

“Nov. 9.—I have been very ill. It was a bad chill at first, followed by most terrible pains, which I thought were part of the chill, and struggled against, moving about when I ought to have kept perfectly still. When at last I sent for a doctor, he said I had been in most imminent danger for several days, and that I must have died before another forty-eight hours were over if he had not come just then. A slight operation was necessary at once to re-arrange an internal misplacement, and this relieved the agonising pain. I have not often been before so immediately, never so suddenly, face to face with possible death. For some hours no one knew how it would go, yet I have often felt more ill. There was constantly in my mind a text which I believe is in the Old Testament somewhere, ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ and I rested upon it somehow. There seems something almost cowardly in the way in which, when very ill, one turns for comfort to texts and hymns and prayers, which one seldom thinks of at other times. But I do find them a comfort, and I suppose it is partly the natural transition from active to contemplative life.... Still I cannot say what my extreme thankfulness was when it was pronounced that all was going on well and that I was likely to recover. I suspect that I shall have to ‘go softly’ for a long time to come, perhaps always, and never be quite as well as I have been: still, in the many mercies which are left to me, I shall never have time to think of the disagreeables.

“How strange it is when one knows, when one is told, that one is almost in the valley of the shadow of death! I felt more surprised than frightened; indeed, I do not think I felt frightened at all, I could leave it so completely in wiser Hands. But I know that I looked very wistfully at all the little familiar pictures on the wall, feeling how sorry I should be to see them for the last time, and to part from all ‘the boys’ and my many interests here, and go into the unknown, of which one knows so little; only that I do, absolutely and entirely, trust in the mercy of God, and know that it will be well somehow; as to the how, God will know best how to settle it.

“I may not always go on feeling so; but I feel now as if I had left my long youth on the other side of this illness. Andersen says, ‘The stem of the pine-tree forms knots which betray the age of the tree: human life has also its perceptible rings;’ I suspect this illness will be a perceptible ring to me.”

“Dec. 21, 1892.—You know how ill I was in November, but you do not know all the serious thoughts it awakened. ‘Il est ennuyeux de vivre dans la grâce de Dieu, mais tout le monde veut y mourir;’ is that what you would answer? I have a great deal to say about it, but as you will like facts better, I will only tell you that since I recovered I have been quite a tour of visits, beginning with Lady Beauchamp,[507] and meeting charming Lady Granville and a party of sixteen young men and maidens at Madresfield Court, a moated house with a lovely view of the Malvern Hills, and full of precious collections of every kind—old books, old music, old miniatures, ivories, enamels, &c. In my room, ‘the Stuart Room,’ it was a pleasure to live with portraits inscribed ‘Mary Stewart, Princess of Orange,’ and ‘King James III.’ There is a chapel, where Lady Mary Lygon watches over the musical part of the services, aided by a footman who sings splendidly and plays five instruments well!

“I was several days at Moor Park near Ludlow, the stately house of Mrs. Johnston Foster and her pleasant heiress-daughters. They have built a huge and handsome church near their present home, and another in Yorkshire. Mrs. Foster took me to spend the day at the curious old house of Kyre, where there is a hiding-place in the hall behind a picture on a sliding panel, and an oubliette in the floor beneath a trap-door. Amongst the pictures was a curious portrait of Lady Pytts, whose daughter married Sir Thomas Stanley, the first baronet of Alderley, and planted the Alderley wood with beech-nuts from her old home, for before that ‘there were no beech-trees in Cheshire.’ The lady of the house, Mrs. Childe, has a wonderful power of making slight sketches from all such old portraits in the houses where she visits, and has many volumes of them.

“At Hereford I spent a most pleasant day with kindly Dean Herbert, who showed me all the details of his cathedral, which is beautiful still, though somewhat spoilt by Wyatt. Nothing was more interesting than the slab tombs of a bishop and dean, who were such friends, that their hands are represented as clasping each other from their adjoining gravestones. How seldom this can have been possible!

“I was one day with my Biddulph cousins at Ledbury, and was even more struck than before with their delightful old house of 1590, ‘entre cour et jardin,’ like the houses of the Faubourg S. Germain, entered by a court from the little town, and with a delicious garden and an old deer-park—perhaps the smallest in England—on the other side. I was at Shakspeare’s Charlecote afterwards, and at Warwick, and oh! so bitterly cold!

“It has been almost constantly bad weather, but I do not mind that as I used. I think it was Caroline Fox who first reminded us of ‘A wet day and all its luxuries, a fine day and all its liabilities.’

“Then I had a happy week at beautiful old Blickling, with Constance, Lady Lothian, who—though no blood relation to her—reminded me more than any one else of my dear Lady Waterford, with much the same charm of manner and power of enjoyment of all the smallest things of beauty. The park, gloriously wild, belonged to Harold, and endless illustrious owners since. The house is a dream of beauty externally, and is full of ghost-stories. It was the family home of the Boleyns, and in the tapestried drawing-room Anne Boleyn is still supposed to walk at night with her head in her hand. In the present serving-room the devil appeared to Lord Rockingham, who threw an inkstand at him, which missed, and marked the wall. When Lord and Lady Lothian first came to Blickling, they altered the house and pulled down partitions to make the present morning-room. ‘I wish these young people would not pull down the partitions,’ said an old woman in the village to the clergyman. ‘Why so?’—‘Oh, because of the dog. Don’t you know that when A. was fishing in the lake, he caught an enormous fish, and that, when it was landed, a great black dog came out of its mouth? They never could get rid of that dog, who kept going round and round in circles inside the house, till they sent for a wise man from London, who opposed the straight lines of the partitions to the lines of the circles, and so quieted the dog. But if these young people pull down the partitions, they will let the dog loose again, and there’s not a wise man in all London could lay that dog now.’

“Lady Lothian took me to Mannington, Lord Orford’s [508] curious little place. The garden, with its clipped hedges, statues, and vases, is surrounded, with the house, by a wide moat. The house is full of old pictures and furniture. In the dining-room is a sculptured skeleton whispering to a monk. It was here that Dr. Jephson saw his much-talked-of ghost. He had been sitting up late over the MSS., when an old man appeared to him. He spoke to the figure, and, though it did not answer, he was for some time quite certain of the apparition. Whilst I was at Blickling, however, Dr. Jephson was one of my fellow-guests, and he now thinks the vision was an optical delusion.

“On the outer wall of the house of Mannington are a number of Latin inscriptions, put up by the present owner. They are all most bitter, vehement, and incisive against women. But in a distant part of the grounds there is also a monument to ‘Louise,’[509] with ‘Pensez à lui, et priez pour elle.’ This is in a little wood, close to an old ruined chapel, within which Lord Orford has already placed his own sarcophagus, with an inscription (saying nobody else would ever do it), and around which he has collected a vast number of architectural fragments from destroyed churches. Lord Orford seldom comes to Mannington now, but till five years ago he was much here in strictest seclusion, with his adopted son and his wife, who were much tried by the dinner at half-past six, always of exactly the same food, after which he would talk to the lady with incessant quotations from the Latin poets, of which she did not understand a word. Every Saturday he used to pass Blickling on his way to Norwich, where he used to see his doctor, play a game of whist, and hear a mass, returning next day.

“I was two days at Titsey with Granville Leveson Gower, who is a delightful archaeologist. I remember him at Oxford. Now he has six sons of his own, several of them very handsome.

“And all this time dear Lady Egerton’s death has been a shadow. She was a most kind friend to me, and ‘La Mort laisse souvent plus de vide que la Vie ne prenait de place.’ It was characteristic of her great unselfishness that, when she knew her illness must be a very suffering one and certainly fatal, she insisted upon being removed from the home she loved so devotedly to a hired house at Eastbourne, in order that Tatton might not be left with any distressing association for her husband. Truly of her may be said—

“Belvoir Castle, Jan. 6, 1893.—‘Be firm with the weather, and it’s sure to clear up,’ said old Miss Hammersley, and, after the terrible early winter, the weather, though bitterly cold, is most glorious. My arrival at this stately castle was a fiasco. The Duchess had forgotten that she had told me to come to their little station of Redmile, and when I arrived at that desolate place, with deep snow on the ground and night fast closing in, there was nothing to meet me. The stationmaster sent his little boy to the next village, and in an hour he returned with an open waggonette, agonisingly cold across the open plain. But I was repaid when we entered the still loveliness of the ice-laden woods, every bough sparkling in the moonlight like crystallised silver; and still more when we emerged upon the plateau at the top of the hill, and the mighty towers of the castle rose pale grey into the clear air, looking down into the wooded frost-bound gorges like the palace of the ice-queen. I found the Duchess waiting for me in the corridor, with that genial solicitude for one’s comfort which goes straight to the heart when one does meet with it, which is so seldom.

“It was a great pleasure to find the all-delightful Speaker here, with his pleasant daughters, also my friend Wilfrid Ricardo. The rest of the party are Lady Bristol and her daughter, Lady Clancarty and hers, pleasant Fred Henniker and his sister, Mr. Macalmont, Mr. G. H. Smith, Miss De la Brosse, &c., besides the sons and daughters of the house.

“How I like all the mediaeval ways—the trumpeters, who walk up and down the passages and sound the dressing-time: the watchman, who calls the hours through the night; the ball-room, always ready in the evenings for those who want to dance: the band, in uniform, which plays soft music from an adjoining room during dinner, at which all the hunting men appear in their red coats, and add brilliancy and colour to the immensely long table with its glorious old silver ornaments.

“On the first morning, the Speaker and I went after breakfast with the Duchess to her private rooms, filled with comfort and sunshine, where she fed thousands of birds upon the little platform outside her windows, and the Duke, amongst other treasures, showed me a deed of King John conferring Haddon upon Richard Manners.

“At 12, I met the Duke and Duchess again, and walked alone with them on the terraces and along the exquisitely beautiful wood walks, all glistening in silvered splendour, whilst the sun was bright and the air quite still. The Duke told me how he had the bill—at £60 a piece—of those curious statues by Cibber which are such an ornament to the garden. Nothing could be more delightful than the way in which he talked about the place, and with great affection of his brother the late Duke. When we reached a little garden where there is a slab inscribed with verses by Mrs. Kemble, he was tired and returned. I went on with the Duchess, a long and most attractive path through the woods, and she talked of her real devotion to the Queen, and of the Queen’s extreme kindness to her, especially in insisting on the Duke’s going to Wiesbaden to the doctor who cured his eyes when he seemed upon the verge of total blindness. After luncheon, the Duke took the Speaker and me to see in detail the miniatures, which are so beautifully arranged in little panels on the drawing-room walls, with movable glasses in front. Wonderful are those portraits of Sir Philip Sidney, of his friend Prince Henry (with pearl earrings), and of Charles I. as a boy, with an inscription speaking of him as ‘the Hope of England.’ Then we saw those two little tables; one a sort of shrine to the Duke of Wellington, with the (framed) letter which he wrote to the then Duchess after her son Lord Robert was wounded in Spain—the prettiest, kindest letter ever written: the other a shrine to the Duke of York, with his little bust, part of his famous Protestant speech on yellow satin, and part of the famous Cheshire cheese presented to him after it, and a bit of which he sent, with a letter, to the Duchess of Rutland.

“In an exquisite old case worked by the Duke’s great-grandmother, and beneath a heart of pearls enclosing his hair, is the last letter of her son, Lord Robert Manners, who fell as captain of the Resolution in action under Rodney. The letter is addressed to the captain of another ship, asking him to come to see him, and is written in the utmost cheerfulness—‘though one leg is off, the other shattered, and one arm broke.’ He died immediately afterwards of lockjaw. The beautiful portrait of this very handsome young hero hangs in the ball-room.

“Yesterday the Duchess was ill, and I went out alone with the Duke to the kitchen-garden and to the fine stables, of Charles II.’s time, where there are still sixty horses, over which Edward Manners presides as ‘field-master.’ The Government gives £5 annually as a retaining fee for ten of the best horses being always entered to serve in case of an invasion. I cannot say how delightful I think the Duke, what a noble old man in every truest sense.”

“Jan. 1893.—Mrs. Kemble was certainly the living person I most wished to see, but I have let too many opportunities slip, and she has passed away without my knowing her. She must have been a great and generous woman, and those who knew her always loved though they feared her. Miss Hosmer has often told me how dearly she and her companions loved Mrs. Kemble when she was at school in America near the place where she lived. She would come voluntarily and read to the school-girls half a play in the morning and would finish it in the evening. Once, when she was reading, snow came on, and when she was to go home it was quite deep; so all the school-girls turned out with spades and brooms and cleared it away before her.

“But her severe manner terrified those who were given that way. ‘We had some private theatricals,’ Mrs. Story told me, ‘and Mrs. Kemble came to look on at the rehearsal, at which a girl was acting who was supposed to do it very well. Afterwards, when she came in, Mrs. Kemble walked up to her, and ‘Are you a fool?’ was all she said.

“Dr. Silas Bartol, the Unitarian minister at Boston, took his girl to see Mrs. Kemble. He was nervous, and said, ‘My daughter wished so much to have the honour of knowing—rather of hearing—rather of seeing Mrs. Kemble, that I have ventured to bring her.’ Mrs. Kemble bowed stiffly, and motioned them to sit down, but she said nothing. The girl only sat and stared at her. Then the father [510] tried again—‘My daughter is very young—is very nervous—is very shy.’ Then Mrs. Kemble looked at them both, and, in her most sepulchral accents, said, ‘Shy! I also am shy. And since your daughter has nothing to say to me, and since most assuredly I have nothing to say to her, I will wish you good morning.’

“To some Americans she met she said, ‘We hate you for your politics: we hate you for your prosperity: we hate you for your manners: and ... I don’t wonder at it.’

“Mrs. Sartoris had more talent, but Mrs. Kemble had the greater genius. Those who met her recognised it at once. I heard one who loved her best say, ‘She married Mr. Butler because, for once in her life, she was a fool. He was very faulty as a husband, but she was so imperious, no one could have lived with dear Mrs. Kemble.’

“When Mr. Cummings was taking the duty in the chapel at Dresden, they lived in the same house. Mrs. Cummings wishing to be civil, after some time sent her card, and asked if she might wait on Mrs. Kemble. The daughter came up at once and explained, very civilly, that her mother now saw no one, so Mrs. Cummings thought no more about it. But some time after, as she was sitting alone in her room, came a tap at the door, and on her opening it, she saw a lady in black velvet and lace, closely veiled, who startled her by saying in sepulchral accents, ‘I’m come to say that I shall never come again.’—‘Oh, is that really you, Mrs. Butler?’ said lively little Mrs. Cummings, and the sound of her real name, unheard for years, made her quite pleasant, and she came in, and was glad to hear of many mutual friends in the Berkshire of Massachusetts. But unfortunately Mrs. Cummings made some allusion to Shakspeare, and ‘I did not come here to speak of Shakspeare,’ said Mrs. Kemble in her most awful accents, and the charm was broken.

“When in Boston long ago, while she was reading in public, she ordered dresses, pink and blue satin, at the great shop, the Marshall & Snelgrove of the town, but gave no address. The shopmen were afraid to ask her. The manager felt he must run after her and ask where the things should be sent. Unfortunately, to attract her attention, he touched her. ‘Unhand me, ruffian,’ she shouted in her most ferocious tone. ‘And such was the man’s terror,’ said my informant, ‘that, though he was quite young, his hair was turned white that night.’

“From personal vanity she was absolutely free. Miss Hosmer once expressed her regret that she had been photographed in a hat—‘We would so much rather have seen your head.’—‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Kemble, ‘my sister, and my friends, and you yourself expressed a wish to possess my photograph, so, as I was passing a photographer’s shop, I just went in and flopped down and was photographed as I was.’

“A lady was once alluding to the hope she entertained of reducing her figure. In her most tragical voice Mrs. Kemble said, dwelling on every syllable, ‘With a hereditary tendency to fat, nor exercise, nor diet, nor grief may avail.’”

“Longford Castle, Salisbury, Jan. 18.—I have been five days in this magnificent old place, and it has been a very interesting visit—and weird, from being with people to whom the other world is so very near, who seem to be as intimate with the dead as with the living, and who think no more of ‘receiving a message’ from one of their ‘guiding spirits’ than we should of a note from an ordinary acquaintance. These spirits, the wise ‘Huldah,’ the scientific ‘Iganesis,’ the sympathetic ‘Echord,’ the evangelistic ‘Ernest,’ and ‘Semirus,’ the wise physician, are the friends of the Radnors’ daily life. There comes a rap, such a noise as we should speak of as ‘only the furniture,’ and then it is supposed that one of the spirits has something to say, and a pencil is put into the hand of a medium. One cannot say that she writes, for she often even goes fast asleep! but it writes, frequently volumes—not the sprawling incomprehensible stuff which I have often seen before from ‘Planchette,’ but clear MS. in different handwritings, and purporting to come from one of the spiritual friends. Personally, I should say that most of these communications were not the least worth the immense amount of time and thought given to them. The letters—‘messages’—from Echord and Ernest, are excellent certainly, but mild and affectionate religious platitudes, such as might be written by an Evangelical clergyman of rather poetical tendencies. They all, however, speak of the dead as not asleep, but in action: of there being no ‘place,’ but ‘a state’ after death: of existence after death being a process through gradations. None of the spirits have seen ‘God,’ but ‘the dear Master,’ ‘the sweet Master,’ is ever with them and amongst them. The communications from Semirus are more important. He is the great physician, and his advice has provided means of healing and safety for numbers, where earthly physicians have proved powerless or helpless. The Bishop of Salisbury has been scandalised at the state of things at Longford and felt impelled to come and testify against it. He recognised all that happened as fact, as every one must, but denounced it as ‘devilry,’ saying that the owners of the castle were risking their own souls and all the souls around them. They answer: ‘It was said to Christ, Thou hast a devil.’

“The great medium is Miss K. Wingfield, now aged about twenty-six. The Radnors have known her and her family most intimately for many years, and are certain of her absolute trustworthiness with regard to what she hears or writes. She is almost as a daughter to them, and they have watched the development of her psychical powers, through various steps, with the greatest interest. Her most remarkable gift is automatic writing, which has been given in many languages, several with which she is wholly unacquainted (including a very old form of Chinese, only decipherable at the British Museum), and in many different handwritings. When her hand writes, or rather the pencil in her hand, she has never the least idea of what is being written. A divining rod has unfailing power in her hands.

“The really remarkable communications are those which have reference to History. In August 1889, Sir Joseph (then Mr.) Barnby, came down to Longford to play the organ at Lady Skelmersdale’s marriage. One day at this time Miss Wingfield’s hand wrote a communication in strange old-fashioned characters, which purported to come from one ‘John Longland.’ When asked why he came, he said that he had been brought ‘by the influence of Mr. Barnby, whose music he had heard in Eton College Chapel, where he was buried.’ Later in the day, the party went to Salisbury Cathedral, and while Lady Radnor and Miss Wingfield were sitting in the Hungerford Chapel (the freehold family pew of the Radnor family), Mr. Barnby played. Whilst he was playing, Miss Wingfield saw, as in a vision, various scenes enacted, culminating in a procession of monks and other ecclesiastics with banners and canopies: one of these, a grave-faced man, came up to the chapel and looked in at her through the bars. At the same time he announced (by loud raps on the wainscot, which is the ordinary means of communication) that he was John Longland, that it was he who had written in the morning, and that he had come to the cathedral because he had been Dean there in 1514, and that he had more to tell. Another vision in the cathedral showed the gorgeous ceremonial of a consecration, which was announced to be that of one Brian Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury: in a third vision, Brian Duppa was again seen, lying dead in his coffin.

“On reaching Longford, Miss Wingfield received more writing from John Longland, who described himself as anxious to confess how faithless he had been to his intimate friendship with Thomas Bullen (Anne’s father); that he had been instrumental in persuading Henry VIII. to divorce Catherine and to marry Anne, thus advancing his friend’s daughter, and that afterwards—entirely from motives of personal pique against his former friend—he had influenced Henry against Anne, and fostered suspicions which led to her execution. He again said that he was buried in Eton College Chapel.

“Anxious to verify these statements, Mr. Wingfield (Coldstream Guards) purposely went to Eton to search for the tomb of John Longland, and nowhere could it be found. The Radnors and Miss Wingfield then thought that John Longland must be a ‘lying spirit,’ and not finding any record of his being Dean of Salisbury either, they tore up his writings.

“After Mr. Barnby had left Longford, John Longland came again, but no one would listen to him. He was, however, so persistent, that the Radnors decided to have a hunt for a list of officers of the cathedral. In a lobby cupboard they discovered some old volumes of county history, uncut and covered with dust. In one of these they found that John Longland had been Dean of Salisbury at the date mentioned, and that he was translated to Lincoln in 1521. Turning to ‘Britton’s Lincolnshire,’ equally covered with dust, showing it had not been moved for months (so that there was no possibility of Miss Wingfield having seen the statement), it was found that Bishop John Longland was a person of great learning and piety, &c., that he was confessor to Henry VIII., and suspected of having unduly influenced the King with regard to Catherine and Anne, &c. He died at Woburn, and was privately buried in Eton College Chapel, of which he was ‘visitor,’ his heart being sent to Lincoln.[511] The Radnors afterwards learnt that the tombstone of Longland was removed from Eton College Chapel during a ‘restoration.’

“Some time after, when Miss Wingfield went for the first time to the Palace at Salisbury with Lady Radnor, she exclaimed, ‘There is my Bishop that I saw!’ and went straight up to a portrait on which the name of Brian Duppa was found to be inscribed in very small characters.

“The day after I came was Sunday—thick snow without, with bright sunshine, which together threw a glorious light on the pictures. Lady Radnor showed them all delightfully. Amongst those which remain in one’s mind are a delightful full-length of his boy by Rubens in the Long Parlour, which the family chiefly inhabit, and the ‘Child Feeding Chickens,’ and Mrs. Edward Bouverie and her child, by Reynolds, in the great saloon. In the Long Gallery are two grand Claudes and a steel chair of enormous value, the delicate work of one Thomas Ruker, given by the city of Augsburg to Rudolph II. in 1577. This gallery opens on one side toward the chapel, with the font in which little Lucius Hare, son of Lord Coleraine, who once lived here, was baptized; and on the other to a sort of ‘Tribune’ with the choicest pictures—the Egidius of Quentin Matsys, the Erasmus of Holbein, a fine Sebastian del Piombo, and a glorious Paris Bordone of a scornful beauty—‘Violante’—in a red velvet dress. In a passage is the curious portrait of Mrs. Honeywood, aged ninety-three, who had 367 descendants at the time of her death. She is represented with a glass goblet. In her great age she was sure she was doomed to eternal damnation. ‘I am as certain to be lost,’ she said, ‘as that goblet is to be broken to pieces,’ and she dashed it to the ground, and it rolled away quite unhurt. So after that she remained perfectly satisfied that all would be well with her. But the pictures which interested me most personally were the noble Vandyke of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Margaret Carey, Countess of Monmouth, and the Holbein of Mary Boleyn, who married William Carey, and was also my grandmother by just ten removes.

“The house is built in a triangle, with three round towers at the angles, known as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Lord Radnor told me how, when he walked out with his father every summer evening, as they neared the house he always saw his father take off his hat, look up at the windows, and bow three times. When his father died he often regretted that he had never liked to ask him why he did this. But now he had asked his father’s spirit through a medium, and the spirit answered that he had always repented not having told him the cause, in an old distich, which he wrote:—

“In one of the round towers is a pleasant room with ancient panelling of white and gold. This is now Lady Radnor’s boudoir, and here she has often sung to us delightfully. The grounds, with their two rivers, and the garden with its terraces and vases and yew-hedges, are enchanting. The younger son, Stuart Bouverie, called ‘Toby’ in the family, is, at fourteen, a clever mechanician.”

On the 17th of February 1893, my dear old cousin Charlotte Leycester died peacefully at her house in London. For months past she had been failing in her great age (ninety-five) as to physical powers, but her mind was as much alive as ever, and her affection and sympathy as warm and ready. “She seemed,” as I have read in the novel “Diana Tempest,” to “have reached a quiet backwater in the river of life, where the pressure of the current could no longer reach her, would never reach her again.” In the last days of her own life, my dearest mother begged me always to be all I possibly could to this dear cousin and friend of her whole life, and I believe that I have been able to fulfil her wishes. She has had a home at Holmhurst every summer, and I have never allowed a week, generally not three days, to pass without writing to her. She carries away with her my closest link with the past, but no one could wish to keep her here. Better that she should go in her great age before the suffering of age came.

Just when her gentle life flickered out in sleep, I read in Grinnell’s “Pawnee Hero Stories”—“The sun was glad. He gave them great age. They were never sick. When they were very old, one morning their children said, ‘Awake, rise and eat.’ They did not move. In the night, in sleep, without pain, their shadows had departed for the sandhills.”

“June 20, 1893.—I was in London a long time, but saw and heard little of interest. At Mr. Knowles’s one day I met the honest sturdy Miss Octavia Hill, and another day Bret Harte, a young-old man, with white hair and an unwrinkled rosy face. It was odd to hear him called ‘Mr. Harte.’ After luncheon Mr. Knowles read Tennyson’s ‘Boadicea’ in a weird monotonous kind of chaunt, imitating him exactly, I should think. He said that was the way Tennyson always wished his poems to be read—straight on, without emphasis or any change of voice. One day I went with the Lowthers to draw at Fulham, and we had tea delightfully in the open air with the Bishop and Mrs. Temple, he helping his boy meanwhile to do Latin verses. George Lefevre had a great pleasant party at the old palace at Kew, to which we went by the river, and where we saw the Tecks with their daughter and the Duke of York a very little while before their marriage. For this I saw the picturesque procession capitally.”

“October 20, 1893.—I have been little away from home all summer, being so busy with my Waterford Memorial, at which I have certainly worked con amore.

“One little frisk I have had to Montacute, whence Mrs. Phelips took me to see two fine old houses, Barrington, and Wolferton near Dorchester. Then I was three pleasant days with Lord Arthur Hervey, the delightful old Bishop of Bath and Wells, in his moated fortified palace, as picturesque and as beautiful as it could possibly be. How attractive is all the apple-filled neighbourhood of Avalon—‘the Apple Island’—and how delightful its legends of Arthur if one seeks them.

“‘As Arthur ever still in British memory lives,’ says the inscription at Cardeña on the tomb of the Cid, but I fear few think of him where he lived. The Bishop took me to Cheddar. How very grand it is! We mounted by a coombe into the hills, and so descended upon the gorge. ‘Imagine yourself a river working its way down,’ said the Bishop, as the narrow ravine opened beneath us with its great purple rocks in labyrinthine windings of inexpressible beauty. Very lovely, too, I thought the little lake at the bottom, covered with a kind of ranunculus unknown elsewhere.

“The Bishop talks freely on all subjects with perfect ease and simplicity, in the repose of a mind at rest and the humility of real knowledge. He was much occupied with the question as to whether the children of Israel were 200 or 400 years in the wilderness, all depending upon where a stop ought to be placed. He was also full of derivations of names, and mentioned several interesting ones—Bevan, ap Evan; Bethel, ap Ithil; Coblentz, confluence; and Snowdon and Ben Nevis, meaning the same thing. He talked of having known Madame de Gontaut long ago, and how, when Louis XVIII. did something she could not approve, she always turned his portrait to the wall. The last time he went to see her, the servant said, ‘Depuis qu’elle est en enfance, Madame la Duchesse ne reçoit pas.’ He told of having been in his childhood at the ball which George IV. gave to children, and how a little girl being asked there what she would like to have, said, ‘I should like to have too much.’ In his room hung a beautiful engraving from Millet’s ‘Angelus,’ which he aptly called ‘the picture of the good lout’[512]

“Later, for my little ‘Sussex’ book, I was four days wandering about the deep sandy lanes and semi-forest tracts in the central part of the county. One of the prettiest places was Broadhurst, near Horsted Keynes, where the saintly Archbishop Leighton passed the last years of his life, and taught his sister’s children and grandchildren under the old oaks. I slept two nights at Groombridge Place, a delightful house, little altered since it was built in James I.’s time, and with three terraced gardens, and peacocks innumerable sunning themselves on the grey parapet of the wall above the moat.

“At Holmhurst I have been much alone, and I feel, with Carlyle, that ‘the memory of many things which it is not at all good to forget rises with strange clearness on me in these solitudes, very touching, very sad, out of the depths of old dead years.’”

The only incidents of my autumn were visits to Sir Raymond and Lady Burrell at Knepp Castle, containing one of the finest collections of portraits to be found at any small place in England; and to the Palace at Chichester, where the noble old Bishop Durnford seemed at ninety-one more full of tireless energy than ever, and whence I was taken to visit the site of the original bishopric, Selsey, with its lichen-covered walls and storm-beaten gravestones.

In December, whilst staying at ever-pleasant Thorncombe with my cousin Victoria Rowe, I sat for my portrait to Mr. Eddis.

“Dec. 5, 1893.—I had a delightful morning with Mr. Eddis, now eighty-three, but full of vigour and vivacity, and still more of reminiscence. He said, ‘You would not have been here now having your portrait painted if it had not been for the Athenaeum. When I was a very young man, one Magrath, who was secretary there, told me he wanted a sketch made of himself, and that he would give me £5 for one. So I did it, and it was such a success, that no fewer than sixty members of the club put their names down to be drawn by me. I was doubtful if I should do them, for I wanted to study, and I had not studied enough, but I asked Hilton, who was a very good artist then, and he told me it would be folly to refuse what came so easily; and so I did the portraits, and from that time orders have poured in all through my long life, and so I have never had time for real study since: I have only learnt through my work.’

“‘What one learns most by experience is the value of reflected light. I once had a discussion with Gladstone about what was the brightest colour in Nature. He maintained red was: he was perfectly certain, and very determined in his opinion. I said blue was. I told him how, in the evening, when all was mysterious, the red flowers in the garden disappeared, but the blue remained visible. But he was unconvinced. Then I showed him how, in a photograph of a flower-bed, the red flowers remained dead, undetached from the leaves, but the blue flowers were light and visible in all their forms. Then—“Good night, Mr. Eddis,” he said.’

“‘Did you know D’Israeli?’ said Mr. Eddis. ‘No, he must have been before your time, but I used to meet him often. He always struck me as lying in wait for points: to make a point was what he cared for most.

“‘James Croker had much to do with the building of the Athenaeum. They wanted him—the members did—to make an icehouse for them, but he wouldn’t. Afterwards some one found in a waste-paper basket a couplet he had written—

“‘Sydney Smith did not make at the time all the jokes which were attributed to him: he thought of them afterwards, and circulated them. He told me once, for instance, that Landseer had asked him to sit for his portrait, and that he had answered, “How could I possibly refuse a chance of immortality,” which was perhaps a very natural thing to say. But it was reported afterwards in London, and reported with at least his consent, that he had answered, “Is thy servant a dog, that I should do this thing?”

“‘One of his best real sayings was of Dr. Whewell—“Science is his forte, omniscience his passion.”

“‘Macaulay, it is true, talked incessantly—talked like a machine, but he had his attractive points. I found this out especially when he brought the present Lady Knutsford, as a very little girl, to me to be painted, and talked nonsense to her the whole time, but it was always nonsense which had a lesson in it.

“‘Lady Waterford was the most glorious specimen of womanhood I ever saw. She came in with Lady Canning when I was drawing the Archbishop of Armagh [515]—“the Beauty of Holiness,” as he was called. Lady Canning had the lovelier face and the more beautiful eyes, but Lady Waterford was always the more striking from the grand pose of her head and her majestic mien. In seeing her, one felt as if one looked upon a goddess.’

“This afternoon Victoria took me to see Mr. Watts.[516] A drive through wooded lanes and water-meadows; then the carriage stopped at the foot of a wooded knoll, and we walked up little winding paths through the bracken and Scotch firs to the house—a rustic hermitage. You enter directly upon the principal dwelling apartment—two low rooms, with old carved furniture and deep windows, and much colour and many pictures. The ceiling is in panels, decorated in stucco by Mrs. Watts (née Fraser Tytler). At least she has finished one room, and is going to do the other with an epitome of the religion of all the nations of the earth—‘A work,’ she said, ‘which gives me much study.’

“Soon Mr. Watts came in, like a pilgrim, like a mediaeval hermit-saint, in a brown blouse and slippers, with a skull-cap above his white hair and beard, and his sharp eager features, in which there is also boundless tenderness and refinement. He sat by me on the window-sill, and began at once to talk of Lady Waterford—of her wonderful inspirations, her unrivalled colouring, her utter unconsciousness of self, and her majestic beauty—how, when he first saw her out walking at Blickling, with her grand mien, he could not but exclaim—‘It is Pallas Athene herself!’

“He regretted that she should never have been painted in later life. ‘When she came into a studio, it was like a glorious vision.’ His wife said how often he spoke of Lady Waterford, and that to herself it was a lifelong regret that she should never have looked upon one who so occupied his thoughts and admiration.

“Mr. Watts took us into his studio, an immense and beautiful room added to the cottage. Here were many of his pictures, the work of years, on which, from time to time, he adds a few touches. He likes to have many of his works around him, and to add to them thus.

“At the end of the room hangs his vast ‘Court of Death,’ which can be lowered by pulleys whenever he wishes to add to it. He was greatly pleased with a photograph of it, which has the effect of a Tintoretto, and which, while preserving the grand masses, blots out the detail. ‘Death’ is throned in the upper part of the picture. ‘I have given her wings,” said Mr. Watts, ‘that she may not seem like a Madonna. In her arms nestles a child—a child unborn, perhaps, who has taken refuge there. By her side the angels of silence guard the portals of the unseen. Beneath is the altar of Death, to which many worshippers are hastening: the old mendicant comes to beg; the noble offers his coronet; the warrior does not offer—but surrenders—his sword; the sick girl clings for refuge to the feet of Death. I have wished to paint Death entirely without terrors.

“‘You wonder what that is, that other picture of a figure of a rich man in Eastern dress whose face is half-hidden, buried away in the folds of his garment. I meant that for the man who was “very sorry, for he had great possessions.” He cannot give them up. He has tried, but he cannot. He is going out into the world again, and yet—and yet he is very sorry. I have only got to give him a number of rings and to put a gold chain round him, and I think his story will be told.’

“‘And that great picture?’ we asked. ‘Oh, that is the Angel of Rest. He has come to that old man, by whom all the instruments of music and science are lying, that weary old man, and he is touching his hand and bidding him come with him and rest.’

“Besides these, Mr. Watts produced from a corner a grand chalk portrait of Lady De Vesci—a most noble picture, giving all the dignity and all the sympathy and pity of her expression. Mr. Watts said he was going to give it to her little girl.

“He said, ‘I am within two years of eighty, and I have worked all my life, but I do not feel old or feeble. I do not even use a maul-stick, and I intend to do my best work yet.’

“On the walls were photographs from Lady Waterford’s drawings, placed beside Titians, and in their ideas as fine.

“Mr. Watts took me to the window of the other room to look out into ‘the half-clothed trees of the winter world.’ In the foreground, a number of cocoa-nuts, open at the ends, were hung up, and wrens and other tiny birds were fluttering in and out of them. ‘They like cocoa-nut,’ he said, ‘and I like to see them enjoy it.’

“He said he had no wish to go into the world again. Living was outliving. Holland House, the second home of many years, was swept away for him, and all its intimates were passing away, and its memories perishing. Nothing else in London could attract him.

“He had wished to make large pictures of Hope, Charity, and Faith. With the two first he had no difficulty, but he lingered long over the third. He showed us the picture he had done—of a woman seated, looking upwards, an Amazonian woman, sheathing her sword, and bathing her blood-stained feet in a brook of clear water. ‘She had found out that all that was no use—no use at all.’ His words, his thoughts, his works, all seemed imbued with the truest spirit of religion. ‘With theology,’ he said, ‘I have nothing to do.’

“He said he had no models. ‘Models are well as studies to draw from, but they check inspiration.’ He rejoiced in Lady Waterford’s using no models for her smaller pictures, and said she would not have been so truly great had she done so.”

“Dec. 7.—Another delightful sitting with Mr. Eddis. I told him of our visit to Watts, and he said how he felt, on seeing his pictures and those of Alma Tadema, that Watts was the head, while Tadema was only the hand.

“He talked of his own early life as a student. At that time, Fuseli [517] had recently been the head of the Academy—the very fierce head. He used to say to his pupils, ‘You may be very good buttermen, you may be very good cheesemen, but students of Art you will never be; and now, give me my umbrella, and I’ll go and look at Constable’s pictures.’

“‘Turner [518] often used to come in and look at us and our work. There was a student amongst us who had painted in a red background, and he painted it the crudest, brightest red he could manage. Turner came in and said, “Come now, this will never do; give me your palette and brush,” and in a few minutes he had toned and mellowed it down with a hundred delicate gradations of tint. “Well now, don’t you think it’s improved?” said Turner. “No, I don’t,” answered the man; “I think it was much better before,” which annoyed Turner rather.

“‘I remember that he came to me that day. I was copying a Vandyke, and he looked at my work. “Part of that is very good,” he said; “why isn’t all the rest as good?”—“Because,” I said, “all the rest is me, and that part is an accident.”—“Well, let that accident to-day become principle to-morrow,” said Turner, and we were always rather friends afterwards.

“‘Turner was proud of his picture of Carthage. He had received many mortifications about his pictures, and people had haggled about the prices—very small prices too—that he asked for them. When Lord Francis Egerton came and told him that a subscription was on foot to buy that picture from him and present it to the National Gallery, he burst into tears, he was so moved. But he said, “No, I will not sell it, but I will leave it to the National Gallery.”

“‘Afterwards, however, he changed his mind, and wished to be buried in that picture. He spoke of it to Chantrey, who was his executor, and begged that he would see that it was done, urging him to promise that it should be done. “Yes, since you wish it, I’ll see you buried in that picture,” said Chantrey, “but, as sure as you’re alive now, I’ll see you dug up again.”

“‘I was very near becoming an Academician,’ said Mr. Eddis, ‘but I never did. I had painted a picture of the “Raising of Jairus’s Daughter,” which was considered a good thing, and my election was thought certain. I was advised to call upon some of the principal members, not to ask them to vote for me, but to conciliate them by the attention. It went rather against the grain with me, and I asked Stanfield about it. “Your election is as certain,” said Stanfield, “as that I am sitting upon this sofa, but you may perhaps hasten it a little if you call as you’ve been advised.” I never did, however; I let it slip, and I was never elected. Then younger men cropped up, and I was forgotten: it was all as well, perhaps.’

“In the afternoon Victoria took me to Lady Sligo’s new house, to which, instead of the suitable name of Altamont,[519] she has insisted on giving that of Mount Brown. It is beautifully situated on a wooded platform above the town of Guildford. I thought the inside of the house very charming, but Frank Thomas, the architect, who was with us, objected because ‘there was too little of the architect, and too much of Lady Sligo in it,’ which seemed to me just its greatest recommendation.

“‘May I tum in?’ said a little boy, knocking at his little sister’s door. ‘No, oo mayn’t,’ answered the little sister. ‘May I tum in now?’ said the little boy. ‘Yes, oo may,’ answered the little sister. ‘And why mightn’t I tum in before?’ said the little boy. ‘Because Mammy said oo wasn’t to see me in my chemise, and now I’ve taken it off,’ answered the little sister.”

“Dec. 8.—‘I see some pictures by amateurs,’ said Mr. Eddis this morning, ‘which produce the same effect that we was does in conversation: it is because they have never studied the grammar of art.

“‘You would scarcely remember Chantrey, I think. He was always a kind friend to me. He rose quite from the ranks, and began as a carver of wood. Rogers was always said to have a table which had been carved by Chantrey.

“‘Lord Eldon sat to me three times, and, while he sat, told me all the story of his life, so when that Life was published, it was all familiar to me: he had told it all. He was unsuccessful as a lawyer in early life, had no practice whatever, and his friends advised him to throw up the profession altogether. Only two friends urged him to wait just a little longer, and he took their advice, and in that “little longer” the tide turned, and carried him on to the Chancellorship: “And then,” said Lord Eldon, “I was able to provide those two friends with very good places.’”

In December 1893 my “Story of Two Noble Lives” appeared, and was warmly welcomed by the upper classes of society—“the public” for whom it was especially written. The last time I had gone out with Lady Waterford, we walked up and down the little ilex avenue by the churchyard at Highcliffe. She spoke then of the great and increasing desolation of her life, and said, “If I survive Charles Stuart, there will not be any one left who would even put up a monument to me.” At the time I inwardly said, “I will,” and held firm to that resolution; and from what people say of the book, I feel that I may venture to regard it, though very unworthy, as a memorial of my dear Lady and her so-beloved sister. Lady Canning’s is the better portrait, for her letters remained; the destruction of all Lady Waterford’s best letters has prevented an equally good picture of her life being produced. General Stuart and many other of Lady Waterford’s friends assured me that a detailed memoir of her was impossible; but no good work was ever successfully carried through which has not at one time seemed impossible.

It was curious, on going to London, to see how opinions differed about the book—how one heard, “Oh, all the interest is confined to Lady Canning,” or, “Of course all one’s sympathies are with Lady Waterford; it is only Lady Waterford one cares for,” or, “The old French history is the only point of interest.” The Reviews were just the same, wishing that the first, or the second, or the third volume were excluded—“the general public would have been sure to welcome the book if it had been much shorter.” But that was exactly the welcome I did not care that it should receive. The general public had no interest in, could not understand, and was not constituted to benefit by such “noble lives,” while the inner circle for whom they were intended could always skip—skip a whole volume if it pleased, just as suited the reader. “Le plus grand malheur d’un homme de lettres n’est peut-être pas d’être l’objet de la jalousie de ses confrères, la victime de la cabale, le mépris des puissants du monde; c’est d’être jugé par des sots.” I was, however, very grateful for the letter of “a Radical,” well known, though quite unknown to me, who wrote that the book had shown him that he had often talked and written of what he had known nothing about, of a class he had misjudged or judged only from individuals, and that “the Story” had taught him what noble, devoted, unselfish lives might belong to the class he had maligned, and that he would never speak against it—in generalities—again. Lady Cork was furious because the married life of Lord and Lady Canning had not been painted as cloudlessly, beatifically happy. But how could I do this with all the written evidence before me? And, after all, what made Lady Canning’s so perfectly “noble” a life was that, however much she suffered, she allowed her mother and sister to live and die under the impression that she was the happiest of wives.

A very large first edition—5300 copies—was produced. I felt these would be called for, and that such an edition would probably cover the very heavy expenses. But the sale of the book is not likely to go on; the generation contemporary with the two sisters will have passed away. For myself, if I like a book, I prefer that it should be very long. It enables you to make a real acquaintance with the people described, to learn to love them perhaps, and to be very sorry to part with them. I wonder if it will be so if some of these—very long—journals are ever made public.

XXIX

WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS

I HAD frequently been urged by my friend Madame E. de Bunsen to write the lives and edit the letters of her family—the Gurneys of Earlham; but I had long declined. Much as I honoured the life-work and character of the Gurneys, I felt that I was so little in sympathy with their outward forms of religion, with their peculiar expression of it—with their religious talking, in fact—that I doubted if I could do them justice. Others seemed much better fitted for the task.

But towards the close of 1893 it was again urged upon me—urged with great persistency; and when I had taken many of the Gurney journals and letters home, a memoir seemed gradually to unravel itself in my mind, and at length I promised to do my best. I know, however, how true it is that “in a whole imbroglio of capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and very often clutch the wrong one.”[521]

In many respects the work soon brought its own reward—inwardly, in being led to enter into the spiritual life and difficulties of so many holy departed ones: outwardly, in many visits to still living members of the family, whose life is a constant example, and has often an intellectual as well as a spiritual charm. Especially charming were some winter days at Colne House, the delightful home of Catherine, Lady Buxton, second daughter of Samuel Gurney; and a lovely spring day with Mrs. Ripley at Earlham, in the old-fashioned rooms, and on the green lawns, fragrant to the family—but also to thousands of others—with endless sacred memories.

“London, April 1894.—I have had a pleasant time here, and as usual have found that there is more to be learnt by enduring the ups and downs of social pleasures than by withdrawing from them, while in the mornings I have been very busy at the Athenaeum with a new edition of ‘Walks in London’ and the production of my little ‘Sussex.’ At Lady Wynford’s I met Miss Harynden, the authoress of ‘Ships that Pass in the Night,’ a very delicate-looking brown ‘Girton girl’—only her degree was not taken at Girton, but at the London University. She was very simple and nice, but seems to feel her books too much. She said she was generally ill and fretful because she was writing, but more ill and more fretful if she was not. She did not find her lodging at Hampstead quiet enough to write in, but shut herself up by day in a desolate cottage on the Heath. She said she had received hundreds of letters about her ‘Ships that Pass.’ That very morning she had a very kind one from an unknown gentleman, saying he liked her book very much, but was disappointed because—in spite of the title—he found no information about shipping in it!

“A little Gould child said the other day, ‘Can God Almighty do everything, mother?’—‘Yes, my dear, God is omnipotent.’—‘I know one thing He couldn’t do, mother.’—‘Quite impossible, my dear.’—‘Yes, mother; God couldn’t make a stone so big that He couldn’t carry it,’—deep unconscious theology.

” ...There is no place where Death makes a stranger impression than at the Athenaeum. You become so accustomed to many men you do not know, to their comings and goings, that they become almost a part of your daily life. You watch them growing older, the dapper young man becoming grizzled, first too careful and then too neglectful of his dress: you see his face become furrowed, his hair grow grey, then white, and at last he is lame and bent. You become worried by his coughs, and hems, and little peculiarities. And—suddenly—you are aware that he is not there, and all your little annoyances immediately seem to have been absurd. For a time you miss him. He never comes. He will cough no more, no longer creak across the floor. He has passed into the unseen; gradually he is forgotten. His place knows him no more. But the wheel goes on turning; it is others; it is oneself perhaps, who is waning away.”

“I went with Henry Maxwell-Lyte. At Grantham was a quantity of red cloth, and crowds of people to see the Princess (Louise), and a string of carriages from the castle, and George Manners to show us which we were to go in. In mine I found a young man, who turned out to be Cecil Hanbury of La Mortola, with whom I made great friends, and found, as I always do, that it makes all the difference if one has one special friend in a large party. The Princess was already at tea when we arrived, and very gracious and kind. But though she is such a really charming person, the conversation had the effect of muffled drums, which always accompanies the presence of royalty. Lord Lorne is much improved in appearance by age—a good Rubens, as his uncle, Ronald Gower—also at Belvoir—is a bad Bronzino. The Duke, as always, was most delightful, so courteous, considerate, and full of interesting information. In the mornings we walked, drew, or sat in the gardens—a many-hued carpet of spring glories. In the evenings most of the company danced. The last day we drove, all the way through the property, to Croxton Old Park, where there was once a monastery, but nothing is left of it now. There is a quaint little house, where the Duchess Mary-Isabella, whoever she may have been, died, and in its succursale we had tea, with all possible ‘ameliorations.’ ...

“Holmhurst is now a nest of spring blossoms, the azaleas glorious, and the gold of the laburnums quite hiding the leaves.

But my nest really is ‘beau.’ I am sometimes blamed for caring so much about it, so that it was a comfort to read somewhere (I cannot remember where), ‘Every man’s proper mansion-house and home, being the theater of his hospitality, the seate of self-fruition, the comfortablest part of his own life, a kind of private princedome, nay, to the possessor thereof an epitome of the whole world, may well deserve by these attributes, according to the degree of the master, to be decently and delightfully adorned.’”

It had weighed upon my mind for the last two years that my “France” remained unfinished. There was still another volume which could not be written without personally visiting all the places of interest in Normandy and Brittany, and my publishers were constantly urging its completion. The book has always been utterly unremunerative, very much the contrary, which is very depressing in its way, but “on ne vit dans le mémoire du monde que par ses travaux pour le monde.’[522] So I determined to give up London and home pleasures this summer, and to set about it, taking my young cousin Theodore Chambers as my companion and guest.

We left Holmhurst together on the first of June, and spent June in Normandy and July in Brittany. It was one of the most laborious journeys I ever made—eight or nine hours a day of walking, standing, collating, correcting, simmering in the relaxing western heat, and constantly soaked by the Scotch mist which pervades that district five days out of seven. For the latter month young Inverurie, Lady Kintore’s eldest boy, was also with me, a most kind and pleasant fellow-traveller, but, though eager about drawing, neither of my companions had any more interest in architecture or history than a stone. Thus my associations with North-Western France are not transcendent. Places, even the most beautiful, are innutritious to the mind in the long run; one needs people with mental life, and enthusiasm to see them with.

To the cloudiest days, however, come gleams of sunshine. I remember with great pleasure the Abbey of S. Waudrille near Caudebec, restored once more to the Benedictines, ejected at the Revolution. We were cordially pressed to go and stay there, and shown the charming rooms we might have, and I should really have liked it. Then five days at Mont S. Michel were enchanting, and the invigorating air, which the hundred and thirty steps to our bedrooms gave us full opportunity of benefiting by. And then from Brittany come recollections of many wonderful calvaries; of Tregastel and its golden rocks; of S. Jean du Doigt in its deep hollow, lovely in spite of soaking rain; and of Carnac and its wild moorland, redolent of sweet basil and thyme. We also saw two stately well-kept houses, Josselin of the Duc de Rohan, and Maintenon of the Duc de Noailles; but, after all, seeing houses without their owners is like seeing frames without portraits. More living to me, because I felt already so familiar with the place, was Les Rochers, pervaded by the spirit of Madame de Sévigné, and even more fragrant from the memories she has bequeathed to it than from the blossoms with which the glorious old orange-trees in its garden are covered now as in her day. It was enchanting to reach home again at the end of July. My companions said the journey had turned my hair grey, and so it really had—rather.

“August 16.—Most delightful has been the return to Holmhurst with its freedom and peace. The shades in my life now are seldom troubles, only uncongenialities, and the ‘small fretting fretfulnesses’ which accompany them: still, when these are past, the relief is enormous, and visits from such delightful young friends as Herbert Vaughan, Cecil Hanbury, and George Cockerton have been a great enjoyment. The last is indeed, in every respect, a dear and true friend. No rules of friendship, I feel, are better than those inculcated by Buddhism:—

“‘An honourable man should minister to his friends and companions by giving presents, by courteous speech, by promoting their interests, by treating them as his equals, by sharing with them his prosperity.

“‘They, in return, should show attachment, by watching over him when he is off his guard, by guarding his property when he is careless, by offering him a refuge in danger, by adhering to him in misfortune, by showing kindness to his family.’

“The natural beauty of the garden here is a never-failing delight to me. Most people seem to be so full of expectations from the future that they do not allow themselves to enjoy the present; but when I am at home, I am sure that is not the case with me. On the prettiest site in the grounds I have just finished putting up the statues of Queen Anne and her four satellites by Bird, which formerly stood in front of St. Paul’s. They were taken away four years ago, and disappeared altogether till last spring, when my friend Lewis Gilbertson discovered them in a stonemason’s yard on the point of being broken up for the sake of the marble. I found they belonged to three people—the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and all these were persuaded to resign their claims to me. The statues were brought down to Holmhurst at great expense, and put up, at much greater, on a home-made pedestal like their old one; and now I hope they are enjoying the verdure and sea-breezes after the smoke of the City.”

“Alderley Rectory, Oct. 5, 1894.—I left home on September 29, to visit the Townshend Marshams at Frognal—the place I have so often heard of and thought of, from Lord and Lady Canning having been there so frequently as the guests of Lord and Lady Sydney, who left it to the Marshams. No wonder they loved it, and that it was one of the places poor Lady Canning most looked forward to seeing again on her return from her long Indian exile. It is an enchanting old house!—its endless succession of small sitting-rooms, all lived in, all full of pictures, books, and flowers, and opening on to a sunny terrace and broad expanse of lawn, with pine-trees beyond it. In one of the rooms Lady Sydney still presides from her picture, but as few alive now can remember her, radiant in loveliness, with a coronet surmounting her abundant and beautiful hair. Upstairs there is an oak gallery, half library, half passage, but deliciously pleasant and quaint. The boy of the family is named Ferdinand, from Ferdinando Marsham, Charles I.’s esquire, upon whose tombstone it is said that ‘he was lamented by all gentlemen.’ Amongst the many curious pamphlets in the house is an account of Charles I.’s execution, printed whilst the king’s body was still lying at Whitehall, and mentioning his famous word, ‘Remember,’ as referring to his ‘George,’ which he had desired might be given to his eldest son. A sketch by Lady Sydney represents the drawing-room at Frognal, with both the Cannings and many other habitués of the house introduced, and easily recognisable as portraits.

“Through a most picturesque and lovely bit of primeval chase belonging to Frognal we walked to Chislehurst, to see the fine tomb of Lord Sydney by Boehm, surrounded by memorials of his family, and, on the common, the Prince Imperial’s Memorial Cross. Mr. Marsham Townshend, who recollected having seen the Empress in all her splendour at Paris, happened once to come upon her here, a widowed and lonely exile, in her deep mourning, attended by a single servant, sobbing alone before this memorial of her murdered son. Often, in the years she was at Chislehurst, while the family at Frognal were sitting at tea in the hall, a carriage would dash up, and the Empress Eugénie come in to stay for two hours. She loved the Sydneys.

“It was most delightful at Frognal having old Mrs. Sackville of Drayton there—‘still constant in a wondrous excellence.’

“A longish journey took me to Bromsgrove, where a carriage met me and an old Mrs. Laurence, who is apparently ‘a power’ in American society, with her nephew, Mr. Mercer, and brought us to Hewell, the great modern house which Bodley has built for the Windsors. It has an immense hall, with open galleries round it, never a comfortable arrangement, I think, but it is handsome, has two beautiful Italian chimney-pieces, and is divided by arches into compartments at the two ends. Lady Windsor is quite as beautiful and fascinating as before she married, and her mother, Lady Paget, is rather additionally embellished than otherwise by added years. Lady De Vesci was at Hewell also, supremely beautiful in her own—a poetical way.

“I have enjoyed being in this familiar place, where the Rector of Alderley, Mr. Bell, and his daughters, are very kind. He has just been driving me to see the Ernest Leycesters at Mobberley. Passing beneath a field on the way to Chorley, he said, ‘A curious thing happened there when I was a little boy. A farmer went out very early to look over his land, and in that field he found a place where the soil had been recently upturned. ‘Oh, poachers must have been here,’ he said to himself, ‘and have buried their game;’ so he dug, and very soon came upon a sack. ‘Here it is,’ he said, when behold! from the sack emerged the long tresses of a young woman! Pale as death, he rushed across the field to Ellen Baskerville’s house, and told what had happened. It was the body of a young woman, buried in Alderley Churchyard a few days before. Resurrection-men had dug it up, and being suddenly surprised, had hastily buried it here.

“‘When I was living as chaplain in the Infirmary at Norwich,’ said Mr. Bell, ‘I was startled by hearing what seemed to be loud and furious imprecations overhead. They did not stop, and at last I ran upstairs to see. There, in bed, was the old fat swarthy cook, screaming with all her might, and a huge monkey was sitting on the bed grinning at her. I seized a newspaper which lay there, rolled it up, and hit out at the monkey. But the beast knew better than to be afraid of that, seized it, tore it up, and made at me. Then I caught up a large ruler, which was happily lying near, to defend myself with. The monkey did not like that, and bounded across the room and out at the window, and I heard a scream from the people upon whom it had descended in the street.

“‘The woman told me how the monkey had come in at the window, and jumped straight on to her bed, where it had found the pot of ointment used for her bad leg, and eaten it all up directly. Having finished that, it made for the table, where it found her wig-box, pulled it open and began to demolish her wig. That she could not stand. “Oh, ye varmint! ye varmint!” she shouted, and continued shouting till I came to the rescue.’”

“Temple Newsam, Oct. 9.—This grand old house in the Black Country has been receiving the Duke and Duchess of York. They were just gone when I arrived, but the Duchess’s pleasant brother, Prince Adolphus, is here, and his future bride, Lady Sybil Grosvenor, with Lady Grosvenor and her daughter, also the William Lowthers and the beloved Halifax’s. With the Lowthers I have been two excursions—to Swillerton, Sir C. Lowther’s rather fine house, and to the beautiful old house of Ledstone, a very picturesque place.”

“Ravenstone, Oct. 14.—This lovely little place of Mrs. Howard is above Lake Bassenthwayte, not considered a beautiful lake, but infinitely lovely at the spot to which she has taken me, through the garden of Sir H. Vane, where a richly wooded promontory embossed upon the still evening sky was reflected in every detail in the calm limpid waters.

“We have been for service to the most delightfully primitive little church—a Dalesman’s church—such as Wordsworth has described. At Greystoke we have spent a day, received by the little girl, daughter of the house, with the manners of a princess. Little of the old castle remains.”

“Bishopthorpe, Oct. 16.—‘That is a portrait of Bishop Willmer of Louisiana,’ said the Archbishop, showing his study. ‘He was at one of the conferences at Lambeth in Archbishop Tait’s time. When he went away Mrs. Tait said to him, “Well, good-bye, Bishop; I hope you’ll come again at the next conference.”—“No, Mrs. Tait, neither you nor I will be at the next conference.”—“Oh, Bishop, but I hope we shall see you again.”—“No, Mrs. Tait,” said the Bishop very solemnly, “neither you nor I shall be at the next conference, but we shall meet again very soon.” Three months after that—one in America, the other at Edinburgh—the Bishop and Mrs. Tait died on the very same day.

“‘Bishop Willmer had the utmost simplicity of character, but he was a true apostle. One day, crossing a green at Boston, he found a little boy playing pitch-and-toss. He was very fond of little boys, and he stopped and spoke to this one—spoke to him very kindly. “Now, are you a good little boy?” he said at length. “Well, I sometimes say cuss words,” answered the boy. “Oh, I’m sorry for that,” said the Bishop; “but at any rate, I see you speak the truth.”—“Oh, only dogs tell lies,” said the boy. “Well, now,” said the Bishop, “would you like to do me a kindness?”—“Yes,” said the boy. “Well, I expect a parcel at the railway station, and I want you to go for it, and bring it to a particular house. There will be seven dollars to pay for that parcel, and here are the seven dollars, and there are fifty cents for yourself.” The boy took the $7.50 and went off.

“‘When the Bishop reached the house, he told what he had done, and was heartily jeered at—that he should trust a Boston waif like that. There was a very large party, and they all went in to dinner. Before it was over, a servant came in and said that there was a boy there who wanted to speak to the Bishop. The Bishop went out, and the whole company followed him—they followed him into the hall, and there was the boy at the door. He was not the least abashed, but, when he saw the Bishop, said, “Well, I’ve brought the parcel, but it cost seven dollars fifty cents: you did not see the fifty cents marked in the corner.”—“Well, how did you get the parcel, then?”—” Oh, I paid the fifty cents you gave me.”—“And how did you know you’d get the fifty cents again?”—“ Well, I thought as a chap as would trust me with seven dollars would never make a trouble for fifty cents.”

“‘Well,’ said the Bishop, before they parted, ‘now I should like to give you my blessing;’ and the boy knelt on the door-mat, and solemnly and episcopally, before all the company, the Bishop gave the poor boy his blessing.’

“The chapel here in the palace is thirteenth-century, and has been restored by Archbishop Maclagan. The stained windows by Kempe are beautiful, representing the Crucifixion, and the saints connected with York. ‘I wished that the Saviour should be represented without any appearance of suffering,’ said the Archbishop—‘as the offering of humanity, not the sacrifice for sin. The suffering crucifixes only grew up in mediaeval times with ideas of purgatory. The early artists wished to excite faith, not pity, and represented the Saviour’s triumph over death, even while enduring it. The earliest crucifix, in the Catacomb of Pope Julius, given by Mrs. Jameson, but which totally disappeared a few years since, represents on the cross a beautiful youth, draped from head to foot, and without suffering.’

“I have had a delightful long drive with Augusta to Bramham. The old house was burnt down sixty years ago, and has never been rebuilt. But its glorious old gardens are kept up. There is nothing like them in England. They were laid out by Le Nôtre when he laid out Versailles, and are more like that than any other place. Eighty acres are intersected by grand avenues with immense walls of clipped beech, ending in summer-houses, statues, vases, or tanks walled in with stone and surrounded by statues and vases of flowers. Mr. Fox, a most grand old man, showed me everything, and talked of the change from the old times of his youth, when Yorkshire country visits were so cheery, and the chief dissipation of the county people was a ball at York. ‘Now every man with three hundred a year and a daughter thinks he must go to London.’ He talked of the degeneracy of Temple Newsam from the time when three litters of cubs were regularly brought up in the woods near the house. His sitting-room is full of hunting pictures and caricatures of his old friends—a great enjoyment to him.

“I asked Augusta much about Mrs. (Adelaide) Sartoris, whom she had known well. She said: ‘Edward Sartoris did not go with Adelaide when she went to Vichy. Leighton, who was always as a slave to her, went with her, took her lodgings, and did everything for her. Then he said, “You will be very dull, knowing no one here; I know some young men here, and I will introduce them to you. They are Burton and Swinburne, but you know one is a believer in Buddhism, the other in nothing; so you must not mind what they say.” Then Leighton left.

“‘The next evening Adelaide was having her coffee in the gardens, when the two young men came up and sat down by her. At first they made themselves very agreeable. Then at length they began to air their opinions, and to say things evidently intended to shock. Adelaide laid down her cup, looked at Burton, and said very slowly, “You believe, I think, in Juggernaut, therefore, with regard to Juggernaut, I shall be very careful not to hurt your feelings. And you, Mr. Swinburne (turning to him), believe, I think, in nothing, but if anything is mentioned in which you do believe, I shall be very careful not to hurt your feelings either, by abusing it: now I expect that you will show the same courtesy to me.”

“‘The young men laughed, and for some days all went well. Then the impression passed, and one day they began to talk as before. Adelaide again laid down her cup, and began again in the same slow tones—“You believe, Mr. Burton, I think, in Juggernaut”.... Then they burst out laughing, and they always behaved themselves in future.’

“‘When I was a girl,’ said Augusta, ‘I was with Mary at Madame de l’Aigle’s near Compiègne. There was to be a little function in the village, and some music was got up for it. We assisted at the practices, and Leighton also, who was there as a beautiful young man. But before the day of the function came he had to go. “Oh, Fay, why should you desert us? what can we do without our tenor?” said Madame de l’Aigle. But she implored him in vain; he said he must go. We all continued, however, to urge him, and at last he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I must go, but I’ll come back.”—“What! all the way from London?” “Yes.” And he did. It was not long after that we found out why he thought himself obliged to go: it was because the sale of the pictures of that poor artist, Mason, who had died leaving his wife and children terribly unprovided for, was going to take place, and Leighton thought that if he were present at the sale, and seen bidding for the pictures, they would fetch higher prices. It was only one of a thousand kindnesses Leighton has done.... People have sometimes called him affected, but he was not. His manners were perfectly natural: he could not help being the spoiled darling of society.

“‘George IV., as Prince Regent, was very charming when he was not drunk, but he generally was. Do you remember how he asked Curran to dinner to amuse him—only for that? Curran was up to it, and sat silent all through dinner. This irritated the Prince, and at last, after dinner, when he had had a good deal too much, he filled a glass with wine and threw it in Curran’s face, with “Say something funny, can’t you!” Curran, without moving a muscle, threw his own glass of wine in his neighbour’s face, saying, “Pass his Royal Highness’s joke.”

“‘That story reminds me of the old Queen of Sweden. She was furious at the appointment of Bernadotte, and would have nothing to do with him; at which people congratulated him rather, because if she had seen him, they said, she would certainly have killed him. But at last she seemed to get tired of her estrangement, and she invited Bernadotte to a banquet. He was delighted—so glad to be friends; but as he was going to her palace, a paper was put into his hands inscribed—by whom he never knew—with the words, “If she offers you food or drink, as you value your life, refuse it.” He arrived, and the Queen was most affable, courtesy and kindness itself. After dinner a cup of coffee was brought on a golden salver, and, with the most exquisite grace, the Queen offered it to Bernadotte. He was just about to drink it when he remembered the warning, and he returned it to her, saying, “Après vous, Madame.” The Queen turned deadly pale, looked him full in the face, and—drank it. Next day Stockholm was agitated by terrible news. The Queen-Dowager had died in the night.’

“The dining-room here is hung with Archbishops, a very fine set of portraits. Sir Joshua painted Archbishop Harcourt, and came down with the picture to Bishopthorpe. At dinner, the chaplain, who was afterwards Archbishop Markham, said, ‘Who is the fellow who has painted that vile picture of the Archbishop?’—‘The fellow is me,’ said Sir Joshua, who was sitting by him; but he was so struck by what Markham said that he insisted on taking the picture back with him to London, and repainted it as it is now. Talking of the portraits led to Sir T. Lawrence, who was an endless time over his pictures. That was the case with his portrait of Lady Mexborough and her child. Lord Mexborough asked to have it home again and again, but it was no use. At last he said he must have the picture. ‘Well,’ said Sir Thomas, ‘I’ve been a long time, I allow; but I’ve got well forward with Lady Mexborough: it’s the baby wants finishing. Now if Lady Mexborough would kindly bring the baby and give me another sitting, I really will finish.’—‘Well, Sir Thomas,’ said Lord Mexborough, ‘my wife will be happy to give you another sitting whenever you like, but the baby’s in the Guards!’”

“Lincoln, Oct. 18.—Between York and this, I turned aside to visit Howden, a most grand church. In the vicarage garden I saw an old lady feeding chickens, and I could not help going up to her and saying, ‘Were you not once a Miss Dixon?’ She was so exactly like her sister, who was with Miss Dixon, the miniature-painter, at the little Holmhurst hospice last year. Her husband, Mr. Hutchinson, showed me all the relics, the remains of the shrine of S. John of Howden, bearing a statue of the Virgin with the dove whispering into her ear, as S. Gregory is so often represented at Rome: the Saltmarshe Chapel, with its old tombs and its stone altar with five crosses: and the lovely ruined choir, with exquisite chantry chapels opening from it. Then, in the vicarage garden, are remains of an old palace of the Bishops of Durham, with a beautiful old gateway.

“I also saw Selby, a very fine church with a Norman nave, but less interesting than Howden.

“Lincoln is altogether delightful, with its crown of yellow-grey towers rising high above the red roofs of the town. And it is most pleasant in staying with the beloved Precentor Venables to go back into the old Hurstmonceaux days, which he, and almost no one else, remembers, even though I could not join in his loyal reverence for Uncle Julius, when it was extended to Aunt Esther also. Time seems to have stood still with him and Mrs. Venables more than with any one I know, and it is difficult to believe that it is more than half a century since they came to Hurstmonceaux as bride and bridegroom—half a century of such entirely happy married life, that one cannot contemplate one surviving the other.[528]

“We visited the delightful and beautiful old Bishop King, who now has fitted up the ruins of the old palace, and lives appropriately in the heart of the cathedral society—‘very rightly placed,’ he says, ‘below the church, and far above the world.’ He has an expression of gentle benignity which I never saw equalled except by Pius IX., and a manner in which the greatest dignity of office and the most perfect personal humility are marvellously blended. He was sitting in what I thought was a purple dressing-gown, but was told it was a cassock: a jewelled cross was on his breast. I hoped to have seen him mitred in the cathedral, but he only appears thus on great festivals. He talked of the Church in France, and I urged him to visit Ars and enjoy its atmosphere of spiritual love and blessing: he said he should go there. We also visited Dean Wickham and his delightful wife, who is Gladstone’s daughter, thinking her father’s principles always right, but so full of goodness, gentleness, and beneficence herself, that it is impossible to connect her with his practice.”

“Nov. 16.—At Letton, the pleasant house of the Gurdons in Suffolk, I have met a large party, including the Hamonds of Westacre, into whose courtyard an invisible horse and rider clatter whenever any death is about to occur in their family. I have been taken to see Hingham, where the church contains the very fine tomb of Thomas, Lord Morley, of 1435. Another day we went to Dereham. S. Werburga was the great saint of the place, and was stolen by the Abbot of Ely, that her body might be venerated there with her two sainted sisters. By her empty grave a miraculous spring gushed forth to console the people of Dereham. So many children died from being bathed in it, that it is now shut off by a railing. In the church is the feeble monument of Cowper and Mrs. Unwin.

“Some young men once determined to frighten the famous naturalist Cuvier. One of them got horns, hoofs, and a tail, and appeared by Cuvier’s bedside. ‘I am the devil,’ he said, ‘and I am come to eat you.’ Cuvier looked at him. ‘Carnivorous! horns—hoofs—impossible! Good-night;’ and he turned over and went to sleep.

“Mrs. Hall Dare had told of a young girl friend of hers. She was with a number of other girls, foolish and frivolous, who went to consult an old woman who had the reputation of being a witch, and who was supposed to have the power of making them see their future husbands. She said they must say their prayers backwards, perform certain incantations with water, lock their doors when they went to bed, and then they would see whom they were to marry, but they would find their doors locked in the morning.

“The girl followed all the witch’s directions. Then she locked her door, went to bed, and waited. Gradually, by the firelight, a young man seemed to come in—to come straight through the locked door—a young man in uniform; she saw him distinctly.

“He went to the end of the room and returned. As he passed the bed his sword caught in the curtain and fell upon the floor. Then he seemed to pass out. The girl fainted.

“In the morning at first she thought it was a dream, but there, though her door was still locked, lay the actual sword upon the floor! Greatly aghast, she told no one, but put it away and kept it hidden. It was a terrible possession to her.

“The following year, at a country-house, she met the very young man she had seen. They fell violently in love and were married. For one year they were intensely—perfectly—happy.

“Then her husband’s regiment had to change its quarters. As she was packing up, with horror which was an instinct, she came upon the sword put away among her things. Just then, before she could hide it, her husband came in. He saw the sword, turned deadly pale, and in a stern voice said, ‘How did you come by that?’ She confessed the whole truth.

“He was rigid. He said, ‘I can never forgive it; I can never see you again;’ and nothing she could say or do could move him. ‘Do you know where I passed that terrible night?’ he said; ‘I passed it in hell!’ He has given up three-quarters of his income to her, but she has never seen him since.

“A few years ago there was a lady living in Ireland—a Mrs. Butler—clever, handsome, popular, prosperous, and perfectly happy. One morning she said to her husband, and to any one who was staying there, ‘Last night I had the most wonderful night. I seemed to be spending hours in the most delightful place, in the most enchanting house I ever saw—not large, you know, but just the sort of house one might live in one’s-self, and oh! so perfectly, so deliciously comfortable. Then there was the loveliest conservatory, and the garden was so enchanting! I wonder if anything half so perfect can really exist.’

“And the next morning she said, ‘Well, I have been to my house again. I must have been there for hours. I sat in the library: I walked on the terrace; I examined all the bedrooms: and it is simply the most perfect house in the world.’ So it grew to be quite a joke in the family. People would ask Mrs. Butler in the morning if she had been to her house in the night, and often she had, and always with more intense enjoyment. She would say, ‘I count the hours till bedtime, that I may get back to my house!’ Then gradually the current of outside life flowed in, and gave a turn to their thoughts: the house ceased to be talked about.

“Two years ago the Butlers grew very weary of their life in Ireland. The district was wild and disturbed. The people were insolent and ungrateful. At last they said, ‘We are well off, we have no children, there’s no reason why we should put up with this, and we’ll go and live altogether in England.’

“So they came to London, and sent for all the house-agents’ lists of places within forty miles of London, and many were the places they went to see. At last they heard of a house in Hampshire. They went to it by rail; and drove from the station. As they came to the lodge, Mrs. Butler said, ‘Do you know, this is the lodge of my house.’ They drove down an avenue—‘But this is my house!’ she said.

“When the housekeeper came, she said, ‘You will think it very odd, but do you mind my showing you the house: that passage leads to the library, and through that there is a conservatory, and then through a window you enter the drawing-room,’ &c., and it was all so. At last, in an upstairs passage, they came upon a baize door. Mrs. Butler, for the first time, looked puzzled. ‘But that door is not in my house,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand about your house, ma’am,’ said the housekeeper, ‘but that door has only been there six weeks.’

“Well, the house was for sale, and the price asked was very small, and they decided at once to buy it. But when it was bought and paid for, the price had been so extraordinarily small, that they could not help a misgiving that there must be something wrong with the place. So they went to the agent of the people who had sold it and said, ‘Well, now the purchase is made and the deeds are signed, will you mind telling us why the price asked was so small?’

“The agent had started violently when they came in, but recovered himself. Then he said to Mrs. Butler, ‘Yes, it is quite true the matter is quite settled, so there can be no harm in telling now. The fact is that the house has had a great reputation for being haunted; but you, madam, need be under no apprehensions, for you are yourself the ghost!’

“On the nights when Mrs. Butler had dreamt she was at her house, she—her ‘astral body’—had been seen there.”

“Ashridge, Nov. 19.—I arrived here by tea-time, passing in the beech woods Lady Lothian, who reminded me of Lady Waterford, as I saw her in her long black dress and black hat, backed by the leafless trees against the golden sunset. Then Lady Brownlow came in, still radiant in her marvellous Bronzino-like beauty. There is much charm too in the guests—Mrs. Dallas Yorke, with her subtle refinement, Mrs. Norman Grosvenor, the Jerseys, pleasant Jack Cator, and many others. Before dark, Lady Lothian took me to the drawing-room, built entirely from designs of Lord Brownlow, and thoroughly Italian in its marble pillars, green hangings, and many fine pictures, a Mona Lisa which disputes originality with that at Paris, a beautiful Lo Spagna of a saint, and the sketch for the Tintoret of the Presentation of the Virgin. The dinner was lighted from brilliant sconces on old boiserie from a Flemish sacristy. In the evening ‘Critic’ was acted as a charade, led by Lady Jersey.

“Breakfast was at small tables. Lord Brownlow, at ours, talked of a neighbouring house where a Lady Ferrers, a freebooter, used to steal out at night and rob the pilgrims coming from St. Albans. She had a passage from her room to the stables. In the morning one of the horses was often found tired out and covered with foam: no one could tell why. At last the poor lady was found dead on her doorstep in her suit of Lincoln green. She constantly haunts the place. Mr. Ady, who lives there now, meets her on the stairs and wishes her good-night. Once, seeing her with her arms stretched out in the doorway, he called out to his wife who was outside, ‘Now we’ve caught her!’ and they rushed upon her from both sides, but caught—nothing.

“Lady Brownlow came over to our table. ‘I’ve come to join in your conversation.’—‘Well, you’ve stopped it,’ said Lord B. ‘However, I bring you this story. A man in a foreign hotel took a loaded pistol to bed with him. By-and-by he saw a terrible deformed hand brandished at the foot of the bed. “If you don’t go, I’ll fire,” he shouted. It did not go and he fired. It was at his own foot.’

“It was Sunday, but I did not go to church, and walked with Lady Lothian through the sunlit green glades and russet woods of autumn. The house is of immense length of frontage, and behind it rises the chapel like a great church. ‘Can you tell me in what part of this village Lord Brownlow lives?’ asked an American when he came to Ashridge. In the evening we went to service in the chapel through the splendid conservatory, with long falling festoons of Ipomea. There was a full congregation and singing. Two panes of Holbein glass recall that Ashridge was the palace of Edward VI. and Elizabeth when young, but she hated it.

“We knew what you would say if you found Lady Waterford’s drawings all lying about,’ said Lady Brownlow, ‘so we worked hard to hang them up the day before you came.’ And they looked grand together, and such a variety—the supreme desolation of the Hagar, the self-abandonment of the Prodigal’s repentance, the proud Othello, the lovely springing, leaping children.”

“Middleton, Dec. 9.—A very agreeable visit to Lord and Lady Jersey. The country is hideous, but the house pleasant and comfortable, and a large new ball-room is hung with many fine portraits—the first Duke of Buckingham by Mytens and by Van Somer; Frances, Countess of Jersey, beloved by George IV., who was sent to meet Queen Caroline and persuaded her to eat onions—‘There is nothing the king likes so much as the smell of onions’—and Sarah, Countess of Jersey, the queen of Almack’s, a huge noble picture by Lawrence. Joining the village church is the mortuary chapel which she built, with her tomb, a copy of the Scipio tomb at Rome, and lovely medallions of her daughters, Sarah, Princess Esterhazy, and Lady Clementina Villiers. The font is said to have been that of Edward the Confessor at Islip, but is of Gothic, not Saxon date.

“Conversation fell on Christine, Lady Saye and Sele, who had three husbands. When she married the first surreptitiously, she took the bull by the horns, and said to her father at dinner, ‘Father, I’m married!’—‘Well, my dear, but at least wait till Thomas has left the room.’—‘No, father, Thomas need not leave the room, for Thomas is the man I’ve married.’”

My home life this year was very quiet and uneventful, only marked by my books. The Edgeworth family had placed Maria Edgeworth’s letters in the hands of Lionel Holland, now a publisher, and desired him to find an editor. He asked me to accept the office—certainly not a remunerative one, as I only received fifty pounds for it, the whole large profits of the book falling to the publishers. I demurred at first, but eventually undertook it, and became interested in the work, and the simple, high-toned, unselfish character of the lady whose letters I was selecting; and the book at once became popular, and had a very large circulation.

But “The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth” was rather a by-play. Most of my time was given to “The Gurneys of Earlham,” which gave me plenty of very hard and anxious work. I could not help feeling, as I attacked the mines and mountains of self-introspection in the form of religious journals which each one of the Gurney brothers and sisters left behind them, how unsuited I was for the task, how little I could enter into their feelings. Indeed Catherine Vaughan had written to me—“You are unworthy even to unfasten the shoe-latchets of those saints,” and I quite agreed with her. Still, into the beauty of their actions, of their devoted and unselfish lives, I could fully enter, and when the peculiar shibboleth of those times is sifted from their words, they said a great deal that was most beautiful and touching. The work has brought me into contact with many good people. And the Gurneys are still, as they were in the early days of Earlham, most liberal to all who do not agree with them, if only they are trying to follow the same Lord and Saviour—the dearest friend of the Gurneys of old time, and I think of most of those of present date.

“Hickleton, Dec. 28, 1894.—Can it be I? I say to myself, when I am called in pitch darkness in these winter mornings, and hurry in the dawn through the still dark shrubberies to the brilliantly lighted church, where, amid clouds of incense and the chanted salutation of the Blessed Sacrament, I receive ‘the mass,’ kneeling under the shadow of a great crucifix. Then, after breakfast, there is matins, what we should call early morning service, at which there are few worshippers; but when it is over, and you think you are going away, not a bit of it; there is a sound like the sea rushing in, and instantly the church is filled—thronged with people—and these come, not to receive the Sacrament, but to adore it! Charlie Halifax says, ‘How strangely things come round. My uncle, a lawyer—who had his home here with my father and mother, and died when I was five years old—used to be a great friend of Newman and Lord Devon, and others who thought as they did, and his beautiful spiritual letters and his religious sonnets remain to us. He longed for what he thought was the impossible; he longed to have it here, and now here it is. At that time there was only celebration here four times in a year; he never hoped it could be otherwise, and yet what he so longed for—what I, too, so longed for as a boy—has been all realised.

“‘Do you know that when Miss Margot Tennant (Mrs. Asquith) said to Jowett, “What do you really think of God?” he said nothing for a moment, and then answered, “I think all that signifies is what God really thinks of me.”’

“I have had many delightful talks with Charlie. When I am with him I feel imperceptibly lifted heavenwards. I do not agree with him in everything, but oh! I love him always. With him, as indeed with every one else, even where I most disagree, I am careful never to speak slightingly of anything he holds sacred. If it made any difference at all, it would only cause him to hold the cloak tighter.”

“Hatfield, Jan. 30.—After a visit to Lord and Lady Knightley at Fawsley, in bitter cold and snow, I came here to meet a huge party—Cadogans, Iveaghs, Hampdens, and very many others. Most of the company have skated in the morning, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the equably warm passages and rooms of this immense house. Arthur Balfour is here, with charming manners, quite unspoilt. He stays in his room and does not appear till luncheon-time, so getting many quiet hours for work. Lord Warkworth was here for one night, a most promising youth, who breaks the silence of the Percies. Lord Rowton also is here, and most agreeable in his natural ripple of pleasant talk. He says that he once asked Disraeli what was the most remarkable, the most self-sustained and powerful sentence he knew. Dizzy paused for a moment, and then said, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

“Disraeli used to say that, apropos of history, he should always remember going to a breakfast at Lord Houghton’s, and, as the door opened, hearing the loud voice of Bunsen exclaim, ‘Modern history! why, modern history begins with Abraham!’

“He described how the Duke of Wellington would always arrange everything for a battle—he did before Waterloo—and then would sleep soundly for an hour. ‘How could you sleep so soundly?’—‘Why, I had arranged everything.’

“Lady Salisbury said that her masseuse went constantly to the Queen. She told Lady Salisbury that what appeared to be lameness in the Queen was merely that her feet were too small to support the weight of her body. Her hands are those of a little child.

“She gave the most graphic description of an awful storm she encountered in going to S. Tropez. ‘The rivers, you know, generally flow into the sea, but then the sea flowed into the rivers: it was such a reversion of things.’

“Describing his great-grandfather, Lord Salisbury said he swore so horribly that he used to be called ‘Blastus, the king’s chamberlain.’

“I said how one of the things I most wished to see, Lady Anne Grimston’s [529] tomb, was in Hertfordshire. ‘Oh,’ said Lady Salisbury, ‘I will drive you there in my sledge;’ and so she did, across the snow-laden roads. It is the most extraordinary sight. Lady Anne Grimston was a sceptic, and when she lay upon her deathbed in 1717, her family were most anxious to make her believe in a future state, but she wouldn’t. ‘It is as likely,’ she said, ‘that I should rise again as that a tree should grow out of my body when I’m dead.’

“Lady Anne Grimston died, and was buried in Tewin churchyard, and over her grave was placed a great altar-tomb, with a huge massive stone slab on the top of it. In a year or two, this slab showed signs of internal combustion, and out of the middle of it—out of the very middle of it—grew a tree (some say six different trees, but one could not see in winter), and increased, till, in the time which has elapsed, it has become one of the largest trees in Hertfordshire. Not only that, but the branches of the tree have writhed about the tomb like the feelers of an octopus, have seized it, and lifted it into the air, so that the very base of the tomb is high up now, one with the tree or trees, so are they welded together. Then a railing was put round the tomb, and the tree has seized upon it in the same way, has twisted the strong iron rails like pack-thread, and they are to be seen tangled and twirled high in the branches of the tree. Another railing has now been put, and the tree will behave to it just as before.

“If this tree were abroad, it would become the most popular place of pilgrimage in the world. As it is, thousands visit it—even across the snow a regular path was worn to it. Tewin churchyard preaches more sermons than a thousand clergymen.

“‘I have brought back Mr. Hare a most firm believer in a future state,’ said Lady Salisbury as we re-entered the Golden Gallery at Hatfield, where all the guests were sitting.”

“London, Feb. 2.—I dined with my two friends, Lewis Gilbertson and Frank Cookson, who live so happily together in the charming little canonical house of the former in Amen Court. Gilbertson told me how Mr. Spooner of Oxford, celebrated for his absence of mind, was one evening found wandering disconsolately about the streets of Greenwich. ‘I’ve been here hours,’ he said. ‘I had an important appointment to meet some one at “The Dull Man, Greenwich,” and I can’t find it anywhere; and the odd thing is no one seems to have heard of it.’ Late at night he went back to Oxford. ‘You idiot!’ exclaimed his wife; ‘why, it was the Green Man, Dulwich, you had to go to.’”

“April 21.—My visit at Elton has been most pleasant, Lord and Lady Carysfort so kind, the house a climax of comfort, and the party one of old friends, Knightleys, Peels, Lady Tollemache, and beautiful Lady Claude Hamilton the elder. Then the gardens and groves are quite beautiful, especially at this time—

But what I really cared for most was that I accomplished my long-wished-for pilgrimage to Little Gidding.

“It is a most attractive spot, a bosky hollow in the uplands, with a pool and an oak-wood. The monastic house is gone, but probably stood where a farmhouse stands now, and whence the raised path which led to the still existing chapel is yet visible in the turf. An ancient box-tree with a stem like an oak, contemporary with the old house, stands on the grass. An old contemporary book in the library at Elton had made me even more familiar than ‘John Inglesant’ had done with Nicholas Ferrar, his sister—‘a tall ancient gentlewoman about eighty years of age, she being matron of the house’—and with Mrs. Collet and her sixteen children, including the seven sisters named after the Christian virtues—the Patient, the Cheerful, the Affectionate, the Submiss, the Moderate, and the Charitable—who spent their home hours in making such wonderful books of Christian Harmonies.

“To me the chapel was of most touching interest, backed by the oak-wood—‘the fine grove and sweet walks’ which the little book describes. A broad paved path leads to the door, but in the midst of the path rises a high grey altar-tomb—Nicholas Ferrar’s, I suppose—and on its paving-stones are inscriptions over graves, in which you may still make out the oft-repeated names of Ferrar and Collet. Inside, the chapel is lined by stalls of Charles I. date, with round-headed canopies and divided by oak pillars. Below is the open space where the sisterhood, who kept the six canonical hours, ‘prayed publicly three times a day after the order of the Booke of Common Prayer,’ and where the writer of my little book himself saw ‘the mother-matron with all her traine, which were her daughters and daughters’ daughters, who, with four sonnes, kneeled all the while in the body of the half-space, all being in black gownes and round Monmouth capps, save one of the daughters, who was in a friar’s grey gowne.’ There are brasses on one side of the chancel arch to John Ferrar, 1637, and John Ferrar, 1719; and on the other side to Susanna Collet, daughter of Nicholas Ferrar, who ‘had eight sons and eight daughters, and who died at the age of 76;’ below this is a brass to ‘Amy, wife of John Ferrar, 1702.’ And within is the chancel, where, with the sacrament, Inglesant received stillness and peace unspeakable, and life and light and sweetness filled his mind; where in the misty autumn sunlight and the sweeping autumn wind, heaven itself seemed to have opened to him.’

“There were many minor relics of those who did not wish it, but were called ‘the Nuns of Gidding’—an embossed book-cover of their gold-thread work, and tapestry cases to hold the sacred books; and in the farmhouse some old church plate, given to Nicholas Ferrar, and a chalice inscribed ‘What Sir Edmund Sandys bequeathed to the remembrance of friendship, his friende hath consecrated to the honour of God’s service,’ and on the handle—‘For the church of Little Gidding of Huntington Shire.’

“The owner of the property came to dinner at Elton, and told me that Charles Fitzwilliam, Lord Fitzwilliam’s brother, was lost many years ago in the wilds of America. When at the very last gasp, he saw the lights of a farmhouse, to which he made his way. The woman of the house received him most kindly, warmed and dried him, and made him some tea. ‘It will do you good; it’s Gidding tea: I had it over from Gidding.’—‘What! Gidding in Huntingdonshire.’—‘Yes.’—‘Why, that’s where I come from: I’m a Fitzwilliam!’”

“July 20, 1895.—I have come away from London because all that was interesting in the season seemed to be at an end; but I enjoyed it to the last, though certainly what I find to delight in would not please many others. Most of all I have liked my quiet writing-table at the Athenæum, and the silence, not the society, of the club, where no one, except Lord Acton and myself, seems to work in the mornings. Then, after two o’clock, I never go back, but see people for the rest of the day. The garden-parties make this delightful, and I had charming afternoons at Osterley, at Roehampton, and at Sion, where the brilliant groups of people are so picturesque under the great cedar-trees. It was a great pleasure once more, to be welcomed to Holland House, and to find how much those who possess it appreciate its great interest and charm. Once a week the writing-time was broken into, and I went with drawing-parties to the garden at Lambeth, to Waltham Abbey, and to the roof of the Record Office, whence we tried to paint St. Paul’s and all the satellite City churches reared up against an opal sky. In the evenings there was less of interest, and a great party at Devonshire House left more to recollect than the daily dinners, with little real conversation. I think it is Bacon who says, ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is not love.’ The last day, however, a dinner at Lady Audrey Buller’s was most pleasant. It was in honour of her cousin Captain Townshend, the hero of Chitral, who gave me a most graphic description of lying all day smoking behind a barrier of earth, with a spyhole through which he could fire at any man who showed himself, hearing the thud of the return shot against his barrier afterwards. Returning to England, he was shocked to find no one but boys at the balls—‘boys who shake hands with a movement like that of kangaroos.’ I sat by —— the widow of the historian, who talked of other historians, especially of Mr. Freeman—how he had the head of a Jupiter on the body of a gorilla: how he did not eat, but devour; it was no use to put anything less than a joint before him: how scenery never gave him the power of realising an event which he could not read of. One day at dinner Mr. Parker was within one of him. To him Freeman talked incessantly across the lady who was next him. At last there was a pause. The lady thought she would have her innings. ‘It has been very hot weather lately, Mr. Freeman,’ she said. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Freeman. ‘Parker, you were saying,’ &c. His biographer misses all his characteristics, but errs most in speaking of him as a typical Teuton, when he was undoubtedly a typical Celt.

“I grumbled very much at being engaged to spend a Sunday in the country during my London time, but never enjoyed a visit more than that to Mr. and Mrs. Tower at the Weald, in Essex. It is only seventeen miles from London, but wild and most beautiful, with glorious trees, a delightful old house, and a still more delightful walled garden, with the curious brick chapel of Mary I., a long tank, and an acre of splendid roses. We ate rather too much and long, but the company was charming. I went and came back with young Lord Abinger, whom I like particularly.

‘How delightful the elections are, and the blatant, self-seeking hypocritical Radicals getting the worst of it. Do you know Luttrell’s lines?—

and have much enjoyed my holiday talking-time. How many delightful people there are in the world. I so seldom see any one I cannot care in the least about. One side, one aspect, seems unprepossessing, but then, if one takes the trouble to go round on the other side, one is sure to find something. Was it not Socrates who said, ‘It is impossible to lead a quiet life, for that would be to disobey the Deity.’ And I am sure no one can carry their eyes about with them through a variety of people as I do, without learning fresh lessons of compensating qualities to be traced in most, and the uniform case of all in the fight to be fought, however different the enemies with which each has to contend. I saw no end of people in Shropshire when I was at Buntingsdale—so familiar in my long-ago—for Gertrude Percy’s wedding at Hodnet. After that I was in quieter scenes, but oh! how lovely, on Wenlock Edge, that eighteen-mile long strip of craggy wooded hill which stretches from Wenlock to Craven Arms, with such fine views over the rich plain below. Wenlock Abbey I saw the evening I arrived, with its grand ruin, and the curious cloistered abbot’s house, so well restored as a residence by the Milnes-Gaskells. Lutwyche, which Lord and Lady Chetwynd have hired, is a charming old house in the very centre of all the beauty, and each day we went to some wonderful old grange, manor, or mansion—Langley, Shipton, Stokesay, Wilderhope, but I think you would have liked best of all Pitchford, the gem of old black and white houses, though you would not have enjoyed as I did the untouched pews of the church, where there is a gigantic oaken effigy of a thirteenth-century De Pitchford. At Condover we saw Miss Mary Cholmondeley the authoress,[532] who looks a genius, which most authoresses I have met do not. Even in conversation, ‘les gens d’esprit sont bêtes’ is usually as true as possible.

“Penrhyn Castle has been delightful, and my room, with its exquisite views over sea and mountains, the most delightful thing in it. Lady Penrhyn presides over the great place with the calm of perpetual moonlight: sunlight is left to her beautiful and impulsive step-daughter Miss Alice (Pennant), who orders out no end of carriages to take guests up into the hills or wherever they want to go. And of course I longed to go to Ogwen Bank and Capel Curig, connected with my mother’s childhood, and more than ever admired these rude savage purple mountains, which have so much individual character that height is quite a secondary consideration. Then yesterday we went to that island in the Menai Straits, where there is an old chapel of great sanctity, to which Welsh funerals still wind along a narrow causeway, singing their beautiful hymns as they go.

“Do you know that ‘The Gurneys of Earlham’ is out? You will not like it, I think, and indeed I feel myself, that Carlyle would be justified in saying it was ‘a very superfluous book.’ Still, I will anticipate your asking me, and tell you that, up to its lights, it is not a bad piece of work. The whole family are a singular instance of unity without uniformity. While I have worked at the book, I have become irresistibly and most strongly attracted by such characters as Catherine Gurney and Richenda Cunningham, though for the great fetish of the family, the self-opinionated, self-parading, egotistical Joseph John, I never could have any warm feeling. Yet a descendant of one of his cousins (Lady Fry) assures me that she was so distressed on hearing of his death in her childhood, that she pulled down all the blinds of her doll’s house. So he must have had his attractive points.

“The book is certainly better reading than the earlier memoirs of those it concerns. Of those memoirs I heard an amusing story the other day. Mr. Parke of Andover, a great American philosopher and thinker, at one time quite lost the power of sleep. He said he had long tried all remedies in vain, but at last found a remedy which never failed. It was to have a book read to him, the story of a woman’s life. It always took effect at once, and soothed him into the sweetest slumbers. If he was nervous, his wife would take the book and begin—‘Elizabeth Fry was born’—‘But,’ said Mr. Parke, ‘she has begun that book constantly for two years, and I have never found out where she was born yet, for with the first words I am in dreamland.’

“Here are two little stories for you. Miss R. told me how the Bishop of Winchester and the Dean of Windsor were walking together down the street of Windsor, when they saw a little boy struggling to reach a bell. ‘Why, you’re not tall enough, my little man; let me ring the bell for you,’ said the Bishop. ‘Yes, if you please, sir,’ said the boy modestly. So the Bishop gave the bell a good pull. ‘Now then, sir, run like the devil,’ shrieked the boy, as he made off as hard as he could.

“Little E. L. was very naughty indeed the other day, and not only scratched her governess, but spit at her. ‘How can you have been so naughty?’ said her mother, ‘it can only have been the devil who made you do such a thing.’ ‘Well, perhaps it was the devil who told me to scratch her,’ replied little E——, ‘but, as for the spitting, it was entirely my own idea.’”

“Garrowby, Yorkshire, Oct. 4.—The glorious weather which illuminated Wales continued at Lyme, which was still in the full splendour of summer flowers. I drew with Lady Newton each day, one day at Prestbury, where there is a wonderful old Norman mortuary chapel, like those in Brittany. Mrs. Mitford was at Lyme, and it was a pleasure to talk with her of the dear Lady Egerton, whom we both so much appreciated, and who preserved her sunny nature to the last. ‘How sad to see you suffering so!’ said Mrs. M. to her in her last terrible illness. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but then, you know, I have enjoyed every day of my life.’ Thinking of her, it is a difficult endeavour to be ‘doux envers la mort,’ as Bossuet said after Henrietta Maria’s death.

“I went on to flattest Lincolnshire, to Revesby Abbey, to visit my distant cousin, dear Edward Stanhope’s widow. It is delightful to see how, by making the effort at once, it is no effort to her now to talk of him, and indeed he is so often spoken of, that he seems to have a part still in the family life, and his cheerful grave, like a little garden, under the east window of the church which he built, has nothing sad. It is as if he had gone from this room into the next. Yet how delightful he was, how truly lovable! I was taken, by my urgent desire, to Mavis Enderby; but it is a little inland village with an insignificant church, which could by no possibility have given any tidal warning; so I suppose Jean Ingelow only took the name [533] because of its musical sound. On the way we passed some grassy mounds. ‘What are those?’—‘The remains of Bolingbroke—of the castle of Bolingbroke.’ How Arthur Stanley would have loved them; yet they are amongst the things which are worth seeing but not worth going to see. Another day we went by the remains of the old house of Eresby, which gave its name to Willoughby d’Eresby, to visit the grand tombs of the Willoughbys at Spilsby. They are all of alabaster, the last representing a mother who died in childbirth, with the infant which cost her life by her side in its cradle. Sir John Franklin was born at Spilsby, and he and his two brothers have monuments in the church. Their father was a small farmer close by, and when his farm failed, he settled in the village itself, and kept its shop, grocery on one side the door, drapery on the other. And, coming from thence, John Franklin became the most famous of those Arctic travellers whom Wilkie Collins aptly describes as ‘the men who go nowhere and find nothing.’ In this drive we passed by Keil, where the church tower had suddenly collapsed. ‘Well, now, how was it? was it a hurricane, or did the soil give way, or what?’ said Mrs. Egerton to the sexton, who for a minute answered nothing, and then, ‘Well, mum, ‘twere this way; her just squatted and settled.’

“The house at Revesby was full of interesting objects. Amongst them was a magnificent repeater watch which belonged to the old Lord Stanhope.[534] One night, when he was out late, a man pounced upon him with pistols and ‘Your money or your life.’ Always imperturbable, Lord Stanhope replied very slowly, ‘My friend, I have no money with me.’—‘No,’ said the robber, ‘but you have your watch; I must have your watch.’—‘My friend, this watch was given to me by one very dear to me, and I value it extremely. It is considered to be worth £100. Now, if you will trust me, I will this evening place a hundred-pound note in the hollow of that tree.’ And the highwayman trusted him and Lord Stanhope placed the note there.

“Very many years after, Lord Stanhope was at a public dinner in London, and opposite him sat a City magnate of great wealth and influence. They conversed pleasantly. Next day Lord Stanhope received a letter from him, enclosing a hundred-pound note, and saying, ‘It was your Lordship’s kind loan of that sum many years ago that started me in life, and enabled me to rise to have the honour of sitting opposite your Lordship at dinner.’

“When I was a child, ‘Marmion’ made me long passionately to see Whitby, and ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ afterwards increased the longing. Now I have been there, and what a wonderful place it is. I think nothing on the English, or French, or Spanish, or German coasts is equal to it. The first morning was a thick fog—a most blessed fog. I felt a presentiment of what would happen. I was certain where the abbey was, and through the dim streets, up the slippery steps, and between the gravestones of the churchyard dripping with wet, I made my way to a certain field, which I was sure was the right place, and there I waited. Soon out of the thick mists rose, bathed in sudden sunlight, the grand ruin of an abbey, all glorious in the heavens, but no earth visible. It was as the summit of Mont Blanc is sometimes seen, but a New Jerusalem, in splendour beyond words—‘And the building of the wall of it was of pure gold.’ And then suddenly the fog came down again and it vanished, and in a few minutes, when the veil drew up the second time, a noble ruined abbey stood there, every arch and pillar reflected in the waters of a lonely tarn, but it was only the bones of the glorious vision which had been.

“The old courthouse of the Cholmondeleys was the abbot’s house, and in it was ‘Lady Anne’s Chamber,’ terribly haunted. A figure used to come down from a picture over the chimney, and was seen by many still living. Close by was a passage with an oubliette, down which ‘the nuns used to throw their babies.’ All, except the offices, has been cleared away by Sir C. Strickland, and a hideous modern house built. Down the steep way below the house Sir Nicholas Cholmondeley used to drive his four-in-hand furiously.

“The fog was fainter all the rest of that day, and oh! how I luxuriated in the winding ways upon the cliffs, in the dark red roofs piled one upon another, and the delicate grey distances of buildings or sea.

“Here, at Garrowby, I have been very happy with the Halifaxes. I always feel better for the life with them, and I have especially liked the spiritual part of it here, where there is no chaplain, as at Hickleton, and where the services in the beautiful little chapel are led by Charlie Halifax himself. Everybody joins, and a footman sings gloriously at the very pitch of his voice. In everything Charlie recalls to me something which I have read with a higher reference—‘Not by his doctrines has Christ laid hold upon the heart of men, but by the story of his life.’[535] He has ‘under all circumstances that just admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity’ which Marcus Aurelius speaks of. Unlike everything else is the simplicity and singleness of heart and purpose written so distinctly on everything he says and does. Action is easy and natural where faith is so absolute. ‘At all times a man who would do faithfully must believe firmly,’ was a saying of Carlyle. And though religion pervades everything, no house was ever so gay as that of which Charlie is master. What merriment we have had over our games in the evening: what fun over the mysterious disappearances by day into the four secret chambers which make this house so curious: what admirably good stories have been told; and while the loss of the dear boys who are gone ever leaves a blank in the parents’ hearts, how happy life is made for the children who remain! ‘La joie est très bonne pour la santé: ce qui est sot, c’est d’être triste’[536]—this seems to be one of the minor guides of action. The place is not very interesting, but the house delightfully full of books and pictures. In the park are African cows, Japanese deer, emus, and kangaroos. Lady Ernestine Edgecumbe and Lady Beauchamp are here. It is a little society of those who feel that ‘we may not only know the truth, but may live even in this life in the very household and court of God.’”[537]

“Holmhurst, Oct. 9.—My return home was saddened by finding dear old Harriet Rogers—Lea’s niece—in a dying state at her little cottage in the grounds. She was just able to recognise me, and whispered touchingly, ‘I thank you! I thank you!’ As in the many other people I have now seen enter the shadow of death, there was no fear and no joy; the power of mental emotion seemed past. Yesterday, whilst I was with her, she died, passing the barrier quite painlessly. Yet what a change for her! There is always something very awe-striking in it.

is a line of the ‘Lady of Shalott’ which Tennyson afterwards removed, as giving too painful an image of death; but it is exactly what happens. To-day I feel it—yes, odd to see the same farm and garden life, in which she was interested and had a share, going on the same, and that her part in it should be so suddenly over—snapped. How she must be longing to tell one now what she felt at that momentous moment. I am exactly like the person in ‘Hitherto’—‘I can’t get over expectin’ her to come in and talk it all over. It seems as though she couldn’t do nothin’ without tellin’ folk how!—But there, I dare say,—if ‘tain’t wicked to think of it,—it’s half over heaven by this time.’

“‘Il faut mourir et rendre compte de sa vie, voilà dans toute sa simplicité le grand enseignement de la maladie. Fais au plus tôt ce que tu as à faire; rentre dans l’ordre, songe à ton devoir; prépare-toi au départ; voilà ce que crient la conscience et la raison.’[538]

“My ‘North-Western France’ is now ready to appear. It has been an immense labour, one compared with which ‘The Gurneys of Earlham’ is as a drop to a river; but I have no doubt the latter will be more read, and certainly more reviewed, for scarcely any Englishmen know enough of France to be critical about descriptions of it. I have another little book ready too—‘Biographical Essays’—which is sure to meet with plenty of abuse, but does not deserve much, all the same. In it I have tried to give such a picture of Arthur Stanley as may make people love him as a friend, whilst they shrink from following him as a guide.”

XXX

IN MANY PLACES

GREATLY as I always enjoy my little home of Holmhurst, dear as every corner of it is to me, I never feel as if it was well to stay there too long in winter alone. In summer, Nature itself can give sufficient companionship; but when earth is dead and frost-bound, the silence in the long hours after sunset becomes almost terrible, and I increasingly feel that late autumn and winter are the best time for visits.

“Holmhurst, Nov. 25.—I have much enjoyed a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Cummings, the Americans who were so kind to us on our terrible return journey from Italy in 1860, and of whom the wife, at least, is so clever, that she is suffering—as Mrs. Kemble said once of some one—from a constipation of her talents. They came here fresh from a visit to Haworth, much impressed with its severe desolation,—‘that any one should be able to have any hope, or look forward to a future life, on the top of Haworth hill is nothing short of a miracle.’ They have made a Brontë museum there now, chiefly full of Branwell’s drawings, of great interest, chiefly military. Did you know that Mr. Nichols hoped to have been rector when Mr. Brontë died? But it was given by election, and he was unpopular, and it went against him. He is still living in Ireland, whither he took all the Brontë memorials he cared for. The rest were sold by auction, and the butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker of Haworth bought them. The sexton showed Mrs. Cummings some of Charlotte’s underclothing, delicately marked by herself with her C. B., and her wedding shoes, of some grey material to match her dress. He had often seen her and her sister come out of the house, and go through the little gate at the back to the moors, which at Haworth are grass, not heather. After Charlotte married, Mr. Nichols would not let her write. His mind was of the very narrowest, and he disapproved of novels, and when she was pent up in that solitude, and all her secret thoughts were pent up too, and never allowed to come out in writing, she—died.

“Mrs. Cummings says we should not like America; ‘it is a country utterly without perspective; one must go up to the Indians and the Jesuit missionaries for that.’ She has been describing Miss Louisa Alcott,[539] the well-known authoress. ‘She lived with her old father and her beautiful mother and her three sisters. They used to write little stories. One day her sisters said, “Louisa, you must write something more than these.”—“I would, but I can’t do it here,” she answered. So the sisters clubbed their little savings together, and they sold a few things, and Louisa went to Boston. There she called upon Roberts, the publisher of all American good things, and said, “I want to write a story.”—“Very well,” he answered; “what kind will you take?”—“Oh, I can’t make up anything,” said Louisa; “I can only just write what I know.”—“Oh, you can just write what you know,” said Roberts; “then don’t stay talking here; go away at once and begin.” So she went and lived by herself and wrote, and in five weeks she brought him her “Little Women.” He took it and said, “Come again to-morrow.” And when she went next day he said, “Well, I will take your story, and I will offer you one of two things; either you can take two hundred dollars down for it, or you can take your chance.”—“But what would you do if you were me?” asked Miss Alcott. Roberts said he had never been placed in such an awkward predicament in his life, but he spoke the truth and said, “I would take my chance.” She did, and soon after he had to pay her 10,000 dollars.[540] She wrote “Little Men” afterwards, but it did not answer as well; boys do not take books to their pillows as girls do.’

“‘I love crying,’ said Mrs. Cummings, ‘but then I must have somebody to cry to. I cried as a little girl because I thought my mother might die, but I cried most because I thought that then I should have no one to cry to.’ Miss Alcott said to her, ‘My dear, I shouldn’t mind dying if it wasn’t for the funeral.’

“‘Mr. Tennyson was very rude and coarse,’ said Mrs. Cummings, ‘but he died well—reading his little book in the moonlight: he really couldn’t have done it better.’

“‘Louisa Payson, who wrote “The Pastor’s Daughter” and many other books,[541] would not say “thank you” when she was a little girl. Her father, the stern minister, punished her in various ways, but it was no good—she said she couldn’t. So at last, at five years old, he turned her out of doors late on a winter’s evening. He went to his affairs, forgot her, I suppose; but her mother was in an agony, and she prayed for her child with all the spirit that was in her. At last she could bear it no longer, and she opened the door a little way, and then she heard a little wail of “I can’t say thank you: I can’t say thank you.” What was the end I do not know, but at any rate Louisa did not die, and lived to write books.’

“Kingston Vicarage, Wareham, Nov. 10.—You would have liked going with us to Wool, on a ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ pilgrimage, for there, rising by the reedy river-side, is the old gabled house to which Tess was taken after her marriage. It is exactly as Hardy describes it;[542] even the plank bridge remains across which Angel carried her in his sleep to the stone coffin at Bindon Abbey. The two old pictures mentioned in the book really hang at the top of the staircase, and the lady in one of them is supposed to blow out the candle of any one who ventures up the stairs after midnight. The whole country-side is full of memories of the D’Urbervilles, and there are many still living who depose to having met their phantom coach and four with outriders. The family still exists at Kingston as—Tollerfield!

“We had an awful storm last night, but such hurricanes are the fashion in Purbeck. A Mr. Bellasye, returning home, met, not his bathing-machine, but his bathing-house coming to meet him across the hedges and ditches. Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had a huge hole blown into their roof by one gust; but that did not much signify, as the next gust blew a haystack on to the roof and filled the hole up. All the cabbages and other vegetables in the kitchen-garden are frequently blown out of the earth and into a heap in a corner, and on one occasion those in the rectory-garden were all blown into the church porch.”

“Elvedon, Thetford, Nov. 14.—All the way back from Dorsetshire did I come for the pleasure of meeting the Duchess of York here (at Lord and Lady Iveagh’s); but that was not to be, as an impending event is considered too near for her to travel with safety. The Duke is here, and very unaffected and pleasant, really a very nice prince, and quite good-looking. He never fails to be punctual to the moment—a grand quality for a prince, and due, probably, to naval discipline. He talks a great deal, and talks well, but in reality princes have no chance—no chance at all—conversationally, as no one ever contradicts them, however much they disagree; no subjects are aired but those which they choose for themselves, and the merest commonplaces from royal lips are listened to as if they were oracles.

“Anything more odious or annoying than being a prince certainly cannot be imagined. Such a wearisome round of dullest duties and painful ‘pleasures’ as it is their life’s-work to live in like a tread-mill. Then, every fault of manner, far more of conduct and character, is commented, dwelt on, and exaggerated. I should be sorry for any prince, but am really dreadfully sorry for this one, as he would have been charming, and might have been extremely happy if the misfortune of his birth had not condemned him to the severe and miserable existence of princedom, in which all minor faults are uncorrected because unsuggested, though I believe such a true friend and fine character as, for instance, Lord Carrington, would always notice any sufficiently grave to be of consequence either to the country or the royal family.

“I floated here in the luxurious saloon carriage of a special train, but felt rather shy, because whereas all the rest of the party were on terms of christian-name intimacy, I knew none of them before except Lord Rowton, who is, however, always very kind and pleasant. But I was interested to see those who are so frequently part of the royal circle, and liked them all, especially and extremely Lord and Lady Carrington; but then—everyone does!

“I wonder if you know this house of Elvedon. It was Duleep Singh’s, and he tried to make it like an Indian palace inside. Much of his decoration still remains, and the delicate white stucco-work has a pretty effect when mingled with groups of tall palms and flowering plants. Otherwise the house (with the kindest of hosts), is almost appallingly luxurious, such masses of orchids, electric light everywhere, &c. However, a set-off the other way is an electric piano, which goes on pounding away by itself with a pertinacity which is perfectly distracting. In the evenings singing men and dancing women are brought down from London, and are supposed to enliven the royal guest.

“You know, probably, how this place is the most wonderful shooting in England. The soil is so bad that it is not worth cultivating, and agriculture has been abandoned as a bad business. Game is found to be far more profitable. The sterile stony fields are intersected at intervals by belts of fir; the hedges, where they exist, are of Scotch fir kept low; and acres of thick broom are planted. Each day I have gone out with the luncheon party, and we have met the shooters at tents pitched at different parts of the wilderness, where boarded floors are laid down, and a luxurious banquet is prepared, with plate and flowers. The quantity of game killed is almost incredible, and the Royal Duke shot more than any one, really, I believe, owing to his being a very good shot, and not, as so often is the case in royal battues, from the birds being driven his way.

“A great feature of the party is Admiral Keppel, kindest, most courteous, and most engaging of old gentlemen, so captivating that there is always a rivalry amongst the ladies as to who shall walk with him, and amongst the men to get hold of his stories. He told me of how his father first started him on his naval career, and, while he talked it over at Holcombe, made him sit in the same chair in which he had talked the same subject over with Nelson when he was starting him.

“He described the prayers at Holcombe on Sunday evening in his boyhood. After dinner the men were allowed an hour or two over their wine. Then the prayer-bell rang, and they all went in. Afterwards an old servant stayed to take up those who could not get up from their knees, and carry them to bed by turns when they were too drunk to go by themselves.

“He remembered Charles James Fox reeling down the corridor at Holcombe, falling helplessly from side to side. His father followed him, and he followed his father, who kept exclaiming, ‘Good God! drunk! Good God! drunk again!’ for the expression had not gone out then.

“He said that the present Lord Leicester and his father had married at exactly a hundred years apart.”

“Nov. 27, Hornby Castle, Bedale.—I came here yesterday. Several people were in the castle omnibus when I got into it at the station, of whom a grand lion-like old man turned out to be Mr. Bayard, the American Ambassador. It was dark when we arrived. We found the Duchess (of Leeds), tall, gracious, and most winning in manner, and indeed all the family, in a noble hall, coved at the top, with busts in the upper niches, like the halls of Roman palaces, and looking (by daylight) into a courtyard, which is very picturesque and curious.

“Lady Harewood is here, sweet-looking and very white, with a pleasant daughter, Mr. and Lady Alice Shaw Stewart, and several young men. Mr. Bayard came down to dinner much delighted with a book he had found in his room—the ‘Life of Agrippina’—in which ‘What news from Armenia?’ is anxiously asked, showing how the same subject occupied conversation then as now, at a distance of nineteen centuries. He said, ‘When bad men conspire, good men ought to confederate.’

“This morning, in the library, I had much and delightful talk with Mr. Bayard. He gave an interesting account of the allotment of land in America: how a reserve was left to the Indians, but they were dying out, chiefly because of their catching all the vices of Europeans, especially their love of alcohol. He said they were like the buffaloes. These used to come down and swoop through the country in vast herds, and devour all the spring produce; and later, in their vast battalions they would swoop back again; but now, fettered and shut in by barriers and fences, they pined, starved, and died; and so it was with the Indians. He described how, after an unjust woman had published a libel on her country,[543] the greatest suffering had resulted to the slaves, who would follow their former masters to suffering, wounds, imprisonment, and death. A Southern lady, when ‘the army of liberation’ approached, had entrusted all her silver and jewels to her slaves, and they had brought it all back safely after the army had passed.

“He talked of the Banco di S. Giorgio at Genoa—‘one of the most interesting buildings in the world;’ that whereas the Bank of London had lasted two centuries, that of Genoa had lasted five: that the Bank was the greatest evidence of the philosophy of nations. No aspersion was ever cast upon it, and this was because those who administered it had never derived any profit from it, only honour. An instance of its usefulness as a record-office occurred lately, when a man in America offered Mr. H. an autograph letter of Columbus. To all appearance it was genuine, but Mr. H. asked leave, which was readily granted, to have a photograph facsimile made of it before purchasing. In the Banco di Giorgio the original letter was found, and, when compared with the facsimile, proved that the copy was false. This was especially fortunate, as, after Napoleon I., ‘that great collector of other people’s property,’ took away the archives of Genoa, though most were restored, all were not.

“The library at Hornby is full of interest, but I can only remember a fifteenth-century ‘Roman de la Rose;’ a first edition of Shakspeare, which came to its present owners through Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, who inherited it from William Congreve; and a copy of ‘Dionysius the Areopagite,’ by Beghir, ‘the one-eyed scribe of Brabant’—most delightful name—with notes by Dean Colet.

“The Duchess has shown us the house minutely and delightfully. The family portraits were full of interest, beginning with that of Sir William Hewitt, whose daughter married William Osborne, the apprentice who saved her when she fell over London Bridge, and who founded the Leeds family. In a curious Hogarth of ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ the Duke of Bolton is represented watching the acting of Polly Peachum, whom he afterwards married: the picture is here because Sir Conyers d’Arcy, an ancestor of the house, is also represented. Mr. Bayard was delighted to find portraits of the wife of the seventh Duke, who was Miss Caton, one of four beautiful American sisters.[544] The Duchess was amused that I had never heard of ‘Godolphin Arabian,’ the ancestor of a succession of famous racehorses.[545] In one of the rooms is the miniature spinning-wheel of Madame de Pompadour; in another, a bed of such glorious embroidery that when Lady Marian Alford was here, she could not get up for looking at it.”

“Nov. 29.—At breakfast, at one of several little round tables, Mr. Bayard talked pleasantly of a grave in the cemetery at Nuremberg. It is one of Adam Kraft’s iron tombstones, and it bears no name. Affixed to it is a human skull, exquisitely modelled, with a jaw which opens and shuts. In the forehead—the bronze forehead—is a white patch of some other metal. The story is that the owner of that skull was very unhappily married. His misery drove him from home, drove him into very bad company, and he sank lower and lower. One day he suddenly died and was buried; but soon afterwards his family began to suspect foul play, and he was exhumed. At first his body seemed to bear no witness, but then, in his forehead, under his hair, a large nail was found, buried up to the hilt, hammered in so accurately that no blood had come. Every one believed that it was his wife who had done it, but it could not be brought home to her; his associates were too bad for their evidence to be trusted. But the model of his skull was laid upon his grave, and his wife left the place; she could not continue to exist near it.

“We went to luncheon at Thorp-Perrow with Sir Frederick and Lady Milbank, who have a glorious garden. He is full of antiquarian lore and interests, and has a precious collection of old locks and keys. She knows sixteen languages well, and is learning a seventeenth. Hungarian she acquired for the sake of its literature. A despatch came to the Foreign Office in Hungarian, and no one there could read it, but Austen Lee sent it to Lady Milbank, who translated it at once. The Milbanks were very intimate with Madame Goldschmidt, whom they lived next door to in London. One day in a church—a country church—they saw her go out of her pew and shake a woman by her shoulders. ‘What on earth had that unfortunate woman done?’ they asked when they came out. ‘Why, didn’t you hear she was singing a false second.’”

“Hams, Birmingham, Nov. 30.—This is a large house of extreme comfort, and its owner, Lord Norton, who looks sixty, though he is eighty-two, is one of the most agreeable hosts in England. Walking on the terrace this morning, he said he ought to put up a slab to record how the whole constitution of New Zealand was settled on that terrace: that which was arranged while walking up and down there had never been altered. The view of the pretty windings of the Thame recalled the exclamation of a famous landscape-gardener when he saw it—‘Clever!’ ‘It was not made, it is natural,’ said Lord Norton. But no, his friend could not regard it except from the gardening point of view, and ‘clever’ was all he could say. The river was terribly polluted by Birmingham, and Lord Norton went to law about it. ‘Should the convenience of one man be considered before that of millions?’ exclaimed the Birmingham advocate at the trial. ‘Yes,’ shouted the opposition, ‘for the grandeur of English law is that millions may not interfere with the comfort and well-being of a single individual. Now the pollution is partially diverted into a sewage farm five miles in extent.

“The clergyman here has only the care of three hundred souls, so he keeps three hundred chickens, and is often able to supplement his income by getting fifty pounds for a cock.

“An oak avenue leads to the church, being a remnant probably of the Forest of Arden, of which there are many traces still, but such an avenue is very rare. The late storm had blown down several fine trees. ‘How strange it is,’ said Lord Norton, ‘that amid the thousand—the million—theories that science has put forth, there should be none about the wind: it is one of the many incidental proofs of the truths of the Bible, that our Saviour saw this when he spoke of—“The wind bloweth where it listeth,” &c.

“‘Those who say that as to religion we know nothing, do not recognise that half religion is instinct (every one has the instinct that there is a God), and the other half what Pascal calls “the submission of reason.”’

“Lord Norton used to know very well Ellis the shoemaker, who devoted himself to the reformation of boys. He said, ‘I do not take them to make shoes only; I take them to give them a conscience.’ He said, ‘Many people say that the boys are fools, but they are philosophers. They reason at night. I overhear them; I hear them reasoning as to whether there is a God.’ There was one boy especially who denied this, who laughed at all who believed. One day this boy was given a parcel to take to Sir Moses Montefiore. Now the boys may steal, but however much they do that, when they are entrusted with anything, they are most tenacious to fulfil their trust. This boy only knew of Sir Moses by his popular name of ‘the King of the Jews,’ and all day long he asked his way to him in vain. He could not find him anywhere. Evening closed in, and he was faint with hunger and fatigue. He was quite sinking, but at the last gasp cried, ‘O God, if there be a God, help me.’

“Immediately a policeman rushed at him. ‘What have you got there, you young rascal? What’s in that parcel?—something you’ve been stealing, I suppose?’—‘No, ‘taint; it’s a parcel for the King of the Jews, and I can’t find him.’—‘Why, you young fool,’ said the policeman, shaking him, ‘it’s Sir Moses Montefiore you mean: I can show you where to find him.’

“That night the boys were philosophising as usual, declaring that there was no God, there couldn’t be, when the boy who had taken the parcel shouted, ‘Stop that rubbish, you fellows; there is a God, and I know it: and as for you, you’re just as much able to judge of God as a worm is to judge of me.’”

“Dec. 2.—A walk amidst the remnants of the Forest of Arden led to much talk about trees. ‘When Gladstone meets any one new,’ said Lord Norton, ‘his first thought is, “What does he know? what can I get out of him?” When he met Lord Leigh, he had heard of Stoneleigh, that it possessed some of the finest oaks in England; so, when he sat down by him, he began at once, “Lord Leigh, have you any theory as to the age of oaks?”—“Yes, certainly I have; I possess several myself that are above a thousand years old.”—“And how do you know that is so?” said Gladstone. “Well,” said Lord Leigh, “I have several that are called ‘Gospel Oaks,’ because the old Saxon missionaries used to preach under them more than eight hundred years ago, and they would not be likely to choose a young oak to preach under: we may suppose that they chose an oak at least two hundred years old.”—“Well, that is a very good reason,” said Gladstone.’

“Lord Norton had lately been with Gladstone to Drayton, full of Peel relics, and with the wonderful collection of portraits which Sir Robert brought together. All the heads of Government, from Walpole to the Peel Administration, are represented. The pistols are preserved with which Peel intended to fight O’Connell at Calais, but O’Connell’s wife prevented it by giving notice and getting him arrested at Dover.

“While talking of hunting as conducive to the manliness of Englishmen, Lord Norton said, ‘When I was hunting with Charlie Newdigate, a boy almost naked, not quite, came out of a coal-pit, and on a donkey, without saddle or bridle, hunted with us all day, not going over the hedges, but through them. Newdigate was delighted. “That’s the stuff English heroes are made of,” he said, and he had a long talk with the boy afterwards, and explained to him all about the field, &c.... In Northumberland there was a boy who would ride one of his father’s bulls. His father cut him off at last, and would have nothing more to do with him. ‘I’m not a bad father,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mind his riding my bull, but when he takes him out with the hounds it’s too much.’”

“The Deanery, Llandaff, Dec. 7.—Lord Robert Bruce told me the facts of Lord Llanover’s ghost story. As Sir Benjamin Hall and he were riding in the Park in London, Sir Benjamin distinctly saw Lord Rivers, who was an intimate friend of his, and he saw him vanish. He went to his club immediately afterwards, and told what he had seen, and before he left the club a telegram was brought in announcing that Lord Rivers was dead. Afterwards Sir Benjamin Hall went to Mrs. Hanbury Leigh, and told her what had happened, adding, ‘You know this must mean something; it must mean that I am myself to die within the year;’ and so he did.

“I have enjoyed being again with the cousin so deeply loved in my childhood, and also seeing the really beautiful work of the gentle and, I am sure, holy Dean amongst the young men preparing for orders, who hover reveringly around him.’

“Catherine Vaughan has told me how, after Augusta Stanley’s death, she said to Mrs. Drummond (of Megginch), who was living at the Deanery, ‘Augusta’s presence so seems to fill this place, that I quite wonder she never appears here;’ and was startled by the way in which Mrs. Drummond said, ‘She does.’ Augusta used on her death-bed to say to Arthur, ‘I shall always be near you when you give the Benediction.’ One day in the Abbey, between the arches, but quite near Arthur, Mrs. Drummond most distinctly saw Augusta—a vaporous figure, wrapped in folds of vaporous white drapery, but with every feature as distinctly visible as in life. This was just before the Benediction, and as its last tones died away the appearance vanished. Mrs. Drummond had no doubt about it at all.”

“Burwarton, Shropshire, Dec. 12.—This is a charming place in the high Clee Hills, and Lord and Lady Boyne, who live in it, are quite delightful. I have been working for a great part of several days in the library at a little book on ‘Shropshire,’ which I hope to be able to finish another year. You would have been amused by the quaint sayings of an old clergyman who came to dinner. Speaking of an unusually stupid neighbour he said, ‘His folly is incredible, but even he has his lucid intervals, for the other day he told me he knew he was an ass.’

“I would give up, if I were you, taking the extra work you speak of. There is an old Swedish proverb which says—‘You cannot get more out of an ox than beef,’ and there is no use, none, in trying to do, or to be, two things at once.”

“Rome, April 23, 1896.—I wonder if you know that I have been abroad since the first of February. At first, for a month, I was on ‘the Rivieras,’ finishing up a little volume which will be so called, and which will appear before next winter. Some new places are opened up now by a railway—a most beautiful miniature railway—from Hyères to S. Raphael, and amongst them is S. Maxime, a quiet scene of tranquil beauty, where the pension is still only six francs, in a charming little hotel with a garden which comes down to a sea-cove, where you look across transparent shallows of emerald-green water into mountain distances, not grand, but supremely lovely, and where, in our long-ago days, you and I should have been in a fever of romantic interest over the old castle of Grimaud, which was the cradle of the princely Grimaldis.

“At Nice, I was not in the town, but at the old Villa Arson, which you will remember. It is now a hotel, though its wonderful garden, full of statues, staircases, fountains, and grottoes amongst the flowers and palm-trees, is quite untouched. It was all beautiful, and the sky was cloudlessly blue for a month; and I lingered at Bordighera with the Strathmores and my dear old friend Emilia de Bunsen, and then at Alassio with my cousin Lady Paul, and at beautiful Rapallo. But oh! the difference on entering real Italy, and finding oneself in the delightful old-world streets of Lucca, with their clean pavements and brown green-shuttered houses, with the air so much more bracing, the sky so much more soft, and the pleasant manner and winning tongue of the Italian people.

“At the Florence station I had an unpleasant experience, in being robbed of £100 by two roughly-jostling men at the entrance of the carriage. It was a great loss, but I could not help admiring the cleverness with which they contrived to extract my pocket-book out of the inner breast pocket of my coat with a greatcoat over it. They were taken up afterwards—Frenchmen, I am glad to say, not Italians—and immense booty of watches, purses, &c., found upon them, all taken at Florence station; but I have no chance of recovering my notes. I have had to appear against them already six times and to identify them in prison.

“My last six weeks have been spent in Rome,—spoilt, destroyed, from the old Rome of our many winters here, but settling down now into the inferior mediocrity to which the Sardinian occupation has reduced it. And, though one does not see them every hour as one used to do, there are still many lovely and attractive corners to be hunted up. The Italian archaeologists (so called) are also finding out that they have made a great mistake in tearing away all the plants and shrubs which protected the tops of the ruins, and are comically occupied in planting little roots of grass and chickweed on their barren summits. There are very few capable or interested winter visitors now. They mostly belong to the class of the first of the three audience-seekers to whom Pius IX. addressed his usual question of ‘How long have you been in Rome, and how much have you seen?’ and who answered, ‘I have been here three days, and have seen everything.’[546]

“Good old Dr. Gason has died lately (the man of whom Pius IX. said—‘un certo pagano, chi si chiama Jasone’), the leader of the Evangelical party here—one of a class who seemed to me ‘every one’ when I was a boy, and when the dreary desert of Sunday was only enlivened by Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and ‘Josephus,’ and almost everything pleasant was a ‘carnal indulgence.’ How few there are who think like that now—no one who has a real part in my life since dear Charlotte Leycester passed away. Certainly, there is no one now to think one—well, much worse than a pagan for taking one’s sketch-book on Sundays to the Palace of the Caesars, where I have spent many quiet hours meditating on my past and its past. I am often oppressed, however, by my great loneliness, by the want of any relation who has a real interest in me, by the constant feeling—however kind people are—of signifying nothing to anybody. And those who remember our old life—the old life with the mother and Lea which was so different from this—are becoming very, very few. I can only try to say—

“The ruin of the great families here is depressing. There has been a sale at the old historic Orsini palace, at which a marble statue holding a baton behind the auctioneer seemed to repeat his action and to preside coldly over the ruin of his house and dispersion of its treasures. And on the floor of the hall, appropriately surrounded by overthrown marble pedestals, lay the great bust of the Orsini Pope, with a look of unutterable disgust upon his face at having been just sold for £6. I bought a little Madonna, which will adorn Holmhurst, if I can get it out of the country.

“There is a new line to Viterbo now, which brings many places, formerly difficult of access, within easy reach. With the Gordons from Salisbury I went to Anguillara, splendid in colour from the orange roofs of its quaint houses rising high above the broad, still lake in which Bracciano and other towns on the farther shore were reflected. We wandered afterwards in the beautiful gardens of an old ‘Ser Vincenzo,’ with woods—real trees—of camelias in fullest bloom, and larks singing, and carpets of violets. Then another day, a large party of us went to Segni in the purple recesses of the Volscian mountains, and saw that wonderful arch whose origin is lost in pre-historic mystery. We took our luncheon with us, and ate it on the down above the huge stones of the wall. But generally we have something odd at the village inns. ‘How I like topographical gastronomy!’ said old Mrs. Blackburn of Moidart on one of these tourettes.

“Few interesting visitors have been at Rome this year, but having Lady Airlie and Lady Kenmare here has been very pleasant, and dear old Miss Garden—even in her great feebleness, which, alas! is constant now—always ripples with wit and wisdom. At Mrs. Terry’s I met Miss Paterson, the martyr-bishop’s sister, who told me how her old father, when he first learnt his son’s determination to go out, began to say, ‘Oh, I cannot let him go,’ and then broke in with, ‘But oh! I cannot deny him to God.’ He parted with him knowing they could never meet again, but, after a time, in his letters found interest and consolation. To-day—a desperately wet day—has been enlivened by a summons to luncheon with the Crown Princess of Sweden, whom I think one of the most charming, natural, and attractive of human beings; and oh! how simple, how utterly without affectation is that sort of person who can have nothing to pretend to. It is that, I suppose, which makes such people so much the easiest to talk to, which makes one feel so far more at rest with them than with persons of another, even of one’s own class. The Princess’s health obliges her to winter in Italy, away from her husband and her little sons, but she will hurry back to them with the warm weather. There was no one else at luncheon but the lady and gentleman in waiting, and the conversation was chiefly about ghost stories, the Princess declaring that ‘every hair of her head had curled up’ from one I had told her at Eastbourne.

“There is a sort of homely amusement in seeing—I cannot help sometimes counting them!—the great number of people who go about here with the familiar little red and black volumes of ‘Walks in Rome.’ Sometimes also I am touched by a kind note from an unknown hand saying that one of my other books has been helpful to them. I am so glad when this happens. As to any other feeling about my books, I think I gradually get to realise how ... ‘there is one glory of the terrestrial, another glory of the celestial,’ and how one has to keep that in one’s heart.”

“Viterbo, May 1, 1896.—Yesterday I went to Toscanella. The landlord of the hotel was to engage a little carriage for me, which I found at the door when I went down, but with a horse which was an absolute skeleton. Still they declared it could go, and it could. How it rushed, and tore, and swung us down the rose-fringed descent to the great Etruscan plain, where the faint dome of Montefiascone rose in the blue haze against the heavens, beyond the aërial distances of burnt grass, broken here and there by Etruscan caves and ruins. Then how the skeleton horse still galloped into the uplands, till great towers appeared grouped like ninepins, or rather like S. Gemignano. It is yet a long circuit to the town, a descent into a rocky gorge, then a steep ascent winding round the hill outside the walls, a sort of Calvary to this Jerusalem, where the great churches stand, S. Pietro like the most magnificent cathedral, girdled by huge walls and towers, with a ruined episcopal palace beside it, and a triumphal arch, like those of Brittany, in front of the east end. The church was locked and the key was away, but a little girl snatched a sick bambino from its cradle, and carried it, and guided me to S. Maria in the depth below—even far lovelier and more refined in the delicate sculpture of its roseate stone than the great church above. All its great western doors were open to the brilliant sunshine, yet it was terribly damp, the font and all the lower part of the pillars green as the grass outside. But the exquisite pulpit and bishop’s throne were unhurt, and the lovely frescoes—even more beautiful in effect than detail—with which the walls were covered. Having secured the key, we returned to S. Pietro, entering it by the crypt—l’incolonnata—a perfect maze of little columns like the mosque at Cordova in extreme miniature. Most grand is the upper church in its orange-grey desolation; mass there only once a year. But our bambino was worse for the damp, so we did not stay long, and indeed it was cheering to emerge on the breezy uplands, where the whole air was embalmed with sweet-basil, as one trod it down.

“The city of Toscanella scrambles, a mass of brown towers, golden roofs, and grey houses, along the opposite hill, and has a thousand corners which are enough to drive an artist frantic—such gothic windows; such dark entries; such arcaded streets, with glints of brilliant foliage and flowers breaking in upon their solemn shadows. At a little inn I had luncheon—a dish of poached eggs, excellent bread, cheese, and wine, and all for forty centimes, so living is not dear in Toscanella.

“Then oh! how the skeleton horse galloped home under the serene loveliness of the pellucid sky, over the plain where all the little grasses and flowers were quivering and shimmering in golden sunset ecstasy.

“I cannot say the food here is delicious; it would be an exaggeration. All the little somethings and nothings a butchered calf is capable of, and vegetables lost in garlic and oil. The host’s name is Zefferino; he is a very substantial zephyr. He arranged for my going this morning to S. Martino, which I was most anxious to visit, for love—or was it hate?—of Donna Olimpia Pamfili. I so longed to see where the great ‘papessa’ died; and how the plague got hold of her on that most grand height, overlooking seventy miles of pink and blue distances, one cannot imagine. Rocky honeysuckle-hung lanes lead up to it—a little brown-walled town, with gates and fountain, and just one street—the steepest street in the world, up which the great white oxen can only just struggle—leading up to the palace and church. Before the high altar of the latter is Olimpia’s tomb, providently placed in her lifetime, with, I thought, a rather touching inscription, saying that she had really tried to do all the good she could; and in the palace are her full-length portrait and furniture of her time, and two pictures of Innocent X. The great cool halls are let in the summer months, and have, oh! such a view from their terrace; while close behind the palace is another gate of the walled town, from which glorious forest—the great Ciminian oak forest—begins at once, and stretches away to infinity. I drew there, and five little swineherds in peaked hats and about a hundred pigs grouped themselves around me. How human the latter are! They all had names, to which, when their masters called them, they responded from a great distance, grunting loud, and running up as hard as they could.

“Then this afternoon—oh! wealthy Viterbo!—I have been again to the glorious Villa Lante. Surely never was there so beautiful a garden; never one so poetical out of nymph-and faun-land—the green glades, the moss-grown staircases, the fountains and vases, the foaming waterfalls, the orange-trees and flowers!”

“Abbazia di S. Gregorio, Venice, May 17.—On arriving here, I was persuaded to go to one of the principal hotels, sumptuously luxurious, and consequently intensely unsympathetic and unattractive. The mass of Americans, travelling like their own trunks, and with as much understanding of the place, drove me away at last, and I was enchanted to find a refuge in this dear little abbey, with its venerable court full of flowers and beautiful decorated gateway, outside which the green waves of the Grand Canal sparkle and dance. Walter Townley and his charming bride have the other rooms, and we go together for our dinner to a restaurant, and close by are Lady Airlie and Lady Kenmare, and, just opposite, Basil and Lady Margaret Levett, all as perfect types of high-bred excellence as can be found anywhere. I have enjoyed Venice more than any other part of this time abroad—have had very happy times with these friends in the afternoons, and in the mornings by myself drawing in desolate but lovely corners, unknown places, quite overlooked in what Symonds calls ‘Ruskin’s paint-box of delirious words.’ Yet I find colouring here very difficult, and quite a new style necessary, where every shadow is transparent. Miss Clara Montalba thoroughly understands this, and the delicate drawings which come from her fairy brush have as much of the most refined poetry of the place as mine have of its most unimaginative prose. But, with the love which I suppose every one has of seeking what is unusual, she paints rather the dull and foggy than the bright days. From the windows of the old house in the Zattere, where she lives with her mother and two sisters, she has the most glorious subjects, in which shipping is the great feature. Her sister Hilda has also a studio in the top of the house—such a quaint and picturesque place, with two tame doves flying about in it. She described an old palace in which they had lived near Vicenza, where the immense dining-room table had a central leg, with a fireplace in it to keep the dinner hot.

“Two sets of people ought always to live in Venice: those who have heart complaints and those who are afraid of horses; the peaceful floating gondola life would be so suited to them. Lord Houghton’s sister, old Lady Galway, spent many winters here for the former reason. But no one ought to come here unless they at least intend to see the best of it, and to enjoy it.”

“August 1, 1896.—I have enjoyed my six weeks in London with their much people-seeing. People laugh at me for liking it all so much, and still more for expressing my liking for it; but I believe I shall never turn out to be ‘one of those whom Dante found in hell-border because they had been sad under the blessed sun.’[548] How many people in ‘the world,’ so called, are perfectly charming! Surely if there are many like the Woods, Jerseys, William Lowthers, Pennants, Ilchesters, and oh! how many others, good must far predominate over evil in society.

“You know how I have always said I hated leaving London for Sundays, but I did leave it for three of them. The first was spent at Reigate Manor—Lady Henry Somerset’s charming old house, with an oak panelled hall and staircase, such as one is surprised to find near London. Lady Henry is a delightful hostess, and though so enthusiastically interested in all her good works, keeps them quite in the background. I was so glad to find George Curzon at Reigate, as pleasant as ever, and his American wife; and he has so much to say on all subjects that one does not wonder he has been spoken of as the man who ‘had seen everything, known everything, read all books, and written most of them.’ But yet the ‘feature’ of the party was Lord Carlisle’s son, Hubert Howard, who jumped upon the donkeys browsing in the park, and was kicked off by them; then upon a stray long-haired pony, and was kicked off by it; and who finally would go out to sea on the lake in a barrel in his Sunday clothes, and of course the barrel upset in the midst, and the nails with which it was studded left him with very few clothes at all.[549]

“Then I was two days at Hatfield—days of brilliant sunshine, glowing gardens, scent of lime-flowers, great kindness from host and hostess, and much pleasant companionship. The rooms have names of trees: I was in the hornbeam room, whence S. Alban’s Abbey was visible. I drew hard on Sunday amid the brilliant flowers of the garden: oh! how wicked it would have been thought when I was younger; but now no one thought it so. Most of the guests did nothing but talk and enjoy the summer beauty. Madame Ignatieff, coming to Hatfield, said, ‘Ah, I see what your life in great country-houses is—eat and doddle (dawdle), doddle and eat.’ Dear Sir Augustus Paget, of many pleasant Roman memories, sat out by me part of the time, and on the Monday morning kept me after breakfast talking of how very happy he was, how many enjoyments in his life. I could not help feeling afterwards what characteristic ‘last words’ those were. I went into the drawing-room to take leave of Lady Salisbury, and in an instant Lady Cranborne ran in saying that Sir Augustus had fallen in the hall. He scarcely spoke again, and on Saturday his bright spirit had departed. I was very sorry. I had known him so long, and—I am again quoting George Eliot, whom I have just been reading—‘how unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears one’s old friends.’

“Lady Salisbury is delightful, not only to listen to but to watch. She is so young in her spirit. ‘On a l’age de son cœur.’ All she does, as all she says, is so clever, and her relation to her many daughters-in-law, to the great variety of her visitors, to her vast household, is so unfailingly sagacious. Even ‘to know her is a liberal education,’ as Steele said of a lady he admired. She is a great contrast to Lord Salisbury: as I watched him solemnly and slowly walking up and down the rooms with his hand on the head of his great dog Pharaoh, I was always reminded of Henry Vaughan’s lines—

“The next Sunday I was at Osterley, in intensely hot weather. Sir E. Burne Jones was there (as well as at Hatfield), the painter of morbid and unlovely women, who has given an apotheosis to ennui—the Botticelli of the nineteenth century. He is very agreeable naturally, and made infinitely more so by his seductively captivating voice. He spoke much of Mr. Pepys’ ‘Diaries,’ and what a pity it was he became blind, ‘we might have had so many more volumes.’ He described going to dine with the Blumenthals, where the footman at the door presented him with a gilt apple, and informed him that he was Paris, and would go down to dinner with whichever of the Graces he presented it to. ‘I knew I must make two deadly enemies,’ said Sir Edward, ‘so I shut my eyes and stretched out the apple into space; some one took it.’ He said peacocks made their shrill cry because they were afraid a thief might come and steal their beauty away, and then he talked of the Talmud—‘that great repository of interesting stories.’ The Grand-Vizier, he said, was terribly afraid Solomon would marry the Queen of Sheba, so he told the king her legs were hairy. Then, in his wisdom, Solomon surrounded his throne with running water, and covered it with glass. And when the queen came to him and saw the water, she lifted up her trailing robe, and he beheld her legs reflected in the glass, and they were not hairy, and he said, ‘The Grand-Vizier is a liar,’ and he put him to death. The beloved Halifaxes were at Osterley, quite delightful always—

“After leaving London finally I went to Oxton Hall in Nottinghamshire for my dear Hugh Bryan’s wedding with Miss Violet Sherbrooke—such a pretty wedding—and thence to Wollaton Hall, Lord Middleton’s glorious old house near Nottingham. On the way I stayed to draw Nottingham Castle, which I had drawn as a boy, but they have quite spoilt it by tearing up its fine old plateau of grey flagstones, and putting down asphalt, only, of course, in the drawing I left that out. Wollaton is a beautiful old grey stone building full of varied ornaments—niches, pinnacles, and busts, with a central tower and huge central hall. It was built by John of Padua with stone from Ancaster, all brought on donkeys, and for which nothing was paid, coal being taken and given in exchange for it from a pit already open in Elizabeth’s time. In the church, to which we went on Sunday morning, is the tomb of John of Padua’s clerk of the works, also the monument of Lady Anne Willoughby, née Grey, aunt of Lady Jane, and a beautiful tomb of a Willoughby who was Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, with little effigies of his four wives, one of whom was mother of the Arctic voyager. The afternoon was wet, and amongst other relics we saw the clothes of this Willoughby hero, left behind when he went to the North Pole, and preserved with many other old dresses in a vast deserted upper chamber called ‘Bedlam,’ probably because the ‘gentlemen’s gentlemen’ slept there in old times, as in a dormitory. There is much else to see in the house, which was strongly fortified against the Nottingham rioters, and a number of handcuffs are hanging up which were prepared for them. The first evening I was alone with my delightfully genial host and hostess, but on Saturday many guests came, including the exceedingly pleasant young Lord Deramore.

“The late Lord Middleton lived in this palace in most primitive fashion. He used to have dinner-parties, but the dinner consisted in a haunch of venison at one end and a haunch of venison at the other, and currant-jelly in the middle, and then two apple-pies to match.

“Here is a delightful story of the present Bishop of London for you, which is molto ben trovato, at any rate. One day, he took a cab home to Fulham from the City, and wishing to be liberal, gave the man sixpence beyond the full fare. The man looked at it. ‘What, aren’t you satisfied?’ said the Bishop. ‘Oh yes, I’m satisfied,’ said the man; ‘but if I might, I should like to ask you a question.’ ‘Oh certainly,’ said the Bishop, ‘ask whatever you like.’ ‘Well, then, if St. Paul had come back to earth and was Bishop, do you suppose he’d be living in this here palace?’ ‘Certainly not,’ replied the Bishop promptly, ‘for he’d be living at Lambeth, and it would be a shilling fare.’

“And now, after all these luxurious fine houses, I am in what, to me, is the tenfold luxury of Holmhurst.

I should not like to live in a bare or commonplace house, but then I don’t; and oh! the luxury of absolute independence. I should rather like a carriage and horse perhaps, but I don’t in the least want them. Certainly, in words I have been reading of Bishop Fraser, ‘living in comfort is a phrase entirely depending for its meaning on the ideas of him who uses it.’”

“Sept. 7.—Is it a sign of old age coming on, I wonder, when one has the distaste for leaving home by which I am now possessed? I simply hate it. When one has all one wants and exactly what one likes, why should one set off on a round of visits, in which one may, and probably will, have many pleasant hours, but as certainly many bare and dull ones, often in dreary rooms, sometimes with wooden-headed people, and without the possibility of the familiar associations which habit makes such a pleasure? Then, in most country-houses, ‘l’anglais s’amuse moult tristement,’ as Froissart says. I cannot say how delightful I always find my home life—the ever-fresh morning glories of the familiar view of brilliant flowers, green lawns, and oak woods; and then the sea, which to me is so much more beautiful in its morning whiteness with faint grey cloud-shadows, or smiling under the tremulous sun-rays,[552] than in the evening light, which brings a lovely but monotonous blueness with it: the joyous companionship of my little black spitz Nero (‘Black,’ not the wicked emperor): the regularity of my proof-sheet work, and other work, till luncheon-dinner, after which there are generally visitors to be attended to; and then quiet work again, or meditation on the long-ago and the future, when

Then there is always my library, in which 6000 agreeable friends are always ready to converse with me at any moment, and ‘vingt-sept années d’ennui et de solitude lui firent lire bien des livres,’ as Catherine II. said in her epitaph on herself, might certainly be applied to me. Only I can imagine, if eyes and limbs failed, the winter evenings becoming long and monotonous. ‘Meglio solo che male accompagnato’ is a good Italian proverb, only it would be pleasant to be ‘ben accompagnato.’ I am beginning to feel with Madame de Staël—‘J’aime la solitude, mais il me faut à qui dire; j’aime la solitude.’

“The neighbours are very kindly beginning to consider me ‘the hermit of Holmhurst,’ and come to visit me in my cell, especially on Tuesdays, without expecting me to go to them. I would not have a bicycle on any account, for then I might be obliged to go, and I am too poor to have a carriage. So, in six weeks, I have only twice been outside the gates—for one day to London for George Jolliffe’s wedding, and for two nights to Battle, whence, to my great joy, the Duchess asked me to ‘mother’ her guests—charming Lady Edward Cavendish, the Vincent Corbets, and Mr. Armstrong, the Oxford history professor—to Hurstmonceaux. How beautiful, how interesting it all looked. No other place ever seems to me half so romantic; but though ‘at each step one treads on a memory,’ as Cicero says, I can go there now without a pang; my affections are too full of Holmhurst to have any room for it, and the old family are almost forgotten there already, ‘so much has happened since they left.’ ‘Lord! to see how the world makes nothing of a man, an houre after he is dead,’ writes Pepys in his Diary.

“I wonder if you ever saw Coventry Patmore here, who died lately. He often came to Holmhurst during the latter part of his residence at Hastings, where he wrote ‘The Angel in the House’ in memory of his first wife, and in memory of his second spent most of the large fortune she had brought him, £60,000, in building a beautiful church, S. Mary Star of the Sea; and whilst building it, though always a devout Catholic, imbibed, from being brought into close contact with them, a hatred of priests which never left him. The existence of ‘In Memoriam’ may be said to be due to Patmore. When young, he and Tennyson lodged together at some house in London, where they had a violent quarrel with their landlady, and left suddenly in a huff. Once well away, they recollected that the MS. of ‘In Memoriam’ was left in the cupboard of their room with the unfinished ham and the half-empty jam-pot. The timid Alfred would not face the wrath of the landlady, but Patmore went back to get it. He found the woman cleaning her doorstep and told her that he was come to get something he had left behind. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there was nothing, and she had seen quite enough of him, he should not go upstairs.’ But the slim Patmore took her by surprise, slipped past her, rushed up to the room, and from the jam cupboard extracted the MS., and made off with it in spite of her imprecations.

“Tennyson recognised what Patmore had done at the time, and said he should give him the MS. But he never did; he gave it to Sir J. Simeon, who left it to his second wife. When Tennyson’s MSS. rose so much in value, his family asked for it back, and Lady Simeon has promised that it shall go back at her death. In another generation, if Tennyson’s fame lasts so long, it will probably be sold for a large sum.

“Apropos of poets, pleasant old Miss Courtenay was talking to me the other day of how Browning was beyond all things a man of the world rather than a poet. When she saw Mrs. Browning at Naples long ago, and expressed some surprise at his being so much with Lockhart, who was then in his last serious illness, Mrs. Browning said, ‘Yes, and isn’t it delightful that Mr. Lockhart likes him so much; he told me the other day, “I like Robert so much because he is not a damned literary person!’”

“The clergyman in the little iron tabernacle of a church at our gate seemed to some to preach at me last night for not having been at the morning service, at which there was the Sacrament. He was quite right. I really might have gone, for I had no ‘boys’ here, and I was not merely kept away by my detestation of sermons, so seldom, what Spurgeon said they should be, ‘the man in flower;’ but I never thought of it, and was very busy at home about a thousand things. But though I revere the Sacrament as a holy commemorative ordinance, I cannot feel as if it did one the slightest good, except as concentrating one’s thoughts for a few minutes on sacred memories. James Adderley, the monk-preacher, says there are many who regard the Sacrament like a ‘mourning ring;’ and that is exactly how I look upon it. I cannot understand how people can consider such a mere commemorative service ‘a thing to live by,’ as they call it; and all the transubstantiation idea is to me too truly horrible. If I were dying—dying, I mean, in the trembling hope of a near blessed reality—the reception of this mere type would be no comfort to me. Then, also, as I am on the confession tack, I do not believe for one instant in ‘original sin;’ rather, as Solomon—who had much personal knowledge of the subject—says, that ‘God hath made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions.’[554] ... And yet, truly, in my own way, I always feel that—

“Chesters, Northumberland, Oct. 6.—All my dread of visits passed away when they began. Capital indeed is Milton’s advice—

And then I know one ought to go into the world ‘as a fireman on duty,’ which Cardinal Manning said was his only way of visiting it for thirty years. One thing a man who pays a good many visits should always be certain of—never to outstay his welcome. It would be dreadful to see one’s hostess begin to have the fidgets. It is safest—at latest—to go by the eleven o’clock train, but a good and pleasant plan is to take leave overnight, and be gone the next morning. I was full of enjoyment at Penrhyn Castle—the genial and charming family, the great variety of the guests, and the excursions, in spite of furious storms, into the Welsh hills. Then I was with a most kind bachelor host, Fred Swete, at Oswestry, and spent the day at Brogyntyn with Lord Harlech, a perfect example of old-fashioned courtesy and kindness. In his grounds is a long terrace with a glorious view over the plains and hills of Shropshire, including the beloved Hawkestone range of my childhood. The next day, at the Brownlow-Towers’ pleasant house at Ellesmere, a little girl of eight was most amusingly fin de siècle. ‘Now, darling, you must go up to the schoolroom and stay there,’ said her mother after luncheon. ‘No, darling, no,’ answered the child. ‘I must not, darling,’ with an exact imitation of its mother’s manner, ‘for I’ve been listening, and it’s going to be interesting.’

“We made delightful excursions from Lutwyche to draw at Bridgenorth and an old moated grange called Elswick, meeting Lady Boyne and her party, who came from Burwarton as to a half-way house.

“Then I was at Ridley Hall, full of—oh! how many memories of my long-ago. But it was the greatest pleasure to see Frank and Lady Anne Lyon there, and how much they appreciated and cared for the place. Lord and Lady Wantage were at Ridley, and I went with them to Hexham Abbey, once a most grand church, but utterly ruined by an ignorant restoration. And now, wandering still on the footprints of past days, I am at Chesters with the widow and children of my dear old friend George Clayton, he as well as all the earlier generation of his family having passed away, and Miss Annie Ogle, whom I knew so well in those far-away days, here as a delightful old lady, with snow-white hair, but the same winning character and ways as in her youth. A museum has been built now for the immense collection of Roman altars and fragments, &c., from the ‘stations’ of the Roman wall, one of the best of which (Cilurnum) is just in front of the house; while below ‘the riotous rapids of the Tyne,’ as Swinburne calls them, with their rocky shores and bosky banks, are the boundary of the park.”

“Redholm, North Berwick, Oct. 17.—I am staying here with Robert Shaw Stewart, a friend of old Roman days, and his kind wife, who was a daughter of Charles Warner, the well-known statesman-philanthropist of Trinidad,—‘fort comme le diamant, plus tendre qu’une mère’—of whom Froude has given so charming a description. The Dalzells and all my other dear friends of past days here have gone over the border-land, but, in this hospitable house, I have seen quite a diorama of people. A topic has been the three modern Scotch novelists, Crockett,[556] Barrie,[557] and Ian Maclaren (Watson): Crockett such a delightful fellow, so full of sunshine, of real happy enjoyment of people and things: Barrie, a weaver’s boy as to his origin, but simple and straightforward to a degree, though his books have made him rich: Watson just a little spoilt since the great success of his annals of Drumtochty, which, under another name (Logiealmond, near Glenalmond) was the place where he was minister. The Free Kirk minister in this place, Dr. Davidson, told me how when they all were at college together, Barrie and Crockett used to tell stories in class. They sate up in a corner, with a little coterie round them, and held their audience enthralled. No one listened to the lecturer, and some of the students outside the charmed circle used to say, ‘Had not you better send down to the professor and tell him not to make so much noise?’ The lower orders in Scotland seem to read the modern national novelists just as much as the upper, and they read other deeper books too, and think calmly in a way very unlike Englishmen. ‘The Shorter Catechism,’ which they all understand, is a proof of this. When it was published, indeed, there was a far more serious catechism for adults: this one was only intended for ‘those of tender years,’ yet there is much requiring deepest thought in it, though the peasant classes always master it.”

“Airlie Castle, Oct. 18.—Monday was fearfully cold, and it was a pleasure to see the beautiful face of Lady Airlie—more picturesque and distinguished in late middle life than any one else—looking out of a close carriage come to meet me. Her most poetical home is just suited to her—the tiniest castle in the world, with its one noble gate-tower giving access to a little green plateau beneath which the Melgum and the Isla rush through deep wooded gorges to their meeting-place. And into these gorges the castle windows look deep down. Then, to those who know Lady Airlie, I need not say how beautiful the little rooms are, how splendid the few flowers, how much of story clusters round the furniture and pictures—‘only a few; I do not like a room or a wall to be crowded, even with the best things,’ says their mistress.

“In the serene beauty of her age, she herself lends a lustre to her surroundings; quietly, contentedly severing most links with the great world in which she has so long been a star, ‘elle dépose fleur à fleur la couronne de la vie.’[558]

“Lady Maude White is here, returning to an intellectual world with which she has never broken a single link, after many years of privation, solitude, and duty nobly borne, first with her brother, and then with her husband, at a horse-ranch in America.

“The castle of Airlie has never recovered its burning by Argyll and the Covenanters, when

The family were always for the King and the Church, indeed too much so, for Maryott Ogilvy was the mistress of Cardinal Beaton, for whom he built several castles, and who was enormously endowed by him. Of their six children, the eldest girl had the richest dower in Scotland, and married the Lord Crawford of that day. It was David, Lord Ogilvy, who was out in the ‘45, who rebuilt a bit of the old castle, just enough to live in by himself after he came home, and added a few rooms for his wife when he married a second time. Behind the castle is a delightful old garden, to which Lady Airlie has added hedges and peacocks in clipped yew, with divers other ‘incidents;’ and all along the ledges of the gorges run wonderful little pathlets—beautiful exceedingly in the crimson and gold of their autumnal glory. But they will be gone directly; for, as Edward Fitzgerald says, ‘The trees in the Highlands give themselves no dying airs, but turn orange in a day, and are swept off in a whirlwind, and winter is come.’

“We drove to Cortachy through woods laid prostrate by the great storm of 1893, which has left the trees piled on one another, like the dead of a vanquished army on a battlefield. Lady Airlie made the whole of the weird desolate country live through her interpretation of it:—

“‘Those are the black hornless cattle of Angus. That is the hill of Clota, on the top of which is the old tower where the last witch was burnt. In the church books there is an entry that on a particular day there was no service, because all the congregation were gone to the burning of the witch. That village in the hollow, which is so red and striking in the sunset, is Kirriemuir: it is the “Thrums” of Barrie’s novel. Now we will leave the carriage at “the Devil’s Stone:” it is just a stone which the devil threw at the kirk, but it missed and fell into the stream: it rests the opposite way to all boulders, and it is of a different formation from all the other stones in the district. Dicky Doyle loved the story and the stone, and used to paint it. And now we will go into the “Garden of Friendship.” I made it when I first married out of an old kitchen-garden, and I cut down a belt of trees and let in the view. The lines in the summer-house are by Robert Lowe. All the trees bear the names of the different friends who planted them. That one was planted by Dr. John Brown. He was often here. He told me that my Clementine was a lassie who had said something she might be proud of. That was because one day when I said to her, “I am so tired; are not you tired, darling?” she answered, “Tired! oh no, not a bit. I have a box of laughter inside me, and the key that unlocks it is ‘fun.’” Over there is our deer-forest. Charlotte, Lady Strathmore, took me up to the tower of Glamis once, and stretched out her hand towards our hills—“You have a deer-forest, and a river, and scenery” she said, “and I have nothing.”

“‘Here is King Charles’s room. Charles II. was here for the gathering of the clans, but they did not gather as they ought, and he went away disappointed. He left a Prayer-book and a Euclid here: he was a great scientist. Under the floor at that corner is a secret room: we have never seen it. Some workmen found it after the great fire here whilst every one was away, and before we came back it was walled up, and it has never been thought worth while to disturb it again. Those are the portraits of the Ogilvy who was out in the ‘45 and his first wife. She was shut up in the Tolbooth for singing Jacobite songs in the Canongate. He was devoted to her, but after they went to St. Germains he was told that he must take a mistress because it was the fashion, and he did. After her death he married again, an extravagant woman, who wheedled him out of £3000 which he had saved to buy the property on the other side of the river at Airlie,[559] and spent it on her own devices. They quarrelled at last, for she would give a ball at Airlie Lodge at Dundee, and he told her if she did he would never forgive it; and she had the ball, and he never saw her again.’

“Lord Airlie is a splendid young man,[560] and has the most delightful of wives in one of the granddaughters of the beloved Lady Jocelyn. He is a consummate soldier. His devotion to his profession only allows him to be six weeks at Cortachy in the year, but in that time he drives about and visits every person on the estate. He has the firm faith and strong religious feeling of his Ogilvy forbears. One day, at the gate of Airlie Castle, with its unprotected precipices, he had mounted a dogcart with his sister Clementine. The horse plunged and backed violently. They were on the very edge of the abyss. ‘Make your peace with God,’ he said to his sister; ‘in an instant we shall be over.’ At the very last moment a man rushed out and caught the horse, but the wheels were half over then.

“To-day we have been to see the Monros at Lindertis—a semi-gothic house, most comfortable inside. Mrs. Munro is a capital portrait-painter in the style of Raeburn, and has done first-rate work. All evening Lady Airlie has talked delightfully:—

“‘We were a very quarrelsome family as children. At Gosport, whilst we were at church, my next sister, Cecilia,[561] who had been left at home, fell out of the window. She lived for some days, very suffering and scarcely conscious, but she used constantly, in her half-delirium, to say, “Oh, don’t quarrel, don’t quarrel;” and it made a very great impression upon me, and afterwards I always tried never to quarrel. My father never let us complain. If anything unpleasant happened and my mother murmured, he would always say, “Oh, don’t; we have so much more than we deserve.” He always thought it so ill-bred—so ill-bred towards God—to murmur. A widow, especially, should never murmur. If one has had a great place and occupied a great position which all vanishes with one’s husband, one ought to be so filled with gratitude for the has-been as to leave no room for complaints. “I have lived my life: I have enjoyed to the utmost,” that should always be the feeling. It is terrible when a widow murmurs, for it is God who gave the husband, who gave the home; and when He takes them away again, how can one doubt that He knows best when one has had enough? For children, leaving an old home is worse than for the widow: she has lived her life, but theirs is to come.

“‘Before I grew up, my mother often took me with her to Miss Berry’s in the evening. My father was away at the House, and she took her work and went there, and Miss Berry liked to see that good and beautiful young woman sitting there. At Miss Berry’s house I saw all the clever men of the day, so I knew them all before I really came out. I shall never forget going down once to Richmond to take leave of Miss Berry before we went into the country, and her saying to me, “Allez vous retremper l’âme à la campagne;” it seemed to me such a beautiful thought. Forty years afterwards my daughter Blanche told it to Schouvaloff, the Russian Minister. “Oui,” he said, and added, “et engourdir l’esprit.” It was as characteristic of him as the first part of the sentence was of Miss Berry.

“‘As soon as I came out, I went with my parents to the Grange, where the first Lady Ashburton was very kind to me, and I passionately adored her. There I first saw Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle, but he had known my mother very well before. Mrs. Carlyle really loved Lady Ashburton, yet she was madly jealous of her. When they were at home, and Carlyle would come in quite tired out with a long day’s work, she would say, “Now just walk down to Bath House and see Lady Ashburton, and that will refresh you.” She meant him to go, but as soon as he was gone her grief was passionate, because she felt it would not have been the same thing to him if he had stayed with her. He was always pleasant, but to a few—to my mother especially—he never failed to show the most intense delicacy of feeling.

“‘I cannot describe what Charles Buller was. Girl as I was, I loved him, but so did every one else; he was so very delightful. I remember as if it were to-day going once into my mother’s room: all her long beautiful hair was down and she was sobbing violently. “Oh,” she said, “Charles Buller is dead.” How I longed to cry too, but I did not dare. I only went to my own room in most bitter grief. Wherever he went, Charles Buller brought sunshine with him. He left me his Coleridge in his will. It surprised people that he should leave anything to a young girl like me, and when I went to the Grange again, many spoke of it. Each had something to show which had belonged to him: we all mourned together.

“‘Oh, how many recollections there are which will always remain with one, which will stay by one at the resurrection. Many of my happiest are of the Grange. Lord Houghton asked me once how long I had been there, and he told me long afterwards that I had answered “Oh, I cannot tell; I only know that it is morning when I come, and night when I go away.” This bookcase is full of the gifts of friends, and recalls much of my past. Here is a volume of Thackeray with an etching by himself, and here are all John Morley’s and Lord Sherbrooke’s books, which they gave me as they came out. Here is Lord Houghton’s “Monographs,” with a touching letter from him after we had had a little coldness; and here are two bound volumes of Mrs. Carlyle’s Letters to me.”

“Balcaskie, Oct. 21.—What a wild country is this ‘low, sea-salted, wind-vexed’ Fife, with its little royal boroughs along the coast, each with its tiny municipality. About them their natives have the same pride, however, as an Aberdonian, who said the other day, ‘Just tak’ awa Aberdeen and twenty mile round her, and where are ye?’ The sea-line is broken by islets, the most important of them being May, where S. Adrian lived in a hermitage, and where the steps at the very difficult landing-place are worn away by the knees of the pilgrims to his shrine. S. Monan lived there after him, but also frequented a little cave on the mainland, where the old church stands to which we went on Sunday, so near the waves that, in rough weather, the roar of the surges mingles with the music.

“Highly picturesque is this house of Balcaskie, and its high-terraced gardens with their vases and statues. The Anstruthers have taken me to Balcarres to spend the afternoon with ever-sunny Lady Crawford. Her husband, weird-looking as an old necromancer, only came in as we were leaving, but several of the handsome sons were at home. The house looks gloomy outside from the black stone of the country, but is bright and cheerful within, and has a beautiful oak-panelled parlour.

“On Sunday afternoon we went to Kellie, a noble stern old castle, with corbie-steps and tourelles. It was neglected and deserted by the Earls of Kellie, but has been restored by Mrs. Lorimer, widow of an Edinburgh professor, who rents it. ‘Two little red shoes’ haunt it, pattering up and down its winding staircases at night. At Crail we saw wonderful old tombs of the Lindsays in the churchyard, and inside the church that of Miss Cunningham, who, said the sacristan, died on the eve of her marriage with some great poet whose name he could not remember: we afterwards found it was Drummond of Hawthornden.”

“Bishopthorpe, Oct. 23.—This house has a charm from the great variety of its styles, even the gingerbread-gothic is important as being of a date anterior to Horace Walpole, who has the reputation of having introduced that style.

“The Archbishop of York says, ‘From sudden death, good Lord deliver us,’ means, ‘From dying unprepared for death, good Lord deliver us.’

“Lord Falkland has been here. He had been lately at Skelton Castle. His hostess, Miss Wharton, took him to his room, down a long passage—a large room, panelled with dark oak and with a great four-post bed with heavy hangings. It was very gloomy and oppressive, Lord Falkland thought, but he said nothing, dressed, and went down to dinner.

“When he came upstairs again, he found the aspect of the room even more oppressive, but he made up a great fire and went to bed. In the night he was awakened by a pattering on the floor as of high-heeled shoes and the rustling of a stiff silk dress. There was still a little fire burning, but he could see nothing. As he distinctly heard the footsteps turn, he thought, ‘Oh, I hope they may not come up to the bed.’ They did. But then they turned away, and he heard them go out at the door.

“With difficulty he composed himself to sleep again, but was soon reawakened by the same sound, the rustling of silk and the footsteps. Then he was thoroughly miserable, got up, lighted candles, made up the fire, and passed a wretched night. In the morning he was glad to find an excuse for going away.

“Afterwards he heard an explanation. An old Wharton, cruel and brutal, had a young wife. One day, coming tipsy into his wife’s room, he found her nursing her baby. He was in a violent temper, and, seizing the baby from her arms, he dashed its head against the wall and killed it on the spot. When he saw it was dead, he softened at once. Even in her grief and horror Mrs. Wharton could not bear to expose him, and together they buried the child under the hearthstone; but she pined away and very soon she died.

“She used to be heard not only rustling, but weeping, wailing, sobbing, crying. At that time the Whartons were Roman Catholics, and when the family were almost driven from their home by its terrors, they got a priest to exorcise the castle and to bury the baby skeleton in consecrated ground. Since then, there have been no sobs and cries, only the rustling and pattering of feet.”

“Oct. 26, 1896.—The first three volumes of the ‘Story of my Life’ are come out, and I send them to you. Even the favourable reviews complain vehemently about their length; and yet, if they were not in a huge type and had not quite half a volume’s space full of woodcuts, they might easily have been two very moderate volumes.[562] Then, say the reviewers, ‘the public would have welcomed the book.’ But after all, it was not written or printed for the public, only for a private inner circle, though I am sure that, in return for having been allowed to read it, ‘the public’ will kindly be willing—well, just to pay for the printing! Then it is funny how each review wants a different part left out—one the childhood, one the youth, one the experiences of later life: there would be nothing left but the little anecdotes about already well-known people, which they all wish to keep, and, in quoting these, they one and all copy each other; it saves trouble. The Saturday had what the world calls ‘a cruel review’ of the book, but what was really an article of nothing but personal vituperation against its author. I know who the review was by, and that it was not, as every one seems to think, by one of the family from whom I suffered in my childhood; certainly, however, if any one cares to know how the members of that family always spoke to and of me in my youth, they have only to read that article. I think there is a good bit about criticism in Matthew Arnold’s Letters. ‘The great thing is to speak without a particle of vice, malice, or rancour.... Even in one’s ridicule one must preserve a sweetness and good-humour.... I remember how Voltaire lamented that the “literae humanae,” humane letters, should be so dreadfully inhuman, and determined in print to be always scrupulously polite.’ Then, how truly Ruskin says, ‘The slightest manifestation of jealousy or self-complacency is sufficient to mark a second-rate character of intellect.’

“As you know, I never intended the book, written seventeen and printed two years ago, to appear till after my death, but this year it was so strongly represented to me that then all who would care to read about my earlier years would then be dead too, that I assented to the story up to 1870 being published. To tell the truth, I feel now how sorry I should have been to have missed the amusement of hearing even the most abusive things people say. And certainly, as regards reviews, I feel with Washington Irving, ‘I have one proud reflection to sustain myself with—that I never in any way sought to win the praises nor deprecate the censures of reviewers, but have left my work to rise or fall by its own deserts. If my writings are worth anything, they will outlive temporary criticism; if not, they are not worth caring about.’[563] Yet, yet, just for the sake of variety, I should like some day, as a change to the unknown, to read a really favourable review of something I have written, though I read somewhere, ‘To like to be right is the last weakness of a wise man: to like to be thought right is the inveterate prejudice of fools.’[564]

“One of the things people find fault with is that I have not shown sufficient adoration for Jowett, who was so exceedingly kind to me at Oxford. But I always felt that it was for Arthur Stanley’s sake. Jowett only really cared for three kinds of undergraduate—a pauper, a profligate, or a peer: he was boundlessly good to the first, he tried to reclaim the second, and he adored the third.”

“Blaise Castle, Henbury, Nov. 23.—I came here to charming Mary Harford [565] from Lockinge, where I paid a pleasant visit to Lord and Lady Wantage, meeting a large party. Lady Wantage, beautified by the glory of her snowy hair, was most charming—so thoughtful and kind for every one—‘elle brillait surtout par le caractère,’[566] and though ‘few can understand an argument, all can appreciate a character.’[567] One of the most agreeable guests, a ripple of interesting anecdote, which began even in the omnibus driving up from the station in the dark, was Lord James of Hereford. At dinner he told how Sir Drummond and Lady Wolff had a Spanish dog, who was the best-bred creature in the world. One day its mistress had a visitor who engrossed her so much that she forgot her dog’s dinner. It would not scratch or whine, it was too well conducted, but it went out into the garden and bit off a flower, and came and laid it at its mistress’s feet: the flower was a forget-me-not.

“George Holford of Westonburt was at Lockinge, and very pleasant. Once he walked from London to Ardington, close to Lockinge, where his grandmother, Mrs. Lindsay, was then living. When he was within a mile and a half of it, he saw a man kneeling on the body of another man on the road. He went up to them, called out, had no answer, and at last struck the kneeling man with his stick. His stick went through the man. His story was received at Lockinge with shouts of derision.

“Three years after, at a tenants’ dinner, Lord Wantage told the story of his nephew’s ‘optical delusion’ to the farmer sitting next, who said, ‘It is a very extraordinary thing, my Lord, but a man was once murdered by his servant on that very spot. The servant knocked him down, knelt upon him, and killed him; and ever since the place has had the reputation of being haunted.’”

“Jan. 9, 1897.—My Christmas was spent very pleasantly at Hewell, where Lord and Lady Windsor had a large party. Most lovely and charming was the hostess, most stately and beautiful the great modern house by Bodley, greatly improved and embellished since I saw it last. How closely, during a week’s visit, one is thrown with people, whom one often does not see again for years, if ever. It is, as Florence Montgomery says—‘People in a country-house play their parts, as it were, before one, and then the curtain falls, and the actors disappear. The play is played out.’[568] How laden with gifts children are nowadays, and how far too luxurious their life is, as much in excess that way as in the privations and penances which I remember in my own childhood.

“Some people are very angry with me for telling the truth in the ‘Story of my Life’[569] about these young years, when I was suffering ‘from an indiscriminate theological education,’ as Mr. Schimmelpennick calls such, and when I was made so constantly to feel how ‘l’ennui n’a pas cessé d’être en Angleterre une institution religeuse.’[570] And it is not merely the ‘canaille of talkers in type’[571] who find fault, but many whose opinion I have a regard for. They think that the portrait of a dead person should never be like a Franz Hals, portraying every ‘projecting peculiarity,’ but all delicately wrought with the smooth enamelling touch of Carlo Dolce. They wonder I can ‘reconcile it to my conscience’ to hold ‘another estimate of the Maurices to that which has been hitherto popular.’ ‘Collect a bag of prejudices and call it conscience, and there you are!’[572] For myself, I believe, and I am sure it is the discipline of years which tells me so, that the rule of after-death praise is a false one to be regulated by. It is true that there is often an enlightenment from death upon sensations and sympathies towards one who is gone, but I cannot feel that a faithful record of words and actions ought to be altered by the mere glamour of death, which so often gives an apotheosis to those who little deserve it. One of my reviewers says he would like to read a truthful word-portrait of Augustus Hare by one of the persons he describes in print: so should I exceedingly, and most appallingly horrible it would be!

is what I would often say. Lately, a wonder whether I can have misjudged or exaggerated my remembrance of the long-ago has made me give many solitary evenings to old-letter reading; yet contemporary letters only confirm all I have expressed. How interesting they are! It is as Archbishop Magee says, ‘Old letters are like old ghosts, coming often uncalled for and startling us with their old familiar faces—pleasant some of them, and some of them very ugly, but all of them dead and bearing the stamp of death—and yet they will survive ourselves.’

“Most extraordinarily virulent certainly reviews can be! Really, ‘hurricanes of calumny and tornados of abuse’[574] have been hurled at me. As Cardinal Manning said, ‘To write anonymously is always a danger to charity, truth, and justice.’ Blackwood (i.e. the Maurice spirit in Blackwood), in an article which breathes of white lips, after dwelling scornfully upon ‘the sickening honey of the “Memorials,”’ writes:—

“What is Mr. Augustus Hare? He is neither anybody nor nobody—neither male nor female—neither imbecile nor wise.... As we wade through this foam of superannuated wrath ... this vicious and venomous personal onslaught ... Mr. Hare’s paragraphs plump like drops of concentrated venom over the dinted page.... Such a tenacity of ill-feeling, such a cold rage of vituperation, is seldom to be met with.’

“I wonder a little if any one can really from his heart have offered such ‘a genuine tribute of undissembled horror,’ or whether these sentiments were only written to order? And then I look at Dante and read:—

“Jan. 31, 1897.—Saw Lady Delawarr, and heard all about her marvellous escape. Lady Mary (Sackville) first heard a crackling noise between two and three in the morning, and, looking out of her room door, saw that the staircase [577] was in flames. She rushed into her sister Margaret’s room, roused her, shrieked to the maids and governess, and finding a fiery gulf separated them from their mother’s room, the sisters flew in their night-dresses down the stairs, already in flames, and into the street. Lady Delawarr, stupefied by smoke, slept on heavily, though for twenty minutes her old servant Vincent, who occupied a room off the garden, threw stones at her window. He dragged his mattress beneath it, and strained it across the garden area. At last he roused her, and she rushed to the door, but closed it again as the flames poured in. Then she threw up the window. ‘Jump, my lady, jump!’ shouted Vincent; ‘there is not a moment to lose.’ There was not time even to throw out her diamonds, but she knotted her sheets firmly together, and sliding down them, dropped upon the mattress. With her it held, but the fat cook, who had not had courage to face the fiery staircase, leapt from the fourth floor, and under her great weight the mattress gave way and she fell into the area, breaking her leg in three places and fracturing her skull, and now she is dead. For a whole hour Lady Delawarr crouched behind the lilac bushes in the ice-bound garden, with the blazing house between her and all else. Then she succeeded in breaking the window of a carpenter’s shop which adjoined the garden, and was dragged through it, and reached a friend’s house in a four-wheel cab.

“This cab she sent back to fetch her daughter Mary, but the horse fell on the ice in Grosvenor Square, and Lady Mary, as she was, had to walk up Upper Brook Street to the house where her mother had taken refuge.”

“Jan. 28.—Dined at Lady Hope’s to meet Dr. Tucker, Bishop of Uganda, who had walked 10,000 miles in his bishopric; there were no other means of locomotion. He said Africa as a whole was more swamp and thicket than desert. ‘Were not the lions alarming?’ ‘Not very; they seldom attacked unless irritated.’ Once he saw five at the same time around him, but ‘they all had their own affairs to attend to.’ Snakes were worse, especially puff-adders, which would attack whenever they could.”

“Feb. 2, 1897.—Dreadful news has come of the terrible murder in the Benin expedition of my dear Kenneth Campbell (of Ardpatrick), than whom no one was better, braver, more attractive to look upon, or more pleasant to live with.

Yet a shadow is thrown over everything, and when even his friend feels as if he could never write or speak of him without tears, what must not it be to his parents! One had felt that he, if any one, had ‘i pensieri stretti ed il viso sciolto’ which would ‘go safely over the whole world,’ as Alberto Scipioni said to Sir Henry Wotton, and which the latter recommended to Milton when asked for advice as to his travels.”

“May 8, 1897.—Do you remember the article on my book, or rather on me, headed ‘A Monument of Self-Sufficiency,’ which amused us both so much? Dining at Lady Margaret Watney’s, I sate opposite to Mr. E. G. who wrote it—a pleasant man and much liked—and longed to make acquaintance with him, but had not the chance. Last night I dined with Lady Ashburton, a quiet party, with all the beautiful Kent House pictures lighted up. Mr. Henschel whistled like a bullfinch at dinner, and sang gloriously ‘Der Kaiser’ afterwards. Mrs. F. Myers, who sate by me, was most agreeable, and is one of those with whom one soon penetrates ‘l’écorce extérieur de la vie,’ as our dear S. Simon calls it. Amongst a thousand interesting things, she told me that, at Cambridge, she found Lord De Rothschild’s son especially difficult to get on with, till one day he startled her by asking, ‘Have you got any fleas?’ She was surprised, but found that special point of Natural History was just the one thing he cared about, knew about, and would talk on for ever; and she was able to get him some rare fleas from a friend in India, with which he was greatly delighted.

“I also sate at dinner by ...whose father was ambassador at Vienna. He rented Prince Clary’s house. One day, as a little girl, she was at the end of the drawing-room with her mother, when they both saw a chasseur—their own chasseur, they supposed—standing in an alcove at the end of the room. ‘Oh, there is Fritz,’ said her mother. ‘What can he be doing there? Run and tell him to go downstairs.’ She ran across the room, but as she came up to the alcove the chasseur seemed to vanish. This happened three times; then the mother said, ‘If we were superstitious we might say we had seen a ghost, but it can be only a question of angles.’ Soon afterwards her father met Prince Clary at dinner and began, ‘Have you ever been troubled by any appearance?’ &c. ‘Oh, don’t speak of it,’ exclaimed Prince Clary; ‘it is a most painful subject: the fact is, that, in a fit of anger, my father killed his chasseur on that spot.’ Sir Augustus Loftus, who succeeded at the Embassy, took the same house, and reproached them much for not warning him of the apparition, on account of which he soon left and went to live in a hotel.

“At Easter I was with the Carysforts at Elton, and was taken to see Castor, with its fine Roman and Norman remains, and Stobbington, a very interesting old house, with a most curious collection of rare living fish, the pets of its owner. Lady Alwyn Compton, who was at Elton, told me a curious story. It was one of the great commentators—Calamy, she thought—who had occasion to go to a market-town in Devonshire, and take a lodging there whilst the assizes were going on. In the evening a servant came to his room and said that the master of the house hoped that he would do him the honour of coming down to supper with him. He said, ‘Oh, pray thank him very much, but say that I never take supper.’ But the servant came three times with the same message, and at last he said to himself, ‘Well, he seems so anxious to have me that it is rather churlish not to go,’ and he went. There were many people in the room, quite a number of guests, and a great supper prepared. But, being a religious man, before sitting down he said grace aloud, and, as he said it, the whole thing vanished.

“Archbishop Benson told Lady Alwyn that two Americans were talking to each other about spiritualism. Said one to the other, ‘You do not believe in ghosts, do you?’—‘No, certainly not!’ ‘You would not believe even if you saw one?’—‘No, certainly not.’ ‘Well, I am one!’ and he vanished on the spot.

“Afterwards I saw Higham Ferrers on my way to stay at Ecton, such a pleasant old house; and the next week I was with the George Drummonds at Swaylands, which has the finest rock-garden in England, and drew with Miss Henniker in the delicious old gardens of Penshurst Place.”

“Castle Hale, Painswick, June 17.—‘Voici venir les longs crépuscules de juin,’[579] and I will employ one of them in writing to you. I have had a Whitsuntide of visits, beginning with the Deanery of Hereford. Mrs. Leigh [580] was full of her visit to Butler’s Island, from which she was lately returned—her last visit, she thinks, but I expect she will not long be able to keep away from the old home in the rice-swamps which she loves so dearly. Before she left, she had a little feast for all the older negroes, who had been slaves, and whose ancestors had been on the place since her great-grandfather’s time. She thanked them for coming in a little speech, expressing her attachment to them, but saying that as her years were advancing, she might not meet them often again on earth, but that she trusted to see them again hereafter. She was much moved herself, and many of the negroes wept; then, as by a universal impulse, they all sprang up and sang the Doxology! Her daughter Alice had a supper for the younger negroes in another room. One of them, a young man, made a speech, and ended it by saying, ‘I am sure that this festival will be remembered by our offspring long after their forespring are dead and gone.’

“‘Old Sie is my foreman,’ said Mrs. Leigh. ‘His grandfather lived with my great-grandfather, the first of our family who established himself on Butler’s Island. He was a very clever, efficient slave. Once, when all the other slaves were out at another island trying to cultivate it—it is called “Experiment” still—there came on one of those tremendous hurricanes which are, happily, very rare with us. The slaves, who are like sheep, all wanted at once to take to the boats and get home. Had they succeeded in embarking, they would all have been lost, as many other negroes were then, when all boats were swamped. But, at the point of the whip, Sie’s grandfather drove them all back inland to a hut where they could take refuge. Afterwards Sie was offered his freedom, but he would not take it; so my grandfather had a silver cup made for him, with an inscription recording what he had done. Last winter I said to Sie, “I think you had better let me buy that cup from you; you are all free now, and your children are not likely to care for it.” He considered awhile, then he said, “No, Missus, I tink not: I keep cup;” and then he thought a little more and said, “Missus, when I be gone done dead, you have de cup.”’

“I went with the Leighs to see the wonderful old church of ‘Abbeydore in the Golden Valley,’ as romantic as its name, and Kilpeck, a marvellous old Norman building.

“I went next to Madresfield, a first visit in a new reign, and very different it looked in its long grass and flowers, with the lovely Malvern hills behind, from the frost-bound place I remember. Its young master has spent all the time of his possession in beautifying it, planting glorious masses of peonies, iris, and a thousand other flowers in the grass, and making a herbaceous walk—winding—with a background of yew hedge, which is a very dream of loveliness. I was very happy at Madresfield, liking Beauchamp and Lady Mary so much, and all the many guests were charming, especially the Arthur Walronds, genial Dick Somerset, delightful Lady Northcote, the evergreen Duchess of Cleveland—‘Aunt Wilhelmine’—and three pleasant young men, Charlie Harris, Victor Cochran, and Lord Jedburgh. What a pleasure there is in thoroughly well-bred society! There is a capital passage in Ouida’s last book about this—‘You are always telling me that I wear my clothes too long: you’ve often seen me in an old coat—a shockingly old coat; but you never saw me in an ill-cut one. Well, I like my acquaintance to be like my clothes. They may be out at elbows, but I must have ’em well cut.’

“One afternoon we drove to Eastnor, which was in great beauty, and the castle—hideous outside—a palace of art treasures within, infinitely lovely from the flowers with which Lady Henry Somerset fills it.

“But most I liked the rambles about the inexhaustible gardens of Madresfield itself, with my charming young host and hostess, and one or other of the guests, and the practice inculcated by the oft-repeated questions which they ask so cheerily—‘Is it wise? is it kind? is it true?’ the very thought of which stops so much scandal; yet one has to consider all the three questions together, for the last would so often bring an affirmative where there would be a negative for the two others. The house itself is full of interesting and precious things, old furniture, miniatures, enamels, &c.

“Now I am with Mrs. Baddeley, whom you will remember as Helen Grant, the second of the three beautiful sisters whom all the great artists wanted to paint, but who have been such dear friends of mine from their earliest childhood, and often at Holmhurst, whether I were there or not. Helen’s husband, St. Clair Baddeley, is full of amusing stories, and his adopted father, Mr. Christie, with whom they live, is the dearest of old gentlemen. Just behind this house is the old courthouse where Charles I. lodged in most troublous times, and whence he fled. Many of his Cavaliers took refuge in the church, and numbers of them were afterwards shot in the churchyard, where old helmets are still dug up, and where a row of yews are said to mark their graves. There are ninety-nine yews altogether, and it is said that a mystic power guards this number; if any one tries to plant more, the old yews destroy them. In their shadow are a number of fine tombs, executed by Italian workmen, who left the place because they were not allowed to have their own chapel, but who were brought over when Painswick was a very flourishing town from its cloth factories, now transferred to Yorkshire.

“Just before her marriage, H. went to see Lady Burton at Mortlake, and was taken to Burton’s mausoleum as a natural part of her visit. Afterwards Lady Burton wrote to her saying that she wanted to ask a very great favour. It was that she would never wear again the hat in which she had come down to Mortlake. H. liked her hat very much—a pretty Paris hat in which she fancied herself particularly, but she said she would do as an old friend of her future husband wished, though utterly mystified. Afterwards Lady Burton wrote that when H. had come into the room on her visit, she was horrified to see three black roses in her hat; that they were the mark of a most terrible secret sect in Arabia, mixed up in every possible atrocity, and that—especially as worn by a girl about to be married—they were a presage of every kind of misfortune; that, in another case of the same kind, she had given the same warning, and the girl, who disregarded it, died on the day before her wedding. H. wore her hat again, but took out the black roses.

“Sir Richard Burton died of syncope of the heart—died twenty minutes before Lady Burton’s priest could arrive; so her report of his having been received into the Roman Catholic Church was a complete delusion.

“H. says that Count Herbert Bismarck went lately to a great function in Russia. While he wished to be incognito, he still did not see why he could not have the advantages of his cognito. ‘Stand back; you must keep the line,’ said an official as he was pushing through. ‘You do not know who I am: I am Count Herbert Bismarck.’ ‘Really? Well that quite explains, but it does not excuse your conduct,’ rejoined the officer.

“At the silver wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, a northern town wished to present an address, but there was a great discussion as to its wording; for some time they could not agree at all. ‘Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness,’ was universally condemned, but when some one proposed, ‘Conscious as we are of each other’s unworthiness,’ it was agreed to to a man. “Mr. P——, Q.C., who has just been here, has called to mind that the Queen’s name is neither Victoria nor Guelf. Her real name is Victorina Wetting (pronounced Vettine). She was christened Victorina, and then there was a little girl called Victorina who played a most unpleasant part in Queen Caroline’s trial, and the Duke and Duchess of Kent changed their child’s name to Victoria, that it might not be the same. And Wetting is her husband’s—the real Saxe-Coburg name.

“H. had been at Oxford when Max Müller one day received a letter which pleased him so much that he insisted on sending a very nice letter in return, though it was evidently only written to get an autograph. It asked if there was any reason, other than coincidence, for meche and mechant: wick, wicked. One day an American was shown in to Max Müller, saying, ‘I have come, sir, four thousand miles to see you,’ &c. The professor was terribly pressed for time, and bored too; but as to the latter, felt that in a quarter of an hour he would be released, as he had a lecture to deliver. So he was civil, and then excused himself, saying that he was afraid he must go to his lecture, but that if his visitor wished to go to hear it, he could. ‘No,’ said the American, ‘I will not go with you, for I am rather deaf; but I can make myself perfectly happy here, and you shall find me here on your return.”

“St. Clair has been talking of Mrs. Procter, whom he knew well, and how she used to say, ‘Never tell anybody how you are, because nobody wants to know.’ All her circle are gone now, Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Adelaide Sartoris. When she was dying, her nun-daughter came and tried to get a priest in, but she would not have it. She had preserved the letters of Thackeray, Dickens, and others in three tin boxes. Mrs. Procter left Browning and two others her executors, but the nun wanted all the papers to be given to a young Nottingham doctor, to be published just as she wished, and, when they would not have it so, she put the whole of the correspondence on the kitchen-fire: it was her vendetta on her mother for having refused the priest.

“Holmhurst, June 29, 1897.—I said I would tell you about the Jubilee. For the first few days I was with the hospitable Lowthers, and thence, on Sunday, went to the Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s. Going very early, I had perhaps the best place in the choir, and enjoyed seeing the gradual gathering of so much of the bravery, learning, and beauty of England beneath the dusky arches and glistening mosaics. When the long file of clergy went out to meet the royal procession at the west door, the faint distant song was very lovely, gradually swelling, and lost in the blare of trumpets, the roll of drums, and the triumphant shout of welcoming voices as the clergy re-entered the choir. The most important figure was the Bishop of Finland in a white satin train with two gorgeous train-bearers; but the newspapers tell this, and how the lines of royal persons sate on crimson chairs opposite the entrance of the choir, and how the Bishop of London preached touchingly, not effusively, about the Queen and her reign, and officiated at the altar in a gorgeous mitre and cope.

“On Monday Miss Lowther and I went to tea with my friend (minor-canon) Lewis Gilbertson at his lovely little house in Amen Court, and then were taken, by one of the many secret staircases of the cathedral, to emerge over the portico for the rehearsal of the next day’s ceremony. Perhaps, in some ways, this was more impressive than the reality, as none of the vast surrounding space was kept clear; all was one sea of heads, whilst every window, every house-top, even every chimney-pot, was crowded with people. Never was anything more jubilant than the ‘Te Deum,’ more reverent than the solemn Lord’s Prayer in the open air—every hat off. When the appointed programme was over, the crowd very naturally asked for ‘God save the Queen,’ and after some hesitation, and goings to and fro of dean and canons, it was begun by the bands and choristers, and taken up vigorously by the mile of people as far as Temple Bar. How grand it was!

“That evening the dear Queen said to Miss ... ‘To-morrow will be a very happy day for me;’ and I think it must have been. Where are anarchists and socialists before such a universal burst of loyalty—not of respect only, but of heartfelt filial love?—Nowhere! Their very existence seems ridiculous. I saw all from the Beaumonts’ in Piccadilly Terrace, where a most kind hostess managed all most beautifully for us, and, entering through the garden, we had neither heat nor crowd to fear. No small part of the sight was the crowd itself—the unfailing good-humour increased by the extreme kindness of the police towards fainting women and all who needed their help. The Colonial procession was charming—its young representatives rode so well, and were in themselves such splendid specimens of humanity, and so picturesquely equipped. Then the group of old English generals on horseback drew every eye, and the sixteen carriages of princesses, amongst whom the Duchess of Teck was far more cheered than any one except the Queen herself. And lastly came the cream-coloured horses with their golden-coated footmen, and the beloved Lady herself—the ‘Mother of the Land,’—every inch a queen, royal most exceedingly, but with an expression of such love, such gratitude, such devotion, such thankfulness! Oh, no one felt for and with her only as a sovereign; it was a far closer tie than that.

“In the evening, Mrs. Tilt and her sister went with me to the Maxwell-Lytes on the top of the Record Tower, whence we saw the bonfires round London light up one by one, and St. Paul’s in silver light—a glorified spiritual church rising out of the darkness of the city against the deep blue sky. Far more than the illuminations of the noisy streets, it was a fitting end to so solemn and momentous a day.

“And on Wednesday I was in the Green Park, and heard the thousands of school-children sing their farewell to the Queen as she went away to Windsor.”

“March 1897.—I think the reviews of the first three volumes of my ‘Story’ must be coming to an end now. I have had them all sent to me, and very amusing they have been, mostly recalling the dictum of Disraeli, that ‘critics are those who have failed in art and literature.’ Many criticisms have been kind. One or two, but not more, have been rather clever, and some of the fault-finding ones would have been very instructive if I had not so entirely agreed with them at the outset on all their main points—that I was a mere nobody, that my life was wholly without importance, and that it was shocking to see parts of the story in print, especially the painful episode which I called ‘The Roman Catholic Conspiracy;’ for reviewers, of course, could not know the anguish it cost when I was led to publish that chapter, by its being my one chance of giving the true version of a story of which so many false versions had been given already. However, it is as Zola says, ‘Every author must, at the outset, swallow his toad,’ i.e., some malicious attack in the periodicals of the day; only I think my toads become more numerous and venomous as years go on.

“Some of the reviews are very funny indeed. The Saturday Review of ‘A Monument of Self-Sufficiency’ contrives to read (oh! where?) ‘how sweet and amenable and clever Augustus was,’ but is so shocked by a book ‘wholly without delicacy’ that it—‘cannot promise to read any more of it’!! The British Review, which thinks me an absolute beast, has a stirring article on ‘Myself in Three Volumes.’ The Pall Mall Gazette dwells upon their ‘bedside sentiment and goody-goody twaddle,’ and is ‘filled with genuine pity for a man who can attach importance to a life so trivial.’ The Athenæum describes me as a mere ‘literary valet.’ The New York Tribune finds the book ‘the continuous wail of a very garrulous person.’ The reviewer in the Bookbuyer speaks of the ‘irritation and occasional fierce anger’ which the book arouses in him(!). The New York Independent dwells upon my ‘want not only of all kindly sense of humour, but also of propriety.’ It is long since the National Observer has met with an author ‘so garrulous or so self-complacent.’ Finally, the Allahabad Pioneer (what a name!) votes that Mr. Hare’s chatter is ‘becoming a prodigious nuisance,’ and ‘if it had its deserts his book would make its way, and pretty quickly, to the pastry-cook and the trunk-maker.’

“What fun! Yet I am glad that most of the more respectable reviews say exactly the opposite, and certainly the public does not seem to agree with those I have quoted; it would be terribly expensive if it did. They are only birds of prey with their beaks cut and their claws pulled out, and if a book is found to be interesting, people read it whatever they say. They influence nobody, except just at first those who choose books for lending libraries.

“What is really almost irritating is the very ragtag and bobtail of reviews, whose writers can scarcely even glance at the books they are penny-a-lining—such as the Table, which ‘explains’ that ‘my grandmother was the wife of Archdeacon Hare;’ as another (I have lost it now) which speaks of ‘Priscilla Maurice, second wife of Julius Hare;’ as the Weekly Register, which reviews the life of ‘Esmeralda,’ or the student of the book who writes in The Dial and describes my life at ‘Balliol College,’ or Household Words (copied by the Free-thinker and several other even inferior reviews), which ‘quotes’ in full a long story about Mr. Gladstone and Father Healy which is not to be found in the ‘Story’ at all.

“Then, did you see Mr. Murray’s letter to the Times, which certainly gives a touching picture of the spirit of self-sacrifice which actuates publishers in their daily life, for he announces that my ‘Handbook of Berks, Bucks, and Oxon,’ which had three editions before his father’s death, and on which the author was only paid altogether £152, left, at that death, a deficit of £158!! I was sorry, all the same, that he was annoyed at my description of his father wrapt in his enveloppe de glace; for old Mr. Murray (who had cut me dead for all the years since the appearance of my Italian Handbooks) asked me to shake hands with him once again a few months before he died, which I did most cordially.”

“Holmhurst, August 29, 1897.— ...With me, life has rippled on through several months, only I have been away for some days with the Lowthers to draw under Carlandi, and quite lately I have sorrowed bitterly at the early death of my dear Inverurie, kindest and most affectionate of young friends. I feel his being taken so much myself that I cannot bear even to think of what it must be to his nearest belongings; and yet—while absolutely free from all humbug—surely never was there any young man more simply and trustfully prepared for an early death.

“He cared less for ‘the world’ than any young fellow I have ever known, and was more in love with his family, his homes, and their surroundings.

“Last week I was for three nights at Hurstmonceaux, actually—for the first time in thirty-seven years—at my old home of Lime. What a mixture of emotions it was; but within all is so changed, I could not recall my mother and Lea there; and the present inhabitants, the young Baron and Baroness von Roemer, were boundlessly good to me. Outside, there were many spots alive with old memories, especially in the garden, where my mother and I lived so much alone—our earthly Paradise. Did you know that the word Paradeisos means a garden?

“How I should like you to know the peculiar surroundings of Lime, different to those of any other place I have seen—the brown parched sun-dried uplands, the bosky ferny hollows, the reedy pools fragrant with mint, the eternal variety of pink lights and grey shadows on the soft downs beyond the wide Levels, which recall O’Hara’s lines—

“We made a little excursion. In my very early childhood I was once at the ever-haunted Warbleton Priory, and the recollection of its utter weirdness and of the skulls kept there had always so remained with me that I had quite longed to see it again. The many stories about it are such as ought never to be told, only whispered. The very approaches have a mystery. No one will stay there now, even by broadest daylight; so we went to an old manor near Rushlake Green for the keys, but found even that so bolted and barred that we were long in obtaining them. ‘Oh no, there is never any one there,’ said the servant, ‘but you must go on till you come to a black gate, then drive in.’ To reach this, we followed a lane with well-built cottages, but they were deserted, their windows broken and their gardens overgrown; no one could live so near the accursed spot. Through the black gate we enter dark woods. A cart-track exists, winding through thickets with fine oaks interspersed, and by reedy ponds dense with waving cotton-plants. Then we cross open fields entirely covered with thistles—enough to seed all Sussex—for no one will work there. Then, through another black gate, we enter a turf-grown space, with lovely distant view between old trees, and there, with high red-tiled roofs, golden here and there with lichen, is a forlorn and mossy but handsome old stone house, built from and rising amidst other remains of an Augustinian priory. In its little garden are roses, and box bushes which have once been clipped into shapes. Inside, the mildewed rooms have some scanty remnants of their old furniture. In one of them, where a most terrible murder was committed, the blood then shed still comes up through the floor—a dark awful pool which no carpenter’s work can efface. The most frightful sounds, cries, and shrieks of anguish, rumblings and clankings, even apparently explosions, are always heard by night, and sometimes by day. In the principal room of the ground floor, in the recess of a window, are two skulls. They are believed to be those of two brothers who fought here and both fell dead. From one, the lower jaw has fallen down, increasing its ghastly effect. Successive generations of farmers have buried them, and instantly everything has gone wrong on the farm and all the cattle have died: now they have altogether abandoned a hopeless struggle with the unseen world. Besides this there is a tradition—often verified—that if any one touches the skulls, within twelve hours they pass through the valley of the shadow of Death. So naturally Warbleton Priory is left to the undisputed possession of its demon-ghosts.”

“Thoresby, Oct. 22, 1897.—I began my little tour of visits at Maiden Bradley.... You know how it is almost the only remnant the title possesses from the once vast Somerset estates. The 12th Duke left everything he possibly could away, and when the present Duke and Duchess succeeded, they were pictureless, bookless, almost spoonless. Still they were determined to make the best of it. ‘He could not take away our future: we will not lament over all that is lost, but enjoy to the very utmost what we have;’ this has been the rule of their existence, and so ‘Algie and Susie,’ as they, always speak of each other, have had a most delightful life, enjoying and giving enjoyment. No one ever looked more ducal than this genial, hearty, handsome Duke: no one brighter or pleasanter than his Duchess: ‘all who have to do with her find nothing but courtesy, gentleness, and goodness,’ as Brantôme wrote of Claude of France. I liked my visit extremely. My fellow-guests were Sir E. Poynter of the Royal Academy, Lady Heytesbury, and Mrs. Kelly, an authoress. With the last I saw stately Longleat, which I had not visited since I was fourteen, and—as horses are the one indulgence the Duke gives himself—he drove us luxuriously about the country on his coach-and-four.

“The following week was delightful—with the Boynes in their beautiful hill-set home. They took me glorious excursions, and we picnicked out in beautiful places five days running. One day we went to Kinlet—a really great house, as well kept by Swedish maids (its mistress is a Swede) as if there were a dozen men-servants. And the last day we went to a real still-standing Norman farmhouse (Millichope), with its original round arched doors and windows.

“From Burwarton I went on to my pleasant cousin’s, the Francis Bridgemans, close to that beautiful church at Tong, and we spent a day with Francis’s kind old father, Lord Bradford, at Weston, and he showed us all the pictures and treasures in the house, and drove us about in his sociable to the ‘Temple of Diana’ and other points of interest in the park of a very comfortable well-to-do place.

“Next, I visited Lady Margaret Herbert (daughter of my dear Lady Carnarvon) as châtelaine at Teversal manor in Notts, a smoky wind-stricken country, but with Hardwicke and other fine houses to see. The charming aunt of my hostess, Lady Guendolen, was living with her as chaperon, none the worse in body for being a strict vegetarian, and in mind the sunniest of the sunny, delightful to be with.

I was glad to be taken to spend the day at Bestwood, the Duke of St. Alban’s modern place, its woods an oasis in the wilderness, and its honours were charmingly done by Lady Sybil Beauclerk and her good-looking brother Burford. In the Duchess’s room were a series of albums with all the original drawings for Dickens’s works. All the best pictures were burnt in a fire.

“The Ladies Herbert sometimes, but in a far-away sense, remind me of their mother, who was quite the most perfectly brilliant person I have ever known. I have always heard that she was this even as a girl, and that it was a perpetual surprise to her parents, who were very inferior people. Lady Dufferin used to say that they were like savages who had found a watch.

“Taking stern dismal Bolsover—its delicate carvings utterly ruined by ‘trippers’—on the way, I came on to meet a large party here at Thoresby, which is in more than usual autumnal forest glory. We have just been spending the afternoon at Welbeck, shown all the improvements by Mrs. Dallas Yorke, in the absence of the tall handsome Duchess, who, however, returned before we left. One did not wonder that she is such a special joy to the old people of the place, because they had ‘been so long without a duchess, and when there was one long ago, it was only such a little one.’ She has built a delightful gallery—Florence-fashion—between the old house and the new, and hung it with a galaxy of old prints, and has made fascinating little terrace-gardens, and edged their beds with dwarf lavender, so that ‘when the ladies’ dresses brush against it, its scent may be wafted into the house.’

“And meantime my thoughts have been much at Llandaff, with the cousin [583] who was the dearest friend of my boyhood, seeming to pass with her through the closing scenes of the good Dean’s life, and to see him as she did, lying in his cathedral, dressed in his surplice, in the majesty of eternal repose.”

“Holmhurst, Nov. 16, 1897.—Here I am again in quietude, thinking of you very much in your last days at Llandaff; busy over the building of which I am architect, overseer, a hundred things at once, and planting a great deal, with a reminiscence of Dumbiedykes in Walter Scott—‘Be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, while you’re sleeping.’ My only companions now are the pleasant Hospitallers in the little Hospice, whom I constantly meet in the garden and wood walks. I wish you could see their little house, and the late roses lingering on their porch.

“I have been away for a week. Lady Stanhope took me from Chevening to see Lullingstone Castle in Kent, the old house of the Dykes, with a good brick gateway, a richly ceilinged upper gallery, and a chapel with interesting tombs. Two days afterwards, Lady Chetwynd took me to a finer place—Chawton in Hants, where the Knights, of Godmersham, live now, representing several old extinct families, especially the Lewknors, with whom I am very familiar through their tombs scattered all over Sussex, and who are commemorated at Chawton by many portraits and fine tapestried needlework. A little bookcase with a globe outside and a series of Elzevir Histories of the World within, was very attractive.

“Then I went to stay with ‘the richest man in the world,’ genial unassuming Mr. Astor, in his beautiful Cliveden, much improved since he bought it from its ducal owners, and enriched within by glorious portraits of Reynolds and Romney, and without by the noble terrace parapet of the Villa Borghese and its fountains, already looking here a natural part of the Buckinghamshire landscape, and replaced on its old site by a copy, which is just the same to nineteenth-century Italians! All the splendid sarcophagi and even the marble benches of the world-famous villa are now also at Cliveden, where they are more valued than at Rome. We had a charming party—Jane, Lady Churchill, retaining in advancing years ‘sa marche de déesse sur les nues,’[584] for which she was famous in her youth; the Lord Chancellor, Lady Halsbury, and a daughter; pretty gentle Princess Löwenstein; the Duchess of Roxburghe, ever wreathed in smiles of geniality and kindness, with two very tall agreeable daughters; Lord Sandwich, as bubbling with fun as when he was a young man; Lord and Lady Stanhope—always salt of the earth; with Mr. Marshall Hall and Sir Arthur Sullivan as geniuses; so, as you will see, ‘une élite très intelligente.’ Every one of these delightful people, too, was simplicity itself, rare as that virtue is to find. I see that Queen Adelaide, as Duchess of Clarence, wrote to Gabrielle von Bülow—‘How rarely you meet a really simple man or woman in our great world; they would be hard to find even with Diogenes’ lantern.’ Certainly ‘learned’ people are scarcely ever agreeable. There is a very good sentence in Hamerton about that—‘A good mental condition includes just as much culture as is necessary to the development of the faculties, but not any burden of erudition heavy enough to diminish, as erudition so often does, the promptitude or elasticity of the mind.’

“On Sunday morning we all went to the beautifully situated little church at Hedsor, arriving early and seeing the congregation wind up the steep grassy hill as to a church in Dalecarlia. In the afternoon we were driven about the grounds of Cliveden to the principal points—Waldo Story’s grand fountain in the avenue and his noble landing-place on the river. Exquisitely beautiful were the peace of the still autumn evening, the amber and golden tints of the woods, and the wide river with its reflections. Mr. Astor has attended to all the historic associations of the spot; placing a fine statue of Marlborough in the temple built by Lord Orkney, who was one of his generals, and portraits of Lady Shrewsbury and her Duke of Buckingham, and of Frederick and Augusta of Wales, in the successor of the house where they lived. Another portrait of Frederick, with his three sisters, Anne, Emily, and Caroline, all playing on musical instruments, has the old house in the background. Our host seemed to me quite absolutely frank and delightful; indeed, Surrey’s lines on Sir T. Wyatt might be applied to him—

“Now, I am enjoying the time alone at home, with its much-reading opportunity, and I often think that my natural bent would have been to enjoy it quite as much as a boy, when all the family except you treated me not only as a consummate dunce, but a hopeless dunce; and when almost every book was thought wicked, or at best quite unsuited for a boy’s digestion. Now, eyes ache often, but I may say with Lady M. Wortley Montagu, ‘If relays of eyes were to be ordered like post-horses, I would admit none but silent companions.’

“Les années d’ennui et de solitude lui firent lire bien des livres’—part of Catherine II.’s epitaph on herself—is certainly true in my case. Just now I have been labouring through the two long thick volumes which are called ‘Memoirs of Tennyson,’ though, when you close them, you have less idea of what the man was like than when you began—of the rude, rugged old egotist, who was yet almost sublimely picturesque; of the aged sage, who in dress, language, manners was always posing for the adoration of strangers, and furious if he did not get it, or—if he did. The book is most provoking, for it would by no means have destroyed the hero to have truthfully described the man.

“There have been no end of hard-worked boy-friends here for Sundays, and it is no trouble, but very much the contrary. We always get on together capitally—

“I think it is Frederick Locker who says that one gradually finds out how much of the affection one inspires is ‘reflected.’ ‘Though thou lose all that thou deemest happiness, if thou canst but make the happiness of others, thou shall find it again in thine own heart,’ is a sentence of George Ebers, of which I mentally leave out as irrelevant the conclusion—‘Is not this playing at being God Almighty?’”

“Holmhurst, August 1, 1898.—I have been much in London since I wrote last, enjoying the garden-parties at Sion, Osterley, Holland House, Hatfield, Lady Penrhyn’s, Lady Portman’s, &c., and seeing many pleasant people, mostly ‘grandes dames de par le monde.’ Yet, in the season, it is all too great a hurry; one seldom has time to become really acquainted with any one; there are few who have even sufficient personality to leave an individual impression on the mind; if any one does, he or she is ‘like a tree in the steppe’ in the monotony of London life. I dined out daily for two months, but how difficult it is to remember any dinner-party! ‘Who cares for the whipped cream of London society?’ was a saying of Walter Scott. I do recollect one dinner, however, at Mr. Knowles’s, from the fine effect of light on Leighton’s ‘Clytie,’ the principal ornament of his dining-room, all the illumination being given to one fold of the dress, and the rest effectively left in shadow. One charming person whom I remember was Lady Blake, lately returned to England with her husband, who had been governor of Jamaica. She was fond of tame animals. ‘In Jamaica,’ she said, ‘I often had a large snake coiled round my waist; my tiger-cat I generally led by a string, for I never knew what he might do, but my tame crocodile always quietly followed me.’ She was Irish—a Bernal Osborne. ‘Oh, I assure you the Irish are very good to us, quite charming, in fact.’ ‘But if you do anything they don’t like, they kill you.’—‘Naturally.’

“On July 11 I was at Miss Fleetwood Wilson’s wedding to Prince Dolgorouki, and also at Lady Mary Savile’s in the Church of the Assumption, which was a most picturesque ceremony, performed by Cardinal Vaughan—such a fine cardinal!—in a jewelled mitre, with all accompaniments of cross-bearers, incense-swingers, &c.

“The nobly Christian death of Mr. Gladstone and the almost ludicrous apotheosis of one who, in his political life, did nothing and undid so much, were events of the spring. I have personally more individual recollection of his kindness to those who needed it than of his witty sayings; but they were constant. ‘What do you think of Purcell’s Life of Manning?’ some one said to him shortly before the end. ‘I think that Manning need have nothing to fear at the day of judgment.’ He was formidable to strangers, chiefly on account of ‘those demoniac eyes of his,’ as Cardinal Alcander said of Luther; and though in his private capacity he was all goodness, it seemed inconsistent with his public one. Yet what admirers he had! I remember his saying once to Lord Houghton, ‘I lead the life of a dog,’ and the answer, ‘Yes, of a St. Bernard—the saviour of men.’ Joseph Parker used to describe him as ‘the greatest Englishman of the century, he was so massive, sincere, and majestic. If he had had humour he would have been too good to live, but eagles don’t laugh.’

“How much and long people have talked of him, and now what a silence will fall upon it all. An amusing breakfast at Mr. Leveson’s has just been recalled to me, where Lady Marian Alford said, ‘Gladstone really puts his foot in it so often, he is a perfect centipede.’ Directly after, a wasp lighted on the breakfast-table and there was some question of killing it. ‘Oh, don’t; I can’t bear killing anything,’ cried Lady Marian. ‘What! not even a centipede?’ quietly said Lord Lyons, who was present.

“I was with Mrs. John Dundas at Holt in Wiltshire, where the little village once prospered exceedingly owing to its mineral spring. Ten smart carriages used to wait round its fountain at once whilst their owners drank the waters, and a house is pointed out where some Duchess or other died. Then the fashion changed, and drainage was allowed to filter into the spring, and Holt sank into obscurity.

“We went to see Mr. Moseley, the admirable old Rector, who is half-paralysed. A farmer had been to him to ask whether he did not think he might get his hay in on a Sunday afternoon, as the weather was likely to change, and he answered, ‘Certainly; it is God’s hay; save it by all means.’ How unlike most English priests, but how Christ-like—‘personne moins prêtre que Jesus Christ.’ ‘From the fetters of spiritual narrowness, Good Lord deliver us,’ is a petition which I feel more and more ought to be added to the Litany.[586] Yet in many houses I visit I still find much of the old Sabbath-bondage remaining, though certainly it is true that ‘we almost sigh with relief when we discover that even saints can find monotony monotonous.’

“There is a perfect cordon of drawable old manor-houses round Holt, and it is only two miles from Bradford-on-Avon, from which the great town in Yorkshire was colonised, and which owes much of its foreign look to French refugees. Its houses rise high, tier above tier, on the hillside, blue-grey against the sky. Over the Avon is a beautiful bridge with a fine old bracketed mass-chapel, long used as a lock-up. A tiny Saxon church—the only real one probably in England—has been discovered walled up into cottages; and there is a noble old ‘palace’ of the Dukes of Kingston standing in high-terraced gardens. Great Chalfield is a most lovely Tudor house, with an old chapel and moat. At South Wraxhall how I recalled many visits from my miserable so-called tutors at Lyncombe, in days of penury and starvation. How indefinite the misty future seemed in the thinking-time which those long solitary rambles afforded, and how I longed to penetrate it. At fifteen ‘j’ai trop voulu, des choses infinies,’ but I was at a parting of the ways of life then, and I think I decided in those early days to try to do the best I could here, and leave the eternities and infinities—of which I heard so much more than of realities—to take care of themselves, for:—

“But I am moralising too much and must return to my old houses, which were full of smugglers formerly—‘moonrakers’ they called them in Wiltshire, because many of the smuggled goods were concealed in the ponds, and when the excisemen caught the smugglers extracting them at night, and demanded what they were doing, they answered, ‘Oh, we are raking out the moon.’ I was working in Shropshire for some time after my Wiltshire visit, inspecting almost every church and old house for my book, and hospitably entertained by genial Fred Swete at Oswestry and the Misses Windsor Clive at beautiful Oakly Park near Ludlow.

“While in London I went for two days to Bulstrode, which the late Duke of Somerset left to his youngest daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, who is the most charming of hostesses, but the place is disappointing—a very large modern villa, only one room remaining of the old house where Mrs. Delany lived so much with Margaret, Duchess of Portland, and nothing of that of Judge Jeffreys, which preceded it. It contains an early portrait of Shakspeare, and a most grand Sir Joshua of a Mrs. Weddell. We dawdled most of the day in the verandah. Oh, the waste of time in country-house visits; but Lady Guendolen had much that was pleasant to tell of her mother, the witty (Sheridan) Duchess of Somerset. ‘She was once at a bazaar selling things, and a fat, burly, plethoric farmer asked her the price of something and she mentioned it. The price seemed to him absurd. ‘Do you take me for the Prodigal,’ he said. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied; ‘I take you for the fatted calf.’ This made Graham Vivian, who was one of the party, recollect. ‘I was walking by the Duchess’s donkey-chair, and suddenly the donkey brayed horribly. “Will he do it again?” said the Duchess. “Not unless he hears another,” answered the donkey-boy. “Then mind you don’t sneeze,” said the Duchess, turning to me.’

“About Mr. L., who always speaks his mind, Lady Guendolen was very amusing:—‘Mr. L. took me in to dinner, and I thought I was making myself very agreeable to him, when he suddenly said—“Talk to your neighbour on the other side.” I felt humiliated, but I thought he fancied I couldn’t, so I did, and went on, and never spoke another word to Mr. L. I told him of it afterwards, that he had hurt me so much that I dreamt of it, and I told him my dream—that I said to him that I was considered to become very amusing after I had had two glasses of wine, and he answered, ‘Then, my dear lady, you must have been most uncommonly sober this evening.’”

“Holmhurst, August 21, 1898.—I have been for three days at Hurstmonceaux, doubly picturesque in the burnt turf of this hot summer, upon which the massy foliage of the trees is embossed as in Titian’s landscapes. I always feel there, as nowhere else except in the views of the Roman Campagna from the Alban Hills, the supreme beauty of looking down upon vast stretches of flat pasture-land, reaching for ten miles or more, and iridescent in its pink and blue cloud-shadows, with here and there a ripple of delicate green in softest glamour of quivering light. Every hour one sees it change—luminous with long lines of natural shadow, purple from drifting storm-clouds—

It is a pleasure now to be there, though life there is living amongst the sepulchres. ‘La morte, l’estrema visitatrice,’[587] has come to all I knew, and the gravestones of most of them are moss-grown—not only of all the family of my childhood, but of all the neighbours, and all that generation of poor people. How often there comes into one’s mind something like the lines often repeated in the cemetery of Port-Royal—

‘Ce n’est pas le temps qui passe, ce sont les hommes,’ was a saying of Louis Philippe. How different everything is to the time which Hurstmonceaux recalls; all hurry now and energy and updoing, and then such an extreme quietude of intellectual pursuits, in which every uninitiated visitor was considered an unendurable bore, if, however interesting he might be in himself, he did not fall in with the mutual admiration society of which the Rectory was the axis. I remember how Thomas Carlyle and Monckton Milnes, with his ‘gay and airy mind,’[588] were amongst those so considered, for they had naturally their outside views and intelligence, and the Rectory group never tried for a moment to penetrate ‘l’écorce exterieur de leur vie;’ and, while bristling with prejudices themselves, they always found much to be shocked at in every outside person they came across. It seemed oddly apropos in all the remembrance of the closed Hurstmonceaux life to read in Madame de Montagu—‘It is not a good thing for everybody to see each other every day and too closely; they risk becoming unconscious egoists, critics, rulers, or subjects, and exhaust themselves by revolving perpetually on a tiny axis.’ Yet in many ways how much more really interesting the life was then; how picturesque Uncle Julius’s enthusiasm, how pathetic his pathos over the books which were his realities; how interesting the conversation, and how genial the courtesy of such constant visitors as Bunsen and Landor, though the latter was such a perfect original, ‘dressed in classical adorning,’ as Arthur Young said of some one; then how unruffled my dearest mother’s temper, over which even Aunt Esther’s strenuous exactions were powerless; and how ceaseless the flow of her love—not charity, as people use the word now—to the poor of the cottages in the hazel-fringed lanes around her, whose cares she made her own, more moved and stirred by the querulous mutterings of Mrs. Burchett or Mrs. Cornford than by the most important events of English politics or the world’s history. Certainly she had a wonderful power with the poor, and an influence which has never passed away, for she had the rare art of entering into and understanding all their feelings; and then, when with them, she always gave them her whole attention. I feel that my two books give very different ideas of what Hurstmonceaux was fifty years ago, but both are quite true; only the ‘Memorials of a Quiet Life’ is the inside, and the ‘Story of my Life’ the outside view. How much of life, after sixty, consists in retrospect! It is, as Fanny Kemble says—

One great difference of feeling older is that one is afraid to put off doing anything. ‘By the street of By-and-by, you come to the house of Nowhere,’ is an admirable Spanish proverb.

“I have greatly enjoyed the vivid, charming, simple letters of Mary Sibylla Holland—‘anche oggi si sente una dolcezza d’affetto a leggere quel libro.’”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 29, 1898.—The building and changes here go on well, but very slowly, a result of having the work done with my own stone, and as much as possible by the men of our village. I think all will look well in the end. Not a chair or a book will be moved from the older part of the house, consecrated by my mother’s memory, but room will be given for the many things connected with Esmeralda, which I bought back at Sir Edward Paul’s sale, and, if I survive her, for many precious pieces of furniture, pictures, prints, and books from Norwich which Mrs. Vaughan says that she has left me. Where you will remember a steep grass bank, there is now a double stone terrace, with vases and obelisks, and luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers edged with stone, copied as a whole from the Italian Villa Lante near Viterbo. At the end are a staircase and gateway to the Solitude, the ‘Ave-Vale Gate,’ with ‘Ave’ on the outside and ‘Vale’ within. Cypresses are growing up beside it to enhance the impression of Italy, which is further carried out in a widening staircase from the centre of the terrace, with lead vases on the piers, copied in design and proportions from one at the Villa Arson near Nice. Just now, in this hot noon-day, the gorgeous flowers against the stone parapet, and background of brown-green ilex and blue-green pine are really very Italian, while below in the meadows all is as English as it can be, the cows feeding in the rich grass, the heavy rounded masses of oak foliage, and the misty sea asleep in the motionless heat. Nothing seems to move, except my little black Pomeranian spitz, Nero, frisking and barking at the butterflies. I am sure that much the happiest part of my present life is that spent at home, though there is nothing to tell about it—‘l’histoire ne se soucie pas des heureux.’

“Emmie Penrhyn is here, whose visits are always an unusual pleasure to me, and who is one of the dearest relations I have left, partly because, more than any one else, she has a distant likeness to my mother. She lives happily and most usefully at Richmond in a very little world, with a weak body but an all-sufficing soul.

“I have grieved so truly over the news of Ranulph Mostyn’s death in India, that I could not help writing to his mother. Yet I always hesitate about whether letters of condolence can be of any comfort, and can only act upon the knowledge that I like myself to have them in any great sorrow. No Christian disquisitions, however: they always seem forced and unmeaning. ‘Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief;’ that is somewhere in Shakspeare. Thirlwall’s Letters have an excellent passage about them—‘Expressions of general condolence may be welcome as tokens of goodwill, but can scarcely exert any general alleviating power. The afflicted ones stand within a circle of images and feelings of their own, which, painful as they may be, they would not part with for worlds. Any attempt to draw them out of that circle can only inflict a useless annoyance.”

“Holmhurst, Oct. 16, 1898.—I am alone this evening; the wind is wailing a dirge, and ‘the dark sea drinks in the greyness of the sky.’[589] But I have been away for three weeks. First to the sisters of my old friend Willie Milligan, who now live in the Barrington dower-house at Shrivenham, close to Beckett, the ideal ‘great house’ of my boyhood, so stately and luxurious. Now, so are the mighty fallen, it is let to some Australians, and the family—unless helped by an heiress—can never afford to live there again. Then I was with the delightful Boynes in the high Shropshire uplands, seeing in the most charming way many beautiful old houses. I saw two more from my next visit at Oxton in Notts—Wiverton, and Annesley where the Miss Chaworth Musters, beloved by Byron, once walked on the beautiful old terraces. Another echo from my long-ago came from my visit to Streatlam, where I so often was in my young days, and which is now inhabited by Lord Strathmore’s sister, Lady Frances Trevanion, and her pleasant cheery husband, both most kind cousins to me. The long galleries are filled with family portraits, including a great one of Mary Eleanor Bowes, whose strange story I have so often told. Lady Frances’s time is greatly taken up by the manners and morals of her dogs, the very smallest and noisiest I ever saw. They must be the sort of dogs Chaucer speaks of—

“It was a short journey from Streatlam to Kiplin, the beautiful old house of Admiral Carpenter.... He told me how his grandfather had six sons, Talbots, and was fond of making them all lie down full length on the dining-room floor, joining one another, that he might see how many yards of sons he had! I saw Richmond from Kiplin: what a beautiful place, few abroad equal to it.

“But my most interesting visit was that to Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, rising, with a fortified central gate-tower, from a deep still moat, and with an inner courtyard full of flowers. It has dark tapestried rooms, several priest’s hiding-holes, ghosts of a lady and a child, and a murder-room, stained with the blood of a priest whom a squire of Edward IV.’s time slew when he caught him chucking his wife under the chin.[590] Then there are all the refined luxuries of fast-day dinners, evening prayers in the chapel with a congregation of maids veiled like nuns, and a live Bishop (of Portsmouth), in violet robes and gold cross and chain, to officiate.

“Such a bishop he is! such a ripple of wit and wisdom! and so full of playfulness! I read and copied somewhere—“A man after God’s own heart is never a one-sided man. He is not wholly spiritual, he is not wholly natural; he is not all earnestness, he is not all play; he cannot be all things at once, and therefore he is all things by turns.”[591] Our Bishop at Baddesley was just like this in his fun, in his love of cats, and never more charming than when he gathered up all the scraps of toast left at breakfast, and throwing open one of the windows, called ‘Quack, quack!’ and crowds of ducks came rushing under the bridge over the moat to scramble for them, one brown duck, which the Bishop called ‘the orphan,’ being especially cared for. Speaking of the frequent ignorance of religious intolerance led him to tell of the people of Imola and Brigatella, who were always quarrelling. When the priest at Brigatella began the paschal mass with ‘Christus immolatus est,’ his congregation thought it was some compliment to the people of Imola, and declared they would kill him unless he began ‘Christus brigatellatus est.’

“He had been with the Calthorpes of Woodland Vale to see an old house of theirs in the Isle of Wight, which was quite deserted, and in the very room where it occurred was told the reason why. A friend who had come there to stay with Mr. Calthorpe saw there, in the dawn of the morning, an old woman sitting knitting at the foot of the bed; he even heard the click of the knitting-needles. At first he thought she had mistaken the room, but it happened again the next day. The third time it happened, he kicked out. The old woman then turned round her face towards him, and displayed—a death’s-head. Another guest met the old woman on the stairs and equally saw the death’s-head. No servant would stay in the house, and now it is pulled down.

“After the evening service in the chapel, the Bishop went to have a cigar before going to bed. When I excused myself from joining him, he told of Benedict XIV., who offered a pinch of snuff to one of his Cardinals. ‘Santo padre, non ho quel vizio,’ he answered. ‘Se fosse vizio, tu l’avrei,’ said the Pope.

“Most charming of all was the châtelaine, the widow of my cousin Heneage Dering, whose first wife was her aunt, Lady Chatterton, the well-known novelist. The niece (‘Pysie’ Orpen) was then married to Marmion Ferrers, the last of a famous Catholic family lineally descended from the Earl of Derby attainted in the Wars of the Roses, and himself legally Baron Compton and De Ferrers, though he never claimed the title on account of his poverty and having no son. He was the pleasantest and most genial of men—‘the old squire’ he used to be called in Warwickshire. One day he found an old woman stealing his wood, and, when she expected a great scolding, he only said, ‘That load of wood is a great deal too heavy for you; you must let me carry it home for you,’ and he did. Another day he caught three poachers, and said, ‘Come, now, let us have it out!’ and they pulled off their coats and had a regular set-to: he floored two of them, he was so strong, and then he let them all go.

“His life seems to have been made up of deeds of faith and charity, but his property fell into decadence and must have been sold, if Heneage Dering, who had married his wife’s aunt, had not come to the rescue. They all lived together in the old house, mediaevally, almost mediaeval even in their dress; and after Lady Chatterton died, and then Marmion Ferrers, a final break-up of the remaining links with the past was prevented by the marriage of Heneage Dering with the widowed ‘Pysie.’ They were perfectly happy for several years, but he always said ‘a sudden death is the happiest death,’ and so in 1892 it was.

and the Catholic religion nourishes as much at Baddesley still as it did in the time of Sir Edward Ferrers, who founded this branch of the family in 1517, and left ‘five masses in worship of the five wounds principal that Our Lord suffered in His bitter Passion,’ and who is depicted kneeling before a crucifix, with the legend ‘Amor meus crucifixus est’ issuing from his mouth. On Sunday afternoon we went to hear the Benediction service beautifully sung by the invisible nuns of a convent close by—a convent of ‘Colettines’ from Bruges, a severe form of Poor Clares, founded here in 1850, the first of the Order since the Dissolution. A niece of Lord Clifford was their abbess. There are 250 Catholics at Baddesley.

“As we drove to Warwick, we passed through a village where the learned Dr. Parr was rector. ‘He took pupils,’ said the Bishop. ‘They were not very bright. One of them said, “I make a point of never believing anything I do not understand.” “Then your creed must be most uncommonly brief,” said Dr. Parr.’

“In returning home, I lingered one day with my kind friend E. Mathews at Sonning. I had often longed to go there on a pilgrimage to dear Hugh Pearson’s grave, and never before been able. What a lovely village it is, with its old red roofs nestling under tufted trees, and how fragrant is the beloved memory of the true pastor who gave himself so royally for his people. ‘Go and break it to my family,’ were his first words when told he could not live, meaning by his family his parishioners, the people in the village, who loved him so, and amongst whom he was almost ideally happy, for he was not only always striving to do good for the poor and helpless, but was successful in doing it.

“My volume on ‘Shropshire’ has come out—another book-child launched into public life.”

“Belvoir Castle, Nov. 18, 1898.—I have been with my dear Lowthers at Campsea Ashe, enjoying their large party of pleasant musicianers, Countess Valda Gleichen, radiant Mrs. Arkwright of the lovely voice, &c., but enjoying much more two quiet days with the family when the others were gone. Mrs. L. took me to Crowe Hall, a moated house with a delightful old lady-farmeress, of the hard-working high-thinking type, so familiar in my boyhood, but almost extinct in these days of over-dressed, gig-driving, pianoforte-strumming minxes.

“One of those kind and characteristic telegrams of the Duchess of Rutland, extending over a whole page, has brought me here, where there is a large party too, almost entirely composed of the Duke’s innumerable nephews and nieces. As I do not either shoot or care for the regular evening ball in the gallery, what I like best is the daily walk with the Duke and Duchess, meeting them in the hall as the clock strikes 12.15, and wandering in the wood walks or on the nearer terraces, already fragrant with violets, listening to the Duke’s reminiscences of his own past and Belvoir’s past, always of endless interest. How I pity my host and hostess in their over-anxious cares about their immense estates; but they must be comforted themselves by the pleasure they are able to give. Sightseers are admitted always, and the great Midland towns daily pour their legions into these beautiful woods: they do no harm and behave wonderfully well, but one almost feels as if the public, who most enjoy it, ought to help to keep up the place. In the case of Belvoir, the scourge of the death-duties affects what is the pleasaunce of thousands.

“I went with Mrs. G. Drummond to Bottesford, where there is such a grand series of monuments of the Earls of Rutland and their families, including one of some children who died by witchcraft. Their nurse was condemned to be burnt for it, but said, ‘If I am guilty, may this bit of bread choke me,’ and it did! The Duchess Elizabeth, who made all the charming walks here, moved all the Dukes to her new mausoleum in the Belvoir woods, but she left the Earls at Bottesford.

“Hearing of her again here has recalled much that Lady Waterford used to tell me of the Duchess Isabella, who was called ‘Was a bella’ in her later years. She used to describe the painting of her fine portrait by Sir Joshua, how he would rush forward and look closely into her eyes, take her well in, and then go as far back as possible and look at the general effect in a distant glass, chiefly making his picture from that. Lady Adeliza Manners once met a very beautiful peasant girl near Belvoir, very beautiful except that she had lost one of her best front teeth. ‘What a misfortune,’ said Lady A.; ‘how could it have happened?’—‘Oh, the Duchess (Isabella) had lost one of her front teeth, so she forced me to have mine taken out to replace it.’

“I wonder if you went to Harlaxton when you were here—the immense modern house by Blomfield, of which a most pleasant Mr. Pearson Gregory suddenly found himself the heir from a godfather. He was staying at the castle and took me there. When the Empress Frederick was here, she admired it beyond words, but I did not: it is magnificent, but too heavy, and the staircase very dark. Outside there are garden-staircases and fountains, which are really beautiful, almost worthy of the Villa Aldobrandini. There is a picture of a De Ligne baby, the heir of the place, whose cradle was put too close to the fire: a coal flew out, and it was burnt to death. The village is rendered infinitely picturesque by stone wells and portals made from fragments of a recently destroyed moated manor-house, of which only the gateway is left.

“There is a great charm in being made a sharer in what Disraeli called ‘the sustained splendour of a stately life,’ but much of the pleasure of a great country-house depends upon whom it falls to your lot to take down to dinner, and the Duchess attends to this with careful cleverness. I was especially amused by one sentence in that delightful ‘Isabel Carnaby’—‘There is one good thing in getting married. You know then that, whatever happens, there is one woman you will never have to take in to dinner again as long as you live.’

“And what funny things people say at dinner. Lately—not here—a very ‘great lady’ said to me, ‘I can assure you that the consciousness of being well dressed gives me an inward peace which religion could never bestow.’”

“Holmhurst, Jan. 21, 1899.—I sit alone on my hilltop, amid the swirling mists, and howling winds, and swelching rain, and am often very desolate and full of melancholy thoughts, which require active work to drive them away. But I ought not to complain, for before Christmas I was a week with the kind Llangattocks at the Hendre in beautiful Monmouthshire, seeing much that was interesting, and driving with four horses and postillions, to Raglan, and through the beautiful brown billowy country of the Forest of Dean. Then I had a quietly happy fortnight at Torquay with my kind Thornycroft cousins; and went from them to Mount Ebford to Pamela Turner, a very pleasant first cousin I had not seen for years; paying, lastly, a sad visit—because probably the last ever possible—to beautiful Cobham.... Yet I am alone now, and perhaps it is as well that my thoughts should be always turning to the ‘undiscovered country’ which will be so much to us, and of which we know nothing, even though we may be very near its shores. I work on, I enjoy on, but I feel more that life is becoming a waiting time.

And there is a sentence of Epictetus which seems to demand thinking about. ‘If the Master call, run to the ship, forsaking all these things, and looking not behind. And if thou be in old age, go not far from the ship at any time, lest the Master should ask, and thou not be ready.’ ... It was Adrienne de Lafayette who said, ‘Must we not all die? The great thing is to be always ready; as for the kind of death, that is only a detail.’ I think and think, as so many millions have thought, how it can be after death, and such inquiries and searchings have no answer. Still, as Jowett wrote towards the close of life, ‘Though we cannot see into another life, we believe, with inextinguishable hope, that there is still something reserved for us.’

“I feel the view usually held now on these subjects is wholesomer than that of my childhood, when ‘good people’ talked with such dogmatic assurance, in all ‘le bel air de leur devotion,’ of how glorious their life in another world would be, whilst definitely condemning so many of their neighbours to the hell which, in their imagination, was their God’s vindictive retaliation for His injuries. I often remember her words, and I think I realise the feeling with which my dear old friend Mrs. Duncan Stewart once said to me, ‘I should say, like Dr. Johnson, I am speaking in crass ignorance, according to the failings of my fallible human nature; and yet, may we not all, whilst acting like fallible human beings as we are, trust respectfully to God’s mercy, though speaking of no glorious future as reserved for us, lest He should say, “What hast thou done to deserve this?”’

“Lord Llangattock writes urging me to join the Anti-vivisection Society; but I answer I am not competent to judge of it. Then he sends me its pamphlets, which seem to me rather blasphemous, asserting that ‘Christ died just as much for all animals as for all human beings.’ What! for bugs, lice, ringworms, mosquitoes? ‘Don’t kill that flea; Christ died for it.’ Then how about cobras and puff-adders? Surely it must have been the Devil that died for those. What nonsense people, especially ‘religious people,’ write in these little pamphlets, almost as great nonsense as most country clergy preach in the dreary Sahara of their endless sermons. ‘Long texts, short sermons,’ was John Wesley’s maxim, and what a good one!”

“Rome, March 10, 1899.—I was very ailing, and Catherine Vaughan insisted on my seeing Dr. Sansom, who found me so ‘run down’ that he insisted on my coming out here to my ‘native air;’ therefore here I am, and already it has done me good. I found my dear old friend Miss Garden rather better than I left her three years ago, and full of her sister Mrs. Ramsay’s escape, having been upset in a carriage close to the edge of the Tarpeian rock. ‘If the horse had not been assolutamente pecora,’ said the coachman, ‘she must have gone over.’

“The other day I was with a circle of old friends who were discussing the ‘Story of my Life.’ ‘Surely the early part must have been exaggerated,’ said one of them, ‘that story of Aunt Esther hanging the cat, for instance,[594] because the child loved it.’ ‘I can testify that that story was absolutely true, for I was there,’ said an old clergyman present, ‘and I have shuddered over the cruel recollection ever since.’ It was Canon Douglas Gordon. I had quite forgotten that he was a pupil of Mr. Simpkinson, curate of Hurstmonceaux, at the time. Mr. Gordon also said, ‘I can vouch, too, for the truth of the story of the bullying at Harrow, for I was myself the victim;’ and he told how a brutal bully got a dead dog, and cut off its feet, ears, &c., and forced him to drink them in coffee. That day he ran away. ‘Alexander Russell’ went with him. They had only four miles to go to his father Lord Aberdeen’s house at Stanmore. He and Lord Abercorn were governors of the school. They happened to be together, and they sent him back in a carriage that evening with a letter to the head-master saying that, in the interests of the school, what had happened had better be hushed up; but that it was so dreadful, that he—the master—must be compelled to take the awful bullying in the school seriously in hand. And he did. Mr. Gordon says that the wickedness of Harrow at that time was quite appalling: things which could never be mentioned were then of nightly occurrence all over the school. The masters were as bad, and would come into the very pupil-rooms humming obscene songs.

“What an age of independent criticism it is! An acquaintance here said to me the other day, ‘I have a horror of the patriarchs, and how any one can set up such wicked, low, mean men as an example, I cannot understand—Jacob and the rams, for instance. No wonder the Jews were bad with such examples to follow.... I believe in Christ thoroughly and cling to the thought of Him: of course the story of His birth and all that is very difficult, but “autre pays, autres mœurs,” that is what I say.’”

“March 24.—We have been to Tivoli on the most glorious day—a pellucid sky, and exquisite blue shadows flitting over the young green of the Campagna. From the station I went to S. Antonio, the old hermitage and shrine bought by the Searles. Mrs. Searle met me most kindly. I said, ‘What a beautiful home you have!’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and the really delightful thing is that the Lord has given it to us.’ I could hardly help saying, ‘I suppose that means you bought it.’ Afterwards I found she was one of the very few ladies who belong to the Salvation Army. She is kind and Christian beyond words—‘vraie marchande de bonheur’—and her lovely home is a centre of thoughtful charity; but being in this Catholic country gives her many qualms and shocks. One day lately she was alone in a lane near her home, and came upon a shrine of the Virgin with her little statue, and was filled with righteous indignation at ‘that doll.’ As she stood there, a number of peasant women came up and knelt before the shrine and prayed most devoutly. When they got up she said, ‘How could you pray to that graven image? I wonder what you were praying for.’ ‘Why, we were asking the Madonna to send us rain; our land needs it so much,’ said the women, much surprised at her wrath. ‘How can you pray to her for that?’ said Mrs. Searle; ‘let me show you how to pray,’ and then and there she knelt down in the dusty road and prayed aloud, prayed with her whole heart to her Lord, that He would send them the rain they needed; and immediately, though the sky had been quite clear till then, it poured!

“The women went away to their priest and told him that they had seen a lady who reviled the Madonna, but who was a powerful witch and had been able to bring the rain by her enchantments.”

“March 29.—To Sutri with Mrs. Ramsay. In the early morning the dew was like crystal, every leaf glistening. The mountains rose pale blue against an opal sky, but were hidden at their base by the delicate mists of the plain. It was a long, long drive before we reached the great solid rock, which is hewn away within into all the circular steps of a vast amphitheatre overhung by mighty ilexes. Behind it, is an Early Christian church, also hewn out of the rock,—pillars, font, and altar all one with it.

“Se voi pensate sedere sopra una cittadina Americana, voi vi sbagliate,’ was heard by Gery Cullum from an American lady here in altercation with her cabman.”

“April 1.—I have had one of my Palatine lectures quite in the old way, and a luncheon with the charming Crown Princess of Sweden has been a great pleasure.

“Dining at Palazzo Bonaparte, M. de Westenberg told me that one day when Madame Mère was living there, a stranger came to the palace and insisted upon seeing her on a matter of vital importance. He was evidently a gentleman, but would not tell his name or errand. At last his urgency prevailed, and Madame Mère admitted him. He gave her a crucifix and said it belonged to her son in St. Helena, and then he said, ‘You need no longer be unhappy about him, for he has just entered into rest: his sorrows are over.’ It was on that day that Napoleon died in St. Helena.

“Miss Garden says, ‘Lanciani came to me one day. He was not married then, and he said, “I am too miserably dull; it cannot go on; I must either take a wife or a cat.” “Well, and which should you prefer, Signer Lanciani?”—“Oh, a me sono tutte due eguale,” he said. “But la signora madre, which would she prefer?”—“Oh, la madre,” he said meditatively, “il gatto.”

“‘All life has its sorrows,’ says Miss Garden, ‘only they are unequally distributed. Do you know what Eddie Baddeley’s sorrow is? He is only three, you know. It is that the turkey-cock at the Villa Borghese will not make friends with him. “But don’t you think he will ever like me?” he said to his mother. “No, my dear,” she said, “I don’t think he ever will.” But it was just one of those cases in which I think a lie would have been permissible; she had better have held out hopes.’”

“Palazzo Guadagni, Florence, April 17.—I have been here ten days as the guest of the ever-kind Duchess Dowager of Sermoneta, and found Mrs. and Miss Lowther here. It is an unusual life. We scarcely see our hostess till dinner-time, unless she asks us to drive with her, and we have each a most comfortable apartment, with excellent food and service, and the whole day to employ as we like. Many are the old friends we have seen, but most frequently the Marchesa Peruzzi, Story’s daughter, who has all his agreeable power of narration. ‘The reason why we loved Mrs. Browning so much as children,’ she says, ‘is because she always treated us as her equals, and talked to us as such. Pen and I used to sit at her feet, and she was just as courteous to us as to any of the grown-up people.’”

“Arco in Sud Tyrol, April 27.—I came here with the Lowthers, and we have been some days with two delightful Misses Warre, sisters of the head-master of Eton. It is an exquisitely beautiful place, with glorious excursions. One day we have spent most deliciously at Castel Toblino, a grand old castle which looks at itself in a glassy lake surrounded by mountains. General Baratieri, a hero, though a most unfortunate one, is one of those of whom we have seen something here.”

“Holmhurst, May 10.—Reached the dear home with great thankfulness, after a most severely hard-worked fortnight for a new edition of my ‘Paris.’”

“June 14, 1899.—At luncheon at Lady Constance Leslie’s I met Mr. Holman Hunt, a charming, simple, natural man. He spoke of the great difficulty of getting any one to do such work as is wanted for St. Paul’s Cathedral; that few would give up the high prices paid now for other work for the small prices the Government would pay. He talked of Leighton, whom he had known intimately in early life. Three tailors in Bond Street, thinking it might be a good speculation, clubbed together to buy one of his first pictures. They offered £100 for it: he stuck out for £200. Eventually it was arranged that they should pay £150, but a suit of clothes was to be thrown in. Then came the violent abuse of all Leighton’s work, and the tailors got alarmed, and sold the picture for £100 without any suit of clothes. That picture was afterwards bought for thousands by the Gallery at Liverpool, and there it is now, unlikely ever to come to the hammer again.

“After this, when Leighton’s pictures were accepted for the Academy and he was hard at work for the next year, he was told by his studio-man that some one wanted to speak to him. He sent out word that he was very busy and could not see any one; but the man was pertinacious and would not go away. At last Leighton said, ‘Well, he had better come in for a minute and say what his business is.’ So he was let in. But it was a man who stood by the door and did not come further. ‘Well,’ said Leighton, ‘what do you want?’ ‘To come straight to the point at once,’ said the man, ‘I want that picture’ (pointing to the work upon the easel). ‘You get £300 now for your pictures, don’t you? Well, I will give you £700.’ ‘But you have not even seen the picture,’ said Leighton; ‘you don’t even know what the subject is.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said the man, ‘and, if I did, I should know no more about it than I do now.’ That man was Agnew. He acquired the picture: it was his first venture.

“Mr. Holman Hunt said, speaking of the bad results of Board Schools, that he had been away lately. When he came back, a boy came to him as a model, a very good boy, whom he had not seen for some time. ‘Well,’ he said to the boy, ‘it’s a long time since I’ve seen you; I’ve been away; I’ve been at Stratford-on-Avon.’ ‘Ah,’ said the boy slowly, ‘so you’ve been at Stratford-on-Avon, have you? That’s where Shakspeare lived, him as married Anne Hathaway, and him as they called the Swan of Avon and the smooth-tongued liar (lyre). It’s well I didn’t live in them times, or they might have been calling me some such beastly names as that.’”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 8.—Early on the morning of July 29 I was summoned from home by telegraph to the dying bed of my dear cousin Catherine Vaughan, perhaps more than any one else still left bound up with all my life in the long-ago. She had forbidden any one to come to her when ill, but desired that, if it was known she was dying, I should be sent for. I found her terribly ill and suffering, though delighted to see me. That Saturday was a day of great anguish, both for herself and those with her. But she grew calmer in the night, and was with us still for four days and nights, during which I seemed to go back into my old life with my mother, constantly by her side, fanning her, wiping the poor brow, trying to help her to bear through. Almost her very last words were ‘Dear, dear Augustus.’ Then, the day before she quite left us, she was unconscious, and we sate in a great calm, only waiting for the coming of the angel. A majestic beauty had come back to her in the shadow of death, a likeness to her mother, to her brother Arthur Stanley at his best, to the ‘Curly Kate’ of sixty years ago, only now they were snow-white curls which rippled over the pillow. I think it was the so frequent sight of this life-long friend, more intimate and dearer than ever in the last few years, yet so much older than myself, which has always made me feel young, and that, with her passing away, a bridge is broken down. It has been since quite a small added pain to take leave of the old furniture and pictures, the inanimate witnesses of our lives—‘auld nick-nackets’ somebody called them—but still silent and sacred memorials of the dear Alderley and Norwich family homes, which have now passed almost to a stranger. They could still recall to those familiar with them so much that only Kate and I knew, and so much more that only Kate and I cared about.

“How long and how full the hours of watching by a death-bed seem! how full of what varied emotions and anxieties, an almost agonising eagerness to do the right thing every minute even in a physical sense, but much more to say the right thing, only the right thing, to one who is on the awful threshold of so great a transition, to whom, because she is on the very brink of unravelling the great mystery, all the commonplaces, even of religion, must fall so flat. One can only try to help, to support the beloved one, who is passing away from our possibilities, spiritually as well as physically, try to recollect what would be a comfort to oneself in such a crisis, and let oneself go with the departing one to the very portal itself.

“With dear Kate I had often spoken of this, yet, when the reality came, it was unlike all we had imagined, and I suppose it is always so. But I felt how well it must always be to talk over the end of life with those you are likely to be near when the close really comes. It makes a sort of death-bed comradeship, if I can so call it, which could never exist without it, and certainly in this case it made Kate cling to my being constantly with her, when she would allow no one else to see her. Then how seldom any words are possible from a dying person. In the six death-beds I have attended it has been so; and even in this case, when it lasted four days and nights, there was little speech, only an urgency that I should never leave her, that I should keep near her, that I should be close by her side as long as she was on earth at all, till she passed into the unseen.

“Whilst feeling the change which her loss makes in my life, I have read words of Bishop Magee which have come home to me. ‘The most beautiful and natural of sunsets is still a sunset, and the shadows that follow it are chill and depressing. I begin to feel the peculiar sadness that the death of much older relatives brings to those who are entering themselves on old age. When I see all those whom I remember once, middle-aged men and women, younger by many years than I am now, all passed and gone, I feel somehow as if light was going out of life very fast. There are so few living with whom one can recall the past, and grow young again in recalling it.’”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 31.—I have been a week at Swaylands to meet the Duchess of York, and as there were scarcely any other guests, saw a great deal of her, and was increasingly filled with admiration for the dignified simplicity and single-mindedness, and the high sense of duty by which her naturally merry, genial nature is pervaded, and which will be the very salvation of England some day. Before her scandal sits dumb: she has a quiet but inflexible power of silencing everything which seems likely to approach ill-natured gossip, yet immediately after gives such a genial kindly look and word to the silenced one as prevents any feeling of mortification. All morning the Duchess was occupied with her lady in real hard work, chiefly letters, I believe; in the afternoons we went for long drives and sight-seeings—of Penshurst, Knole, Groombridge, Hever, Ightham, and she was full of interest in the history and associations of these old-world places. At Hever the owners were away, but we got a table from a cottage, and an excellent tea-meal was spread upon it at the top of the high field above the castle. If the Duchess is ever Queen of England, that table will be considered to have a history.”

“Holmhurst, Sept. 8.—I have been in Suffolk on an ancestor-hunt, which involved a delightful visit to Herbert and Lady Mary Ewart at Great Thurlow. It was in the time of George I., I think, that our great-great-uncle Francis Naylor, the owner of Hurstmonceaux Castle, a ‘Medmenham Brother’ and the wildest of the wild, was led to a changed and better life by his love for the beautiful Carlotta Alston of Edwardstone. Unfortunately, whilst they were engaged, his father, Bishop Hare, found out that her elder sister, Mary Margaret, was one of the greatest heiresses in England, married her without telling his son till the day before the wedding, and then positively forbade him to become his brother-in-law. Francis Naylor was very much inclined to go to the devil again, but Carlotta maintained her influence, and eventually they were married without the Bishop’s consent. They were too poor to live at Hurstmonceaux, but the third Miss Alston had married the rich Stephen Soame, and she gave them a home, and there, in the house of the generous Anne Soame, they lived and died. The old Jacobean mansion of Little Thurlow was magnificent and had eighty-one bedrooms; its beautiful wrought-iron gates with pilasters were given by Charles II., who often stayed there, and the family lived at Little Thurlow in most unusual state, even for that time, driving out daily in three carriages-and-four. Sir Stephen Soame, the builder of the house, has a grand tomb in the church where Francis and Carlotta Naylor and Anne Soame are buried behind his stately carved pew, and there are a most picturesque grammar-school and almshouses erected by him. I remember some of the Soames coming to Hurstmonceaux—as cousins—in my childhood, but their direct line died out at last, and the place went to some very distant relations from Beverley, who pulled down the old hall, because ‘they could not live in a house where you could drive a coach-and-four up the great staircase.’ Old Mrs. Soame, however, of the second set, did not die till she was 104, and the last of her two daughters only in 1885. Yet the Misses Soame had never been to London: their travels were limited to being driven twice a year to Lowestoft in their large yellow chariot with post-horses. They always intended to try the railway by going from Haverhill to the next station and having their carriage to meet them there; but when the day came they shrank from the feat. They were ‘worth an income to the doctor, the chemist, and the fishmonger,’ and they left a fortune to the family of a man who had once proposed to one of them.”

“Holmhurst, Oct. 23.—Again I have been on an ancestor-hunt. I met Mrs. Lowther at the old haunted house of Lawford Hall near Manningtree, and our hostess, Mrs. Mouncey, sent us to Hadleigh, where Mary Margaret Alston’s grandfather, Charles Trumbull, was the very saintly Rector in the time of James II., and resigned his living for his ordination oath’s sake on the advent of William III. The Rectory, now known as the Deanery, is a glorious old house, with a grand brick gateway, priests’ hiding-holes, and curious pictures by Canaletto—an intimate friend and visitor of one of the rectors—let into its walls. It was the home of Rowland Taylor, the Marian martyr, who was dragged down the street of Hadleigh to his stake outside the town ‘cracking jokes all the way,’ and another vicar was Hugh Rose, when Archbishop Trench was the curate.

“Two days later I went to Edwardstone, a delightful old place near Sudbury, one of the many of which Bishop Hare’s wife was the heiress, and where numbers of her Alston ancestors are buried; and then I was two days at the familiar Campsea Ashe, where, as its beloved owner says, ‘If you do not know how to enjoy yourself, you must be made to.’ Mr. Astor was there, and told me that the origin of the American expression ‘a chestnut’ lay in the rivalries of the theatres in Chestnut Street and Walnut Street in New York. An expected star who came out in the Walnut Street Theatre could only do things which had already appeared in Chestnut Street, and when the young men saw them they said, ‘That’s a chestnut,’ and it passed into a proverb.

“Mr. Astor was very funny about a man who was always late for everything, and who one day, when he was expecting a party to stay with him, rushed home after all his guests had arrived. On the stairs he met a man, with whom, to make up for lost time, he shook hands most warmly, saying, ‘Oh, my dear fellow, I’m so glad to see you; do make yourself quite at home and enjoy yourself.’ It was a burglar, very much surprised at his cordial reception, for he was carrying off all the valuables. He also said—

“‘You know Dr. N. and his wonderful tales. I heard him tell of going to shoot chamois. He had sighted one a long way off and fired. He said the chamois never moved, but put up one foot and scratched its ear. He fired again, and it put up the other foot and scratched the other ear. Then he fired again and killed it. When he came up to it, he found that each of the first shots had touched an ear. The chamois had only thought, “Oh, these damned fleas!”

“‘Then Dr. N. told of how he went after bears. A grisly came and he shot him: then another grisly came and he shot him: then a third grisly came.... “If you say you shot him” said a man present, “I’ll throw this bottle at your head.” “Well, the third grisly escaped,” calmly said Dr. N.’

“The last two days of my absence I spent with the Grant Duffs at Lexden Manor, where Sir Mountstuart was most agreeable and anecdotive, and whence Lady Grant Duff drove me to see the old gateway of Layer Marney, beautiful in its great decay.”

“London, Nov. 29.—Luncheon with the C.’s, who had dined last night with the Wilberforces. Canon Wilberforce told them of a missionary establishment in Africa, a most admirable mission, which had been most effective, had converted the whole neighbourhood, built church and schools, and done no end of good.

“Then, in some crisis or other, the mission was swept away and the place was long left desolate.

“After many years the missionaries returned, expecting to find everything destroyed. But, to their astonishment, they found the church-bell going and the buildings in perfect repair, all looking as before—only there was a difference. They could not make out what it was.

“So they went to the chief and asked him about it. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘there is one little difference. You used to tell us that God was love and always watching over us for good, while the devil was always seeking to destroy us; so we felt it was the devil we had better propitiate, and it is the devil we have worshipped ever since you left, and—it has most completely answered.’”

“Dec. 22, 1899.—I am just at the end of a long retreat in a sort of private hospital, where I have been for the sake of the ‘Nauheim cure’ for an affection of the heart, from which I have now suffered for more than a year, and which was greatly increased by the anxieties and sorrows of last August. I am better since my ‘cure,’ but am seldom quite well now, and, as I read in a novel, ‘my dinner is always either a satisfying fact or a poignant memory,’ and generally the latter. The South African war news is casting a shadow over the closing year, and the death of Lady Salisbury has been a real sorrow—an ever-kind friend since my early boyhood. I went to the memorial service for her in the Chapel-Royal—a beautiful service, but a very sad one to many.”

“Liskeard, May 7, 1900.—I will begin a history to my two kindest of hostesses from this dreary wind-stricken little town, which is as ugly as it can be, but with a large, clean, old-fashioned posting-inn. I got a little victoria to take me the 2½ miles to St. Cleer’s Well in the uplands, in a moorland village, approached by primrosy, stitchworty lanes. The well is a glorious subject for sketching, old grey stones tinged with golden lichen, a canopy of open Norman arches, and background of purple hill. It was so bitterly, snowily cold that I feared, as I sate down on my camp-stool, that sciatica would never allow me to rise from it; but Providence sent me a whole schoolful of children, boys and girls, about sixty of them, who pressed close round through the whole performance, so I just wore them like an eider-down, and was rather hot than otherwise. Returning, the evening was still so young that I took the carriage on to St Keyne’s Well, on the other side of Liskeard, but it was scarcely worth the visit.”

“Helston, May 8, 6 P.M.—No farther than this, for when I arrived here at midday, I found there was no chance of getting on to the Lizard; the whole town was in too great a turmoil to attend to any individual, for it was Furry Day, a local floral festa from very early times, and all the gentlemen and ladies of the neighbourhood (the real ones!) were dancing in couples, with bands playing through the streets, under garlanded arches and flags flying from every window. This sounds lovely, but really was not—only curious, though it gave infinite satisfaction to the thousands of spectators, who on this day bring great wealth to the town. But oh! the noise and discomfort for an unwilling spectator—the organs, and peep-shows, and wild-beast shows, and ‘Boer and Briton’ shows, and horsemanship-ladies careering through the streets after the dancing was over. If any one wishes to know what the Inferno is like and the worst din the human mind can imagine, they should spend a ‘Furry Day;’ only, to be sure, at Helston all the people are quite good, which would probably make a very considerable difference!”

“Helston, May 10.—Yesterday I breakfasted in the coffee-room with an old gentleman who was exceedingly angry with me because I did not think Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’ should be one of the twelve novels to be saved if all the rest in the world were swept away—‘only the most dense ignorance of literature’ could make me confess such a thing!

“It was a drive of ten miles in a grand and lonely landau through a country brilliant with gorse and blackthorn. Beneath a great plantation on the right was the Loe Pool, only separated by a strip of silver sand from the sea, and described in Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Beyond a wooded hollow with rocks and fir trees the road enters upon the high-lying plain of the Lizard, wind-stricken, storm-swept, without a tree, the houses of ugly Lizard-town rising black against a pellucid sky on the horizon. A scrambling walk down a rugged lane, and then a pathlet marked by white stones above tremendous precipices brought me to Kynance Cove—a little disappointing, for it was high water when it ought to have been low, and a grey colourless day when it ought to have been brilliant. However, my drawing ‘answered,’ as Aunt Kitty would have said, and in two hours, as it began to mizzle, I was ready to return.”

“Tintagel, May 10.—The ‘girling’ of the sea in the old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ just expresses what one hears here. This ‘Wharncliffe Arms’ is an ideal inn, and very striking is the little glen, now so primrosy, with the black ruined castle, the cries of the seabirds—

“Royal Hotel, Bideford, May 15.—This house has beautiful old rooms built by John Davy, the first tobacco merchant, with splendid Italian ceilings: the little Revenge was built in a shipping yard just before the house, and in a narrow street on the other side the river is a public-house which is the house of Sir Richard Grenville. I thought the path above the precipice at Lynton the most beautiful sea-walk I ever saw. In places it is a sheer wall of rock rising from the waves—

“Middlewick, Corsham, May 18.—The kind Clutterbucks, with whom I am staying, took me to Castlecombe yesterday, the home of the Scroopes for five hundred years, and quite one of the most enchanting places in England, in its green glen, its clear rushing river, its exquisite church tower and old market-cross. I saw it last at nine years old, and was enchanted to find its loveliness all and more than I remembered. To-day we went to luncheon at Harnish, and I visited once more the little rectory where I was at school for three and a half most miserable years. How different a little boy’s path is now! We saw Corsham Court afterwards, with Cronje’s flag floating over its staircase.”

“Holmhurst, May 23.—I found a very large party on Saturday at hospitable Mr. Astor’s, and Cliveden in great beauty, entrancing carpets of bluebells under the trees. A telegram from the Queen of Sweden took me to Roehampton on Monday. It was twenty-two years since I had seen the King, and I thought him even handsomer and more royal-looking than of old. The Queen is not less fragile, and as full of good thoughts and words as ever. I had luncheon with the royal pair and their household, and a long talk with the Queen afterwards, who told me much of my especial Prince, now Regent in his father’s absence.”

XXXI

FAREWELL

I mUST close this book. Printers are calling for its last pages. It is like seeing an old friend go forth into a new world, and wondering if those who inhabit it will understand him and treat him well. Perhaps no one will read it except the intimate circle—a large one certainly—who have loved Hurstmonceaux, Stoke, and little Holmhurst at different times. But I can never regret having written it, and it has been so great an enjoyment to me, that perhaps others may like it; for I have concealed nothing, and Coleridge says, “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.”[597]

Most people will say two volumes would have been enough, but the fact is I have written chiefly for myself and my relations, and not for the general public at all. They may read the book if they like, but it was not intended for them, and, as Walter Scott describes it—

Except that I have seen more varieties of people than some do, I believe there has been nothing unusual in my life. All lives are made up of joys and sorrows with a little calm, neutral ground connecting them; though, from physical reasons perhaps, I think I have enjoyed the pleasures and suffered in the troubles more than most. But from the calm backwater of my present life at Holmhurst, as I overlook the past, the pleasures seem to predominate, and I could cordially answer to any one who asked me “Is life worth living?”—“Yes, to the very dregs.”

Sainte-Beuve says, “Il est donné, de nos jours, à un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux, de recueillir, d’ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite, avec noblesse.” And latterly my days have been “avec suite;” “avec noblesse” is what they ought to have been. In my quiet home, of which little has been said in these volumes, days succeed each other unmarked, but on the whole happy, though sometimes very lonely. The whole time passes very quickly, yet it is, as I remember the Grand Duchess Stephanie of Baden wrote to my aunt Mrs. Stanley—“In youth the years are long, the moments short, but in age the moments are long, the years short.” Really I have been alone here for thirty years, twelve in which my dearest Lea was still presiding over the lower regions of the house, and eighteen in absolute solitude. It is the winter evenings, after the early twilight has set in, which are the longest. Then there are often no voices but those of the past:—

People say, “It is all your own fault that you are solitary; you ought to have married long ago.” But they know nothing about it; for as long as my mother lived, and for some time after, I had nothing whatever to marry upon, and after that I had very little, and I have been constantly reminded that people of the class in which I have always lived do not like to marry paupers. Besides, the fact is, that except in one impossible case perhaps, very long ago, “I have never loved any one well enough to put myself in a noose for them: it is a noose, you know.”[599] What I have to regret is that I have no very near relations who have in the least my own interests and sympathies, though they are all very kind to me. I have far more in common with many of my younger friends, “the boys,” who cease to be boys after a few years, and many of whom, I am sure, turn to Holmhurst as the haven of their lives. But one feels that there would be this difference between any very congenial near relations and even the kindest friends: the latter are very glad to see one, but would be very sorry to see more of one; whilst the former, if they existed, would take it as a matter of course.

By friends I often feel that I am greatly over-estimated, so many ask my advice, and act upon what I tell them. It is a responsibility, but I feel that I am right in urging what I have always found answer in my own case, and what has greatly added to my happiness. When a wrong, sometimes a very cruel wrong, is done to one, one must not try at once to do some good to those who have done it, because that would be to mortify them; but if one immediately, at once, sets to think of what one can do for somebody else, it takes out the taste. Then one can very soon paste down that unpleasant page of life, as if it had never existed, and all will be as before.

Also, always believe the best of people till the worst is proved, and meditate not on your miseries, but your blessings.

The greatest of all the blessings I have to be grateful for is, that though, since my serious illness six years ago, I have never been entirely without pain, I have, notwithstanding this, good health and a feeling of youth—just the same feeling I had forty years ago. I suppose there will be many who will be surprised to see in these pages how old I am; I am unspeakably surprised at it myself. I have to be perpetually reminding myself of my years, that I am so much nearer the close than the outset of life. I feel so young still, that I can hardly help making plans for quite the far-distant future, schemes of work and of travel, and I hope sometimes of usefulness, which of course can never be realised. I have very good spirits, and I feel that I should be inexcusable if I were not happy when I remember the contrast of my present life to my oppressed boyhood, or to the terrible trial of the time when every thought was occupied by such tangled perplexities as those of the Roman Catholic conspiracy.

My next greatest blessing is my home, so infinitely, so exquisitely suited to my needs, and indeed to all my wishes. As I write this, and look from my window across the tiny terrace with its brilliant flowers to the oakwoods, golden in the autumn sunset, and the blue sea beyond, with the craggy mass of Hastings Castle rising up against it, I feel that there are few places more lovely than Holmhurst. Then the walks in the grounds offer a constant variety of wood and rock, flowers and water, and the distant view changes constantly, and composes into a hundred pictures. And in the little circle of this pleasant home love assuredly reigns supreme. I look upon my servants as my best and truest friends; their rooms, in their way, are as pretty and comfortable as my own, and I believe that they have a real pleasure in serving me. We unite together in looking after our less fortunate friends, who come in batches, for a month each set, to the little Hospice in the grounds. I could not ask my servants to do this, but they are delighted to help me thus, as in everything. When one of our little household community, as has happened four times now, passes, in an honoured and cherished old age, from amongst us, we all mourn together, watch by the deathbed, and follow the flower-laden coffin to the grave.

My local affections are centred in Holmhurst now. Rome, which I was formerly even fonder of, is so utterly changed, it has lost its enchaining power, and, with the places, the familiar faces there have all passed away. I go there every third year, but not for pleasure, only because it is necessary for “Walks in Rome,” the one of my books which pays best.

In the summer I generally have guests at Holmhurst, but even then my mornings are passed in writing, and several twilight hours besides. In the evenings there is generally reading aloud, or there are drawings to be looked at, or if “the boys” are with me there are games. Then the early months of spring are often spent abroad, and the later in London, and in the autumn I have the opportunity of far more visits than I like to pay: so that I have quite sufficient people-seeing to prevent getting rusty, or at any rate to remind me of my utter insignificance in every society except my own. However, Reviews are a perfect antidote to all follies of vainglory. I used to be pained by the most abusive ones, though I generally learnt something from them. Latterly, however, I have been more aware of the indescribable incapacity and indolence of the writers, and have not cared at all. I a little wonder, however, why I have scarcely ever had a favourable Review. My work cannot always have been so terribly bad, or it would not have had so wide a circulation—wider, I think, than has attended any other work of the kind.

How I wish one knew something, anything, of the hereafter to which the Old Testament never alludes, and of which the New Testament tells us nothing satisfactory. Can we really sleep, for millions of years perhaps, or can we live in another hemisphere, or can we linger here near people and places we love, incorporeal, invisible? I believe all the truths of revealed religion, but there is so much that is unrevealed. Oh! if the disciples, during their three years’ opportunity, had only asked our Saviour a few more questions—questions so absolutely essential, to which the answers would have been of such vital importance. For oh! how far more important what our state after death is than all our life’s work, than everything we have done or said or written, or what any one has thought of us. I can truly say with Olga de la Ferronays, “Je crois, j’aime, j’espère, je me repens;” but how strangely dim is the clearest sight as to the future. “The awful mysteries of life and nature,” says Whittier, “sometimes almost overwhelm me. What? Where? Whither? These questions sometimes hold me breathless. How little, after all, do we know! And the soul’s anchor of Faith can only grapple fast upon two or three things, and fast and surest of all upon the Fatherhood of God.”[600]

It is astonishing how little good can be derived from all the religious teaching which is the form and order of the day, from the endless monotony of services, from the wearisome sermons, not one of which remains with me from the thousands upon thousands I have been condemned to listen to, some few of them excellent, but most of them a farrago of stilted nonsense. I suppose that there are some types of mind which are benefited by them: I cannot believe that they were good for me. “Oh, stop, do stop; you have talked enough,” my whole heart has generally cried out when I have listened to a preacher—generally a man whom one would never dream of listening to in ordinary conversation for a quarter of an hour. It is a terrible penalty to pay for one’s religion to have weekly to hear it worried and tangled by these incapable and often arrogant beings. What does really remain with me, and raise my mind heavenwards with every thought of it, is the gentle teaching of my sweet mother in my childhood, and the practical lesson of her long life of love to God and man; the austere, unswerving uprightness and justice which was the mainspring of life’s action to the dear old nurse who was spared for forty-eight years to be the blessing of our home, ever one of those who, as Emerson says, “make the earth wholesome;” the remembrance of Hugh Pearson, Lady Waterford, and many other holy ones entered into the Perfect Life, and the certainty whence their peace in life and their calm in death was derived. Whittier again echoes my own thoughts when he says, “I regard Christianity as a life rather than a creed; and in judging my fellow-men, I can use no other standard than that which our Lord and Master has given us, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ The only orthodoxy that I am especially interested in is that of life and practice.”

I know my own great imperfection and unworthiness, and when I turn from myself to others, I cannot judge them. One cannot know all the secret guiding wires of action in them. I think perhaps the secret of any influence I have with boys is, that though I am willing to tell them what I think best as to the future, I never condemn their past; I am not called upon to do so. Southey’s lines come back to me:—

When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has been usually allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel so young, the evening of life is closing in. Perhaps it may not be so, perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s sunrise.”[602]

“La figure de ce monde passe. Sans la possession de l’éternité, sans la vue religieuse de la vie, ces journées fugitives ne sont qu’un sujet d’effroi, le bonheur doit être une prière et le malheur aussi. Pense, aime, agis et souffris en Dieu; c’est la grande science.”[603]

INDEX

A
Abbots-kerswel, iv. 249.
Aberdare, Henry Bruce, 1st Lord, iv. 427, 428; v. 225.
Aberdeen, Hon. Ishbel Marjoribanks, Countess of, v. 192, 204, 205, 380.
—— John Gordon, 7th Earl of, iii. 43; v. 192, 204, 205, 380.
—— Lady Mary Baillie, Countess of, v. 204.
Abinger, James Scarlett, 4th Lord, vi. 380.
Ackermann, Félix, i. 36, 97, 158; ii. 192, 195, 423; iii. 53-56, 338, 349.
—— Madame Victoire, i. 31, 32, 96, 339-340; ii. 192, 195, 405, 422-423, 499; iii. 52-64, 189, 253, 308, 310-312, 339, 351.
—— Victoria, iii. 309.
Acland, Sir Thomas, ii. 149.
Acland-Hood, Sir Alexander, vi. 233.
Acton, Sir John, iv. 437.
Acuto, ii. 426, 438-441; iv. 103.
Adeane, Lady Elizabeth, iv. 360.
—— Henry John, i. 214.
Adelaide, Madame, de France, iii. 23; iv. 339-340; vi. 109.
—— of Saxe-Meiningen, Queen of England, i. 189, 294; vi. 106, 478.
Aïdé, Mrs., iv. 293.
Aigues-Mortes, v. 431.
Ailesbury, Maria Tollemache, Marchioness of, v. 213, 233; vi. 67.
Airlie, Hon. Blanche Stanley, Countess of, iv. 127-128, 325-326; v. 274-275, 278, 289, 312, 384; vi. 90, 97, 135, 415-420, 436-443.
—— David Stanley William Ogilvy, 10th Earl of, vi. 440.
—— Lady Mabel Gore, Countess of, vi. 440.
Alacoque, Marguerite Marie, i. 445.
Alatri, iv. 103.
Albanie, Louisa of Stohlberg, Duchesse d’, vi. 121.
Albert, H.R.H. the Prince Consort, i. 302; ii. 286-288.
Albrecht, Archduke of Austria, 11. 35-36.
Alcock, Mrs., story of, iii. 118-123.
—— Sir Rutherford, v. 209.
Alcott, Miss Louisa, the authoress, vi. 405.
Aldeburgh, vi. 23.
Alderley, i. 61, 66; ii. 292, 293; vi. 351.
Aldermaston, ii. 219.
Alderson, Miss Louisa, iv. 73, 123.
Alemayu, Prince of Abyssinia, v. 237-238.
Alexander, Mary Manning, Mrs., i. 185, 248-251, 357, 469, 481; ii. 128.
Alford, Henry, Dean of Canterbury, i. 479; ii. 390-391, 432-433; iii. 155-157, 393-394.
—— Lady Marian, i. 293; ii. 298; iii. 28, 368; iv. 51, 55-60, 121, 399; v. 20-21, 66, 213-214, 294, 415, 455; vi. 110, 141-142, 270, 404,1 483, 484.
Alfriston, i. 505.
Algeciras, iv. 33.
Alice, H.R.H. Princess, of Hesse, ii. 288; iv. 101; v. 147.
Alington, Henry Gerard Stuart, 1st Lord, vi. 164.
Allan, Charles Stuart, ii. 515.
—— John Hay, ii. 515.
Almena, Marqueza d’, iv. 41.
Alnwick Castle, ii. 353; iii. 33; vi. 134-139.
Alston, Carlotta, i. 2; vi. 517.
—— Mary Margaret, i. 2, 5; vi. 519
Altieri, Prince and Princess, v. 148, 159.
Alton Barnes, i. 45-48, 191-192, 278; iii. 110.
Amadeo, Duke of Aosta and King of Spain, iv. 31.
Amboise, ii. 495.
Amesbury, v. 292-293.
Ammerdown Park, vi. 240.
Amory, Henrietta Unwin, Lady Heathcote, vi. 90.
Ampère, J. J., v. 305.
Ampthill, Arthur, 2nd Lord, vi. 75.
Ampthill Park, iv. 412-422; v. 55.
Anagni, iv. 103.
Ancaster, Mary Panton, Duchess of, vi. 105.
Anderson, Henry, of Bradley, ii. 320.
Andover, Henry Charles Howard, Viscount, iv. 392, 393.
—— Lady Jane Coke, Viscountess, iv. 453-454.
Anglesey, Henry-William Paget, 1st Marquis of, v. 335.
Angoulême, Marie Therése de France, Duchesse d’, ii. 298; iii. 43-44; vi. 113.
Anguillara, vi. 414.
Annesley, vi. 494.
Anson, Sir John, iv. 359.
Anthony, iv. 243.
Antibes, iii. 146-149.
Antonelli, Cardinal Giacomo, ii. 72; iii. 71; iv. 172.
Antrobus, Marianne Dashwood, Lady, v. 292.
Aponte, Dom Emmanuele, i. 6-8.
Apponyi, Countess, v. 148.
Aquila, iv. 179.
Aram, Eugene, ii. 232-234.
Arcachon, ii. 465.
Archaeological Society, Roman, speech at the, v. 179.
Arco, vi. 310.
Argyll, George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of, iv. 329.
—— John Campbell, 2nd Duke of, iv. 216-217.
Arkcoll, Mrs. Thomas, ii. 228, 244.
Arles, iii. 184; vi. 3, 39.
—— sur Tech, v. 440.
Arley, iv. 461; vi. 230.
Armagh, Lord John George Beresford, Archbishop of, vi. 326.
Arnold, Edward, iii. 329.
—— Edward, the younger, vi. 145.
—— Mary Penrose, Mrs., i. 177; iii. 327-329, 418; iv. 63.
—— Matthew, the poet, i. 177, 512; v. 288; vi. 143-144.
—— Dr. Thomas, Headmaster of Rugby, i. 160.
Arpino, iv. 181.
Ars, Jean-Marie Vianney, le Curé d’, ii. 417-420.
Ars, visit to, iii. 134-136.
Arthur, King of Britain, vi. 320.
—— H.R.H. Prince, iv. 88, 90-93, 224.
Arundel, vi. 297.
Ashburnham House, London, iv. 337.
Ashburnham, Bertram, 4th Earl of, vi. 79.
—— Lady Catherine Baillie, Countess of, v. 323; vi. 76.
—— Hon. John, iv. 271.
—— Lady Mary, v. 320.
Ashburton, Lady Harriet Montagu, Lady, vi. 441.
—— Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, Lady, iv. 90, 91, 99, 121, 154, 305, 329; v. 60, 61, 66, 73, 211, 284, 294, 297, 314.
Ashdown, ii. 229.
Ashley, Hon. Anthony Lionel, iv. 290-291.
Ashridge, vi. 367.
Astor, Hon. W., vi. 478, 519, 525.
Athelstan, Mrs., ii. 270.
Atkens, Mr., of Kingston-Lyle, ii. 140.
Aubrey, Sir George, v. 333.
Audley End, iv. 243.
Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Empress of Germany, v. 195.
Aumale, Henri de Bourbon, Duc d’, iii. 18; v. 446; vi. 109.
Austin, Alfred, the poet, v. 92.
Autun, ii. 320.
Avalanche, on the Mont Cenis, v. 133-135.
Avalon, the Isle of, vi. 320.
Avezzano, iv. 180.
Avila, iv. 43.
Avonmore, Therèse Longworth, Lady, v. 412.
Aylesford, Jane Knightley, Countess of, v. 292.

B
Babington, Mrs. Catherine, ii. 351.
Babraham, vi. 229.
Babworth Hall, v. 41, 366, 417.
Bacon, Sir Hickman, vi. 64.
—— Mrs. Nicholas, iii. 169.
Baddeley, Helen Grant, Mrs. St. Clair, vi. 459, 460.
Baddesley-Clinton, vi. 34, 495.
Baden, Frederic William, Grand Duke, and Louisa, Grand Duchess, iii. 109.
—— Louis, Hereditary Grand Duke of, v. 211, 212, 213, 225-228.
Baden-Baden, i. 384.
Bagot, Mr. Charles, iii. 132.
—— Lucia Welbore, Lady, iii. 32, 368; vi. 298.
—— William, Lord, iii. 368.
Baillie-Hamilton, Mrs. Cospatrick, iii. 395.
—— James, vi. 17-18.
Baker, Sir George and Lady, v. 245.
—— Sir Samuel, iv. 388, 482.
—— Thomas Barwick Lloyd, iv. 350.
Balcarres, vi. 443.
—— Anne Dalrymple, Countess of, iv. 137.
—— Colin, 3rd Earl of, iii. 25.
—— James, 5th Earl of, iii. 24.
Balcaskie, vi. 442.
Balfour, Right Hon. Arthur, v. 92; vi. 373.
—— Charles, of Newton Don, vi. 88.
—— of Burleigh, Lady Katherine Gordon, Lady, vi. 94.
—— Minnie Georgiana Liddell, Mrs. Charles, vi. 88.
Bamborough Castle, ii. 271, 354; iii. 8, 170.
Bampfylde, Hon. Coplestone, v. 318.
Bankes, Rev. E. S., v. 457.
Bankhead, Charles, Secretary of Legation at Constantinople, i. 26.
—— Maria Horatia Paul, Mrs., i. 27, 28, 296.
Bantry, Jane Herbert, Countess of, vi. 94.
Bar-le-Duc, iii. 333.
Baratieri, General, vi. 510.
Barcelona, iv. 28.
Baring, Mrs. Drummond, v. 41, 417.
—— Hon. Mary, iv. 95.
Barker, Mary Ann Stewart, Lady, iv. 304, 331.
Barnard, Lady Anne, iii. 14, 27, 324-326.
Barnard Castle, ii. 275, 340.
Barnby, Sir Joseph, the musician, vi. 314.
Barnekow, Countess, v. 145, 152, 158.
—— Elizabeth de, v. 152.
Barraud, Madame and Mademoiselle, ii. 116, 125-128.
Barrère, Madame, iii. 87.
Barrie, James M., the novelist, vi. 434-435.
Barrington, Hon. Adelaide, ii. 139.
—— Hon. Augusta, ii. 139.
—— George, 5th Viscount, ii. 320.
—— George, 7th Viscount, iv. 362, 395.
—— Hon. Jane Liddell, Viscountess, iii. 138, 140; iv. 362, 395; v. 20, 210.
—— Maria Lyon, Hon. Mrs. Russell, ii. 282.
—— Shute, Bishop of Durham, ii. 139.
—— William Keppel, 6th Viscount, ii. 139, 140.
Bassi, Donna Laura, i. 7.
Bathurst, Benjamin, vi. 146.
—— Miss Rosa, vi. 145.
Bathyany, Count and Countess, iv. 285, 286, 429.
Battle Abbey, iv. 300-301; v. 66; vi. 4.
Baume, La Sainte, vi. 40.
Bayard, Hon. T. F., American Ambassador, vi. 402.
Bayley, Mrs., iii. 130-134.
Baynards, vi. 162.
Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister, 1st Earl of, v. 47-48, 210, 343-344; vi. 99-100, 325, 373.
Bean, Ainslie, the artist, vi. 168.
Beauchamp, Lady Emily Pierrepont, Countess, vi. 101.
—— William, 7th Earl, vi. 459.
Beauclerk, Lady Sybil, vi. 475.
Beaujour, Château de, ii. 500-503.
Beaumont, Hubert G., ii. 66, 147; v. 377-378.
—— Lady Margaret, iv. 62, 65-69, 122, 148, 307, 329; v. 196; vi. 253.
—— Wentworth, iv. 62.
Beaurepaire, Mademoiselle de, iv. 411.
Beckett, ii. 138-140, 217, 229; vi. 494.
Beckwith, Priscilla Maria Hopper, Mrs., of Silksworth, ii. 422.
Bedford, Lady Elizabeth Sackville West, Duchess of, iv. 145; v. 60.
—— Francis Russell, 9th Duke of, v. 60-61.
Belgians, Marie Henriette, Queen of the, vi. 29, 68.
Belgium, tour in, ii. 377.
Belhaven, Hamilton Campbell, Lady, ii. 335-337, 354-355, 358; iii. 35-36; iv. 268.
—— Robert, Lord, ii. 354, 358; iii. 35, 45-46.
Bell, Rev. Edward, vi. 351-353.
Bellagio, iii. 106.
Bellairs, Mr. and Mrs., vi. 158.
Belsay, ii. 347.
Belvoir Castle, iv. 58-60; vi. 305, 341-342.
Benalta family, story of, ii. 454-460.
Benedict, Sir Julius, the composer, v. 8.
Benedict XIV., Pope, vi. 497.
Beneventum, v. 271.
Bengivenga, Francesca, iii. 200.
Bennett, Rev. T. J. Filmer, vi. 237, 242.
—— Hon. Frederick, ii. 268-269.
—— Hon. George, ii. 268-269.
Bennigsen, Countess Marie Paul von, v. 91.
Bentinck, Penelope Leslie, Mrs. Cavendish, v. 70, 191, 275.
Bentley, Harriet, iii. 406, 412
Benzoni, the sculptor, iii. 83.
Berchtesgaden, iii. 231.
Bergeret, Madame, story of, iii. 177-182.
Berkeley Castle, i. 287; v. 304.
Berlin, v. 91-94.
Bernabo, Cardinal, iv. 172.
Bernhardt, Sarah, the actress, v. 198.
Berri, Caroline, Duchesse de, iii. 15-17, 43-44.
Berry, the Misses Mary and Agnes, i. 299-300; vi. 440.
Bestwood, vi. 475.
Betharram, iii. 487.
Beust, Frederick Ferdinand, Count von, iv. 145.
Biarritz, ii. 488; iv. 42.
Bidart, ii. 489.
Biddulph, Lady Elizabeth, v. 53. 221; vi. 302.
Bideford, vi. 524.
Birch, Sir Arthur, vi. 56.
Birtles, iii. 117.
Bishopthorpe Palace, vi. 256, 354, 356, 360, 444.
Bismarck, Count Herbert, vi. 236, 461.
Black, William, the novelist, v. 16.
Blackett, Sir Edward and Lady, of Matfen, ii. 266-267, 341, 346; iii. 170, 323; v. 19.
Blackmoor, iv. 131.
Blackwood, Sir Arthur, iii. 243.
Blaise Castle, vi. 447.
Blake, Edith Bernal Osborne, Lady, vi. 482.
—— Sir Francis, iii. 31.
Blake, Mrs. Jex, v. 237.
—— William, the artist, iii. 14.
Bland, Ven. Archdeacon, v. 424.
Blenkinsopp Castle, ii. 353.
Blessington, Harriet Power, Countess of, i. 20, 37; ii. 408.
Blickling, v. 452; vi. 105, 303.
Bligh, Hon. Arthur, iv. 237.
—— Hon. Ivo, iv. 237.
—— Lady Kathleen, iv. 426; vi. 105, 163, 164.
Blomfield, Charles James, Bishop of London, i. 470.
Blommart, Miss Elizabeth, ii. 489.
Bloomfield, Hon. Georgiana Liddell, Lady, iv. 305, 365; vi. 97, 184, 247.
—— John Arthur Douglas, Lord, v. 220.
Blyth, Miss Mary Popham, the authoress, vi. 275.
Bodley, G. F., the architect, iv. 476; vi. 448.
Bodryddan, iii. 123.
Boleyn, Anne, Queen of England, vi. 303, 315.
—— Lady Mary, vi. 317.
Bologna, i. 7-9; iii. 380; iv. 313.
Bolsover Castle, vi. 475.
Bolsover, Augusta Browne, Lady, v. 366.
Bolvilliers, Comtesse de, i. 343-351.
Bonaparte, Letizia Raimolino, Madame Mère, vi. 509.
—— Madame Jerome, v. 301.
Bonis, Madame Maria de, iii. 373, 378.
Bonnyrigg, ii. 341.
Bordighera, vi. 265.
Borghese, Adèle de Rochefoucauld, Princess, ii. 58.
—— Lady Guendolina Talbot, Princess, ii. 58, 59.
—— Marc-Antonio, Prince, ii. 58, 375.
—— Pauline Bonaparte, Princess, ii. 336.
Borghese, Teresa de Rochefoucauld, Princess, ii. 58; iii. 85, 194.
Bosanquet, Charles, of Rock, ii. 278.
—— Mrs., of Rock, ii 279.
Boscobel, iv. 440.
Bothwell Castle, iii. 48.
Boughton, v. 448.
Bourbon, Louis Henri Joseph, Duc de, iii. 21-23; vi. 122.
Bourges, ii. 310.
Bouverie, Hon. Stuart, vi. 318.
Bowes, Lady Anna, ii. 172, 173.
—— John, of Streatham, ii. 173, 178, 179, 274-276; v. 20.
—— Mrs. John, iii. 275.
Bowles, Miss, iii. 294, 298.
Boyle, Carolina Amelia Poyntz, Lady, i. 89, 291-292.
—— Hon. Carolina Courtenay, i. 289-294, 436-437, 508-509; ii. 381-384; iv. 61.
—— Edmund Montagu, iv. 249; v. 412.
—— Hon. John, iv. 249.
—— Miss Mary, i. 293; iii. 368, 370; iv. 55, 214, 426.
—— Ella Gordon, Hon. Mrs. Richard, the authoress, iv. 60.
Boyne, Lady Katherine Scott, Viscountess, iv. 445; v. 457; vi. 411, 433.
Bozledene Wood, i. 361.
Bracciano, iii. 375.
Bradford-on-Avon, vi. 484.
Bradford, Orlando Bridgeman, Earl of, vi. 474.
Bradley Manor, in Devon, i. 287.
—— in Northumberland, ii. 320.
Bradley, Rev. Charles, i. 297-299, 303-315, 332-335, 368, 369, 390-393, 396-398, 408.
—— Mrs. Charles, i. 303, 307, 369.
Brainscleugh, ii. 358.
Bramham, vi. 356.
Bramshill, v. 340.
Brandling, Charles, v. 229; vi. 105.
Brassey, Albert, ii. 391; iv. 427.
Brassey, Annie Allnutt, Mrs. Thomas, afterwards Lady, iii. 416; v. 69.
—— Henry, ii. 391.
—— Thomas, afterwards Lord, ii. 25; iv. 379.
Braybrooke, Hon. Florence Maude, Lady, iv. 223.
Breamore, iv. 348.
Breadalbane, Lady Alma Graham, Marchioness of, vi. 80, 81.
Bremen, v. 129.
Bremer, Margaret, Countess, v. 15.
Bretton Park, iv. 64-69.
Bridges, Mrs., v. 449.
Bridgeman, Hon. Francis, vi. 474.
—— Gertrude Hanbury, Hon. Mrs. Francis, vi. 474.
—— Lady Selina, ii. 389.
Bright, Right Hon. John, the orator and statesman, v. 196; vi. 95.
Brimham Rocks, ii. 339.
Brinkburn Abbey, ii. 365.
Bristol, Geraldine Anson, Marchioness of, vi. 306.
Broadlands, iv. 340-341; v. 295.
Brodie, Sir Benjamin, i. 248.
Brogyntyn, vi. 433.
Bromley, Miss Caroline Davenport, iv. 476; v. 20, 32, 38, 310, 425.
Brontë, Branwell, iv. 69; vi. 394.
—— Charlotte, the novelist, iv. 69; vi. 394.
Brooke, Rev. Stopford, iv. 335; v. 209-210.
Brooks, Bishop, vi. 310.
Broughton, Miss Rhoda, the novelist, iv. 218-219, 326, 330, 383; vi. 253.
Brown, Dr., Professor at Aberdeen, i. 22.
—— Dr. John, the author of “Rab and his Friends,” vi. 438.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, the poetess, ii. 91, 409; vi. 431, 510.
—— Robert, the poet, ii. 408; iv. 218-219; v. 24, 289; vi. 85, 96, 431, 463.
Brownlow, Lady Adelaide Talbot, Countess, v. 204, 212; vi. 242, 246, 367-368.
—— John, 2nd Earl, ii. 137.
—— Adelbert, 3rd Earl, v. 204; vi. 242, 243, 367-368.
Brougham, Henry, 1st Lord, the legal orator, iii. 143-144; iv. 472; v. 321.
Broussa, vi. 209-214.
Bruce, Rev. J. Collingwood, the antiquarian, ii. 318; iii. 49.
—— Lord Robert, vi. 297.
—— Hon. Mrs. Robert, iii. 203.
Brunnow, Baron and Baroness, iv. 129.
Bruschi, Countess, v. 143.
Brussels, vi. 191.
Bryan, Hugh, vi. 146, 148, 192, 222, 424.
Bryce, James, the historian, v. 196.
Brymer, Dr. (Archdeacon of Wells), i. 338.
—— Marianne Wilkinson, Mrs., i. 338.
Brympton, v. 73.
Buccleuch, Lady Elizabeth Montagu, Duchess of, v. 449.
Buchanan, Miss Helen, iii. 181.
Buckhurst, v. 455; vi. 17.
Buckland, Dr. William, v. 358.
Bufalo, The Venerable Gaspare del, ii. 425, 442.
Bulkeley, Anna Maria Hare, Mrs., i. 3, 494.
Buller, Right Hon. Charles, the politician, vi. 442.
—— Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey, vi. 182, 379.
Bulman, Mrs., ii. 346.
Bülow, Madame de, v. 200.
Bulstrode, vi. 486.
Bulwer, Sir Henry, iv. 76.
Bunsen, Charles de, ii. 109; v. 85, 86, 155.
Bunsen, Isabel Waddington, Mrs. Charles de, v. 85, 155.
—— Christian, Chevalier, afterwards Baron, i. 162-163, 164, 465, 504; vi. 373.
—— Emilia de, iii. 109; v. 1, 76, 78; vi. 412.
—— Frances Waddington, Madame, afterwards Baroness de, i. 465; ii. 293; iii. 333-336; iv. 321-323; v. 1, 3, 54, 130, 157.
—— Frances de, ii. 293; iii. 109; iv. 322; v. 1, 76, 87.
—— George de, i. 481; v. 91.
—— Rev. Henry de, ii. 328; iv. 440.
—— Mary Battersby, Mrs. Henry de, v. 33.
—— Matilda de, ii. 293.
—— Theodora de, i. 464; ii. 294.
—— Theodore de, i. 163; v. 86.
Buntingsdale, i. 144, 208; ii. 326-327; v. 217; vi. 381.
Burford, Charles de Vere, Earl of.,, vi. 475.
Burghley House, v. 51.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, the artist, vi. 423-424.
Burney, Miss, the authoress, ii. 436.
Burns, Robert, the poet, ii. 164.
Burr, Mrs. Higford, ii. 220.
Burrell, Sir Raymond and Lady, vi. 323.
Burton, Isabel Arundel, Lady, vi. 460.
—— Sir Richard Francis, the traveller, vi. 357-358, 461.
Burwarton, v. 457; vi. 411.
Butcher, Miss, iv. 33.
Bute, John Patrick Stuart, 1st Marquis of, iv. 269-271, 400; v. 197, 225.
—— Gwendoline Howard, Marchioness of, iv. 270.
Butler, Rev. W. J., Vicar of Wantage, afterwards Dean of Lincoln, ii. 222-224.
Butler, Mrs., i. 501.
—— story of Mrs., vi. 365-367.
Buxton, Catharine Gurney, Lady, vi. 263, 339.
—— Miss Richenda, v. 99.
Byng, Hon. and Rev. Francis, iv. 475.

C
Cadenabbia, vi. 293.
Cadiz, iv. 33.
Cadland, vi. 155.
Cadogan, Lady Augusta, v. 351.
—— Lady Beatrix Craven, Countess, vi. 372.
—— George Henry, 5th Earl, vi. 372.
Cadouin, v. 437.
Caen, i. 319.
Caerlaverock Castle, ii. 164.
Caiëtani, Don Filippo, ii. 58.
—— Don Onorato, iii. 87.
Cairns, Mary Harriet M’Neile, Countess, v. 205, 212.
Caister Castle, vi. 103.
Caithness, Marie de Mariategni, Countess of, iv. 325.
Calotkin, Count, i. 15.
Cambo, ii. 490.
Cambrai, vi. 44.
Cambridge, H. R. H. Adolphus, Duke of, iv. 455.
Cameron, Lady Margaret, v. 362.
—— Lady Vere, ii. 8, 481, 482.
Campbell, Janey Callander, Lady Archibald, v. 289, 290.
—— Charlotte Malcolm, Lady, i. 88.
—— Colin, i. 309, 310, 313.
—— Lady Constance, vi. 135.
—— Gertrude Blood, Lady Colin, vi. 31.
—— Lady Evelyn, vi. 17.
—— Mary Meredith, Lady Frederick, iv. 236.
—— Lord and Lady George, vi. 4.
Campbell, Kenneth, of Ardpatrick, vi. 454.
Campsea Ashe, v. 444; vi. 23, 186, 258, 499, 519.
Canevari, G. B., the portrait painter, ii. 75.
Cannes, iii. 136-156; iv. 163-165; vi. 264.
Canning, Charlotte Stuart, Countess, ii. 360; iii. 324; vi. 334, 349-350.
Canons Ashby, v. 405.
Canossa, iv. 313.
Canterbury, i. 357-366; ii. 23-25; iii. 331-332, 394.
—— Edward White Benson, Archbishop of, vi. 97, 182, 456.
—— Archibald Tait, Archbishop of, iii 35-36, 39; v. 205, 383.
Capel, Monsignor, ii. 486.
Capheaton, ii. 350.
Caprarola, Palace of, iv. 108-113.
Capri, ii. 81.
Carcolo, Marchese, iv. 101.
Cardwell, Edward Viscount, and Viscountess, iv. 362-363, 401.
Carew, Frances Anne Buller, Mrs. Pole, iii. 375, 425; iv. 244.
—— Miss Julia Pole, iii. 372; iv. 246.
—— William Henry Pole, iv. 243; v. 71.
Carham, iii. 326.
Carlandi, Onorato, vi. 468.
Carlisle, vi. 134.
Carlo Borromeo, St., iv. 112.
Carlsruhe, i. 6; iii. 109, 333.
Carlyle, Jane Baillie Welsh, Mrs., v. 7, 314; vi. 441.
—— Thomas, the author, i. 166; iv. 71, 81, 123, 154-155, 305, 367, 383; v. 274, 310, 310, 313-314, 319, 384; vi. 96, 442, 488.
Carmichael, Sir William, iii. 46.
Carnac, vi. 345.
Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn Stanhope, Countess of, iv. 126, 149, 222, 223, 228, 300; vi. 253, 474.
Carnarvon, Henrietta Howard, Countess of, iv. 228.
Caroline, Empress of Austria, ii. 42.
—— of Brunswick, Queen of England, iii. 14-15.
Carpenter, Hon. Walter Talbot, Admiral, vi. 494.
Carr of Hedgeley, family of, ii. 280.
Carrington, Charles Robert Wynn, Earl, vi. 399.
Carysfort, Charlotte Heathcote, Countess of, v. 196; vi. 376, 455.
—— William Proby, 5th Earl of, vi. 376.
Cator, John, vi. 367.
—— Mary Mohun-Harris, Mrs., vi. 225.
—— the Misses, vi. 280.
Castagnuolo, iv. 194, 319-320.
Castel Fusano, ii. 390; iv. 100.
—— del Monte, v. 270.
—— Toblino, vi. 510.
Castlecombe, vi. 525.
Castlecraig, iii. 46.
Castletown of Upper Ossory, Augusta Douglas, Lady, iv. 171, 173, 174, 218, 220, 224, 231, 232; v. 209.
—— of Upper Ossory, John FitzPatrick, Lord, iv. 232-233.
Castro, Don Alessandro del, iii. 194.
Cavaillon, vi. 38.
Cavendish, Admiral and Mrs. George, ii. 94, 97.
—— Lady Beatrice, v. 229.
—— Hon. Compton, v. 229.
—— Mr. and Lady Harriet, vi. 175.
—— Louisa Lascelles, Hon. Mrs., i. 212.
—— Lord Richard, i. 212.
Cavoni, Marchesa, v. 154.
Cecchi, Cardinal, iii. 68.
Cecil, Lord Eustace, i. 241; v. 195; vi. 22-23, 81.
Cecinelli, Lucia, i. 53.
Cenci, Count Bolognetti, iii. 49, 85, 87.
Chaise Dieu, La, iii. 150.
Chalfield Manor, Great, vi. 485.
Chalus, v. 434.
Challinor, Mrs. Hannah, i. 151.
Chambers, Theodore, vi. 343.
Chambord, Henri, Comte de, iii. 16-18.
Champlatreux, vi. 100.
Chantrey, Sir Francis, the sculptor, vi. 331.
Charlemont, Hon. Elizabeth Somerville, Countess of, iv. 483; v. 8, 11, 12, 285.
Charles II., King of England, vi. 439.
Charles X., King of France, iii. 43.
Charlotte of Mecklenbourg-Strelitz, Queen of England, ii. 436-437; vi. 105.
—— Princess, of Belgium, ii. 36, 37.
Charlton Hall, iv. 390.
—— House, near Greenwich, v. 280.
Charltons of Hesleyside, the. ii. 343.
Charteris, Lady Caroline, iv. 213.
Chartwell, i. 507; ii. 321.
Chatterton, Henrietta Georgiana, Lady, vi. 497.
Chawton, vi. 477.
Cheddar Cliff, vi. 320-321.
Cheney, Edward, of Badger, iv. 128, 325, 395.
Chequers, ii. 8.
Chesham, Henrietta Lascelles, Lady, iv. 145.
Chesterfield, Anne-Elizabeth Forester, Countess of, iv. 228.
Chesters, ii. 341; iii 49; vi. 435.
Chetwode, Mrs. George, i. 157.
Chetwynd, Harriet Johanna Camphill, Viscountess, vi. 382, 477.
Chevening, iv. 126, 235-237; vi. 295, 476.
Chevreuse, ii. 125.
Chewton, William Frederick, Viscount, iv. 240.
Chichester, vi. 19.
Chichester, Miss Catherine, ii. 94, 286.
—— Richard Durnford, Bishop of, vi. 19-20, 324.
—— Henry Thomas Pelham, 3rd Earl of, iv. 90, 348; vi. 260.
Childe, Frances Christina Leighton, Mrs., vi. 302.
Chillingham, ii. 267-271, 364; iii. 33.
Chingford, i. 312, 400.
Chipchase, ii. 343.
Chiswick, v. 24.
Cholmondeley, Miss Mary, the novelist, vi. 383.
—— Mary Heber, Mrs., i. 143.
Christ-Church, Hants, iv. 211.
Christian, H. R. H. the Princess, vi. 87.
Christina, Queen of Spain, ii. 57.
Church, Richard William, Dean of St. Paul’s, iv. 245.
Churchill, Jane Conyngham, Lady, vi. 478.
Chute, Challoner, of the Vyne, vi. 156.
Cimies, iv. 165.
“Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” iv. 352-356, 375.
Civita Castellana, ii. 53; iv. 107.
Clairvaux, vi. 17.
Clanricarde, Hon. Harriet Canning, Marchioness of, iv. 64.
Clarence, H. R. H. William, Duke of, iv. 144.
Clarendon, Lady Caroline Agar, wife of the 5th Earl of, ii. 139.
Clarke, Miss Freeman, the authoress, iv. 90.
Clayton, Mrs. Anne, ii. 318-319.
—— George Nathaniel, ii. 318, 353: vi. 435.
—— Isabel, Mrs. G. Nathaniel, ii. 318; vi. 435.
Clayton, John, of Chesters, ii. 318, 343.
—— Miss, ii. 274, 318, 341-344.
—— Mr. Matthew, ii. 318-319.
Clemens, Mr. Samuel (Mark Twain), vi. 281-283.
Clermont-Tonnerre, Comte and Comtesse de, iv. 85.
Cleveland, Lady Caroline Lowther, Duchess of, iv. 412, 417, 41-424, 468-469, 482; v. 19, 229-230, 285; vi. 79.
—— Elizabeth Russell, Duchess of, v. 230-231.
—— Harry George Powlett, 4th Duke of, iv, 83; v. 68; vi. 120-123.
—— Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope, Duchess of, iv. 83, 145, 279, 334, 338, 376; v. 210; vi. 82, 120, 128-129, 140, 459.
—— William Henry, 1st Duke of, iii. 46.
Clifford, Captain, ii. 81.
—— Edward, the artist, iv. 72; vi. 243.
Clinton, Elizabeth Grant, Lady Charles, ii. 477; iv. 328; v. 205.
—— Lady Louisa, i. 383.
—— Miss Louisa, i. 59, 210, 257, 387-388.
Clisson, vi. 147.
Clive, Mrs. Archer, the novelist, i. 453.
—— Lady Catherine, v. 308.
—— Charles Meysey, of Whitfield, v. 16.
—— Lady Mary, v. 459.
Cliveden, v. 229; vi. 478, 479, 525.
Close, Mr. and Mrs., of Nottingham, vi. 58.
Cluny, iii. 383.
Clutterbuck, Marianne Lyon, Mrs., of Warkworth, ii. 17, 284, 352.
Clyde, Falls of the, iii. 49.
Clyde, Colin Campbell, Lord, General and hero, iv. 211-212.
Cobbold, Felix, vi. 259.
Cobham, Claude Delawal, iii. 152-153.
Cobham Hall, Kent, iv. 237-238, 356-357, 411-412; v. 16, 31; vi. 141, 254, 295, 503.
Cockerton, George, vi. 347.
Coigny, Augustin, Duc de, iii. 18-19.
Colchester, v. 446.
Cole, Miss Florence, ii. 45, 54; iv. 129.
—— Miss Louisa, ii. 46; iv. 129.
—— Sir Henry, Director of South Kensington Museum, iv. 157.
Colegrave, Mrs. Francis, ii. 94, 286.
Coleman, Miss Sarah, i. 173.
Coleridge, John Duke Coleridge, Baron, iv. 77, 78.
Collatia, ii. 390.
Collet, Susanna, vi. 376-377.
Collins, Staunton, i. 154, 190.
Colonna, Isabella de Toledo, Princess, iii. 191.
Colquhoun, J. A., i. 507; ii. 322.
—— Archibald, iv. 6.
Combermere, Mary Gibbings, Countess of, v. 22, 315.
Compton, Florence Anderson, Lady Alwyne, iv. 336, 399; vi. 456.
—— Mrs., iii. 326.
Condé, Louis Philippe d’Orléans, Prince de, vi. 109.
Condover, vi. 383.
Conington Castle, iv. 424.
Conington, John, Professor of Latin, ii. 4.
Conques, v. 442.
Consolo, the musician, v. 176.
Constantinople, vi. 193-209.
Conwy, Shipley, iii. 129.
—— Colonel Shipley, iii. 130.
Cookson, Francis, vi. 375.
Coomb Bank, iv. 236.
Copeland Castle, ii. 364.
Copenhagen, v. 99-101.
Copley, Lady Charlotte, v. 419.
Corbet, Hester Cotton, Lady, of Adderley, iii. 401; iv. 133.
Cordova, iv. 30.
Cori, iv. 104.
Cork and Orrery, Edmund, 8th Earl of, i. 293.
—— Lady Emily De Burgh, Countess of, iv. 125, 410; vi. 335.
—— Isabella Poyntz, Countess of, v. 301.
Cornford, Joseph, vi. 189.
Corry, Montagu Lowrie, afterwards Lord Rowton, v. 47, 48.
Cortachy, vi. 438.
Costa le Cerda, Vicomte, ii. 115-116, 121.
Cotehele, iv. 248.
Cottrell Dormer, Mr. and Mrs., of Rousham, ii. 150.
—— Mrs. Upton, vi. 183.
Coulson, Colonel, ii. 354.
—— Mary-Anne Byron, Hon. Mrs., ii. 354.
—— Misses Mary and Arabella, of Blenkinsopp, ii. 176, 272.
Courmayeur, i. 458; ii. 409.
Courtenay, Hon. and Rev. Charles and Lady Caroline, vi. 257.
—— Lady Agnes, iii. 320.
—— Edward Baldwin, Lord, iv. 385.
—— “Sir William” (Nichols Tom), i. 361-365.
—— Miss, vi. 431.
Cousin, M. Victor, iii. 146.
Coutts, Angela Georgina, Baroness Burdett, the philanthropist, iv. 71, 396; vi. 77, 172.
Coventry, Miss Augusta, iv. 231.
Cowburne, Mrs., i. 128, 209.
Cowdray, vi. 20.
Cowell, Sir J., v. 70.
Cowley, Henry Richard Wellesley, 1st Lord, the Ambassador, iv. 81.
—— Olivia de Ros, Countess, iv. 81, 394.
Cowling Castle, v. 32.
Cowper, Lady Anne Florence de Grey, Countess, iv. 414-416.
—— Hon. Henry, iv. 145, 308, 416; vi. 95.
Cowper-Temple, Hon. William, iv. 341.
Coxe, Rev. Henry Octavius, Bodleian Librarian, ii. 157; v. 202.
Cracroft, Colonel and Mrs., iii. 382.
Cradock, Hon. Harriet Lister, Mrs., i. 512; ii. 137-138.
Cranborne, Lady Alice Cicely Gore, Viscountess, vi. 422.
Craster, family of, ii. 279.
Craven, Lady Emily Grimston, Countess, v. 47, 296.
—— Pauline de la Ferronays, Mrs. Augustus, v. 22.
Crawford, Misses Annie and Mimoli, iv. 106.
—— Frank Marion, the novelist, iv. 106; v. 177.
—— James Ludovic Lindsay, 9th Earl of, vi. 120.
—— Emily Florence Wilbraham, Countess of, vi. 224, 443.
Crealock, Lieutenant-General Henry Hope, iv. 66.
Crecy, ii. 380.
Creslow Pastures, ii. 220.
Cresswell, Sir Cresswell, the judge, ii. 353.
Crewe, John, 3rd Lord, v. 13, 63.
Crewe Hall, v. 62.
Crichton, Colonel and Lady Madeleine, iv. 94.
Crichton Castle, ii. 172.
Crockett, Samuel Rutherford, the novelist, vi. 434-435.
Croglin Grange, story of, iv. 203-208.
Croisic, Le, vi. 147, 152.
Croker, James, vi. 325.
—— John Wilson, vi. 255.
Cromer, v. 449; vi. 262-263.
Crowcombe, vi. 233.
Croyland, iii. 164.
Crozant, Le, v. 433.
Crum, Mr. and Mrs., vi. 231.
Cuffe, Sir Charles, ii. 358.
Cullum, Gery Milner Gibson, vi. 24, 508.
Cummings, Mr. and Mrs. E. C., iii. 380; vi. 310-311, 394-397.
Cunliffe, Sir Robert, iv. 486.
Curran, John Philpot, vi. 359.
Curzon, Hon. George Nathaniel, afterwards Viceroy of India, v. 284, 296; vi. 421.
Cushman, Miss Charlotte, the actress, iii. 204-207, 386.
Cust, Hon. Archdeacon Arthur, afterwards Dean of York, iv. 411.
—— Lady Caroline, iv. 58-59.
Cuvier, Frederic, the naturalist, vi. 363.

D
Daldy and Isbister, Messrs., v. 241-243.
Dalison, Charles Burrell, iv. 17, 89, 316; vi. 294.
Dallas, Mrs., iii. 380.
Dalton Hall, iii. 131; iv. 63.
Dalzel, Mrs. Allen, iii. 172.
—— Aventina Macmurdo, Mrs., ii. 17-19, 172, 357; iii. 172, 174-176.
Dampierre, ii. 125.
Darley, George, i. 164.
Darling, Mr., of Bamborough, ii. 272.
Darnley, John Stuart Bligh, 6th Earl of, vi. 164.
—— Lady Harriet Pelham, Countess of, iv. 223, 237, 426; v. 31, 199.
Dasent, Sir George, the author, i. 67, 449; v. 339, 341; vi. 31, 61-63, 75-77.
Dashwood, Anna Maria Shipley, Mrs., i. 17, 26, 158; iii. 125, 127-128.
Dashwood, Bertha Abercromby, Lady, ii. 466, 477; v. 193.
—— Sir Edwin, ii. 466.
—— Florence Norton, Lady, vi. 299.
—— Sir Francis, iv. 445.
D’Aubigné, M. Merle, the historian, i. 453.
Davenport, Augusta Campbell, Mrs. Bromley, v. 216.
—— Edward, of Capesthorne, ii. 142.
—— Miss Evelyn Bromley, v. 289.
Davidoff, Adèle, Madame, i. 351; ii. 65-67, 76, 115, 416.
Davidson, Susan Jessop, Mrs., of Ridley Hall, ii. 172-177, 266, 272-274; iii. 322-323; iv. 272, 458; v. 20.
Davy, Jane, Lady, v. 56-57.
Dawkins, Mrs. Francis, ii. 297; iii. 71-75, 315.
Daylesford, iv. 435.
Days near Rome, iv. 84-85, 162.
De Capel Brooke, Mr. and Mrs., vi. 238.
Decies, John Beresford, Lord, iv. 290.
Deimling, Herr Otto, i. 162.
De Jarnac, Hon. Geraldine Foley, Comtesse, iv. 300.
Delamere, Hugh Cholmondeley, 2nd Lord, v. 195.
Delawarr, Constance Baillie-Cochrane, Countess, v. 455; vi. 143, 452.
De L’Isle, Philip Sidney, Lord, iv. 459.
Dempster, Mr. and Mrs., of Ormistoun, iv. 267-268.
Denbigh, Rudolph Feilding, 8th Earl of, iv. 427, 465; v. 281.
—— Mary Berkeley, Countess of, iv. 427, 465; v. 195.
Denfenella, ii. 168.
Denison, Alfred, iv. 465; v. 316.
Denison, Lady Charlotte, iii. 42.
—— Rev. George Anthony, v. 278.
—— Mr. Stephen, ii. 272.
Denman, George, Judge, iv. 283.
Dent, Emma Brocklehurst, Mrs., iv. 439.
Deramore, Sir R. W. de Yarburgh Bateson, Lord, vi. 425.
Derby, Edward Smith Stanley, 13th Earl of, iii. 131.
Dereham, vi. 363.
Dering, Edward Heneage, vi. 34, 497.
—— Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen, Mrs., vi. 497.
Derwentwater, James Radcliffe, Earl of, ii. 266, 351.
De Ros, Georgiana Lennox, Lady, vi. 190-191.
De Selby, Mrs., iii. 71, 73.
—— Mrs. Robert, iii. 192.
Des Voeux, Miss Georgiana, ii. 371-372; iii. 139.
De Vesci, Hon. Evelyn Charteris, Viscountess, vi. 329, 351.
Devon, William Reginald Courtenay, 12th Earl of, iv. 240, 385, 387; v. 461.
Devonshire, Lady Georgiana Spencer, wife of the 5th Duke of, i. 5, 6.
Dickens, Charles, ii. 275.
—— Lady Elizabeth, v. 20.
Dictionary of National Biography, vi. 223.
Dilston, ii. 266, 320.
Dino, Duc de, v. 155.
Dixon, Louisa Simpkinson, Mrs., iii. 397.
Dixon-Browne, Mr. and Mrs., of Unthank, iii. 170.
Dodd, Mr. Wolley, the botanist, vi. 231.
Dolceacqua, ii. 253.
Dolgorouki, Prince Nicol, iii. 68, 84.
—— Princess, the story of, iv. 293-299.
Domremy, vi. 44.
Doncaster, ii. 261.
Donington, Charles Abney-Hastings, Lord, vi. 230.
Donoughmore, Thomasine Steele, Countess of, v. 383; vi. 97.
Dorchester, Dudley Carleton, 4th Lord, v. 205.
Doria, Donna Guendolina, ii. 71.
—— Prince Filippo, ii. 424.
—— Donna Olimpia, ii. 72.
—— Donna Teresa, ii. 70.
D’Orsay, Count Alfred, artist and dandy, i. 18, 20, 29, 37; ii. 408; v. 299.
Dorset, John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of, vi. 121.
Douglas, Lady Agnes, v. 138, 145, 150.
Dowdeswell, Miss, iii. 76, 82.
Downshire, Caroline Frances Cotton, Marchioness of, v. 223.
Doyle, Sir Francis, the poet, v. 16, 55.
—— Percy, iv. 360.
—— Richard, the artist, iv. 67, 325; v. 46.
Draycot, iv. 394.
Drayton House, v. 447.
Drummond, Augusta Charlotte Fraser, Mrs. Robert, vi. 12, 26.
—— Frances Jemima Oswald, Mrs., of Megginch, vi. 410.
—— George, of Swaylands, vi. 456.
—— Elizabeth Norman, Mrs. George, vi. 456, 500.
—— Henry, founder of the Irvingites vi. 136.
—— William [1585-1649], of Hawthornden, the poet, vi. 444.
Dublin, Richard Chevenix Trench, Archbishop of, iv. 90, 328.
Dubois, Madame, iv. 163.
Ducie, Henry John Moreton, 3rd Earl of, iv. 381, 397; v. 298.
Ducie, Julia Langston, Countess of, iv. 219, 435; v. 30, 273, 281.
Duckworth, Sir John and Lady, iv. 245.
—— Robinson, afterwards tutor to Prince Leopold and Canon of Westminster, i. 446, 472; ii. 4, 33.
Dudley, 1st Earl of, i. 20; iv. 421.
Dufferin, Helen Selina Sheridan, Baroness, vi. 475.
Dugdale, Alice Trevelyan, Mrs. Stratford, v. 13.
Dumbleton, Miss Harriet, i. 269.
Dumfries, ii. 163.
Dundas, Hon. Alice Wood, Mrs. John, iv. 369; v. 422; vi. 484.
Dunlop, Harriet, Mrs., iii. 258, 260, 281-282, 288, 290, 292, 298, 304, 306, 317.
Dunraven, Anne, Countess of, v. 148, 151.
Dunottar, ii. 166.
Dunstanborough Castle, ii. 269-270, 364; iii. 35, 36.
Dunster Castle, vi. 235.
Duntrune, ii. 165.
Dupanloup, Felix Antoine Philibert, Bishop of Orleans, iii. 360.
Du Quaire, Fanny Blackett, Madame, iv. 200, 219, 220; v. 198, 311, 386; vi. 28-31.
Durham, ii. 262.
Durham, Beatrix, Countess of, ii. 364-366; iii. 35-39.
—— George Frederick, 2nd Earl of, ii, 364-365; iii. 35-36; iv. 124.
—— Sir Philip, v. 15.
Dutton, Hon. Julia, iv. 466.
—— Hon. Ralph and Mrs., iv. 71, 331. 397; v. 287.
Dyrham Park, i. 315.
Dysart, Elizabeth Tollemache, Countess of, v. 235.

E
Eardley, Sir Culling, ii. 289.
Earle, Theresa Villiers, Mrs., the authoress, vi. 254.
Eastbourne, i. 63, 210, 256, 376, 505.
East Hendred, 11. 230.
Eastlake, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady, iii. 154-155, 418; v. 308, 311.
Ebury, Robert, 1st Lord, iv. 400; vi. 89.
Eccles Greig, ii. 168.
Eddis, E. V., the portrait-painter, vi. 324-326, 330-333.
Edgecumbe, Fanny-Lucy Shelley, Hon. Mrs. George, iv. 247-248.
—— Lady Ernestine, vi. 257.
—— Hon. George, iv. 247.
—— Sir Richard, iv. 248.
Edgeworth, Life and Letters of Maria, vi. 370.
Edinburgh, iv. 449.
Edinburgh, H.R.H. Duke and Duchess of, v. 210.
—— H.R.H. the Duchess of, vi. 261.
Edwardstone, vi. 519.
Egerton, Lady Blanche, iii. 32.
—— Rev. Charles, i. 137.
—— Elizabeth Sykes, Mrs., iv. 460.
—— Miss Mary, vi. 97.
—— Lady Mary, iv. 348, 464.
—— of Tatton, Lady Charlotte Loftus, Lady, iv. 460-462; v. 65.
—— of Tatton, Lady Mary Amherst, Lady, vi. 229-239, 305.
—— of Tatton, William Egerton, William, 1st Lord, iv. 382; v. 18.
Elcho, Lady Anne Anson, Lady, ii. 356; iii 42; v. 206.
Eldon, John Scott, 1st Earl of, vi. 333.
Eliot, William, Lord, iv. 245.
Elizabeth, Queen of England, iv. 77, 337; v. 332.
Ellice, Lady Jane, iv. 9, 51, 136, 209, 213, 254, 338, 405, 406, 408; v. 214; vi. 21.
—— Mr. William, iv. 51, 405; v. 214.
Elliot, Lady Harriet, iv. 447.
—— Miss Margaret, iv. 324.
Ellis, Hon. Harriet, iv. 182, 189.
Ellisland, ii. 164.
Ellison, Mr. Cuthbert, i. 50.
—— Mrs. of Sugbrooke, iii. 169.
Elphinstone, Sir Howard, iv. 230; vi. 152, 181.
Elsdon, ii. 345.
Elton Hall, v. 271; vi. 376, 455.
Eltz, vi. 223.
Elvedon, vi. 400.
Ely, iii. 8.
Embrun, vi. 46.
Enfield, Lady Alice Egerton, Viscountess, v. 363.
Enniskillen, William Willoughby, 3rd Earl of, iv. 382.
Ensleigh, vi. 181.
Erskine, Emmeline Adeane, Mrs. Thomas, novelist, iii. 201; v. 278.
—— Thomas, of Linlathen, essayist, ii. 165, 278.
Escrick, ii. 437.
Escurial, Palace of the, iv. 42.
Eslington, ii. 320, 364.
Este, iii. 229.
Eugène Beauharnais, Prince, i. 20.
Eugénie de Montijos, Empress of the French, i. 492; iii. 392; iv. 225, 434; v. 205, 210-211, 417-418; vi. 350-351.
Eulenborg, Count, v. 96, 98.
Evans, Rev., iii. 3.
Eversley, Charles Shaw-Lefevre, Viscount, ii. 217; iv. 343; v. 221, 340.
Evreux, i. 326.
Ewart, Herbert and Lady Mary, vi. 517.
Exeter, Lady Georgina Pakenham, Marchioness of, v. 47.
Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of, ii. 264; iv. 249.
—— William Alleyne Cecil, 3rd Marquis of, v. 47, 52.

F
Faa, Esther, Queen of the Gipsies, iv. 250-252.
Facchini, Giacinta, “the Saint of St. Peter’s,” ii. 429-430; iii. 253-254.
Fairholme, Grace Palliser, Mrs., iv. 133, 135, 136, 139, 143.
Falconnet, Mademoiselle Judith, ii. 59.
Falk, Paul Ludwig, the politician, v. 92.
Falkirk Tryst, iii. 48.
Falkland, Byron Plantagenet Cary, 12th Viscount, vi. 445.
Fane, Captain, iv. 288.
Farfa, iv. 190.
Farley Hungerford, i. 271-272.
Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro, iv. 112.
Farquharson, Miss, of Invercauld, v. 456.
Favart, Madame, v. 176.
Fawsley, v. 404.
Feilden, Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot, iii. 78-80; iv. 106.
Feilding, Lord and Lady, i. 340.
Felbrigge, v. 451.
Felixstowe, vi. 259.
Fellowes, Hon. Ailwyn and Mrs., vi. 241.
—— Susan Lyon, Mrs., ii. 272, 317.
Fénélon, Chateau de, v. 437.
Fergusson, Sir James, v. 8.
Ferney Voltaire, i. 453.
Ferrar, Nicholas, of Little Gidding, vi. 376-378.
Ferrara, ii. 47; iii. 345.
Ferrers, Sir Edward, vi. 498.
—— Laurence, 4th Earl, iv. 236.
—— Marmion Edward, vi. 497.
Ferronays, M. de la, ii. 68.
Fersen, John Axel, Comte de, iv. 273-279.
Feuchères, Sophia Dawes, Madame de, iii. 21-23; iv. 338-339; vi. 122.
Feuchtwanger, the Misses, vi. 285.
Fiano, Don Marco, Duke of, ii. 59, 424.
—— Donna Giulia Boncompagni, Duchess of, ii. 59.
Fielding, Copley, the artist, i. 165, 505.
Filiol, Sybil, i. 157.
Fina, S., iii. 344.
Finucane, Miss Anastasia, iii. 209, 378.
Firle, v. 407.
Fisher, Captain Edward, iv. 201, 203, 307.
—— Frederick, iii. 67, 414.
FitzClarence, Lady Frederick, iii. 29-30.
Fitzhardinge, Georgina Sumner, Lady, v. 304, 306.
FitzGerald, Edward Fox, i. 29.
—— Jane Paul, Mrs. Edward, i. 29; iii. 267, 269, 271, 272; iv. 243.
—— Pamela Sims, Lady Edward, i. 28; iv. 243; v. 413.
—— Percy, the author, vi. 259.
Fitzherbert, Mrs., iii. 324.
Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond, v. 14.
—— Mrs., iii. 226.
Fitzwilliam, Lady Albreda, iv. 282.
—— Hon. Charles, vi. 378.
—— Lady Frances Douglas, Countess, iv. 269, 281-282.
—— William, 6th Earl, iv. 269, 281.
Flahault, Margaret, Baroness Keith, Comtesse de, iv. 61.
Fletcher, Miss, of Saltoun, ii. 355; iii. 40, 42, 43.
—— Lady Charlotte, ii. 356; iii. 43-45.
Flint, Professor Robert, theologian, v. 323.
Flodden Field, ii. 281.
Florence, ii. 84; iii. 315; iv. 193; vi. 510.
Florence, Henry, iii. 363.
Flower, Constance de Rothschild, Mrs. Cyril, afterwards Lady Battersea, vi. 90.
—— Professor (Sir) William Henry, vi. 81.
Foley, Henry Thom, 5th Lord, v. 284.
—— Lady Mary Howard, Lady, v. 413.
—— Miss Margaret, the sculptress, iv. 90.
Folkestone, Matilda Chaplin, Viscountess, v. 15.
Fontainebleau, i. 451.
Fontaines, iii. 183.
Fontarabia, ii. 493.
Fontenay, iii. 385.
Ford Abbey, vi. 296.
Ford Castle, ii. 280-282, 360-363; iii. 323-326; iv. 51, 133-144; vi. 158-161, 244-249.
—— Mary Molesworth, Mrs., of Pencarrow, vi. 95.
Forester, Hon. Eleanor Fraser, Mrs. Henry, vi. 123.
Forli, iv. 315-318.
Forster, Harry, vi. 156.
—— Professor, iv. 326.
Fortescue, Elizabeth Geale, Countess, iv. 249.
—— Hugh, Earl, iv. 249.
Foscolo, Ugo, iv. 346.
Foster, Dr., Bishop of Kilmore, ii. 233.
—— Miss, ii. 234.
—— Mrs. Johnston, vi. 301.
Fotheringham, Mrs., of Fotheringham, ii. 165.
Fotheringhay, v. 272.
Fox, Charles James, the politician, vi. 401.
—— George Lane, of Bramham, vi. 357.
—— St. George Lane, v. 416.
Framlingham, v. 445.
France, publication of volumes on, vi. 238.
Francesca Romana, St., iii. 225-226.
Francesco d’Assise, King Consort of Spain, iv. 35-37.
Francesco II., King of Naples, iii. 85, 96-97.
Francheschi, Signor, v. 22.
Franklin, Lady, iii. 2.
Franzoni, Madame, iv. 166-167.
Fraser, Mrs., v. 323.
Fray, Miss, i. 268.
Frederick the Great of Prussia, ii. 148; v. 92.
—— Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, ii. 374; v. 96, 97; vi. 69.
Freeman, Edward Augustus, the historian, iv. 354-356. 424; vi. 380.
Frere, G. E., v. 331.
Fribourg, in Breisgau, iii. 109.
—— in Switzerland, ii. 112.
Fritwell Manor, ii. 151.
Froude, James Anthony, the historian, iv. 397; v. 18, 197, 289.
Fry, Elizabeth Gurney, Mrs., i. 229; ii. 437.
—— Mrs., of Clifton, iv. 78-80.
Fryston, iv. 69.
Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, ii. 400, 403; iii. 270, 287.
Fuseli, Henry, R.A., vi. 330.
Fyler, Rev. J., Vicar of Cornhill, iv. 264, 266.
—— Gabet, M., ii. 421.

G
Gabriac, Marquis de, ii. 115.
—— Marquise de, ii. 67.
Gabrielli, Augusta Bonaparte, Princess, v. 140.
Gaebler, M. Bernard, i. 161.
Gage, Henry, 5th Viscount, v. 407.
Galicano, the Hermitage of, ii. 98.
Galloway, Lady Mary Cecil, Countess of, vi. 224.
Galway, Henrietta Eliza Milnes, Viscountess, vi. 421.
—— Rev. Father, ii. 398-404, 427; iii. 263, 287.
Garden, Miss Henrietta, i. 108; iii. 193, 213, 220; v. 135, 345; vi. 264, 275, 279, 415, 505, 509.
Gargilesse, v. 433.
Garrowby, vi. 389.
Gaskell, Charles Milnes, vi. 28.
—— Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, Mrs., the novelist, ii. 224; iii. 117.
Gasperoni, the robber chieftain, ii. 54.
Gatton Park, v. 33.
Gaussen, M., i. 453.
Gayford, Mrs., i. 53, 369.
Gemmi, adventure on the, i. 462.
Geneva, i. 452; ii. 379.
Genoa, ii. 253; iii. 187.
George III., King of England, ii. 434-436.
George IV., King of England, iii. 14, 15, 176, 324; iv. 308; v. 335; vi. 359.
Germany, H.R.H. Frederick, Crown Prince of, ii. 374; v. 96, 97; vi. 69.
—— Frederick William II., Emperor of, vi. 253.
—— H.R.H. Victoria, the Crown Princess of, v. 75, 96-98; vi. 69, 70.
Ghizza, Ancilla, iii. 234.
Giacinta, the “Saint of St. Peter’s,” ii. 429-430; iii. 253-254.
Gibraltar, iv. 34-37.
Gibside, ii. 180.
Gibson, John, the sculptor, iii. 76-78.
Gidding, Little, vi. 376-378.
Gidman, John, i. 131; ii. 33, 83, 386; iii. 232, 406, 412; iv. 46; v. 378.
—— Mary Lea, Mrs., i. 205-207, 210; ii. 33, 468, 489; iii. 195, 316, 399, 403, 409, 412, 413, 414; iv. 46, 299, 373-375; v. 315, 325, 352, 369-381.
Gilbertson, Rev. Lewis, Minor Canon of St. Paul’s, vi. 375, 464.
Gilling Castle, vi. 256.
Gioberti, Signor, iii. 167.
Girgenti, v. 251.
Gladstone, Catherine Glynne, Mrs., ii. 381; iv. 397, 462; v. 210.
—— Rt. Hon. William Ewart, the statesman, iv. 397, 461-462; v. 210; vi. 235-236, 325, 408, 483.
Glamis Castle, i. 22; v. 44, 217-218.
Glamis, John Lyon, 6th Lord, i. 23.
—— John Lyon, 7th Lord, i. 23.
—— John Lyon, 8th Lord, i. 23.
Glassenbury, vi. 55.
Glastonbury, i. 98.
Gleichen, Countess Valda, vi. 499.
Glemham, v. 445.
Gloucester and Bristol, Charles John Ellicott, Bishop of, iv. 401.
Glyn, Hon. and Rev. Edward Carr, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, iv. 283, 284.
Glynde Place, v. 407.
Goldschmidt, Jenny Lind, Madame, i. 236; iii. 146-149; iv. 80; v. 200; vi. 260-262, 406.
Goldsmid, Nathaniel, ii. 68; iii. 168.
—— Mrs. Nathaniel, iii. 69, 71-75, 93.
Goldstone Farm, i. 150, 208.
Gondi, Count, iii. 252.
Gontaut, Duchesse de, Governess of the Children of France, vi. 321.
Gordon, Alexander, v. 319-320.
—— Hon. Sir Arthur, afterwards Lord Stanmore, v. 203, 208.
—— Hon. Canon Douglas, iv. 347; vi. 105, 414.
Gordon, Lady E., vi. 405, 414.
—— Hon. John, iii. 43.
—— Misses Duff, iv. 370.
—— Isabella Grant, Lady Francis, iv. 66, 67, 410.
Gore, Lady, i. 278.
Gorhambury, v. 47.
Gosau, Lakes of, 11, 41.
Gosford, ii. 356.
Gower, vi. 101.
—— Granville Leveson, vi. 305.
—— Lord Ronald, iv. 61; v. 228, 275, 340, 372, 374; vi. 341.
Grammont, Antoine, Duc de, vi. 29.
Granada, iv. 37-39.
Grande Chartreuse, La, ii. 258.
Grant, Dr., Bishop of Southwark, ii. 442.
—— Frederick Forsyth, i. 440; ii. 151, 168.
—— General, the American, v. 97.
—— Miss Katherine, v. 429.
—— Lady Lucy, v. 281.
—— Miss Mary, the sculptress, iv. 397; v. 281.
—— Owen, v. 279; vi. 96.
—— Duff, Sir Mountstuart and Lady, vi. 520.
Granville, Castalia Campbell, Countess, vi. 301.
—— Mr. Court, and Lady Charlotte, ii. 353.
Gravetye, vi. 227.
Gray, Dr. Asa, the botanist, v. 300-301.
Great Oakley Hall, vi. 238.
Greenwell, Rev. Canon William, the archaeologist, v. 424.
Greenwood, John, of Swancliffe, v. 425.
Gregory, Pearson, of Harlaxton, vi. 501.
—— Mrs., ii. 482-486; iv. 200.
Gregory XVI., Pope, iii. 74.
Grenfell, Alethea Adeane, Mrs. Henry, v. 326.
Grenoble, vi. 51.
Gresford, i. 96; ii. 448.
Grey, Albert, vi. 18.
—— Anna Sophia Ryder, Lady, of Falloden, ii. 279, 363.
—— Charles, 2nd Earl, the Prime Minister, iii. 36; iv. 286.
—— Charlotte Des Voeux, Lady, ii. 251, 371, 377; iii. 139, 154; iv. 327.
—— Lady Elizabeth, ii. 276, 366.
—— Hon. and Rev. Francis, ii. 276-278, 366; v. 231, 461.
—— Hon. Sir Frederick, iv. 283.
—— George, of Falloden, iv. 290.
—— Right Hon. Sir George, of Falloden, statesman, ii. 279, 363; iii. 36; iv. 99; v. 2.
—— Sir George, of New Zealand, ii. 214-217; iii. 330.
—— Rev. Harry, i. 253.
—— Henry George, 3rd Earl, the politician, iii. 35, 36; iv. 62.
—— Lady Georgiana, ii. 332, 334-335, 337-339.
—— John, of Dilston, ii. 266.
—— Maria Copley, Countess, iii. 35-36; iv. 62.
—— Mrs. William, iv. 473.
Greystoke, vi. 354.
Greville, Hon. Alwyn, v. 214.
—— Mrs., née Locke, ii. 94.
—— Sabine Thellusson, Mrs., iv. 370, 484; v. 38-41, 289-290.
—— William Fulke, v. 223.
Grignan, Chateau de, vi. 37.
Grigor, Dr., of Nairn, iii. 373; iv. 89.
Grimaldi, ii. 250.
—— the Marchesa, ii. 320.
Grimston, Lady Anne, vi. 374-375.
—— Lady Jane, v. 48.
Groombridge Place, vi. 322-323.
Grosvenor, Hon. Mrs. Norman, vi. 367.
—— Lady Sybil Lumley, Countess, vi. 353.
Grosvenor, Hon. Victoria, vi. 77.
Grote, Harriet Lewin, Mrs., ii. 26-29, 218; iv. 480; v. 307-308, 310-312; vi. 253.
Grove, Elizabeth Hill, Mrs. Thomas, iii. 394; v. 291.
Guerande, La, vi. 152.
Guildford, the trial at, iii. 294.
Guiness, Adelaide Maria Guiness, Mrs. Edward, v. 204.
Guizot, M. François Pierre Guillaume, Prime Minister, i. 320.
Gunnora, Duchess of Normandy, i. 319.
Gurdon, story of Father, vi. 130.
Gurney, Miss Anna, i. 230.
—— Mrs. Catherine, i. 229.
Gurneys of Earlham, the, vi. 337-339, 370-371, 384.

H
Haddington, Helen Warrender, Countess of, iv. 445.
Hadleigh in Essex, vi. 518.
Haig of Bemerside, the Misses, iii. 378.
Hailes Abbey, iv. 438.
Hailstone, Mr. and Mrs., of Walton, iv. 68.
Hale, Dr. Douglas, ii. 369, 497.
—— Mrs., ii. 497; iii. 414.
Halifax, Lady Agnes Courtenay, Viscountess, iv. 290; vi. 353, 424.
—— Miss Caroline, i. 284.
—— Sir Charles Wood, Viscount, the statesman, iv. 290, 325, 362; v. 421.
—— Charles Lindley Wood, Viscount, President of the Church Union, v. 461; vi. 64, 97, 181-182, 257-258, 353, 424.
—— Lady Mary Grey, Viscountess, iv. 290, 475.
Hall, Mrs. Richard, iii. 159, 196, 198.
Hallam, Arthur, i. 509.
Hallein, mines of, ii. 42.
Hallingbury, iii. 7.
Hallstadt, ii. 40.
Halsbury, Hardinge Stanley Giffard, Lord Chancellor, vi. 478.
Hamilton, Alexander, 10th Duke of, ii. 336, 359.
—— Hon. Emma Elizabeth Proby, Lady Claude, vi. 376.
—— Lady Emily, iii. 48.
—— Hon. Frances Scott, Mrs. Baillie, iv. 259.
—— Rev. Henry Parr, Dean of Salisbury, iv. 346.
—— Hon. Margaret Dillon, Mrs., i. 382.
—— Princess Mary of Baden, Duchess of, ii. 358.
—— Mary Grove, Mrs. Cospatrick Baillie, iii. 395.
—— Lady Margaret, vi. 97.
—— Hamilton, Mrs., iv. 211-212, 215, 338-340, 404, 408.
Ham House, v. 231; vi. 225.
Hampden, Great, ii. 8.
—— Eliza Ellice, Viscountess, v. 407.
Hams, vi. 406.
Hanbury, Cecil, of La Murtola, vi. 341, 347.
Hanover, H.R.H. Princess Frederika of, v. 195.
—— H.R.H. Princess Mary of, iv. 429; v. 351, 429.
—— H.M. Queen Mary of, iv. 431-434; v. 351.
—— H.M. King George of, ii. 152, 153; iv. 431; v. 307.
Harcourt, Archbishop, iii. 157.
—— House, vi. 80.
—— Right Hon. Sir William, the statesman, v. 273.
Hardwick Hall, Suffolk, vi. 24, 102-103.
Hardwicke, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay, Countess of, iii. 24-27, 324; iv. 139-140.
Hardwicke, Hon. Susan Liddell, Countess of, ii. 403; iv. 409; v. 222.
Hardy, Thomas, the novelist, vi. 398.
Hare, Anna-Maria Clementina, i. 11, 13.
—— Anne Frances Maria Louisa, i. 39, 161, 338-357, 370; ii. 55-57, 70, 72, 114-115, 182-213, 284, 400, 409-432, 499-517; iii. 68, 89, 232, 233-272.
—— Augustus John Cuthbert: birth of, i. 42;
baptism, 50;
adoption, 51;
is sent to England, 53;
childhood of, 54-166;
sent to school at Harnish, 167;
private school life of, 170;
at Harrow, 214-246;
at Lyncombe, 247-296;
at Southgate, 297-401;
tour in Normandy, 318-331;
tour in Belgium, Germany, and France, 377-387;
goes to University College, Oxford, 402;
second tour in Germany and France, 422-436;
in France and Switzerland, 450-465;
in Wales, 501-503;
in Scotland, ii. 17-23;
leaves Oxford, 31;
in Switzerland and Austria, 33-44;
first journey to Rome and Naples, 45-84;
summer at Florence and Lucca, 84-103;
autumn in Northern Italy and Paris, 103-128;
writes Murray’s Handbook for Berks, Bucks, and Oxfordshire, 133-241;
second summer in Scotland, 162-172;
has to leave Hurstmonceaux, 227;
leaves Lime, 243;
settles at Holmhurst, 244;
spends the winter at Mentone, 246-258;
writes Murray’s Handbook for Durham and Northumberland, 260-366;
spends the spring at Nice and early summer in Switzerland, 370-380;
second winter at Rome, 384-409;
visit to Escrick, 433;
spring at Pau and Biarritz, 462-497;
summer in Northumberland, iii. 8-49;
third winter at Rome, 50-109;
winter at Cannes, 134-152;
fourth winter at Rome, 183-232;
death of his sister, 232;
is attacked by a Roman Catholic conspiracy, 272-312;
fifth winter at Rome and dangerous illness, 314-320;
sixth winter at Rome, 333-386;
death of his adopted mother, 400;
writes “Memorials of a Quiet Life” under great opposition, iv. 1-9;
visits at Penzance and Bournemouth and Highcliffe, 6-14;
lawsuit about a portrait by Sir J. Reynolds, 17-24;
travels in Spain with Miss Wright, 24-44;
autumn of 1872 in Northumberland and Yorkshire, 51-71;
visit at Hatfield, 72-82;
publication of “Wanderings in Spain,” 83-84;
seventh winter at Rome, 85-123;
autumn of 1873 in the North of England, 132-148;
work in 1874 on “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” 162-197;
becomes a member of the Athenaeum, 198-199;
publishes a third volume of “The Memorials,” 309-311;
tour for work in 1875 in Northern and Central Italy, 312-323;
visits in London and the country, 323-351;
publishes “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” 352;
is attacked by Mr. John Murray, 353;
by Mr. Edward Freeman, 354;
attends Lady Augusta Stanley’s funeral, 366;
visit at Powdenham, 385;
at Charlton, 388;
at Highcliffe, 404;
at Cobham, 411;
at Ampthill, 412;
at Conington, 424;
at Sarsden, 426;
at Donington, 440;
at Raby, 442;
at Whitburn, 443;
at Winton, 447;
at Ravensworth, 451;
at Kinmel, 458;
at Tatton, 459;
at Sherborne, 465;
at Osterley, 467;
at Hinchinbroke, 470;
writes the Memoirs of Baroness Bunsen, v. 1;
visit at Llanover, 3;
at Milford, 38;
at Babworth, 41;
at Thoresby, 43;
at Glamis, 44;
at Gorhambury, 47;
at Goldings, 53;
at Ampthill, 55;
at Crewe, 62;
at Battle Abbey, 66;
meets the Crown Princess of Germany, 75;
visits the Princess of Wied, 77;
visits and tour in Germany, 85-99;
in Denmark, 99-102;
in Sweden, 102-108;
in Norway, 108-118;
visit to the King and Queen of Sweden and Norway, 118-129;
undertakes to be with the Crown Prince at Rome, 132;
is overtaken by an avalanche on the Mont Cenis, 134;
at Rome with the Crown Prince, 135-177;
speech before the Roman Archaeological Society, 179-190;
in London with the Crown Prince, 195-213;
visits with the Crown Prince, 213-217;
at Llanover with the Hereditary Grand Duke of Baden, 225-228;
suffers from the bankruptcy of his publishers, 241;
makes a tour in Sicily and Apulia in 1879-80, 245-271;
edits the Life of Amelie von Lassaulx, 292;
goes to Holyrood as equerry to the High Commissioner, 318-324;
visits Rome, Capri, Calabria, and Venice in 1882, 344-352;
tour in Holland in 1882, 363-365;
death of his old nurse, 369-381;
travels in Russia in 1883, 391-401;
tour in Picardy and Switzerland in 1884, 408-411;
loss of fortune, 416;
first journey in France for literary purposes in 1885, 430-442;
his failures in trying to help young men, 462-470;
reaches middle life, vi. 1-3;
travels in France and Italy in 1886, 8-17;
travels in France in 1887, 35-54;
is arrested at Vizille, 48;
publishes “Paris,” and “Days near Paris,” 114-117;
travels again in France in 1888, 146-152;
last visit to Ford, 158;
spring on the Riviera and at Rome and Venice in 1889, 165-170;
loss from books, 165;
illness at Holmhurst in 1889, 187-188;
journey to Constantinople, Broussa, and Oberammergau in 1890, 192-225;
last visit to Highcliffe, 228-229;
his loss in Lady Waterford, 241-251;
spring on the Riviera and at Rome and Venice in 1892, 263-294;
serious illness at Holmhurst in 1892, 299-301;
loss of Miss Leycester, 318-319;
writes a volume on Sussex, 322;
publishes “Two Noble Lives,” 333-336;
writes the “Gurney Memoirs,” 337-339;
travels in Normandy and Brittany in 1894, 342-346;
publishes “Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth,” 370-371;
publishes “The Gurneys of Earlham,” 384-385;
publishes “North-Western France” and “Biographical Sketches,” 392;
spring on the Rivieras and at Rome and Venice in 1896, 411-421;
visits at Reigate, Hatfield, and Osterley, 421-424;
visit at Wollaton, 425;
visits at Oswestry, Lutwyche, Chesters, North Berwick, Airlie Castle, Bishopthorpe, 434-436;
publishes the first three volumes of “The Story of my Life,” 446;
visits at Lockinge, Blaise Castle, Hewell, Elton, Madresfield, Painswick, Hereford, 447-463;
visits at Maiden-Bradley, Burwarton, Teversal, Thoresby, Cliveden, 473-480;
builds at Holmhurst, 491;
visits at Shrivenham, Oxton, Streatlam, Kiplin, Baddesley-Clinton, Sonning, and Belvoir, 494-502;
at Rome in the spring of 1899, 505-510;
at Florence and Arco, 510;
attends the deathbed of Mrs. C. Vaughan, 513-516;
is at Swaylands with the Duchess of York, 410;
visits in Suffolk, 517-521;
undergoes the Nauheim treatment, 521;
tour in Devon and Cornwall, 522-524;
visits at Corsham and Cliveden, 525;
visit to the King and Queen of Sweden, 525.
Hare, Augustus William, Rector of Alton-Barnes, i. 6, 13, 14, 43-49.
—— Mrs. Augustus (Maria Leycester), i. 43, 54-80, 98-171, 187-196, 200-201, 210-212, 240, 254, 259, 262, 365, 376-377, 437-438, 442-444, 450, 454, 464, 466, 469, 487-492; ii. 14-17, 44-49, 76, 80, 85, 97, 109, 130, 227-229, 243, 246-247, 259, 326-328, 367-372, 392-393, 460-497; iii. 3, 84, 103, 107, 110, 141, 183, 187-190, 202-232, 320-322, 331, 337-419; vi. 489.
—— Miss Caroline, i. 4, 89, 94, 291.
—— Caroline, daughter of Francis and Anne, i. 33, 35.
—— Francis, Dean of St. Paul’s and Bishop of St. Asaph and Chichester, i. 1, 2; ii. 156.
Hare, Francis George (the elder), i. 6-21, 26, 29-42, 49-53, 84-85, 95, 157-159; ii. 57;
portrait by Sir J. Reynolds of, iv. 17-24.
—— Francis George (the younger), i. 35, 92-94, 160, 373-375; ii. 400-402, 408; iii. 240, 248, 257-259, 276, 278, 282-313.
—— Anne Frances Paul, Mrs., i. 33-42, 51, 53, 95, 160, 260-261, 276, 339-355, 370-376; ii. 55-57, 114, 212-213, 397-406; iii. 53, 54; iv. 18.
—— Charlotte Fuller, Mrs. Robert, iv. 50.
—— George, i. 91-94.
—— Georgiana, afterwards Mrs. Frederick Maurice, i. 13, 16, 82-83, 280.
—— Gustavus Cockburn, i. 13, 123, 287, 481.
—— Annie Wright, Mrs. Gustavus, i. 123.
—— Mrs. Henckel, i. 3, 4, 89, 90.
—— Henry, i. 91.
—— Julius Charles, Rector of Hurstmonceaux and Archdeacon of Lewes, i. 6, 10, 14, 49, 50, 59, 67-68, 77, 80-81, 99, 104-107, 109-111, 122, 156, 159, 176, 179, 251-253, 261-262, 357, 466-469, 476, 478, 480-484; iv. 18; vi. 6.
—— Marcus Augustus Stanley, i. 74, 86; ii. 366, 370; iv. 51, 164, 249; v. 69-70.
—— Marcus Theodore, i. 6, 11, 85, 96, 175, 190, 192, 194-196; iv. 18; vi. 6.
—— Lucy Anne Stanley, Hon. Mrs. Marcus, i. 49, 74, 166, 175, 178, 192, 194-196, 201-204; iii. 318-319.
—— Miss Marianne, i. 4, 10, 89, 95, 291.
—— Mary Margaret Alston, Mrs. i. 2, 494; ii. 156; vi. 518, 519.
—— Mary Hargreaves, Mrs. Theodore, vi. 297.
—— Reginald John, i. 13.
—— Rev. Robert, Rector of Hurstmonceaux, i. 4, 5; vi. 5.
—— Rev. Robert, Canon of Winchester, i. 2, 6, 494.
—— Theodore Julius, i. 160, 204.
—— William Robert, i. 18, 160, 373-375; ii. 401-402, 411, 452-453, 514; iii. 241-250.
Hare-Naylor, Anna Maria Mealey, Mrs., i. 13, 82, 83; vi. 6.
—— Francis, i. 5, 11, 12, 13; vi. 5.
—— Georgiana Shipley, Mrs., i. 5-12; vi. 6.
Harewood, Lady Florence Bridgeman, Countess of, vi. 402.
Harford, Mary de Bunsen, Mrs., iv. 165; v. 2.
Harlaxton, vi. 501.
Harlech, William Richard Ormsby Gore, 2nd Lord, vi. 434.
Harnham, ii. 351.
Harnish, i. 170; vi. 525.
Harraden, Miss, the novelist, vi. 340.
Harrington, Elizabeth Green, Countess of, v. 198.
Harris, Hon. Charles, vi. 459.
—— George Robert Canning, Lord, iv. 357.
—— Hon. Reginald Temple, i. 264, 277, 282.
Harrison, Archdeacon Benjamin and Mrs., iii. 331-332.
Harrow, i. 214.
Harte, Bret, the poet, vi. 319.
Harvey, Annie Tennant, Mrs., of Ickwellbury, iv. 335, 363; v. 406.
Hastings, i. 122.
Hastings, Francis, 1st Marquis of, iv. 285-286.
—— Warren, the statesman, iv. 435.
Hatfield House, i. 307, 313; iv. 72-82, 223, 224; vi. 372-375. 422-423, 482.
Hatherley, Lord and Lady, iv. 379.
Haweis, Rev. Hugh Reginald, the author, iv. 307.
Hawker, Misses Jane and Adelaide, iii. 106-107, 146.
Hawkestone, i. 148, 208; ii. 327.
Haworth, iv. 68-69; vi. 394.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, the novelist, v. 19.
Hawtrey, Dr. Edward Craven, Provost of Eton, ii. 230; iv. 198.
Hay, Adam, of King’s Meadows, ii. 137; iii. 46, 146.
—— Sir Adam, ii. 357; iii. 146.
—— Miss Ida, ii. 372.
—— Sir John, v. 51.
Haygarth, Mrs., afterwards Lady Blanche, iv. 83, 240; v. 276; vi. 257.
—— Colonel Francis, iv. 83, 240; v. 276; vi. 257.
Hayward, Abraham, the essayist, iv. 226, 395.
Heber, Rev. Reginald, Rector of Hodnet and Bishop of Calcutta, i. 44.
—— Emilia Shipley, Mrs. Reginald, i. 44; iii. 125.
Heckfield Place, iv. 343.
Hedley, Rev. W., Dean of University College, afterwards Rector of Beckley, i. 405.
Heidelberg, i. 380.
Heiligenkreutz, ii. 38.
Helbig, Professor Wolfgang, the antiquarian, v. 142.
Helmingham, v. 445.
Helston, vi. 522.
Hely-Hutchinson, Lady Margaret, v. 320.
Henckel, Mrs., i. 90.
Henderson, Colonel, iv. 155-156.
Hendre, the, vi. 502.
Henniker, Miss Edith, vi. 456.
Herbert, E., the artist, v. 191-192.
—— Rev. George, the poet, vi. 108.
—— Hon. George, Dean of Hereford, vi. 302.
—— Lady Gladys, iv. 406.
—— Lady Gwendolen, vi. 474.
—— Lady Margaret, vi. 474.
—— Lady Winifred, iv. 149; v. 11.
—— of Lea, Elizabeth A’Court, Lady, the authoress, iv. 51-55, 406.
—— of Llanarth, Arthur, v. 6.
—— of Llanarth, Hon. Augusta Hall, Mrs., v. 6, 228.
Hereford, vi. 302.
Herkomer, Hubert, the artist, v. 429.
Herrenalb, iv. 322-323; v. 86, 87.
Herries, Marcia Vavasour, Lady, iii. 237.
Hervey, Lord Arthur, Bishop of Bath and Wells, vi. 320-321.
—— Lord Francis, iv. 153.
Hesleyside, ii. 343.
Hesse, H.R.H. Princess Alice of, iv. 102; v. 147.
—— H.R.H. Prince Louis of, iv. 102.
Hewell, vi. 351, 448.
Hewitt, Sir Prescott, the great surgeon, vi. 4.
Hibbert, Caroline Cholmondeley, Mrs., iii. 117.
—— Miss Letitia, vi. 9.
Hickleton, ii. 283; iv. 290; v. 418; vi. 257-258, 371-372.
Higginson, Miss Adelaide, i. 478.
—— Lady Frances, i. 478; iv. 132; vi. 94.
—— General Sir George, v. 279; vi. 86, 94, 299.
Highclere, iv. 148.
Highcliffe, iii. 427; iv. 8-14, 208-217, 404-409; vi. 21, 108, 228-229.
High Force, the, ii. 340.
Hill, Anne Clegg, Viscountess, i. 148.
—— Miss Octavia, vi. 319.
—— Sir Roger, the philanthropist, vi. 183.
—— Sir Rowland, i. 147.
—— Rowland, 1st Viscount, i. 145.
Hills-Johnes, Lady, vi. 142-143.
Hinchinbroke, iv. 425, 470.
Hirsel, the, iv. 258.
Hoare, Mrs. R., v. 452.
Hobart, Vere Henry, Lord, and Mary Catherine Carr, Lady, ii. 389.
Hodnet, i. 143; ii. 327.
Hogg, James, the Ettrick Shepherd, ii. 314-315; iv. 55.
—— Mary Magniac, Mrs., vi. 247.
Hohenzollern, Prince Friedrich of, v. 98.
Holcombe, vi. 401.
Holford, Miss Evelyn, vi. 78.
—— George, vi. 448.
Holland, Mary-Augusta Coventry, Lady, iv. 226, 231, 325, 331, 395, 474.
—— Miss Caroline, v. 99, 109, 112, 245, 316, 390; vi. 92.
—— Miss Gertrude, v. 99, 245, 255, 316, 390
—— Mary Sibylia, Mrs. Frank, vi. 490.
Holland House, iv. 226-228, 231, 325, 331, 335 395, 398; v. 21, 212; vi. 329.
Holmbury, vi. 225.
Holmesdale, Lady Julia Cornwallis, Viscountess, v. 45.
Holmhurst, ii. 241-246, 259, 368; iii. 320; iv. 46, 49, 229, 311, 404; v. 30-31, 352, 462; vi. 4, 139, 170, 173-174, 342, 393, 428-429, 476, 480, 491, 503.
Holtermann, Baron, v. 119, 117, 138.
Holy Island, ii. 271-272.
Home, Cospatrick Alexander, 11th Earl of, iv. 258.
Honingham Hall, vi. 241.
Hood, Henry, iii. 152.
Hope, Adrian, vi. 101.
—— Aldena Kingscote, Lady, iv. 454.
—— Alexander James Beresford, iv. 290-291.
—— Miss Louisa, v. 321
—— Lady Mildred, ii. 14.
Hopton, vi. 103.
Hornby Castle, vi. 402.
Hornby, Mrs., of Dalton, iii. 80, 131, 329-330.
Horsley, Bishop, iii. 332.
Hosmer, Miss Harriet, the sculptress, iii. 76, 368; iv. 124; v. 66; vi. 268-273; 284-285, 287-290, 311-312.
Hos Tendis, i. 4; vi. 103.
Houblon, Mr. and Mrs. Archer, ii. 390; iii. 7.
Houghton Hall, vi. 104.
Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron, iii. 229, 360; iv. 69-71, 140, 143, 226, 307-308, 370, 383, 422, 478, 481; v. 14, 16, 17, 23, 63, 64, 66, 68, 209, 272-273, 274, 287, 314; vi. 84, 253, 275, 373, 442, 483, 488.
Hour, the Holy, ii. 499.
Housesteads, ii. 343.
Hovingham Hall, vi. 256.
Howard, Edward Henry, Monsignor, afterwards Cardinal, ii. 67; vi. 297.
—— Miss Elizabeth, iv. 99; v. 245, 255.
—— Hon. Hubert George Lyulph, vi. 422.
—— Lady Victoria, iii. 145; iv. 391.
—— of Glossop, Clara Louisa Greenwood, Lady, v. 60.
—— of Greystoke, Charlotte Long, Mrs., vi. 162, 354.
—— de Walden, Lady Lucy Bentinck, Lady, iv. 101.
Howden, vi. 361.
Howe, Mrs. Julia Ward, the poetess, v. 16.
Howick, iii. 35, 36.
Howitt, Miss Margaret, v. 163, 175.
—— William and Mary, author and authoress, v. 163-164, 175-176.
Hughan, Miss Janetta, ii 284.
Hughes, Hugh, of Kinmel, iv. 362.
—— Lady Florentia, vi. 77, 164.
—— Miss, “Sister Marion,” i. 473-474.
Hull, Henry Winstanley, i. 164, 196-197, 501.
Hulne Abbey, iii. 33.
Hulse, Sir Edward, iv. 249, 348.
Hungerford, Mrs., iv. 202.
Hunt, Holman, the artist, vi 511.
—— Leigh, v. 384.
—— Sir J., iii. 31.
Huntingtower, Katherine Burke, Lady, v. 234, 359; vi. 225.
—— William, Lord, v. 234.
Hurstmonceaux, i. 4, 9-12, 54-60, 92-94, 156, 157, 159, 164-165, 187-189, 258-260, 437-438, 475-478, 504-507; ii. 14, 227-228; iii. 410-411, 413-416; iv. 49-50; v. 380-381, 387; vi. 429, 470, 487-490. vi. 429, 470, 487-490.
Husband, story of Mr., vi. 102.
Hussey, Edward, of Scotney, iv. 301, 355-358. v. 408.
Hutt, William, M.P. for Gateshead, ii. 180.
—— Hon. Henrietta Clive, Mrs., iv. 330; v. 355, 359, 408.
Hyères, ii. 370.

I
Ickwellbury, vi. 27.
Ightham Mote, iv. 66; vi. 516.
Ignatieff, Madame, vi. 422.
Ignatius, Brother (Rev. Leycester Lyne), iii. 81, 83; v. 306-307.
Imperial, Napoléon Victor Jerome Frederic, the Prince, iv. 396, 398; v. 122, 123, 126-129, 204-205, 210-211; vi. 350.
Indelicati, the family of the, v. 254-258.
Ingilby, Elizabeth Macdowall, Lady, of Ripley, ii. 283, 337; iv. 287.
—— Miss, ii. 332; iv. 287.
Inglefield, Admiral, iv. 422.
Ingmire, vi. 183.
Ingram, Hon. Emily Wood, Mrs. Meynell, iv. 283.
Inverurie, Ian, Lord, vi. 343, 468.
—— Lady Sydney, v. 217-218.
Iona, v. 220.
Ipswich, v. 442.
Irongray Church, the, ii. 164.
Irving, Washington, the author, v. 385.
—— Henry, the actor, iv. 383, 484-486; v. 10-11.
Italy, H.M. Margherita di Savoia, Queen of, v. 135-136, 158.
—— H.M. Umberto II., King of, v. 158; vi. 278.
Iveagh, Edward Guinness, Lord, and Maria Guinness, Lady, vi. 372, 398.

J
Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, i. 15.
Jagherds, v. 53.
James, Henry, the novelist, iv. 481; v. 16.
—— of Hereford, Lord, vi. 447.
Janin, Jules, iii. 6.
Jarnac, Hon. Geraldine Foley, Comtesse de, iv. 474.
Jedburgh, Lord, vi. 459.
Jekyll, Walter, iv. 100.
Jelf, Dr., Canon of Christ Church, ii. 152-153.
Jenkin, Mrs. Fleeming, v. 289, 323.
Jersey, Frances Twysden, Countess of, iv. 308; vi. 369.
—— Julia Peel, Countess of, v. 229, 297; vi. 105.
—— Hon. Margaret Leigh, Countess of, authoress, vi. 79-80, 182, 224-225, 367, 369.
—— Lady Sarah Fane, Countess of, iii. 8-9; vi. 369.
—— Victor Child-Villiers, 7th Earl of, vi. 182, 224-225, 369.
Jerusalem, Bishopric of, i. 163.
Jeune, Dr. Francis, Master of Pembroke, Oxford, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, ii. 6; iii. 161-168; iv. 425.
Jewsbury, Miss Geraldine, the authoress, v. 6-7.
Jocelyn, Lady Frances Cowper, Viscountess, iii. 140; iv. 166, 415.
Johnes, Miss, v. 225, 326.
Johnson, G. H. Sacheverell, Dean of Wells, iv. 355.
—— Mr., of Akeley Heads, ii. 265.
Jolliffe, Hon. Agatha, vi. 6.
—— Colonel Hylton, i. 25.
—— Hon. George Hylton, v. 151, 175; vi. 97, 192, 194, 209, 264, 429.
Jones, Anna Maria Shipley, Lady, i. 6, 13, 16; ii. 144; vi. 5.
—— Sir Edward Burne, the artist, vi. 423.
—— Rev. Herbert, vi. 104.
—— Sir Laurence, vi. 103.
—— Rev. Robert, of Branxton, ii. 280.
—— Sir William, the orientalist, i. 6.
—— Miss Whitmore, vi. 430.
Josselin, vi. 345.
Jowett, Dr. Benjamin, tutor and Master of Balliol, i. 399, 402, 404, 420, 439, 472; ii. 220, 222, vi. 372.
Joyce, Miss, iii. 95.
Jubilee, ceremonies of the First Victorian, vi. 65-75, 81, 83;
of the Second, vi. 463-465.

K
Keate, Dr. John, Headmaster of Eton, iv. 232.
Keith, Lady, iii. 26.
Kellie Castle, vi. 443.
Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, the authoress, iv. 87; v. 360-361, 453, 455; vi. 309-312.
Kendal, Mr. and Mrs., v. 359.
Kenmare, Gertrude Harriet Thynne, Countess of, vi. 415, 420.
Kenyon, Matilda Cotton, Mrs. Orlando, v. 223.
Keppel, Hon. Derek, vi. 99.
—— Hon. Admiral Sir Henry, vi. 401.
Kerrison, Sir Edward, v. 330.
Kershaw, Rev. E. E., ii. 388.
Kerslake, Mr., iv. 77.
Kestner, Christian William, physician and author, vi. 275.
Keudel, M. and Mme. de, v. 158.
Kieff, v. 398.
Kielder, ii. 342.
Kildare, Lady Hermione Duncombe, Marchioness of, v. 409.
Kilmarnock, Mary Caroline L’Estrange, Lady, vi. 134, 184.
Kilmorey, Francis Jack, 1st Earl of, v. 279.
Kilvert, Rev. Robert, i. 167, 172, 213.
—— Thermuthis Coleman, Mrs. Robert, i. 167.
King, Edward, Bishop of Lincoln, vi. 362.
Kinglake, Alexander William, the historian, v. 359.
Kings Meadows, ii. 357.
Kinlet, vi. 474.
Kiplin, vi. 494.
Kirk-Newton, ii. 362.
Knaresborough, ii. 322.
Knebel, Mademoiselle, ii. 387.
Knebworth, v. 415.
Knepp Castle, vi. 323.
Knightley, Louisa-Mary Bowater, Lady, v. 404-405, 407; vi. 372.
—— Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, v. 404-405, 407; vi. 372.
Knowles, James, the editor, iv. 478; vi. 220, 225-226, 482.
Knowsley, iv. 63.
Knox, Mrs. John, ii. 274.
Königsfelden, iii. 108.
Krohn, M. de, v. 167, 214.
Kuper, Mrs. and Miss, iii. 338, 339.
Kynance Cove, vi. 524.
Kyre, vi. 302.

L
Labouchere, Henry, M.P., vi. 85.
Labre, the Venerable, ii. 443.
Lacaita, Sir James, iv. 119-123, 332-334, 397, 400; v. 155; vi. 88.
Laire, M., the antiquary, i. 324.
Lajatico, Marchesa, v. 154.
Lamarre, M., ii. 404-405.
Lambert, Lady Mary, iv. 209, 213.
Lamington, Annabella Drummond, Lady, vi. 91.
Lanciani, Rudolfo, the archaeologist, vi. 509.
Landor, Julia Thuillier, Mrs., ii. 92, 407.
—— Walter Savage, the poet, i. 16, 18, 26, 37, 265-268, 270, 277, 289, 292, 510; ii. 111-112, 407-409; iv. 155; vi. 145.
Landseer, Sir Edwin, the artist, vi. 325-326.
Lanerton, Diana Ponsonby, Lady, vi. 297-298.
Langford, Elizabeth, Viscountess, iii. 129.
Langy, M. de, iv. 255.
Lansdowne, Henry Fitz-Maurice, 5th Marquis of, v. 199.
Larmignac, Mademoiselle Martine de, ii. 193, 505.
Large, Mrs., iii. 309, 310.
Lassaulx, Amalie von, v. 292.
Laughton Place, v. 407.
Lavalette, Marquis de, iv. 81, 279.
Lawford Hall, vi. 518.
Lawley, Hon. and Rev. Stephen, ii. 433; iv. 6.
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, the artist, i. 22; vi. 360-361.
Layard, Mr., afterwards Sir Henry, explorer and ambassador, iv. 35.
Layer Marney, vi. 520.
Lea, Mary, i. 50, 54, 60, 78, 117, 122, 124, 140, 171, 205, 487.
Lear, Edward, the artist, iv. 428.
Lecky, Elizabeth de Dedem, Mrs., v. 199.
Ledbury, vi. 302.
Ledstone, vi. 354.
Lee, Henry Hives, v. 32, 363.
Leeds, Fanny Georgiana Pitt, Duchess of, vi. 402, 404.
—— Louisa Catherine Caton, Duchess of, vi. 404.
Lefevre, Miss Emily Shaw, iv. 378.
—— Hon. Emma Shaw, v. 221.
—— Right Hon. George Shaw, the politician, iv. 397; v. 19; vi. 320.
—— Sir John Shaw, ii. 213, 454; iv. 157, 239, 356, 371-373, 400, 471; v. 62, 196, 220-221.
—— Miss Madeleine Shaw, iv. 23, 219, 229, 231.
—— Miss Maria Shaw, ii. 392.
—— Miss Mary Shaw, ii. 392; iv. 217, 231.
—— Miss Rachel Shaw, iv. 372.
Legh, Emily Wodehouse, Mrs., of Lyme, afterwards Lady Newton, iii. 113, 116; v. 216; vi. 183.
Lehmann, Hon. Chandos and Mrs., iv. 149.
—— Miss Theodosia, i. 178.
—— Frances Butler, Hon. Mrs. James, vi. 457-458.
—— Hon. James Wentworth, Dean of Hereford, vi. 457.
—— William Henry, Lord, vi. 408.
—— Dr., i. 9, 11.
Leighton, Sir Frederick, R.A., i. 294; vi. 357-358, 512.
—— Sir Baldwin, iv. 484.
Leinster, Lady Caroline Grosvenor, Duchess of, v. 218.
Leitrim, Robert Clements, 4th Earl of, v. 416.
—— Lady Winifred Coke, Countess of, v. 416.
Lennox, Adelaide Campbell, Lady Arthur, ii. 354.
—— Miss Ethel, ii. 354.
Leo XIII., Pope, vi. 277-278.
Le Puy, iii. 149.
L’Estelle, ii. 480, 487.
Leslie, Constance Dawson-Damer, Mrs., afterwards Lady Constance, iv. 323; v. 14; vi. 511.
—— Hon. George Waldegrave, v. 44.
—— Lady, story of, ii. 322-324.
Le Strange, Emmeline Austin, Mrs., vi. 25.
—— Hamon Styleman, of Hunstanton, ii. 137.
Letton, vi. 362.
Leuk, Baths of, i. 460.
Leven and Melville, Sophia Thornton, Countess of, iv. 219.
Levett, Basil, vi. 97, 420.
—— Lady Margaret, vi. 87, 97, 420.
Leycester, Miss Emma Theodosia, i. 114, 500; ii. 477-481.
—— Miss Charlotte, i. 114, 317, 376, 450, 454-458, 480, 487, 499; ii. 161, 289, 479; iii. 199, 208-221, 322, 397, 398; iv. 49, 129, 160, 230, 329, 404; v. 291; vi. 111-114, 255, 318-319.
Leycester, Miss Georgiana, iii. 200.
—— Mr. and Mrs. Henry, of White Place, ii. 156-157.
—— Judge Hugh, i. 141.
—— Maria, youngest daughter of Rev. Oswald, i. 33.
—— Elizabeth White, Mrs. Oswald, i. 102, 126-141, 209, 272-274, 228-229.
—— Rev. Oswald, Rector of Stoke-upon-Terne, i. 44, 61, 126, 207-208.
—— Ralph, of Toft, i. 317.
—— Susannah Leigh, Mrs. Ralph, i. 66.
—— Emily Tyrwhitt Jones, Mrs. Ralph, iv. 307.
Licenza, iv. 174.
Lichfield, ii. 330; v. 403.
—— John Hacket, Bishop of, v. 403.
—— William Maclagan, Bishop of, v. 402.
—— George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of, v. 404.
Lichtenstein, Marie Fox, Princess, iv. 228.
Liddell, Miss Amelia, ii. 264, 271.
—— Hon. Colonel Augustus, iii. 367.
—— Cecil Elizabeth Wellesley, Hon. Mrs. Augustus, iii. 367.
—— Miss Charlotte, ii. 264, 271.
—— Charlotte Lyon, Mrs. Henry, i. 283; ii. 263, 271; iii. 8, 171.
—— Christina Fraser Tytler, Mrs. Edward, the novelist, iv. 51, 444, 446.
—— Edward, afterwards Rev., iii. 365-368; iv. 51, 444, 446.
—— Hon. George, ii. 262, 263, 318; iv. 447; v. 292.
—— Louisa Meade, Hon. Mrs. George, ii. 263, 318.
—— Hon. Hedworth, ii. 364.
—— Henry, Headmaster of Westminster and Dean of Christ Church, i. 283; ii. 9, 157.
Liddell, Rev. Henry, Rector of Easington, and trustee of Bamborough Castle, i. 283; ii. 263; iii. 8-10, 171;
death of, iv. 39.
—— Lorena Reeve, Mrs., vi. 89.
—— Maria Susanna Simpson, Lady, i. 25.
—— Hon. Thomas, ii. 139.
—— Rev. William, ii. 264.
—— Lady Victoria, iv. 201, 232.
Lieven, Princesse de, iv. 308.
Lievenhaupt, Count and Countess, v. 150.
Lilford, Emma Brandling, Lady, iv. 395.
Lillieköök, M. de, v. 214.
Lime, at Hurstmonceaux, in Sussex, i. 57, 60; 66-75.
Limosin, Madame Flora, iii. 311, 339, 349.
Lincluden Abbey, ii. 164.
Lincoln, vi. 361.
Lincoln, Abraham, the American statesman and President, v. 451.
Lind, Mademoiselle Jenny, i. 236; vi. 260, 261.
Lindertis, vi. 439.
Lindsay, Hon. Colonel Hugh, v. 426.
—— Lady Margaret, iii. 27.
—— Miss Maude, iv. 133, 137, 209, 213, 250, 260, 264, 404; v. 214; vi. 246, 249.
—— Lady Sarah, iv. 222, 250, 360, 370; v. 426-427.
—— Miss Violet, iv. 332.
Liskeard, vi. 522.
Liszt, Franz, ii. 389.
Littlecote Hall, vi. 161.
Llanarth, v. 226.
Llandaff, vi. 101, 240, 476.
Llangattock, John Rolls, Lord, vi. 505.
Llanover, v. 2-6, 225-228.
Llanover, Augusta Waddington, Lady, v. 2-6, 226-228.
Llanover, Benjamin Hall, Lord, v. 6; vi. 410.
Loch, Sir Henry, afterwards Lord, Colonial Governor, v. 336.
—— Elizabeth Villiers, Lady, v. 336.
Locke, Selina Tollemache, Mrs., iv. 226.
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, the poet, v. 449; vi. 263.
Lockhart, John Gibson, novelist and biographer, vi.
Lockinge, vi. 447.
Lockwood, Lady Julia, iv. 472.
London, Frederick Temple, Bishop of, vi. 320.
London dinners, vi. 252.
Londonderry, Frances Anne Vane Tempest, Marchioness of, iii. 9; v. 428.
—— Mary Cornelia Edwards, Marchioness of, iii. 270.
Longford Castle, vi. 312.
Longland, John, Dean of Salisbury and Bishop of Lincoln, vi. 314-316.
Longley, Charles Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, v. 340.
Loraine, Sir Lambton, v. 13.
Lorne, John George Campbell, Marquis of, v. 22; vi. 341.
Loseley, iv. 307.
Lothian, Lady Cecil Talbot, widow of the 7th Marquis of, i. 339, 356; ii. 398-404, 409, 444; iii. 153, 270, 287, 294, 298.
—— Lady Constance Talbot, Marchioness of, iii. 47; v. 452; vi. 105, 243, 303-304, 367-368.
—— William Schomberg, 8th Marquis of, iii. 47.
Louis, King of Bavaria, ii. 374.
—— XVIII., King of France, vi. 113.
—— Philippe d’Orleans, King of the French, iv. 339.
Louisa, Queen of Prussia, v. 95, 97.
Louise, H.R.H. the Princess, v. 16, 22, 316; vi. 341.
Lourdes, v. 432.
Lovat, Simon, Lord, ii. 351.
Lovelace, Jane Jenkins, Countess of, vi. 183.
Lowe, Mrs., iv. 401-403, 479.
—— Right Hon. Robert, the statesman, iv. 402-403; vi. 119.
Lowell, James Russell, Minister and poet, v. 305; vi. 129.
Löwenjelm, Count Carl, iv. 278-279.
Löwenstein Wertheim, Lady Anne Saville, Princess, vi. 478.
Lowther, Hon. Alice Parke, Hon. Mrs. William, iv. 67, 124, 224, 331; v. 444.; vi. 175-176, 186, 215, 222, 225 241, 258, 262, 326 353, 499, 510, 518.
—— James, v. 444.
—— Gerard Augustus, vi. 201.
—— Miss Mabel, vi. 510.
—— Miss Mary, iv. 416; v. 445; vi. 175.
—— Hon. William, iv. 416; v. 59, 297; vi. 23, 187, 353, 499.
Loyd, Frances Irby, Mrs. Lewis, iv. 359.
—— Graham, vi. 101.
—— Henry, of Langleybury, vi. 97.
Lubbock, Sir John, afterwards Lord Avebury, natural historian and antiquarian, vi. 298.
Lübeck, v. 98.
Lucca, Bagni di, ii. 93; iv. 318.
Lucchesi, Marchese, iii. 17.
Lucerne, ii. 33.
Lucy, Mrs., of Charlcote, ii. 14.
Ludlow, v. 459.
Lullingstone Castle, vi. 476.
Lulworth, vi. 22.
Lumley, Aldred, Viscount, v. 41.
—— Augustus Savile, vi. 119.
Lumley, Sir John, afterwards Lord Savile, vi. 9.
Lurgan, Hon. Emily Browne, Lady, vi. 163.
Lushington, Dr., ii. 298-309.
Luttrell, Henry, the wit, iv. 421.
Lützow, Harriet Seymour, Countess, iv. 171, 182; v. 350; vi. 169, 192.
—— Francis, Count von, iv. 171, 182.
Lyall, William Rowe, Dean of Canterbury, i. 359.
Lychett Heath, vi. 22.
Lygon, Lady Mary, vi. 459.
Lyme Hall, iii. 113; v. 216; vi. 183, 386.
Lyncombe, i. 261.
Lyndhurst, Georgiana Goldsmith, Lady, v. 66, 292, 336-339, 341; vi. 92.
—— John Singleton Copley, Lord, v. 336-339.
Lyne, Rev. Leycester, iii. 81.
Lynn-Linton, Mrs., i. 268.
Lyon, Lady Anne (Crawford), vi. 433.
—— Hon. Francis, vi. 433.
—— Sir John, of Glamis, i. 23.
—— Sir John, 1st Baron Kinghorn, i. 22.
—— Hon. Thomas, of Hetton, ii. 317.
—— Mary Wren, Hon. Mrs. Thomas, ii. 317.
Lyons, i. 452.
Lyons, Richard, Lord, Ambassador at Paris, iv. 44-45; vi. 484.
Lyte, Frances Somerville, Mrs., afterwards Lady Maxwell, iv. 377.
—— Henry Maxwell, Deputy Keeper of the Records, vi. 163, 341, 465.
Lyttleton, Hon. Mrs. Robert, vi. 34.
—— Hon. Spencer, iv. 469; v. 231.
Lytton, Edward Robert Lytton, 1st Earl of, iv. 365; v. 415.
—— Edward Bulwer Lytton, Lord, vi. 142-143.
—— Edith Villiers, Countess of, iv. 365; v. 415; vi. 236.
—— Rosina Doyle Wheeler, Lady, v. 57-58.
Lyveden, v. 448.
Lyveden, Emma Mary Fitzpatrick, Lady, v. 310, 314.

M
Maberly, General, iv. 406.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord, the historian, i. 515; ii. 218; iv. 129; vi. 86.
Macchi, Cardinal, Governor of the Romagna, iv. 257.
Macdonald, Hon. Flora, iv. 222.
—— General Jem, v. 341.
—— George, the novelist, v. 30; vi. 265-266.
Mackenzie, Dr. Morel, the famous surgeon, vi. 90.
Maclagan, Hon. Augusta Barrington, Mrs., v. 402-403; vi. 99, 294, 356-360.
Maclaren, Ian, the author, vi. 434.
M’Neile, Lady Emma, vi. 135.
—— Sir John, v. 70.
Macmurdo, General, iii. 176.
Macon, iii. 383.
Macpherson, of Glen Truim, Mr., iv. 201.
Macsween, Alexander, i. 171.
Madraza, Don Juan de, iv. 40.
Madresfield Court, vi. 301, 458-459.
Madrid, iv. 39.
Magee, William Connor, Bishop of Peterborough, vi. 241, 451.
Magnusson, Eric, the Icelandic scholar, v. 107.
Maiden Bradley, vi. 473.
Maine, Sir Henry, the authority on Law, and Lady, iv. 73.
Mainsforth, ii. 309.
Maintenon, vi. 345.
Maitland, Rev. Charles, v. 357.
Makrina, La Madre, of Minsk, ii. 72-74.
Malaga, iv. 37.
Malcolm, Miss Ann-Emilia, i. 435; iv. 119.
—— Lady, i. 435.
—— Miss Kate, i. 435; iv. 119.
Malet, Sir Edward, the ambassador, v. 427.
Mallock, W. H., the novelist, v. 16.
Malmesbury, James Edward. 2nd Earl of, iv. 12.
Malpas, vi. 232.
Malshanger, vi. 156.
Manchester Exhibition, vi. 97.
Manners, Lady Adeliza, vi. 501.
—— Lord Edward, vi. 308.
—— Jannetta Hughan, Lady John, ii. 284.
—— Lord John, iv. 334.
—— Lydia Sophia Dashwood, Lady, v. 19; vi. 60.
—— Lord Robert, vi. 308.
Manners-Sutton, Archbishop of York, iii. 157.
Mannheim, i. 53, 383.
Manning, Henry Edward, Archdeacon of Chichester, afterwards Cardinal, i. 98, 339; ii. 395; iii. 308, 360; iv. 332, 333; vi. 260, 451, 483.
Mannington, vi. 104.
Mantua, iii. 337.
Manvers, Charles Herbert Pierrepont, 2nd Earl, v. 43; vi. 119.
—— Georgine de Franquetot, Countess, v. 43.
—— Sydney Pierrepont, 3rd Earl, v. 43.
Marbourg, i. 425.
Margherita, H.R.H. Princess of Savoy, iv. 102.
Maria, Angelo, the famous brigand, vi. 167.
Marie Antoinette d’Autriche, Queen of France, ii. 298; vi. 121;
prison of, ii. 125.
—— Amelie, Queen of the French, i. 274; iv. 339-340.
—— Anne, Sœur, ii. 443.
Marino, Teresa Caraccioli, Duchess of, v. 149.
Mariott, Lady Smith, v. 357.
Marjoribanks, Sir Dudley, v. 210.
—— Sir John and Lady, of Lees, iv. 258-259.
Marlborough, John, 1st Duke of, i. 1.
—— Sarah Jennings, Duchess of, v. 61.
Marple, vi. 183.
Marsh, Miss Catherine, the philanthropist, i. 407; ii. 289; iii. 245-247, 250.
Marsham, Hon. Mr. and Mrs. Townshend, vi. 349-350.
Martin, Baron, the judge, iii. 297.
—— Mr., afterwards Sir Theodore, the biographer, iv. 304.
—— Helen Faucit, Mrs. Theodore, afterwards Lady, the actress, iv. 304.
Martineau, Harriet, the novelist, iv. 481-482.
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, iv. 75-76.
Masham, Mrs., ii. 309.
Massereene, Clotworthy, Viscount, iv. 363.
Massie, Hester Townsend, Mrs., iii. 113.
Massimo, Marie-Gabrielle de Savoie Carignan, Princess, v. 173.
Mastai-Ferretti, Conte, ii. 236.
Matfen, ii. 266, 346.
Matheson, Sir Kenneth, vi. 187.
Mathews, E., vi. 478.
Matthias, Marie de, Foundress of the “Order of the Precious Blood,” ii. 426, 438-442; iii. 86, 238-239; iv. 103.
Maurice, Annie Barton, Mrs. Frederick, i. 70.
—— Esther Jane, i. 73-112, 176-178.
—— Rev. Frederick Denison, i. 70-72; iii. 280; iv. 21.
—— Georgiana Hare, Mrs. Frederick, iii. 412.
—— Harriet, i. 179.
—— Mary, i. 179, 182.
—— Priscilla, i. 70-73, 112, 181-182, 410.
Maximilian, Archduke and Emperor, ii. 36.
Maxwell, Sir John, vi. 88.
May, Sir T. Erskine, afterwards Lord Farnborough, v. 340.
Mayo, Dermot, 7th Earl of, iv. 370.
Mecklenbourg, Duchess Paul of, vi. 143-144.
Mecklenbourg-Strelitz, H.R.H. Augusta, of Cambridge, Grand Duchess of, v. 212; vi. 68, 82.
—— Frederic William, Grand Duke of, iv. 338.
Medine, Count Battistino, iii. 338.
Mela, Padre, iv. 333.
Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount, v. 23.
Melchet, v. 294.
Mellor, Judge, iv. 22, 23.
Melun, M., Protestant Pasteur at Caen, i. 321.
Melville, Major G. J. Whyte, the novelist, iv. 363.
“Memorials of a Quiet Life,” publication of, iv. 62, 63, 309-310.
Mentone, ii. 246-258; iii. 185; vi. 164.
Mère, Marie Letitia Raimolino, Madame, iv. 260; vi. 509.
Merimée, Prosper, the author, iv. 330; v. 417.
Merivale, Mr. Herman, the historian, iv. 149, 150.
Merlini, Don Giovanni, Father-General of the Precious Blood, ii. 425, 427, 442.
Merode, Monsignor de, iii. 70.
Messina, v. 246.
Mexborough, Mary Anne Yorke, Countess of, vi. 360.
Meyer, M. Carl Friedrich, i. 382.
Mezzofanti, Cardinal, i. 9; iv. 303.
Middleton Park, vi. 369.
Middleton, Digby Wentworth Bayard Willoughby, 9th Lord, vi. 425.
—— Eliza Maria Gordon, Lady, vi. 61.
Milbank, Sir Frederick and (Alexina Don) Lady, vi. 405.
Mildmay, Mary Baillie, Mrs. George St. John, v. 18.
Miles, Frank, the artist, v. 275.
Millais, Sir John, the artist, v. 274.
Miller, Joaquin, the author, iv. 308.
Milligan, Misses Christina and Mary, vi. 494.
—— William Henry, i. 416, 420, 422, 493, 499; ii. 1, 2, 131; v. 20; vi. 494.
Mills, Mr. Charles, vi. 145.
Milman, Henry Hart, Dean of St. Paul’s, poet and historian, i. 394; ii. 231.
Milner, Elizabeth Mordaunt, Lady, i. 96.
Milton Court, vi. 227.
Minghetti, Madame, v. 160.
Mitford, Hon. Emily Egerton, Mrs. Percy, vi. 183.
Moberly, George, Bishop of Salisbury, iv. 347.
Mocenigo, Countess, vi. 291.
Modjeska, Madame, the actress, v. 359.
Mohl, M. Julius, ii. 118.
—— Frewen, Madame, ii. 118-121; iii. 5-7; vi. 253.
Mohun, Arthur, Lord, and Evelyn, Lady, iv. 126, 235, 351.
Moissac, v. 439.
Mommsen, Theodore, the historian, v. 92.
Monan, St., vi. 442.
Monceaux, Château de, iii. 383.
Monk, Miss Emily, iii. 203; iv. 398.
Monk’s Orchard, iv. 359.
Monreale, v. 262.
Monserrat, iv. 26.
Mont Blanc, the tour of, i. 458.
Mont S. Michel, vi. 344.
Monte Cassino, ii. 78; iv. 182.
Monte Vergine, iv. 183.
Montacute, v. 74; vi. 296, 320.
Montagu, Lady Elizabeth, ii. 437.
—— Lord and Lady, vi. 119.
Montalba, Misses Clara and Hilda, the artists, vi. 420.
Montbard, iii. 383; vi. 15.
Montefiore, Sir Moses, the philanthropist, v. 412; vi. 407.
Monteith, Robert, of Carstairs, iii. 95, 288, 293, 295.
—— Wilhelmina Mellish, Mrs., ii. 427; iii. 289, 290, 294.
Montgolfier, Madame de, iii. 385; vi. 16.
Montgomery, Hon. Fanny Wyndham, Mrs. Alfred, iii. 71, 96, 239, 280, 282, 284, 289, 294, 301.
—— Miss Florence, vi. 33, 449.
Montmajour, vi. 40.
Montpensier, Marie Louise de Bourbon, Duchess of, iv. 31.
Moody and Sankey, Messrs., the revivalists, iv. 306, 331.
Moor Park, vi. 301.
Moore, Henry, Archdeacon of Stafford, theologian, i. 164; ii. 132; iv. 440.
Mordaunt, Lady Mary, v. 447.
Morgan, Mrs. Mary, iv. 210.
—— Sydney Owenson, Lady, v. 301.
Morini, Padre Agostino, the orator, iii. 256.
Morley, Margaret Holford, Countess of, v. 212.
—— Harriet Sophia Parker, Countess of, iii. 139; iv. 221, 241; v. 212; vi. 181.
—— Albert-Edmund, 3rd Earl of, iii. 145; iv. 241.
Morlot, Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, ii. 121-122.
Morpeth, ii. 277, 365.
Morton, Lady Alice Lambton, Countess of, vi. 257.
—— Frances Rose, Countess of, v. 140, 148, 160.
Moscow, v. 394.
Moseley, Rev. Herbert Henry, Rector of Holt, vi. 484.
Mostyn, Mary Monk, Hon. Mrs., iv. 398.
—— Hon. Ranulph, vi. 493.
Motley, John Lothrop, the historian, iv. 147-148.
—— Miss Susan, iv. 148.
Mount Edgcumbe, Caroline Augusta Feilding, Countess of, ii. 356.
—— Lady Katherine Hamilton, Countess of, iii. 138.
—— Lady Sophia Hobart, Countess of, iv. 247.
—— Ernest Augustus Edgcumbe, 3rd Earl of, iv. 247.
—— William Henry Edgcumbe, 4th Earl of, iii. 137, 145.
Mount Temple, Georgiana Tollemache, Lady, v. 295.
—— William Cowper Temple, Lord, v. 295.
Müller, Professor Max, vi. 462.
Muncaster Castle, vi. 133, 184.
Muncaster, Constance L’Estrange, Countess of, vi. 79, 134, 184.
—— Sir Josslyn Pennington, 5th Lord, v. 212; vi. 134.
Munich, iii. 336.
Munn, Rev. John Reade, iii. 415.
Munro, Henrietta Drummond, Mrs. Campbell, vi. 439.
Murcia, iv. 30.
Murray, Sir Digby and Lady, v. 154.
—— John, the 3rd, publisher, ii. 133, 134, 260; iv. 352-353, 379.
—— John, the 4th, publisher, vi. 468.
Musgrave, Thomas, Archbishop of York, vi. 360.
—— Hon. Catherine Cavendish, Mrs., vi. 360.
Musset, Alfred de, v. 299.

N
Napier and Ettrick, Francis, Lord, iv. 332, 334.
—— Hon. Mark, v. 62.
—— Hon. William, Master of, iv. 224.
Naples, ii. 80.
—— Francesco II., King of, iii. 96-97.
—— Marie of Bavaria, Queen of, iii. 86, 94, 97.
—— Marie Therèse Isabelle, Queen of, iii. 86, 190.
—— Victor Emmanuel, Prince of, vi. 253.
Napoleon I., Emperor of the French, i. 91.
Napoleon III., Emperor of the French, ii. 508; iv. 225-226.
Narni, iii. 100.
Naworth, ii. 354.
Naylor, Anna Maria Mealey, Mrs. Hare, i. 13, 82-83, 280, 287.
—— Bethaia, i. 4.
—— Francis, i. 1; vi. 517.
—— Francis Hare, i. 5, 11.
—— Georgiana Shipley, Mrs. Hare, i. 5-12.
—— Miss Grace, i. 1, 260.
—— Robert Hare, i. 2.
Necker, Madame, vi. 123.
Neri, S. Filippo, iii. 201.
Nesselrode, Count, iv. 301.
Netherlands, Sophie of Wurtemburg, Queen of the, iv. 326, 335.
Nettlecombe, vi. 234.
Neuchatel, ii. 113.
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, v. 277; vi. 4, 61.
Neville, Rev. W., vi. 234.
—— Rev. Hastings Mackelcan, vi. 159, 246.
Nevin, Rev. Dr., v. 164.
New Abbey, ii. 164.
New Hailes, iv. 451.
Newbattle Abbey, iii. 47.
Newburgh Hall, v. 423.
Newcastle-on-Tyne, ii. 318.
Newman, Rev. John Henry, afterwards Cardinal, iii. 1-2.
Newton, Mr., afterwards Sir Charles, iv. 83, 348; v. 363.
Nice, ii. 370; vi. 412.
Nicholas I., Emperor of Russia, ii. 74, 506; v. 68.
Nicholson, Miss, iii. 372.
Nilsson, Mademoiselle Christine, v. 200, 206.
Ninfa, iv. 105.
Noailles, Henriette Anne de, Duchesse d’Ayen, vi. 100.
Noel, Lady Augusta, iv. 467.
—— Ernest, iv. 467.
Norfolk, Lady Flora Hastings, Duchess of, v. 281.
—— Lady Mary Mordaunt, Duchess of, v. 447.
Normanby, George Augustus Constantine Phipps, 2nd Marquis of, vi. 77.
—— Maria Liddell, Marchioness of, ii. 93, 204, 211.
Normanton, Hon. Caroline Barrington, Countess of, vi. 72, 73.
Northampton, Charles Compton, 3rd Marquis of, iv. 336.
North Berwick, ii. 357; vi. 484.
Northbrook, Sir James Baring, 1st Earl of, vi. 164.
Northcote, Miss Agnes, v. 11.
—— Captain and Mrs., ii. 364.
—— Sir Stafford, the statesman, iv. 149, 371.
Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of, ii. 353; iii. 331.
—— Algernon George Percy, 6th Duke of, vi. 135.
—— Lady Eleanor Grosvenor, Duchess of, ii. 353; iii. 331; vi. 135-136.
—— Louisa Drummond, Duchess of, vi. 135-138.
Norton, Charles Bowyer Adderley, Lord, vi. 406-409.
Norwich, i. 116-120, 229; v. 330.
—— Hon. John Thomas Pelham, Bishop of, vi. 259-262.
—— Edward Stanley, Bishop of, i. 44, 62, 66, 69, 117-118, 133, 231-236, 280.
Nostell, v. 297.
Nottingham Castle, vi. 424.
Nova Scotia, Bishop of, vi. 286.
Novgorod the Great, v. 393.
Noyon, v. 409.
Nunnington Hall, ii. 16.
Nuremberg, i. 435; vi. 405.

O
Oakly Park, v. 459.
Ober-Ammergau, the Passion-Play of, vi. 214-222.
Oberlin, ii. 109.
Oberwesel, iii. 231.
Ockwells, vi. 26.
Ogilvy, Lady Clementine, vi. 438, 439.
—— Lady Griselda, vi. 97, 135.
Ogle, Miss Annie, the authoress, vi. 434.
Olevano, iv. 105.
Oliphant, Lawrence, the mystic, v. 275.
Onslow, Hon. Florence Gardner, Countess of, vi. 90.
—— William Hillier Onslow, 4th Earl of, v. 16.
Ordelaffi, Barbara, tomb of, iv. 317.
Orford, Horatio William Walpole, 4th Earl of, vi. 304.
Orkeröd, v. 119-127.
Ormistoun, iv. 267.
Orsi, Carlo, the artist, v. 277.
Orvieto, ii. 84, 385; iv. 116-118; vi. 13.
Ossington, Lady Charlotte Bentinck, Viscountess, v. 363.
Ossulston, Charles Bennet, Lord, ii. 268-269; v. 209.
Osterley, iv. 467; v. 19, 231; vi. 79, 224-225, 423, 482.
Otterburn, ii. 344.
Ouseley, Sir Frederick Gore, v. 316-317.
Overstone, Lord, iv. 362, 482.
Owen, Professor Richard, iv. 265, 317.
Oxenham, Rev. W., i. 236.
Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of, iii. 153.
—— Jane Elizabeth Scott, Countess of, i. 18.
Oxton Hall, vi. 424.

P
Padua, iii. 338-339.
Paestum, ii. 83.
Page, Miss, vi. 283.
Paget, Right Hon. Sir Augustus Berkeley, v. 291; vi. 422-423.
—— Miss Ruth, v. 385.
—— Walpurga de Hohenlohe, Lady, iv. 171; v. 160, 324, 415; vi. 351.
Palermo, v. 260.
Pallavicini, Carolina Boncompagni Ludovisi, Princess, ii. 59.
Palmer, Edward, vi. 233.
Palmer, William, ii. 207.
Palmerston, H. Temple, 1st Earl of, i. 12.
Panizzi, Sir Antonio, the great librarian, ii. 132; iii. 142; iv. 333.
Pantaleoni, Dr., ii. 374-376.
Paolucci di Calboli, Marchese Annibale, ii. 388.
—— Marchese Raniero, ii. 388.
Papillon, Rev. Henry, iii. 412.
—— Mrs. Henry, iii. 414.
Paraclete, The, vi. 17.
Paray le Monial, ii. 445, 499; iv. 197.
Parham Hall in Suffolk, vi. 23.
—— in Sussex, vi. 296.
Paris, i. 318-319, 327; ii. 114-128; iv. 24, 44; vi. 17.
—— Book upon, vi. 34, 112, 114.
—— Days near, vi. 114-116.
Parisani, Palazzo, i. 261, 340, 373; ii. 55-56; iii. 190.
Parker, John Henry, the publisher, ii. 9; iii. 319; vi. 380.
—— Mrs. John Henry, i. 473.
—— Lady Katherine, iii. 145; iv. 222, 241; vi. 181, 182.
Parnell, Hon. Victor, iv. 486.
Parr, Queen Katherine, iv. 438-439.
—— Dr. Samuel, iv. 347; vi. 498.
Parry, Catherine Hankinson, Lady, i. 279.
—— Sir Edward, the Arctic voyager, i. 114, 279.
—— Edward, Bishop of Dover, i. 279.
—— Hon. Isabella Stanley, 1st wife of Sir Edward, i. 114.
—— Serjeant, iii. 298, 299, 303.
Paterson, Rev. George J. Mapletoft, v. 295, 329.
Patmore, Coventry Kearsey Deighton, the poet, vi. 429-431.
Patrizi, Francesco Saverio Patrizi-Naro-Montoro, Cardinal, iii. 76.
Pattenden, Deborah, i. 211.
Pau, ii. 465; iv. 25.
Paul, Anne Frances, i. 25, 26, 30.
—— Eleanor Maria, i. 42, 95, 351-352; ii. 69-70, 94, 103-106, 206, 411-415; iii. 262, 266, 315; iv. 17, 22; v. 273.
—— Elizabeth Halifax, Lady, i. 284, 295.
—— Frances Eleanor Simpson, Lady, i. 21, 26.
—— Jane, i. 28, 295.
—— Sir John Dean, 1st Bart., i. 21, 30, 50, 84, 284, 295; iv. 17, 19.
—— Sir John Dean, 2nd Bart., i. 495.
—— Maria Horatia, i. 27, 296.
—— Mary Napier of Pennard, Lady, i. 84.
—— William Wentworth, i. 295.
—— Marie Marcia, Countess Benningsen, widow of W. Wentworth, v. 91.
Paulet, Lady Lilian, v. 50.
Payne, Mrs., iii. 87.
Payson, Miss Louisa, the authoress, vi. 397.
Peabody, Mr. George, ii. 372-374.
—— Robert, iii. 341, 344, 360, 370.
Peakirk, iii. 165.
Pearse, Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey, iv. 220.
Pearson, Rev. Hugh, Rector of Sonning and Canon of Windsor, i. 120, 411, 470; ii. 221; iv. 131, 153, 351; v. 235-237, 328, 340, 352-355.
—— his grave, vi. 498-499.
Pease, Mary Fox, Mrs., afterwards Lady, iv. 269, 279-280; v. 44.
Peate, Dr., iv. 347.
Peebles, ii. 357.
Peel, William Robert Wellesley, vi. 83.
Peglia, ii. 253.
Peglione, ii. 253, 255, 372.
Pelham, Elizabeth Mary Bligh, Lady, iv. 356; v. 16.
—— Hon. John Thomas, Bishop of Norwich, vi. 259-262.
Pellerin, Monsignor, ii. 68-69.
Pellew, Hon. George, Dean of Norwich, i. 231.
Pembroke, George Herbert, 13th Earl of, vi. 243.
—— Lady Gertrude Talbot, Countess of, vi. 107, 243.
Pencaitland, ii. 356.
Pennant, Hon. Alice, vi. 384.
Penrhyn, Lady Charlotte, i. 48, 142-143, 408-409.
—— Edward Leycester, i. 48, 69, 208, 408, 464, 514; ii. 259-260.
—— Emma Charlotte Leycester, i. 383-384, 408, 464; iii. 377, 414; vi. 493.
—— Edward-Gordon, Lord, v. 334-335.
—— Gertrude Glynne, Lady, vi. 383.
—— Mr. and Mrs. Leycester, iii. 414.
—— Lady Mary-Louisa FitzRoy, v. 334.
Penrhyn Castle, v. 384; vi. 381, 433.
Percy, Lady Edith Campbell, Countess, iv. 398; v. 208; vi. 137.
—— Emily Heber, Mrs. Heber, ii. 159.
—— Henry George Percy, Earl, vi. 139.
—— Lord Henry, iii. 145.
—— Hugh Heber, iii. 159.
—— Dr. Hugh, Bishop of Carlisle, ii. 160.
Perkins, Mrs. Mary Ridge, vi. 292-293.
Persia, Nasr-ed-Din, Shah of, vi, 171.
Perugia, vi. 12.
Peruzzi, Edith Story, Marchesa, vi. 510.
Pescitelli, Abbot of Farfa, v. 141.
Petit, Miss Emma, ii. 256, 328.
—— Rev. J. L., the ecclesiologist, ii. 256-258, 330.
Petworth, vi. 297.
Phelips, Constance Ponsonby-Fane, Mrs., vi. 296, 320.
Phillimore, Admiral and Mrs. Augustus, iv. 37.
—— Sir Robert, the ecclesiastical lawyer, iv. 360-361.
Pierrepont, Lady Mary, vi. 119.
Pietra Santa, ii. 102.
Pile, Mr. Robert, i. 60; iii. 112; iv. 49-50.
—— Mary Miller, Mrs. Robert, i. 60, 171, 192, 278; iv. 49-50.
Pine, Miss, iv. 76.
Pinkie, iv. 451.
Piombino, Prince and Princess, ii. 428.
Piper, Count, the Minister, iv. 193; v. 199.
—— Mrs., i. 103, 260.
Pisa, ii. 101; iii. 52, 190, 310-312, 338-358; v. 155.
Pitcairn, Mrs., ii. 289.
Pitchford Hall, vi. 383.
Pius IX., Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope, i. 341; ii. 61-64, 289, 428; iii. 70, 71, 80, 93, 167, 190, 319, 360; iv. 97-98, 99, 333; vi. 288.
Planché, Mr., the Somerset Herald, iv. 83.
—— James Robinson, the dramatist, V. 11-12.
Playfair, Sir Hugh Lyon, Provost of St. Andrews, ii. 170.
—— Right Hon. Sir Lyon, politician and scientist, iv. 427.
Plumptre, Rev. Edward, afterwards Dean of Wells, i. 179; iv. 21.
—— Rev. Dr. Frederick Charles, Master of University College, i. 405, 441, 474.
Plumptre, Harriet Maurice, Mrs. E., i. 179.
Pole, Lady Louisa, i. 354.
—— Miss Marguerite, i. 352-357; iii. 249.
—— Sir Peter Van Notten, i. 352.
Polignac, Duc de, iii. 43.
Pollock, Mr., afterwards Sir Frederick, iv. 19.
Ponsonby, Hon. Ashley, v. 302.
—— Mary Bulteel, Lady, v. 229.
—— Miss Melita, ii. 358.
Popham, Francis, of Littlecote, vi. 162.
Porson, Dr. Richard, ii. 376.
Port Eliot, iv. 245.
Port Royal, ii. 125.
Portal, Mrs. George, v. 420-421.
—— Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham, vi. 156.
Portland, William Bentinck, 5th Duke of, v. 366.
—— Winifred Yorke, Duchess of, vi. 475, 476.
Portman, Mary Selina Fitzwilliam, Mrs., afterwards Lady, vi. 86.
—— Hon. Walter, i. 306, 308, 332, 452.
Porto d’Anzio, iv. 104.
—— Fino, ii. 254.
—— Venere, ii. 102.
Portsmouth, Lady Evelina Herbert, Countess of, v. 193.
—— John Vertue, Bishop of, vi. 495, 496, 498.
Potocka, Count and Countess, v. 41-43.
Potsdam, v. 95-98.
Poulevey, Père de, ii. 416.
Powderham Castle, iv. 239, 249, 385; v. 461.
Powell, Lucilla Maurice, Mrs., i. 179.
Powers, Carolyn S., Mrs., vi. 284.
Poynter, Sir Edward, President of the Royal Academy, vi. 474.
Prague, i. 432.
Praslin, Charles Laure, Duc de, vi. 29.
—— Duchesse de, i. 245; iii. 19-20.
Prât, Marquis and Marquise du, ii. 115.
Pregnier, Marquise du, ii. 118.
Prentiss, Mr., i. 164.
Preston, Georgiana Campbell, Mrs., iv. 219.
Price, Lady Maria Barrington, vi. 35.
Primoli, Charlotte Bonaparte, Countess, v. 140, 176.
Primrose, Hon. Everard, iv. 42, 208, 228, 325, 370; vi. 140.
Prinzsköld, M. de, v. 139, 150, 155, 214.
Probyn, Sir Dighton, v. 14.
Procter, Anne Montagu, Mrs., v. 287-288, 406-407; vi. 84-85, 462-463.
Prosperi, Monsignor, iii. 70; v. 137.
Purbeck, Isle of, vi. 398.
Pusey, Dr. Edward Bouverie, the Church leader, iii. 70.

Q
Quin, Georgiana Boyle, Mrs., iv. 249; v. 412, 428.

R
Raasloff, General von, iv. 188, 192.
—— Mademoiselle von, iv. 183.
Raby Castle, iv. 145-147, 269, 272; vi. 120.
Rachel, Madame, the actress, v. 359.
Radicofani, iv. 274-279.
Radnor, Helen Matilda Chaplin, Countess of, vi. 313-318.
Radnor, William Bouverie, 5th Earl of, vi. 313-318.
Radowitz, General, iv. 141.
Raeburn, portraits by Sir Henry, iv. 450.
Raglan, Richard, 2nd Lord, v. 227.
—— Mary Blanche Farquhar, Lady, v. 227.
Ramsay, Claudia Garden, Mrs., the authoress, iii. 193, 198; vi. 276, 279, 505.
—— Sir James and Lady, v. 217.
Ramsden, Lady Guendolen, vi. 486.
Rate, Mary Mackintosh, Mrs., vi. 227.
Rathdonnel, Lady, iii. 83.
Ratisbon, Le Père, ii. 68.
Ravenna, ii. 48.
Ravenstone, vi. 354.
Ravensworth, Henry Liddell, politician and poet, 1st Earl of, ii. 453; iv. 124, 201, 273, 279; v. 69.
Ravignan, Le Père de, i. 353, 355.
Rayleigh, John William Strutt, Lord, vi. 99, 128.
—— Evelyn Balfour, Lady, vi. 99.
Reay, Fanny Hasler, Lady, v. 200.
Recamier, Madame, v. 305.
Redesdale, John Thomas Mitford, politician and controversialist, Earl of, iv. 306.
Reedswire, the, ii. 345.
Reeve, Henry, the editor and essayist, iv. 449; v. 360; vi. 89.
Reisach, Cardinal de, iii. 96.
Repton, Lady Jane, v. 413, 427.
Revesby, vi. 386.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, R.A., iv. 18; vi. 360.
Riaño, Emilia de Guyangos, Madame de, iv. 40, 41, 400; v. 277, 281.
Rianzares, Duc de, ii. 57.
Ricardo, Mrs. David, iv. 213.
—— Wilfred, vi. 306.
Rice, Captain Ernest, iv. 244.
Richelieu, Duc de, iv. 227.
Richmond, Elizabeth Liddell, Mrs. Brook, ii. 208, 209, 213.
—— George, R.A., ii. 214; iv. 72, 80; v. 279.
—— Rev. Canon Thomas Knyvett, vi. 134.
Richmond, in Yorkshire, vi. 495.
Ridley, Alice Bromley-Davenport, Mrs. Edward, afterwards Lady, vi. 222.
Ridley Hall, ii. 172-178, 266, 272, 341; iii. 170; vi. 433.
Riez, vi. 36.
Rignano, Emilio Massimo, Duke of, ii. 70.
Rimini, ii. 49.
Ripley Castle, ii. 283, 332-336; iv. 285-288.
Ripon, George Robinson, 1st Marquis of, vi. 293.
—— William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of, vi. 172.
Ritchie, Annie Thackeray, Mrs., the authoress, v. 453.
Rivieras, book on the, vi. 411.
Robertson, Miss Erica, v. 45.
Robinson, William, the botanist, vi. 227.
—— Miss, ii. 310-317.
Rocamadour, v. 435.
Rochers, Chateau de les, vi. 346.
Rockend, i. 85-87, 251; v. 215.
Rockingham Castle, vi. 239, 256.
Rodd, Rennell, author, iv. 359.
Roddam, Mr. and Mrs., of Roddam, ii. 280, 282, 364.
Roemer, Baron and Baroness von, vi. 470.
Rogers, Samuel, the poet, iv. 421; v. 449; vi. 86.
Rogerson, Christina Stewart, Mrs., v. 10, 13, 15, 443.
Rohan, Princess Charlotte de, vi. 122.
Roleston, Mary Pierina, Abbess of the Precious Blood, ii. 425, 438-442; iii. 238, 266-268, 270, 274, 275, 287, 295, 298, 305, 306.
Rolle, Mr. and Lady Gertrude, iv. 258.
Rome, ii. 54-76, 387-391, 422-432; iii. 65-100, 313-319, 359-378; iv. 86-101, 170-172; v. 135; vi. 165-168, 268-290, 412-415, 505.
Romilly, Helen Denison, Lady, v. 333.
—— Sir Samuel, the famous lawyer, iv. 286-287.
—— William, Lord, v. 333.
Romney, Charles Marsham, 4th Earl of, iv. 258.
Rosam, Miss, i. 504.
Roscia, Capolo, the brigand, vi. 167.
Rosen, Countess Ebba von, v. 84, 119, 120, 122, 124, 132, 144, 238-241.
Rosny, vi. 113.
Ross, Janet Duff-Gordon, Mrs., the authoress, iv. 194-196, 320; v. 155; vi. 290.
—— Lady Mary, iv. 201.
Rossetti, Madame, iv. 326.
Rossini, Goachino Antonio, the composer, iv. 257.
Rothbury, ii. 365.
Rothenburg, vi. 222.
Rothes, Henrietta Leslie, Countess of, v. 45, 46.
Rousham, ii. 150.
Routh, Dr. Joseph Martin, President of Magdalen, i. 447-450.
Routing Lynn, iv. 143.
Rowe, Lady Victoria, vi. 324, 326.
Rowley, Charlotte Shipley, Hon. Mrs., iii. 129.
Rowton, Montagu Corrie, Lord, the philanthropist, vi. 373, 400.
Roxburghe, Lady Anne Spencer Churchill, Duchess of, vi. 478.
Royat, Baths of, iii. 151.
Rudolstadt, v. 89.
Rufford, vi. 119.
Rumbold, Louisa Anne Crampton, Lady, v. 277.
Rushbrooke Hall, vi. 25.
Rushmore, v. 293.
Rushton Hall, vi. 239.
Ruskin, John, the author, ii. 107-109, 277, 484; v. 295.
Russell, Lady Agatha, v. 197.
—— Lord Arthur, iv. 308.
—— Sir Charles, iv. 149, 151.
—— Elizabeth Rawdon, Lady William, iv. 285-286.
—— Lady Ermyntrude, v. 417.
—— Lady Frances Elliot, Countess, v. 197.
—— Lady Frankland, ii. 8, 240.
—— George W. E., v. 193, 284-285.
—— John, Earl, the statesman, iv. 250, 403.
—— Sir John, of Chequers, ii. 240.
—— Hon. Odo and Lady Emily, iii. 368.
—— Hon. Rollo, v. 197; vi. 105.
Rutherford, of Ettington, Mr. and Mrs., ii. 322-324.
Ruthven, Mary, Baroness, ii. 335-337, 354-356; iii. 39, 42-43. 47; iv. 267-269, 447-449; v. 322.
Rutland, Lady Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of, vi. 500.
—— Janetta Manners, Duchess of, vi. 306-308, 500.
—— John Manners, 7th Duke of, vi. 306-309, 341-342, 500.
—— Lady Mary Isabella Somerset, Duchess of, vi. 501.
Rutson, Albert O., ii. 7, 13, 16.
Rycroft, Edith Berners, Mrs., of Everlands, vi. 267, 295.
Rye, Miss, iv. 360.
Rye House, the, i. 314; v. 19.
Ryton, ii. 320.

S
Sackville, S. Stopford, of Drayton, ii. 137; iv. 87, 96.
—— Caroline Harriet Sackville, Mrs. Stopford, v. 447; vi. 351.
—— Lady Margaret, v. 457; vi. 452.
—— Lady Mary, vi. 452, 453.
Saffi, Count Aurelio, the triumvir, iv. 315.
St. Alban’s Head, vi. 153-154.
S. Aldegonde, Madame, iii. 71.
St. Andrews, ii. 19, 170.
St. Ann’s Hill, iv. 474.
S. Arpino, Augusta Selina Locke, Duchess of, iv. 101.
St. Audries, vi. 233-235.
S. Bernard, Le Grand, i. 459.
S. Cloud, iv. 44.
St. Davids, v. 333.
S. Denis, i. 327.
S. Emilion, ii. 494.
S. Flour, vi. 150.
S. Gemignano, iii. 342-344.
St. Germans, Edward Granville, 3rd Earl of, iv. 246.
S. Giorgio, Lady Anne, ii. 86-90; iii. 192-193, 358.
—— Contessa Carolina di, ii. 90-91; iii. 191.
S. Jean du Doigt, vi. 345.
St. Levan, Sir John St. Aubyn, 1st Lord, vi. 175.
S. Martino, vi. 418.
S. Maxime, vi. 411.
St. Michael’s Mount, vi. 175-180.
S. Michele, iv. 312.
S. Nectaire, vi. 151.
St. Paul, Sir Horace, iv. 264, 265.
St. Petersburg, v. 391.
S. Pierre, Le Curé de, ii. 420.
S. Remo, ii. 377; vi. 110, 266.
S. Wandrille, vi. 344.
Salamanca, iv. 42.
Salette, La, ii. 512; vi. 42.
Salisbury, Georgina Alderson, Marchioness of, iv. 68; 72-82, 324, 325, 328; v. 14, 195, 196; vi. 237, 373-374, 423, 521.
Salisbury, James Cecil, 2nd Marquis of, iv. 74.
—— Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of, the statesman, iv. 68, 72-77, 125, 324; vi. 237, 374, 423.
—— Lady Amelia Hill, Marchioness of, iv. 73-74.
Salm-Reiffersheid, Princess of, v. 161.
Salt, Miss Harriet, ii. 328.
—— Miss Sarah, ii, 256-258, 328.
—— Sir Titus, iv. 157.
Salzburg, ii. 40; iii. 231.
Sand, Madame George, the novelist, v. 299, 433.
Sandwich, Lady Blanche Egerton, Countess of, iv. 425.
—— John William Montagu, 7th Earl of, iv. 470; v. 206.
Sandwich Islands, Emma, Queen Dowager of the, iii. 2-3, 109.
Santa-Croce, Catherine Scully, Princess of, ii. 59-61.
—— Donna Vincenza, iii. 91.
Sarlat, v. 436.
Sartines, M. de, ii. 145.
Sartoris, Adelaide Kemble, Mrs., v. 360-361; vi. 310-357.
Sauchiehall, Mrs., story of, vi. 123.
Savile, Lady Mary, vi. 483.
—— Sir John Savile, Lord, the ambassador, vi. 9.
Savona, iii. 186.
Saxe-Altenbourg, Duke Josef of, v. 90.
—— Princess Therèse of, v. 90.
Saxe-Weimar, Charles Auguste, Hereditary Grand Duke of, v. 174.
—— Pauline of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, Hereditary Grand Duchess of, v. 174, 176.
Saxon Switzerland, i. 430.
Saye and Sele, 14th Baron, ii. 152.
Scarborough, Richard George Lumley, 6th Earl of, v. 41.
Schenk, General, iv. 348.
Schleswig, v. 99.
Schleswig-Holstein, Princess Amalie of, iv. 398; v. 193.
Schouvaloff, Count, ii. 65.
Schulenberg, Countess, v. 148, 151.
Scotney Castle, v. 355; vi. 54.
Scott, Lord Henry, iv. 381.
—— Sir Walter, the poet and novelist, ii. 166, 309, 312-314; iv. 135, 258.
—— Alicia-Anne Spottiswoode, Lady John, v. 238.
Sculthorpe, i. 4; vi. 103.
Sebright, Guy, vi. 90.
—— Hon. Olivia Fitz-Patrick, Lady, v. 315.
Sedgwick, Professor Adam, i. 120, 164.
Segni, vi. 415.
Segovia, iv. 41.
Selborne, iv. 132.
Selborne, Lady Laura Waldegrave, Countess of, iv. 343.
—— Roundell Palmer, Earl of, the Lord Chancellor, iv. 73, 131, 343; vi. 237.
Selby, vi. 361.
Selby, Lady, of the Mote, iv. 66-67.
Selman, Sarah, i. 3.
Senior, John Nassau, iv. 472.
Sepolti Vivi, the, iii. 73-76.
Serafina della Croce, iii. 234-235, 287.
Sergisson, the Misses, v. 225.
Serlupi, Marchese, iii. 191, 198.
Sermoneta, Hon. Harriet Ellis, Duchess of, v. 141, 148, 160, 177; vi. 8-9, 290, 510.
—— Margherita Knight, Duchess of, ii. 58.
—— Michelangelo Caiëtani, Duke of, ii. 58; iii. 87; v. 141, 160, 174, 177, 178, 345.
Servites, Order of the, ii, 445.
Sestri, iii. 187.
Seville, iv. 32.
Seymour, Miss Charlotte, iv. 171, 182, 189.
—— Elizabeth Baillie-Hamilton, Mrs. Hamilton, iii. 395; v. 292.
—— Miss Emma, iv. 171, 182, 189: vi. 28-29.
—— Sir Francis, v. 362.
Shavington, iv. 132.
Sheffield, George, i. 421, 446, 493; ii. 5-8, 33-38, 132, 156; iv. 44, 45, 85, 159.
—— Sir Robert and Lady, v. 285.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs., i. 39.
—— Jane Gibson, Lady, ii. 278.
Sherborne, James Dalton, 3rd Lord, iv. 465.
—— Susan Block, Lady, iv. 403; v. 274; vi. 97, 162.
Sherbrooke, Miss Violet, vi. 424.
Shipley, Anna Maria, i. 13.
—— Anna Maria Mordaunt, Mrs., i. 5.
—— Emilia, i. 84.
—— Jonathan, Bishop of St. Asaph, i. 5; iv. 18.
—— Mrs. Louisa, i. 20, 84, 95, 96; iv. 18.
—— Penelope, ii. 144; vi. 5.
—— William, Dean of St. Asaph, iii. 123-129; vi. 5.
Shrewsbury, Anna Theresa Cockerell, Countess of, vi. 290.
—— John, 16th Earl, and Maria Theresa Talbot, Countess of, i. 230.
Shropshire, book on, vi. 499.
Siddons, Mrs., i. 134; ii. 316.
Siena, iii. 342; vi. 13.
Silchester, iv. 345.
Simpkinson, Miss Emma, iii. 50, 208, 220, 228, 397.
—— Rev. John Nassau, i. 122, 214, 243.
—— Miss Louisa, i. 122, 123, 214.
Simpson, Lady Anne, i. 22-26, 351; ii. 320.
—— Frances Emily Baring, Mrs. Bridgeman, v. 41.
—— John, of Bradley, i. 22.
—— Palgrave, the novelist, v. 282-284.
Singh, Prince Duleep, vi. 400.
Skelton Castle, vi. 443.
Skiddaw, ascent of, ii. 163.
Sligo, Isabelle de Peyronnet, Marchioness of, vi. 332.
Sloper, Rev. John, i. 84.
Smith, Dudley, v. 304.
—— Goldwin, i. 415, 448.
—— Isabel Adeane, Mrs. Robert, v. 414.
—— John Abel, iv. 330.
—— the Misses Horace, iv. 293.
—— “Sir Hugh,” i. 437.
—— Miss Leigh, vi. 283-284.
—— Mr. and Mrs. Spencer, iii. 395; vi. 152.
—— Rev. Sydney, the wit, i. 515; ii. 316, 317; iv. 80; v. 62; vi. 325-326.
—— Miss Virginia, iv. 396.
Soame, Stephen and Anne, vi. 517.
Somers, Charles, 3rd Earl, iv. 253.
—— Virginia Pattle, Countess, iv. 222.
Somerset, Algernon Seymour, 15th Duke of, vi. 473.
—— Jane Georgiana Sheridan, Duchess of, vi. 473, 486.
—— Susan Mackinnon, Duchess of, vi. 473.
—— Lady Isabella Somers Cocks, Lady Henry, vi. 421, 459.
—— Raglan, G. H., iv. 223; vi. 99.
Somerton, Hon. Caroline Barington, Viscountess, ii. 139.
Somerville, Mrs. Mary, the authoress, iv. 303-304.
Sonning, i. 411, 470; vi. 498.
Sora, Agnese Borghese, Duchess of, ii. 59, 405, 424, 428; iii. 95, 253.
Sora, Rodolfo Boncompagni, Duke of, ii. 59, 428; iii. 95.
Soracte, ascent of, iv. 107.
Sorrento, ii. 81, 396.
South Wraxhall Manor, i. 272; vi. 485.
Southam, v. 224.
Southgate, i. 297.
Souvigny, iii. 152.
Soveral, Mr. and Madame de, iii. 198.
Speke, iv. 63.
Spencer, Adelaide Seymour, Countess, iv. 475.
—— 5th Earl, and Charlotte Seymour, Countess, ii. 213.
Spilsby, vi. 387.
Spinola, Marchese and Marchesa, iv. 169.
Splugen, Passage of the, iii. 107.
Spoleto, iii. 101.
Spottiswoode, William, iv. 236-237, 379.
Spurgeon, Rev. Charles Haddon, v. 324; vi. 431.
Spy, the Family, i. 370-376.
Squires, Dr., iii. 262-264, 298.
Staël, Auguste de, vi. 122.
—— Anne Louise Necker, Madame de, iii. 416; vi. 428.
Staffa, v. 219-220.
Stanhope, Arthur Philip, 6th Earl, vi. 478.
—— Dorothea Hay, Lady Scudamore, v. 222.
—— Hon. Edward, ii. 137; vi. 386.
—— Emily Harriet Kerrison, Countess, iv. 81, 126, 235, 350.
—— Evelyn Pennefather, Countess, vi. 476, 478.
—— Lucy Constance Egerton, Hon. Mrs. Edward, vi. 386.
—— Hon. Harry, iv. 83.
—— Sir Henry Edwyn Scudamore, v. 222-223.
—— Philip Henry, 4th Earl, iv. 330; v. 357.
—— Philip Henry, 5th Earl, the historian, iv. 81, 99, 126-128, 235, 238, 300-301, 325, 330, 350-351.
—— General Philip, iv. 451.
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Dean of Westminster, i. 67, 118-120, 230, 236, 238, 264, 284, 357-366, 383, 393, 402, 439, 471, 481, 483, 491; ii. 122-126, 132, 135-137, 153-155, 158-159, 220-222, 290, 380-381, 390, 497-498; iii. 110, 153, 158-159, 414-415; iv. 2, 63, 153, 324, 365, 367; v. 196, 208, 326-329, 331.
—— Lady Augusta, ii. 390, 497-498; iii. 110, 153, 158, 414; iv. 365-369; vi. 410.
—— Catherine Maria, afterwards Mrs. C. Vaughan, i. 66, 69, 118, 210, 281, 291.
—— Miss Cecilia, vi. 439.
—— Captain Charles Edward, i. 156, 281.
—— Eliza Clayton, Mrs. Charles Edward, ii. 45.
—— Rev. Edward, Rector of Alderley, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich, i. 44, 62, 66, 69, 117-118, 132, 231-236, 280.
—— Catherine Leycester, Mrs. Edward, i. 44, 62, 102, 118, 124, 208, 257, 281, 299-301, 360, 383, 399, 407, 471, 514-515; ii. 122-124, 132, 290-292.
—— Hon. Emmeline, ii. 133.
—— of Alderley, Fabia, Lady, iv. 324, 383.
—— Edward John, 2nd Lord, vi. 440.
—— Hon. Henrietta, Dillon, Lady, vi. 440.
—— Hon. Louisa, i. 412; ii. 140-141.
—— Maria Joseph Holroyd, Lady Stanley of Alderley, i. 114, 140-143, 411-412.
—— Hon. Maria Margaret, i. 412; ii. 140.
—— Mary, i. 69, 118, 210, 331, 383, 471; ii. 8, 9, 10, 11; iii. 4, 281, 287, 289, 304, 414; iv. 2, 63; v. 243-244.
—— Captain Owen, i. 281.
—— Hon. William Owen, antiquarian author, i. 502; v. 334.
—— Ellen Williams, Mr. William Owen, i. 502.
Stapleton, Lady, iii. 124.
Star, Thomas, i. 164.
Stephanie, Grand Duchess of Baden, i. 383, 385.
Sterling, John, i. 70.
Sternberg, Baron Reinhold von Ungern, v. 87.
Stewart, Harriet Everilda Gore, Mrs. Duncan, iv. 428-438, 480-481; v. 13, 190, 198-199, 200, 204, 272, 273 274, 277, 288, 289, 298-309, 315-316, 342-344, 358-359, 384-386, 406.
—— Lady Helen, vi. 94.
—— Robert Shaw, iii. 48, 49; iv. 449; vi. 434.
Stichill, iv. 252.
Stirling, Mrs., of Glenbervie, iii. 48.
—— Mrs., of Kippenross, iii. 40-42.
—— Mrs., of Linlathan, ii. 165.
Stirling-Graham, Miss Clementina, of Duntrune, ii. 165.
Stisted, Mrs., of the Bagni di Lucca, ii. 94.
Stockholm, v. 102-108.
Stoke-upon-Terne, i. 61, 64, 124-151; ii. 160, 327.
Stokesay Castle, vi. 382.
Stonebyres, ii. 360.
Stonehenge, ii. 155; v. 293.
Stoney, Mr. Robinson, i. 24.
Story, Miss Amelia, ii. 466.
—— William Wetmore, the author and sculptor, vi. 77, 90, 273-274.
Stover, Mr., of Biddick, iv. 280.
Stowe, Mrs. Beecher, i. 515.
Stradbroke, Augusta-Sophia Musgrave, Countess of, vi. 77.
Stratford de Redcliffe, Stratford Canning, Viscount, the statesman, iv. 302-304, 308-309.
Strathfieldsaye, iv. 343-345.
Strathmore, Charles, 6th Earl of, i. 23.
—— Claude Bowes Lyon, 13th Earl of, iv. 365; v. 45, 217.
—— Hon. Charlotte Barrington, Countess of, vi. 438.
—— Frances Dora Smith, Countess of, vi. 87.
—— John, 5th Earl of, i. 23.
—— John, 9th Earl of, ii. 172.
—— John, 10th Earl of, ii. 173, 178.
—— Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of, i. 24; ii. 172, 275; iv. 210, 416; vi. 494.
—— Mary Milner, Countess of, i. 53; ii. 178, 274.
Strawberry Hill, iv. 328.
Streatlam Castle, ii. 178, 274; vi. 494.
Streletski, Count, iv. 332, 423.
Strettel, Mr. and Mrs., ii. 254.
Strickland, Mr., of Cokethorp, ii. 151
Stuart, Charles Edward, ii. 515.
—— Sir J., of Allenbank, iv. 266.
—— General Charles, v. 138.
—— Lady Euphemia, i. 23.
—— Lady Jane, i. 22.
—— John Sobieski Stolberg, ii. 515.
—— Lady Louisa, i. 301.
Stuart de Rothesay, Lady Elizabeth Yorke, ii. 280-282, 360; iv. 255, 407, 408.
Stuart Wortley, Hon. Jane Lawley, Mrs. James, iv. 224.
Stucley, Marion Elizabeth Fane, Mrs., vi. 235.
Stufa, Marchese Lotteria Lotharingo
della, iv. 194, 319; v. 155; vi. 9.
Stuttgart, iii. 336.
Subiaco, iv. 173.
Sudeley Castle, iv. 438.
Sudeley, Ada Tollemache, Lady, v. 233, 275
Suffolk, Hon. Isabella Howard, Countess of, iii. 139, 149; iv. 390-391.
—— Charles John, 17th Earl of, iii. 139, 145.
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, vi. 478.
Sulmona, Prince and Princess, v. 148.
Sumner, John Bird, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 407.
Surtees, Robert, of Mainsforth, the historian and poet, ii. 309, 313.
—— Anne Robinson, Mrs., of Mainsforth, ii. 309-317.
Sussex, book upon, vi. 322.
Sutherland, Anna Hay-Mackenzie, Duchess of, iii. 245; iv. 331; v. 212.
—— George, iv. 165.
Sutri, iv. 108; vi. 508.
Sutton Place, ii. 217; iv. 239.
Swaylands, vi. 510.
Sweden, J. B. J. Bernadotte, Charles XIV., King of, vi. 359.
Sweden and Norway, Gustaf, Crown Prince of, v. 119, 123, 124-125, 128, 132, 137-174, 195-200, 202-208, 210, 213-217, 238-240, 410-411; vi. 68, 80-81, 525.
—— Louisa, Queen of, vi. 76.
—— Oscar, King of, v. 106, 119-128; vi. 525.
—— Sophie of Nassau, Queen of, v. 79-85, 106, 119-127, 132, 144, 147, 239-240, 310-325; vi. 525.
—— Victoria of Baden, Crown Princess of, v. 410-411; vi. 415, 509.
Swete, F. H. Buller, of Oswestry, vi. 433, 486.
Swillerton, vi. 354.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, the poet, v. 16; vi. 357.
—— Sir John, ii. 350.
Sydenham, vi. 180.
Sydney, Lady Emily Paget, Countess, vi. 349-350.
—— John Robert Townshend, Earl, iv. 224; vi. 350.
Symonds, John Addington, the author, iv. 427.
Syon House, iv. 397.
Syracuse, v. 248.

T
Tabley, the old house of, vi. 98.
Taddini, Conte Luigi, iii. 83.
Tadema, Alma, the artist, v. 277.
Taglioni, Madame, iv. 483.
Tailetti, Don Pietro, v. 141.
Tait, Archibald Campbell, Bishop of London, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, iii. 35-36, 39; iv. 219; v. 383.
—— Catherine Spooner, Mrs. J. Archibald, iii. 35-36, 39; iv. 219; vi. 354.
—— Crawford, iii. 39.
Talbot, Lady Gertrude, iv. 133.
—— Monsignor, ii. 67; iii. 190, 238, 252, 307.
Talleyrand, Baron de, v. 154.
Tambroni, Clotilda, Professor of Greek at Bologna, i. 6-9.
Tanjore, the Princess, vi. 275.
Tankerville, Charles Bennet, 6th Earl of, ii. 267-271, 365; iv. 226.
—— Corisande de Gramont, Countess of, iv. 139.
—— Lady Olivia Montagu, Countess of, ii. 267-272; iii. 32, 33.
Taormina, v. 247, 266.
Tatton, Miss Fanny, iii. 401; iv. 129, 230.
Tatton Park, iv. 459, 463; vi. 97, 182-183, 229.
Taranto, v. 269.
Taunton, Lady Mary Howard, Lady, iv. 133, 357.
Tayler, Frederick, the artist, v. 44.
Tayleur, Miss Harriet, i. 143-144, 502; ii. 326; iii. 113; v. 217.
—— Miss Mary, i. 143-144. 502; ii. 326; v. 217.
—— Mr. John and Mrs., of Buntingsdale, i. 143.
—— William, of Buntingsdale, ii. 326.
Taylor, Sir Charles, iv. 132.
—— Colonel Philip Meadows, iv. 363.
—— Rowland, the martyr, vi. 519.
—— Tom, editor of Punch, iv. 307, 370.
Teano, Ada Wilbraham, Princess of, iii. 194; v. 151, 160.
Teck, Prince Adolphus of, vi. 353.
—— H.S.H. Francis, Duke of, iv. 224, 325-327.
—— H.R.H. Princess Mary, Duchess of, iv. 222, 224; v. 14, 312; vi. 320, 465.
Teesdale, ii. 340.
Tellemarken, v. 109-113.
Temple, Right Rev. Frederick, Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, vi. 320.
—— W. S. Gore-Langton, Lord, vi. 240.
—— Harry, i. 12.
—— Hon. William Cowper, iv. 71.
Temple Newsam, iv. 283-285; vi. 353-354.
Tenby, v. 333.
Tennyson, Alfred, the Poet Laureate, i. 258; iv. 478; v. 38-41, 314, 453; vi. 96, 226, 397, 429-431.
Tenterden steeple, iii. 332.
Terry, Mrs., iii. 375, 376; vi. 415.
Thackeray, Miss Annie, the novelist, iv. 155, 224, 305, 306.
Thellusson, Maria Macnaughton, Mrs., iv. 376, 483.
Thiers, Louis Adolphe, President of the French Republic, vi. 121.
Thirlwall, Connop, Bishop of St. Davids, i. 164, 437, 482.
Thomas, John, Bishop of Peterborough, ii. 338.
—— William Brodrick, the landscape gardener, iv. 239.
Thoresby, v. 43; vi. 118, 473.
Thorncombe, iv. 307.
Thornton, Harriet Heber, Mrs. John, ii. 144-149.
—— Miss, iv. 419.
Thorneycroft, ii. 161.
—— Blanche Swete, Mrs., vi. 502, 522.
Thorp Perrow, vi. 405.
Thorpe, Mrs., iii. 237, 262.
Throndtjem, v. 108.
Thun, i. 464, v. 408.
Thurlow, Edward, Lord High Chancellor, v. 286-287.
—— Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, of Baynards, vi. 162.
Thurlow, Great, vi. 517.
—— Little, vi. 507.
Thynne, Lord John, iv. 418, 479.
Tilt, Georgiana Hibbert, Mrs., vi. 9, 465.
Timsbury, iv. 71.
Tintagel, vi. 524.
Tittenhanger, v. 50; vi. 109.
Tivoli, iii. 370; iv. 175; vi. 507.
Tollemache, Hon. Algernon, v. 233.
Tollemache, John, 1st Baron, v. 445.
—— Marguerite Hume-Purves, Hon. Mrs. Augustus, iv. 307.
—— Mary Stuart Hamilton, Lady, vi. 376.
—— Colonel Thomas, v. 445.
Tong Church, iv. 441.
Torcello, iii. 230.
Torchio, iii. 236-237.
Torlonia, Duke of, ii. 295-297.
—— origin of the family of, iv. 349-350.
Torre, Contessa della, ii. 448-449.
Torrigiani, Marchesa Cristina, v. 154; vi. 9.
—— Marchesa Elisabetta, v. 154; vi. 8, 290.
—— Don Filippo, v. 154.
—— Marchese Pietro, v. 154.
—— Marchesa Margherita, vi. 8.
Tortworth, v. 298.
Toscanella, vi. 416.
Tosti, the Abbate, iv. 182.
Toul, iii. 333.
Tours, ii. 464.
Tower, Mr. and Mrs., of the Weald, vi. 380.
Towneley, Colonel, iv. 346.
Townley, Walter, vi. 420.
Townshend, Lady Anne, v. 421.
—— Lady Agnes, vi. 175.
—— Dorothy Walpole, Lady, vi. 104.
Trafford, Edward William, of Wroxham, ii. 193, 406, 506.
—— Martine Larmignac, Madame de, ii. 186-200, 406, 412-415, 500-513; iii. 53-64, 251-254, 260, 265.
Trani, Mathilde of Bavaria, Countess of, iii. 86.
Trebeck, Rev. Canon, James John and Mrs., vi. 119.
Tregastel, vi. 345.
Tremayne, Hon. Mary Vivian Mrs., vi. 180.
Trenca, M. and Madame, ii. 247.
Trench, Mrs. R. C., ii. 434; iv. 90.
Trent, iii. 231.
Trevanion, Lady Frances, vi. 494.
Trevelyan, Sir Alfred, vi. 234.
—— Sir Charles, Governor of Madras, ii. 348; iv. 379.
—— Sir George Otto, politician and author, iv. 401.
—— Paulina Jermyn, Lady, ii. 277, 348-50.
—— Mrs. Spencer, ii. 351.
—— Mrs. Raleigh, ii. 351.
—— Sir Walter, ii. 277, 348-351.
Treves, i. 385.
Trisulti, iv. 192.
Trollope, Adolphus, the novelist, iv. 171; v. 300.
—— Mrs. Anthony, v. 16.
—— Miss Beatrice, iv. 171; v. 151.
Tronchin, Colonel, the philanthropist, i. 453.
Trotter, Captain, i. 313.
—— Hon. Charlotte Liddell, Mrs., i. 315.
Troubridge, Miss Laura, vi. 104.
Troutbeck, John, afterwards Minor Canon of Westminster, i. 414, 417, 419, 446.
Truro, Edward White Benson, Bishop of, v. 71.
Tucker, Rev. Alfred Robert, Bishop of Uganda, vi. 453.
Tufton, i. 278.
Tullgarn, Gustaf, Comte de, v. 153.
Turin, ii. 106.
Turner, J. M. W., the artist, vi. 330-331.
—— Miss, iii. 114-115.
—— Pamela FitzGerald, Mrs., vi. 502.
Turnour, Algernon, vi. 28.
Tusculum, ii. 391; v. 150.
Twain, Mark (Mr. Samuel Clemens),
the author, vi. 281-283.
“Two Noble Lives, the Story of,” vi. 333-336.
Tytler, Christina Fraser, the authoress, iii. 368.

U
Ugolini, Cardinal, iii. 71.
Umberto II., King of Italy, v. 135, 158; vi. 278.
Ungern Sternberg, Theodora v. Bunsen, Baroness von, ii. 294; iii. 109.
Unthank, iii. 170.
Upsala, v. 105.
Upton, General, v. 64.
Upton Court, vi. 26.
Usedom, Baron von, i. 435; iii. 104-106.
—— Olympia Malcolm, Baroness, afterwards Countess von, i. 435; iii. 104-106; v. 349-350.

V
Val Anzasca, ii. 109.
Valdagno, iv. 321.
Vallombrosa, ii. 84; iii. 381; vi. 273.
Val Richer, i. 320.
Valsamachi, Emily Shipley, Countess, ii. 145, 159, 160, 327.
Van de Weyer, Madame, ii. 232.
—— M. Sylvain, ii. 231-232.
Vane, Lady Katherine, afterwards Lady Barnard, vi. 79.
—— Margaret Gladstone, Lady, vi. 32.
—— Sir Henry, vi. 33, 354.
Vatche, the, in Buckinghamshire, i. 2, 3, 493; ii. 156.
Vaucher, Mademoiselle, ii. 379.
Vaudois, the, ii. 109.
Vaughan, Cardinal, vi. 483.
—— Catherine Maria Stanley, Mrs. Charles, i. 281, 311, 336; ii. 213, 261; iii. 170; iv. 360, 366; v. 225, 316, 327; vi. 102, 476, 505;
death of, vi. 513-515.
—— Dr. Charles, afterwards Dean of Llandaff, i. 214, 218, 281, 336; ii. 213, 260, iii. 414;
death of, vi. 476.
—— Herbert, of Llangoedmore, vi. 347.
Vauriol, Vicomte de, iii. 354.
Veii, ii. 391; iv. 95-96.
Venables, Rev. Edmund, afterwards Canon and Precentor of Lincoln, i. 240; vi. 361-362.
—— George Stovin, vi. 99.
Venice, vi. 168-170, 290-293.
Vernon, Augustus Henry, 6th Lord, iii. 140.
Verona, iii. 230, 337.
Verulam, Elizabeth Weyland, Countess of, iii. 139; v. 47.
—— James Walter Grimston, 2nd Earl of, v. 47, 49.
Vetturino travelling, ii. 46-49.
Vicenza, iii. 338; vi. 420.
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, ii. 376; iv. 96, 222.
Victoria, Queen of England, ii. 286-288; iv. 224, 366, 368; vi. 69-75, 82-83, 228, 264, 307, 464, 465.
Victorine, Madame, iii. 89-90.
Vienna, ii. 36.
Vigne, Père la, i. 338.
Villari, Professor Pasquale, the historian, v. 155.
Villiers, Hon. Francis, iv. 396.
Vine’s Gate, iii. 393.
Vitelleschi, Francesco Nobile, Marchese, politician, iv. 332-343.
Vivian, William Graham, vi. 101, 486.
Vivian, Amabel Beaumont, Lady Hussey, vi. 101.
Vivier, M., the actor, iv. 220-221, 225.
Vizille, vi. 48.
Voight, the artist, iv. 86.
Vyne, the, vi. 156.

W
Waddington, Dean of Durham, ii. 265.
—— Mary Port, Mrs., v. 2, 5, 6.
—— William Henry, the statesman and ambassador, i. 319; ii. 109; v. 94-95.
Wagner, Rev. George, i. 79, 80.
—— Mrs., i. 79; ii. 427; iii. 397.
Wagstaff, Mrs., the clairvoyant, iv. 392.
Wake, Sir Baldwin, ii. 151.
Waldegrave, Frances Braham, Countess, iv. 328; v. 209.
—— Sarah Milward, Countess, iii. 397.
Wales, H.R.H. Albert Edward, Prince of, ii. 381; iv. 222, 223, 331, 379; v. 24, 212, 213; vi. 34.
—— H.R.H. Alexandra, Princess of, ii. 381; iv. 222, 223, 328, 331, 334, 396; v. 212.
—— H.R.H. Prince George of, v. 24.
Walker, Frederick J., i. 309, 332, 398; vi. 264.
—— Mrs. Frederick, v. 166; vi. 264.
—— Frederick, the artist, iv. 357-358.
“Walks in Rome,” iii. 388, 397, 408; vi. 416.
Wallace, Sir Richard, v. 208.
Wallington, ii. 277, 347-352.
Wallop, Hon. John, v. 296.
Walpole, Catherine Shorter, Lady, vi. 104-105.
—— George, Lord, vi. 104.
—— Sir Robert, i. 2; vi. 104.
Walsh, Hon. Christopher, vi. 156.
Waltham Abbey, i. 311.
Walton, in Yorkshire, iv. 67.
“Wanderings in Spain,” iv. 83.
Wantage, ii. 222.
Wantage, Hon. Robert James Loyd Lindsay, Lord, vi. 433, 447.
—— Hon. Harriet Loyd, Lady, vi. 433, 447.
Warbleton Priory, vi. 470.
Warburton, Egerton, of Arley, iv. 461.
—— Matilda Grove, Mrs. Eliot, i. 510, 511-513; ii. 12.
—— Miss Sydney, the authoress, i. 510.
—— Miss Jane, iv. 216.
Ward, Hon. Elizabeth Blackwood, Mrs., v. 428.
—— Miss Geneviève, iv. 436; v. 276.
—— Herbert, vi. 240.
—— Mrs. Humphry, vi. 164.
Ward-Howe, Mrs. Julia, the poetess, v. 174.
Wardour Castle, v. 293.
Warkworth, ii. 278, 352.
Warkworth, Henry Algernon George, Lord, vi. 373.
Warner, Charles, the Trinidad philanthropist, vi. 434.
Warre, the Misses Florence and Margaret, vi. 510.
Warren, Miss Anna, ii. 144.
—— Penelope Shipley, Mrs., i. 165-166; ii. 143-144; iii. 125.
Warsaw, v. 401.
Warwick, George Guy Greville, 3rd Earl of, iv. 253-254, 261.
—— Lady Anne Charteris, Countess of, iv. 261, 267; vi. 33.
Warwick Castle, vi. 33.
Waterford, Christina Leslie, Marchioness of, vi 21.
—— John, Marquis of, ii. 280.
—— Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquis of, ii. 362; iv. 291-292; v. 358.
—— Hon. Louisa Stuart, Marchioness of, ii. 280-282, 360-363; iii. 10-13, 23-31, 323-327; iv. 51, 60-61, 133-143, 208-217, 251-265, 340-343, 376, 404-409; v. 15, 213-214, 290-291; vi. 108-110, 158-161, 241-251, 326, 327, 333.
Watson, Sir Thomas, physician (1792-1882), v. 184.
—— Mr. and Mrs., of Rockingham, vi. 256.
—— the author, vi. 434.
Watts, G. F., R.A., vi. 326-330.
—— Theodore, the author, v. 289-290.
Way, Albert, i. 503; ii. 133.
—— Rev. John, vi. 183.
Wayland Smith’s cave, ii. 230.
Webster, Charlotte Adamson, Lady, iii. 177; iv. 301.
Weeping Cross, ii. 328.
Weimar, Pauline of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, Grand Duchess of, v. 87.
Welbeck Abbey, v. 366; vi. 475.
Weld, Thomas, Cardinal, vi. 22-23.
Weling, Fräulein von, the authoress, v. 77, 292.
Wellesley, Rev. Dr. Henry, Principal of New Inn Hall and Rector of Hurstmonceaux, i. 16; ii. 213, 244, 294-297.
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, i. 393; iv. 345; v. 276; vi. 190-191, 373.
—— Arthur Richard Wellesley, 2nd Duke of, iv. 81, 344; v. 11-12, 29, 276.
Wells, i. 308; v. 291; vi. 320.
Wells, Lady Louisa, ii. 356; iii. 140.
Wemyss, Francis, 8th Earl of, iii. 44.
—— Lady Louisa Bingham, Countess of, ii. 356; iv. 267.
Wenlock Abbey, vi. 382.
Wenlock, Hon. Caroline Neville, Lady, ii. 389; iii. 154.
Wensleydale, Cecilia Barlow, Lady, iv. 124, 414; v. 62.
Wentworth, Lady Harriet, v. 298.
Wentworth Castle, v. 297.
—— Wodehouse, iv. 281-283.
Wesselow, Mr. and Mrs. Simpkinson de, iv. 163-165; vi. 264.
Westenberg, M. and Mme. de, v. 152, 160; vi. 509.
Westminster, Lady Constance Gower, Duchess of, v. 229.
—— Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Marchioness of, v. 366.
Westmoreland, Anne Child, Countess of, iv. 468.
West Woodhay, i. 84, 95.
West Wycombe, vi. 299.
Weyland, Lady Catherine, iv. 69; v. 47.
Weymouth, ii. 229.
Wharncliffe, Lady Susan Lascelles, Countess of, iv. 327.
Whately, Richard, Archbishop of Dublin, i. 228, 283.
Whewell, Dr. William, Master of Trinity, i. 164; iii. 158; vi. 526.
Whistler, James, the artist, iv. 376; v. 190.
Whitburn, ii. 206-213; iv. 272; v. 423.
White, Lady Maude, vi. 436.
Whiteway, vi. 181.
Whitford, Mrs. Mary, vi. 174.
Wickham, Agnes Gladstone, Mrs., vi. 362.
—— William of Binstead-Wyck, afterwards M.P., ii. 217; iv. 131.
Wied, Marie of Nassau, Dowager Princess of, v. 78-84.
Wigan, Mrs., iv. 219.
Wilberforce, Rev. Canon Basil, vi. 520.
—— Samuel, Bishop of Oxford, afterwards of Winchester, i. 470; iii. 153; iv. 125; v. 218-219.
Wilbraham, Charles, v. 17.
Wilcot House, i. 278.
Wilde, Oscar, the play-writer, v. 386.
Wilkinson, Rev. George Howard, iv. 342.
William IV., King of England, i. 69, 294.
Williams, Captain, iii. 28, 32.
—— Sir Fenwick, iv. 35.
—— Sir John and Lady Sarah, i. 503.
Williamson, Hon. Anne Liddell, Lady, ii. 207, 208, 211, 212, 400, 403.
—— Captain Charles, ii. 210, 212; iv. 248.
—— Lady Elizabeth, iv. 272, 365, 456; v. 423.
—— Sir Hedworth, iv. 272, 365, 459
—— Victor A., ii. 137, 210, 214, 403; iv. 232; v. 208.
Willmer, Bishop of Louisiana, vi. 354-356.
Willoughby, Sir Hugh, the Arctic voyager, vi. 425.
Wilson, Miss Fanny Fleetwood, vi. 280, 483.
—— Georgiana Sumner, Mrs., i. 407.
—— Sir Thomas Maryon, v. 280.
Wimbledon Camp, iv. 219.
Wimpole, iv. 252.
Winchelsea, Fanny Rice, Countess, iv. 411.
Winchester, John Paulet, 14th Marquis of, iv. 482.
Windham, Rt. Hon. William, the statesman, v. 451.
Windsor, Alberta Victoria Paget, Lady, vi. 351, 448.
—— Robert George Clive, Lord, v. 359; vi. 351, 448.
Wingfield, Miss Katherine, vi. 313.
—— Hon. Cecilia FitzPatrick, Hon. Mrs. Lewis, iv. 173, 227, 228, 231; v. 209.
Winkworth, Mrs. Stephen, v. 289.
Winslow, Dr., iii. 313, 359, 366, 370.
Winton Castle, ii. 354; iv. 267, 447.
Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick, Cardinal, ii. 486; vi. 162.
Wishaw House, ii. 358.
Woburn Abbey, v. 60-61; vi. 77.
Wodehouse, Miss Emily, i. 120.
—— Canon and Lady Jane, i. 120.
Wolff, Rev. Joseph, v. 278.
Wollaton Hall, vi. 424.
Wolseley, Sir Garnet, afterwards Viscount, iv. 305, 465.
—— Louisa Erskine, Viscountess, iv. 305, 465.
Wombwell, Lady Julia, v. 423.
Wood, Lady Agnes, iv. 240-243, 249, 293, 385.
—— Alderman, iii. 15.
—— Rt. Hon. Sir Charles, ii. 283; iv. 286.
—— Hon. Charles Lindley, ii. 137-138, 214, 251-253, 283, 325; iii. 320; iv. 239-243, 249, 290-293, 363, 385; v. 419-421.
—— Hon. Frederick, iv. 283.
—— Misses Isabel and Lorraine, vi. 12.
—— Lady Mary, ii. 251.
—— Mrs. Shakespeare, iii. 191, 204.
Woodbastwick Hall, vi. 225, 262.
Woodlands, vi. 99.
Woodward, Fanny Finucane, Mrs., iii. 209, 211, 213, 318, 364, 365, 374, 378.
Woolbeding, vi. 297.
Wordsworth, William, the poet, i. 177, 499.
Worsley Sir William, Bart., vi. 256.
Worth Park, vi. 27, 227.
Worting House, near Basingstoke, i. 13; ii. 143, 144.
Wortley, Hon. Mrs. James Stuart, iv. 82.
Wraxhall Manor, South, i. 272; vi. 485.
Wright, Miss Sophia of Mapperley, ii. 392; iii. 140, 183, 318; iv. 24, 25, 28, 48, 95, 99, 106, 304; v. 17, 130-131, 147.
Wynford, Caroline Baillie, Lady, iv. 398; v. 45, 195.
Wynne, Sir Watkin, v. 65, 202.
Wythenshawe, iv. 463.

Y
Yates, Edmund Hodgson, the novelist, v. 16.
Yeatman, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, iii. 414.
Yetholm, iii. 31.
York, H.R.H. George, Duke of, vi. 353, 399.
—— William Maclagan, Archbishop of, vi. 256-257, 294, 356, 443.
—— William Markham, Archbishop of, vi. 360.
—— Thomas Musgrave, Archbishop of, vi. 262.
—— William Thompson, Archbishop of, iv. 473.
—— Edward Vernon Harcourt, Archbishop of, vi. 360.
—— H. R. H. Victoria Mary, Duchess of, vi. 353, 516.
Yorke, Hon. Alexander, iv. 250, 251; v. 222.
—— Frances Graham, Mrs. Dallas, vi. 475.
—— Hon. Eliot, iv. 288-290, 410.
Yorke, Annie de Rothschild, Hon. Mrs. Eliot, iv. 410.

Z
Zanzibar, the Sultan of, iv. 328.
Zermatt, i. 460.
Zouche, Robert Curzon, Lord de la, vi. 296.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] J. Greenleaf Whittier, “Letters.”

[2] I had to pay a duty of 10 per cent, even on all my own money and savings, as it had been unfortunately invested in her name.

[3] Archibald, eldest son of John Archibald Colquhoun of Killermont, N.B., and Chartwell, near Westerham, in Kent.

[4] Archie Colquhoun died at Nice in the following spring.

[5] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[6] These rooms have been entirely altered since Lady Waterford’s death.

[7] Mary Amelia, widow of the first Marquis.

[8] Daughter of the 5th Earl of Balcarres.

[9] James Edward, 2nd Earl.

[10] Afterwards Dean of Wells.

[11] The picture was exhibited in the spring of 1845, and was sent straight to Hurstmonceaux from the Exhibition.

[12] Our cousins Sir Alexander and Lady Taylor. See vol. iii.

[13] The Rev. Henry Liddell, brother of my great-uncle Ravensworth, and whose wife, Charlotte Lyon, was niece of my great-grandmother, Lady Anne Simpson.

[14] Don Juan died in 1880, leaving his last great work, the restoration of Leon Cathedral, unfinished.

[15] This was my first meeting with Everard Primrose, afterwards for many years one of my most intimate friends. He had a cold manner, which was repellant to those who did not know him well, and in conversation he was tantalising, for nothing came out of him at all comparable to what one knew was within. But no young man’s life was more noble, stainless, and full of highest hopes and purposes. He died—to my lasting sorrow—of fever during the African campaign of 1885. His mother printed a memoir afterwards, which was a beautiful and simple portrait of his life—a very model of biographical truth.

[16] It has since been entirely destroyed.

[17] From “Paris.”

[18] W. S. Landor.

[19] Dr. Chalmers.

[20] Wordsworth.

[21] For these old friends of my mother, vide vols. i. and iii.

[22] This dear old lady (widow of a first cousin of my father’s) lived in uncomplaining poverty till 1891, and was a great pleasure to me. I was glad to be able to contribute to the support of her small establishment at Norbiton.

[23] Since this was written the pictures have all been dispersed.

[24] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[25] Mrs. T. Erskine’s novel.

[26] George Macdonald.

[27] Lady Margaret Beaumont, whom I afterwards knew very intimately, and learnt to regard with ever-increasing esteem and affection, died, to my great sorrow, March 31, 1888.

[28] Afterwards Lieutenant-General Henry Hope Crealock. He died May 1891.

[29] The Mote has since been sold and its contents dispersed.

[30] Mr. Hailstone of Walton Hall died 1890, his wife some years earlier. He bequeathed his topographical collections to the Chapter at York, where they are preserved as the “Hailstone Yorkshire Library.”

[31] This church, the most interesting memorial of the Brontë life at Haworth, was wantonly destroyed in 1880-81.

[32] Lady Salisbury’s description.

[33] Told me by Lord Houghton.

[34] Note added 1890.—Authorities now decide that this picture does not represent Mary at all, and it is certainly not, as formerly stated, by Zucchero, for Zucchero, who was never in England till the Queen was in captivity, never painted her.

[35] Afterwards Lady Sherbrooke.

[36] This was so for a long time. Then in about ten years several more editions were called for in rapid succession. One can never anticipate how it will be with books.

[37] 1890.—This was so for many years: then the sale of “Days near Rome” suddenly and unaccountably stopped.

[38] From “Days near Rome”

[39] Miss Margaret Foley died Dec. 1877.

[40] Afterwards Lady Compton.

[41] From “Days near Rome.”

[42] From “Days near Rome.”

[43] Perhaps the interest of these details is of the past, but I insert them because the conduct of the Sardinian Government is being rapidly forgotten, and I was at great pains in obtaining accurate statistics and verifying the facts mentioned.

[44] From “Days near Rome.”

[45] Afterwards Duchess of Marino.

[46] Mother of the Duchess S. Arpino.

[47] Shortly before this my publishers had given me a magnificently bound copy of “Walks in Rome,” with the desire that I would present it to Princess Margherita. I demurred to doing this, because, owing to the strictures which the book contains on the “Sardinian Government,” I thought it might be considered little less than an impertinence; but I told the Duchess S. Arpino, who was in waiting at the time, and she repeated it. The amiable Princess said, “I am sorry Mr. Hare does not appreciate us, but I should like my present all the same,” and the book was sent to her.

[48] From “Days near Rome.”

[49] From “Days near Rome.”

[50] This quaint journey is described in the introductory chapter of “Days near Rome.”

[51] From “Days near Rome.”

[52] From “Days near Rome.”

[53] From “Days near Rome.”

[54] From “Days near Rome.”

[55] From “Days near Rome.”

[56] From “Days near Rome.”

[57] From “Days near Rome.”

[58] Miss Kate Malcolm, the last of her family, died, universally beloved, in May 1891.

[59] From “Northern Italy.”

[60] From “Northern Italy.”

[61] Samuel Wilberforce.

[62] Rev. Hugh Pearson, Rector of Sonning.

[63] The house of William Wickham, who married my cousin Sophia Lefevre.

[64] In 1884 this fine old property of the Needhams was sold to A. P. Heywood Lonsdale, Esq. (now Heywood), who is also owner of the neighbouring estate of Cloverly.

[65] This old friend of my childhood died Dec. 1890, in her 99th year.

[66]

“Andrew, she has a face looks like a story,
The story of the heavens looks very like her.”
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Elder Brother.

[67] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[68] Afterwards Lady Harcourt.

[69] This is much like the epitaph which Ruskin has placed on the grave of his father.

[70] A rich farmer, the landlord of our Lime farm at Hurstmonceaux.

[71] Mrs. Harford of Blaise Castle, third daughter of Baron de Bunsen.

[72] From “Northern Italy.”

[73] From “Northern Italy.”

[74] From “Northern Italy.”

[75] Beatrice, afterwards the first wife of Charles Stuart Wortley.

[76] From “Days near Rome.”

[77] From “Days near Rome.”

[78] From “Days near Rome.”

[79] From “Days near Rome.”

[80] From “Days near Rome.”

[81] From “Days near Rome.”

[82] From “Days near Rome.”

[83] From “Days near Rome.”

[84] From “Days near Rome.”

[85] From “Days near Rome.”

[86] Daughter of Lord Howard de Walden, afterwards Duchess of Sermoneta.

[87] From “Days near Rome.”

[88] This excellent old Abbot was afterwards cruelly murdered at Rome.

[89] From “Days near Rome.”

[90] From “Days near Rome.”

[91] From “Florence.”

[92] All the women have fainted.

[93] Sermon on Ezekiel.

[94] From “Northern Italy.”

[95] From “North-Eastern France.”

[96] Afterwards known as “Sunday Hill.”

[97] Fanny Blackett, Vicomtesse du Quaire, who died, universally beloved and regretted, in the spring of 1895.

[98] Feb. 8, 1814.

[99] Hon. E. Primrose, second son of the Duchess of Cleveland by her first marriage with Lord Dalmeny.

[100] Cambry.

[101] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[102] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[103] Eighth daughter of the 7th Earl of Wemyss. She died, deeply mourned and beloved, in 1891.

[104] Author of “Rab and his Friends.”

[105] Daughter of the 8th Earl of Cavan, afterwards Baroness von Essen.

[106] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[107] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[108] John, second Duke of Argyll, immortalised by Pope.

[109] Author of “Music and Morals,” &c.

[110] From “Walks in London.”

[111] From “Walks in London.”

[112] From “Days near Paris.”

[113] This was my first sight of the contentious and arbitrary essayist Abraham Hayward, whom I often saw afterwards. He was always interesting to meet, if only on account of his perverse acerbity. Constantly invited by a world which feared him, he was always determined to be listened to, and generally said something worth hearing.

[114] From “Walks in London.”

[115] From “Walks in London.”

[116] Lady Victoria Liddell married Captain Edward Fisher, now Rowe.

[117] John FitzPatrick, Baron Castletown of Upper Ossory.

[118] From “Walks in London.”

[119] Emily, wife of the 5th Earl Stanhope, died Dec. 31, 1873.

[120] Evelyn Henrietta, daughter of R. Pennefather, Esq., afterwards 6th Countess Stanhope.

[121] Daughter of Amos Meredith, Esq. She married, secondly, a son of the 4th Duke of Argyll.

[122] Lady Harriet Pelham, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Chichester, wife of the 6th Earl of Darnley.

[123] Tasso.

[124] My real mother’s youngest sister Jane (see vol. i.). She married Edward, only son of the famous Lord Edward FitzGerald and of the beautiful Pamela. She lived till November 1891.

[125] The family circle was broken up by the death of Mr. Carew in 1888, a few months after that of his eldest daughter.

[126] I learnt to value Dean Church very much afterwards. The story of his beautiful and noble life is told in a wonderfully interesting “Memoir.”

[127] William, afterwards 4th Earl of St. Germans, died Oct. 7, 1877.

[128] Edward Granville, 3rd Earl of St. Germans, died 1877.

[129] George, second son of the 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, married Fanny Lucy, eldest daughter of Sir John Shelley.

[130] Sophia, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire.

[131] Hugh, 3rd Earl Fortescue.

[132] The Queen of the Gipsies died in July 1883, at the age of eighty-six.

[133] Her mother, Lady Stuart de Rothesay, was daughter of the 3rd Earl of Hardwicke.

[134] Charles, 3rd Earl of Somers.

[135] George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick, died Dec. 2, 1893.

[136] I afterwards heard the same story, almost in the same words, from Lord Warwick himself.

[137] from “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[138] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[139] Bk. vi. 73, 74.

[140] Anne, wife of the 4th Earl of Warwick, daughter of Francis, 8th Earl of Wemyss and March.

[141] My mother’s first cousin, Georgiana Liddell, had married Lord Bloomfield, formerly ambassador at Berlin and Vienna.

[142] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[143] I have heard Professor Owen tell this story himself.

[144] Louisa, fourth daughter of 2nd Earl of Lucan.

[145] John Patrick, 3rd Marquis of Bute.

[146] Gwendoline Mary-Anne, eldest daughter of Lord Howard of Glossop.

[147] Prior.

[148] Sir Hedworth and Lady Elizabeth Williamson. The parents of both were first cousins of my mother.

[149] My mother’s first cousin, Henry Liddell, 1st Earl of Ravensworth.

[150] John Axel Fersen, making the tour of France at nineteen, was presented to the Dauphine, herself nineteen, in 1774. Throughout his friendship with her, the perfect reserve of a great gentleman and great lady was never broken.

[151] In 1879 I told this story to the Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway, who took the trouble to verify facts and dates as to the Löwenjelms, &c., and found everything coincide.

[152] Mrs., then Lady Pease, died, universally beloved and regretted, in 1892.

[153] The 6th Earl of Fitzwilliam.

[154] Lady Frances Douglas, daughter of the 18th Earl of Morton.

[155] Eldest daughter and youngest son of Viscount Halifax.

[156] Edward Carr Glyn, afterwards Vicar of Kensington, son of the 1st Baron Wolverton.

[157] Mother of the 9th Duke of Bedford, a most charming and hospitable person. She died August 1874.

[158] Lord Moira was created Marquis of Hastings 1816, and died at Malta, November 26, 1826.

[159] “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then He openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction.”—Elihu in Job.

[160] Charles, 2nd Earl Grey.

[161] I have since heard this story as told by a Captain Campbell, and as having happened in Ireland near the Curragh. A similar story is told of two officers invited to the house of a Mr. T. near Dorchester. The appearance of the hostess at dinner was excused on plea of illness, and the younger guest, staring at the place where she would have sat, implored his elder friend to get him away from this devil-haunted place. An excuse of early parade was made, and as they were returning over the hills, the young man described the figure of “a lady with dripping hair wringing her hands.” Soon afterwards her body was found in the moat of the house. It was Mrs. T.

[162] My old schoolfellow, George, Equerry to the Prince of Wales, only son of the Right Hon. Sir George Grey.

[163] Anthony Lionel Ashley, died Jan. 14, 1836.

[164] I afterwards heard this story confirmed in every particular by Lord Waterford’s widow.

[165] From “Central Italy.”

[166] Miss Wright

[167] Whose real name is Cincinnatus.

[168] From “Northern Italy.”

[169] From “Northern Italy.”

[170] From “Central Italy.”

[171] From “Central Italy.”

[172] From “Florence.”

[173] From “Florence.”

[174] From “Northern Italy.”

[175] From “Northern Italy.”

[176] From “Walks in London.”

[177] He died March 1888.

[178] Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[179] Professor Forster has since assured me that this was impossible, for that hair will only continue to grow for a few hours after death.

[180] Daughter of the famous English tenor, John Braham.

[181] From “Walks in London.”

[182] From “Walks in London.”

[183] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[184] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[185] Story told me by Sir J. Shaw Lefevre.

[186] Afterwards Sir Charles Newton. He died Nov. 28, 1894.

[187] I need scarcely say that, as soon as possible thereafter, I eliminated all reference to Mr. Freeman, and all quotations from his works, from my books.

[188] From “Walks in London.”

[189] From “Walks in London.”

[190] Tom Taylor, editor of Punch, died 1880.

[191] Née Sabine Thellusson.

[192] Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[193] From “Walks in London.”

[194] From “Walks in London.”

[195] From “Walks in London.”

[196] From “Walks in London.”

[197] From “Walks in London.”

[198] From “Walks in London.”

[199] From “Walks in London.”

[200] William Reginald Courtenay, 12th Earl of Devon.

[201] Sir Samuel Baker died Dec. 1893.

[202] This picture was sold to the National Gallery in 1880 for £9000, and is probably the cheapest purchase the Gallery ever made.

[203] Isabella, second daughter of Lord Henry Howard.

[204] Mr. Abraham Hayward, the well-known critic and essayist, who had been articled in early life to an obscure country attorney, always seemed to consider it the summum-bonum of life to dwell amongst the aristocracy as a man of letters: and in this he succeeded admirably, and was always witty and well-informed, usually satirical, and often very coarse.

[205] Fourth son of the 4th Earl of Clarendon.

[206] Eldest sister of Prince Christian.

[207] From “Walks in London.”

[208] Many years afterwards I saw her again: her name was Mrs. Macnabb.

[209] Lord Russell died May 28, 1878.

[210] Lady Gladys afterwards married the 4th Earl of Lonsdale.

[211] My mother’s first cousin, Susan, sixth daughter of the 1st Lord Ravensworth.

[212] Eliot Yorke died Dec. 21, 1878—a bitter family sorrow.

[213] From “Walks in London.”

[214] Anne-Florence, Baroness Lucas, Dowager Countess Cowper, elder daughter and co-heir of Thomas Philip, Earl De Grey. She died in 1880.

[215] P.S.—The unpublished letters of Lady Mary Cooke show that this local tradition is incorrect. Lord Tavistock’s accident occurred far away, and he lingered afterwards for three weeks; but it is true that the family never lived at Houghton after his death.

[216] Lord Hinton afterwards used to play a barrel-organ in the streets of London, with an inscription over it in large letters, “I am the only Viscount Hinton.” He would play it for hours opposite the windows of Lord Powlett in Berkeley Square.

[217] Mr. E. A. Freeman—whose lengthy and disproportionate writings were never wholly without interest—died March 1892.

[218] Blanche, Countess of Sandwich, died March 1894.

[219] Letters of Alexis de Tocqueville to Mrs. Grote.

[220] Sir John Acton was commander-in-chief of the land and sea forces of Naples, and was for several years Neapolitan Prime Minister. His wife was the daughter of his brother, General Acton, and he had by her two sons (the younger of whom became Cardinal), and a daughter, afterwards Lady Throckmorton.

[221] At Sudeley Castle, where “the Mother of the English Reformation” is buried, I wrote for Mrs. Dent:—

“Here, within the chapel’s shade,
Reverent hands have gently laid,
From the suffering of her life,
From its storminess and strife,
All that rests of one who shone
For a time on England’s throne,
Ever gentle, ever kind,
Seeking human souls to bind
In a Christian’s fetters fast,
Heavenward leading at the last:
And their watch two angels keep
Over Katherine’s gentle sleep.
. . . . . . . . . .
Oh! amid this world of ours,
With its sunshine and its flowers,
Glad with light and blest with love,
Let us still so live above
All earth’s jealousies and snares,
All its fretfulness and cares,
Ever faithful, ever true,
With the noblest end in view,
Seeking human souls to raise
By the simplest, purest ways;
Then their ward will angels keep
When we too are hush’d to sleep.”

[222] Emma, daughter of John Brocklehurst, Esq., of Hurdsfield, the authoress of an admirable work on the “Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley.”

[223] The great feature in views from Stoke Rectory.

[224] The name is thus spelt in the epitaph on the tomb of Richard Pendrill at St. Giles in the Fields.

[225] Henry Strutt, who succeeded his father as 2nd Lord Belper in 1880, married Lady Margaret, sixth daughter of the 2nd Earl of Leicester.

[226] Frederick Arthur, second son of the 14th Earl of Derby, married Constance, eldest daughter of the 4th Earl of Clarendon.

[227] He succeeded his grandfather as 5th Viscount Gage in 1877.

[228] Frederick, third son of the 6th Earl of Tankerville. See vol. ii.

[229] Eldest son of the Hon. Colonel Augustus Liddell, married Christina Catherine, daughter of C. E. Fraser Tytler, Esq., of Sanquhar, the authoress of “Mistress Judith,” “Jonathan,” &c. See vol. iii.

[230] Helen, daughter of Sir John Warrender, wife of the 11th Earl of Haddington.

[231] Katherine, third daughter of the 2nd Earl of Eldon.

[232] Coleridge.

[233] Lady Harriet Elliot, sixth daughter of the 1st Earl of Ravensworth.

[234] E. Waller.

[235] Aldena (Kingscote), wife of Sir Archibald Hope.

[236] General Philip Stanhope, fifth son of Walter Spencer Stanhope of Cannon Hall, celebrated for his kindly nature and pleasant conversation. Died 1879.

[237] Charles Nevison, Viscount Andover, son of the 15th Earl of Suffolk, died January 11, 1800.

[238] Lord Eslington, afterwards 2nd Earl of Ravensworth.

[239] See my visit in 1866.

[240] Afterwards Mrs. C. Warren.

[241] Lady Charlotte Loftus, eldest daughter of John, 2nd Marquis of Ely.

[242] Eldest daughter of William Pitt, Earl Amherst.

[243] Elizabeth, second daughter of Sir Christopher Sykes, died 1853.

[244] Eldest sister of the 1st Earl of Lathom.

[245] Egerton Warburton, Esq.

[246] A family home. In 1807 Thomas Tatton of Wythenshawe married my mother’s first cousin, Emma, daughter of the Hon. John Grey.

[247] Harriet Susan, eldest daughter of Robert Townley Parker of Cuerden Hall.

[248] Fourth daughter of the 6th Earl of Albemarle.

[249] Second son of the 3rd Lord Lyttelton and Lady Sarah Spencer.

[250] Lady Agneta Montagu was one of the daughters of Susan, Countess of Hardwicke, my mother’s first cousin.

[251] Pascal.

[252] Sotherton Peckham Branthwayt Micklethwait.

[253] Third daughter of the 2nd Earl of Arran by his third wife, Elizabeth Underwood.

[254] Dr. William Thompson, Archbishop of York, married Miss Zoë Skene, a beautiful Greek.

[255] Adelaide Horatia Seymour, Countess Spencer, who died October 1877.

[256] The well-known architect.

[257] From “Walks in London.”

[258] Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson (“Book of Recollections”) gives a most attractive account of this lady, which may be summed up in his dictum “It is impossible for a daughter of Eve to be a better woman than Geraldine Jewsbury.”

[259] Elizabeth Jane, daughter of the first Lord Athlumney.

[260] From “Walks in London.”

[261] Helen Matilda, daughter of Rev. Henry Chaplin, afterwards 5th Countess of Radnor.

[262] Mr. Froude died Oct. 1894.

[263] Mrs. Davidson of Ridley Hall. See vols. ii. and iii.

[264] From “Walks in London.”

[265] I have frequently seen Mrs. L.’s pictures in the Academy. I had often been told of the strange likeness between Napoleon III. and myself.

[266] Author of “Unspoken Sermons,” “David Elginbrod,” &c.

[267] Died June 20, 1889.

[268] The house of Joseph Pease, M.P., afterwards Sir Joseph Pease.

[269] Afterwards Lord Rowton.

[270] From “The Story of Two Noble Lives.”

[271] All the best pictures at Burghley have since been sold at Christie’s.

[272] The same amusement was in vogue during the parties of the second Empire at Compiègne, where the worst of the many bad organ-grinders was the Emperor himself.

[273] Francis-Charles, 9th Duke, a great archaeologist.

[274] Hungerford Crewe, Lord Crewe, died Jan. 1894.

[275] The Roman sculptress, Gibson’s favourite pupil. See vol. iii.

[276] Widow of John Singleton Copley, three times Lord Chancellor.

[277] Told me by Mrs. Henry Forester.

[278] Afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.

[279] See Macpherson’s “Memorials of Mrs. Jameson.”

[280] Fräulein von Weling afterwards translated my “Life and Letters of Baroness Bunsen” into German, and it has thus had a wide circulation in Germany.

[281] Afterwards “Carmen Sylva,” the poet-queen of Roumania.

[282] Widow of my cousin Marcus, lost in the Eurydice.

[283] The epitaph of Prince Otto, by his mother, is—

“Made perfect through Suffering and patient in Hope,
Of a fearless Spirit and strong in Faith,
His mind turned towards heavenly things,
He searched for truth and a knowledge of God.
What he humbly sought in Life,
He, being set free, has now found in Light.”

[284] Née Isabel Waddington, sister of the ambassador from France to England.

[285] Younger son of my real mother’s youngest brother Wentworth.

[286] My real mother’s younger brother, Wentworth Paul, had married Countess Marie Marcia von Benningsen, lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Hanover.

[287] Afterwards ambassador in England.

[288] From “Sketches in Holland and Scandinavia.”

[289] Longfellow.

[290] Carlyle.

[291] Their grandmother was a Mademoiselle Clary, sister of Queen Desirée of Sweden.

[292] From “Days near Rome,” vol. ii.

[293] From “Days near Rome,” vol. ii.

[294] From “Central Italy.”

[295] From “Central Italy.”

[296] See vol. iii.

[297] Wife of a north-country baronet.

[298] Mary Howitt, aged 89, fulfilled her heart’s desire by also dying at Rome, Jan. 30, 1888, and, though a Catholic, was permitted to rest by her husband’s side in the Protestant cemetery. She never recovered the fatigue of a visit to the Pope. It was all made as easy as possible for her, on account of her great age, and the Duke of Norfolk was allowed to bring her in separately. “Adieu! we shall meet again in heaven,” said Leo XIII., on taking leave of her: a fortnight after she was dead.

[299] I have not been able to do this, as there is a prohibition in England against wearing foreign orders, dating from Elizabeth, who said, “My dogs shall wear nothing but my own collars.”

[300] I little thought at the time that Frank Crawford would turn out a distinguished and popular novelist: it was at Bombay that he met the original of “Mr. Isaacs.”

[301] The Misses Monk, daughters of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.

[302] Miss Clarke.

[303] From “South-Eastern France.”

[304] Of very humble origin himself, to court great personages had been the ruling passion of his life, and it had been a subject of extravagant pride to him that he had occasionally entertained this good-natured Princess at dinner at Pau.

[305] From “Walks in London.”

[306] I often saw Mademoiselle Bernhardt act afterwards, and was far less impressed by her, feeling the truth of the expression “Une tragédienne du Boulevard.”

[307] With whom afterwards I became great friends.

[308] The story of Count Piper is curious and highly honourable to him. He discovered that the late King Carl XV. was going to make a most unworthy and disgraceful marriage, and he wrote to him most strongly upon the subject. The king never forgave him, and made it impossible for him to stay in Sweden, but the cause of his disgrace was unknown, till the present king, Oscar, found the letter among his brother’s papers after his death. Count Piper was at once recalled, and given first-rate diplomatic posts.

[309] From “Walks in London.”

[310] From “Walks in London.”

[311] Daughter of John Braham, the singer. She married (1) John James Waldegrave, Esq.; (2) George-Edward, 7th Earl Waldegrave; (3) George Granville Harcourt, Esq., of Nuneham; (4) Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford. When she was a child a gipsy foretold that she would marry first to please her parents, secondly for rank, thirdly for wealth, and fourthly to please herself.

[312] Eldest son of the Earl of Tankerville. See vol. iii.

[313] Lady Waterford, Lady Jane Ellice, and Lady Marian Alford.

[314] See vol. i.

[315] Joaquin Miller.

[316] See vol. i.

[317] Sir John Shaw Lefevre died at Margate.

[318] My cousin, Lady Elizabeth Adeane, née Yorke, had married Michael Biddulph, Esq., of Ledbury.

[319] See vol. iii.

[320] Constance-Gertrude, youngest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland.

[321] Maria, youngest daughter of Hon. Charles Tollemache, second wife (1833) of Charles Bruce, 2nd Earl of Ailesbury.

[322] Ada Maria Katherine, daughter of Hon. Frederick Tollemache, married (1868) Charles Hanbury Tracy, Baron Sudeley.

[323] Ham House has been greatly, perhaps too much restored since this, by the 8th Earl of Dysart.

[324] Feb. 17, 1671-2.

[325] Afterwards Dean of Winchester.

[326] Two thousand pounds and its interests for many years have (1900) never been repaid.

[327] Archbishop Trench.

[328] From “Southern Italy.”

[329] From “Southern Italy.”

[330] From “Southern Italy.”

[331] From “Southern Italy.”

[332] From “Southern Italy.”

[333] From “Southern Italy.”

[334] From “Southern Italy.”

[335] From “Southern Italy.”

[336] From “Southern Italy.”

[337] From “Southern Italy.”

[338] This story was told to me by Susan, Lady Sherborne, who heard it from Lord Clanwilliam.

[339] From “Southern Italy.”

[340] From “Southern Italy.”

[341] From “Southern Italy.”

[342] From “Southern Italy.”

[343] Eleanor Paul, who had lived with my sister, and who afterwards lived with her brother, George Paul.

[344] Frank Miles died July 1891.

[345] Marquis de Sade.

[346] Afterwards Lady Rumbold.

[347] Rev. Joseph Wolff, missionary to Palestine, died 1862.

[348] Doña Emilia de Guyangos. See vol. iv.

[349] Mrs. Thellusson died January 23, 1881, leaving a most loving memory behind. Swinburne wrote a pretty poem on her death.

[350] Afterwards married to Robert-George, Lord Windsor.

[351] See vol. ii.

[352] Dr. Grey died, aged 77, January 1888.

[353] Isabella Henrietta Poyntz, 8th Countess of Cork.

[354]

“No wonder, Mary, that thy story
Touches all hearts—for there we see
The soul’s corruption, and its glory,
Its death and life combin’d in thee.
. . . . . . . .
No wonder, Mary, that thy face,
In all its touching light of tears,
Should meet us in each holy place,
When man before his God appears,
Hopeless—were he not taught to see
All hope in Him who pardoned thee.”

[355] Yet, M. Vivier told Madame du Quaire that, when he first went to see Mrs. Grote, he found her sitting high aloft in a tree, dressed in a coachman’s brown greatcoat with capes, playing on the violoncello.

[356] Mr. Grote was ever imperturbably placid. When Jenny Lind was asked what she thought of Mr. Grote, she said he was “like a fine old bust in a corner which one longed to dust.” Mrs. Grote dusted him.

[357] This was my last sight of Lady Ruthven, who died April 5, 1885, aged 96.

[358] “Pensées Philosophiques,” 1747.

[359] Since republished in “Biographical Sketches.”

[360] The Stanleys’ dear old nurse.

[361] From “Biographical Sketches.”

[362] Lord Romilly perished in his burning house in Egerton Gardens, London, in May 1891, having never recovered the death of his most sweet wife several years before.

[363] Hon. W. Owen Stanley, brother of the 2nd Lord Stanley of Alderley, and of my aunt Mrs. Marcus Hare.

[364] Mary Louisa, daughter of Henry, 5th Duke of Grafton.

[365] Edward Gordon Douglas Pennant, Baron Penrhyn, who had succeeded to Penrhyn Castle in right of his first wife, Miss Dawkins Pennant.

[366] Her grandmother, Lady Ravensworth, was my grandmother’s only sister.

[367] From “Southern Italy.”

[368] From “Southern Italy.”

[369] From “Southern Italy.”

[370] Olympia, Countess von Usedom, eldest daughter of Sir John Malcolm. See vols. i. and iii.

[371] This Patriarch died of the influenza in 1892.

[372] From “Venice.”

[373] Dr. Walter Smith on Robertson of Irvine.

[374] Philip-Henry, 4th Earl Stanhope, died 1855.

[375] Dr. Buckland afterwards told Lady Lyndhurst that there was one thing even worse than a mole, and that was a blue-bottle fly.

[376] From “Walks in London.”

[377] From “Holland.”

[378] From “Holland.”

[379] The results of this tour appeared in the first part of my little volume, “Sketches in Holland and Scandinavia.”

[380] Second daughter of the 1st Duke of Sutherland, born 1797; she wrote to me several times after this, and showed me great kindness, but we never met again. She died November 11, 1891.

[381] Lowell.

[382] Gray’s “Enigmas of Life.”

[383] John Gidman, her most unworthy husband, the cloud and scourge and sorrow of her life. He had (fortunately for me) kept away during her illness, and did not wish to have anything to do with her funeral, or even to attend it. Immediately after, he removed all her possessions to Cheshire, and soon married again, dying six years after.

[384] Madame de Staël.

[385] Princess Elizabeth of Wied; translated by Sir Edwin Arnold.

[386] Thomasine Jocelyn, widow of the 4th Earl of Donoughmore.

[387] From “Studies in Russia.”

[388] From “Studies in Russia.”

[389] From “Studies in Russia.”

[390] From “Studies in Russia.”

[391] From “Studies in Russia.”

[392] From “Studies in Russia.”

[393] From “Studies in Russia.”

[394] I published some articles on Mrs. Duncan Stewart and her remarkable life in Good Words for 1892. They have been republished in “Biographical Sketches.”

[395] From “North-Eastern France.”

[396] From “North-Eastern France.”

[397] From “North-Eastern France.”

[398] The third boy, Henry Wood, died in London, June 6, 1886. The second son, Francis, died at Eton, March 17, 1889. The beloved eldest son, Charlie, died at Hickledon, September 1890.

[399] My second-cousin, Lady Elizabeth Williamson, daughter of the 1st Earl of Ravensworth.

[400] Lady Elizabeth Lindsay, widow of Philip, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke[.] Her eldest daughter, Lady Mexborough, was the mother of Lady Sarah Savile, who married Hon. Sir James Lindsay.

[401] Frances-Anne, daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Vane Tempest, who (1819) became the second wife of the 3rd Marquis of Londonderry.

[402] From “Walks in London.”

[403] From “South-Western France.”

[404] From “South-Western France.”

[405] From “South-Western France.”

[406] From “South-Western France.”

[407] From “South-Western France.”

[408] From “South-Western France.”

[409] From “South-Western France.”

[410] William Schomberg, 8th Marquis of Lothian, died 1870, aged 38.

[411] From “Sussex.”

[412] Very soon after I was at Ludlow, gentle Lady Mary Clive lost all her powers by a paralytic seizure, and she died in the summer of 1889

[413] William Reginald Courtenay, 12th Earl of Devon.

[414] Clough.

[415] W. H. Smith, 1844.

[416] Dante, Purg. III.

[417] “Le Lys dans la Vallée.”

[418] Ben Jonson.

[419] Monckton Milnes.

[420] From “Sussex.”

[421] This was my last visit to the kind and excellent Lotteringo della Stufa, who died at Castagnolo, Feb. 26, 1889, after a long and painful illness.

[422] From “Days near Rome.”

[423] From “Days near Rome.”

[424] From “Days near Rome.”

[425] From “Central Italy.”

[426] From “Central Italy.”

[427] From “South-Eastern France.”

[428] From “North-Eastern France.”

[429] Lady Gage died a few months after, and left Hengrave to Lord Kenmare, who sold it.

[430] Ockwells was afterwards bought by my friend Stephen Leech, who restored it thoroughly and then sold it again.

[431] Frances Mary, daughter of Christopher Blackett of Wylam, widow of the Vicomte du Quaire.

[432] Emma, sister of Sir Francis Seymour.

[433] Margaret, daughter of T. Steuart Gladstone, Esq., of Capenoch.

[434] Anne, daughter of the Earl of Wemyss and March, wife of the 4th Earl of Warwick.

[435] Edward Heneage Dering was the author of several books. His last, a novel—“The Ban of Maplethorpe”—was only completed the day before his sudden death in November 1892. His grandmother, Lady Maria Harrington Price, and my grandmother. Lady Paul, were first cousins.

[436] From “South-Eastern France.”

[437] From “South-Eastern France.”

[438] From “South-Eastern France.”

[439] From “South-Eastern France.”

[440] From “South-Eastern France.”

[441] From “South-Eastern France.”

[442] From “South-Eastern France.”

[443] From “South-Eastern France.”

[444] From “South-Eastern France.”

[445] From “South-Eastern France.”

[446] From “South-Eastern France.”

[447] From “South-Eastern France.”

[448] From “Sussex.”

[449] He had been sub-editor of the Times.

[450] From “Walks in London.”

[451] Prince Abu’n Nasr Mir Hissanum, Sultanah of Persia; Devawongse Varspraker of Siam; and Komatsu of Japan.

[452] Princess “Liliuokalani.” Queen Liliuokalani was deposed January 1893, after a reign of only two years.

[453] Bertram, 4th Earl of Ashburnham.

[454] Fourth daughter of the 3rd Marquis of Exeter, afterwards Lady Barnard.

[455] Lady Alma Graham, youngest daughter of the 4th Duke of Montrose.

[456] I never saw Mrs. Procter again; she died March 5, 1888. She liked to see people to the last. Every Sunday and Tuesday she admitted all who came to her as long as she could; then she saw a portion: up to the last few weeks she saw one or two. As Landor says, “She warmed both hands before the fire of life, and when it sank she was ready to depart.”

One day a young man remonstrated with Mrs. Procter for not going to see an exhibition of Sir Joshuas which was open at that time. “I have seen them all,” she said. “Why, Mrs. Procter, there has never been such an exhibition before.”—“I beg your pardon; there has been.”—“Why, when?”—“In 1808, and—where were you then?”

Mrs. Procter used to tell how she had been at the jubilee of George III., and would add that if she could see the jubilee of Queen Victoria she would say her “Nunc Dimittis;” and she did see it, and the Queen expressed a wish that Mrs. Procter, who was invited to her garden-party, should be especially presented to her.

Mrs. Procter—Anne Benson Procter—was born Sept. 11, 1799, being the daughter of Mr. Skepper, a small Yorkshire squire. Her mother, a Benson, who was aunt of the Archbishop of Canterbury of that name, married, as her second husband, Basil Montagu, Q.C. In 1823, Miss Skepper married Bryan Waller Procter, known as Barry Cornwall, described by Patmore as a “simple, sincere, shy, and delicate soul,” well known to his contemporaries by his songs set to music by popular composers. He died in 1874.

[457] Née Janet Duff Gordon.

[458] Second daughter of the 1st Earl of Kilmorey, aged 95.

[459] Henry Cowper, than whom no one was a more universal favourite, or more deservedly so, died a few months after this.

[460] Afterwards Lady Swansea.

[461] Third son of the 4th Earl of Aberdeen, married Ellen, 2nd daughter of the 19th Earl of Morton.

[462] Lady Gertrude Talbot, daughter of the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury.

[463] Esquire being written as well as Reverend, is supposed to have been intended to indicate the son of a baronet.

[464] In 1890 Mr. Pigott died, and the new Rector destroyed the character of Bemerton by adding largely to the rectory in red brick.

[465] The Earl of Caledon’s place in Hertfordshire.

[466] The 16th Earl, father of the Princesses Doria and Borghese.

[467] Browning.

[468] From “North-Western France.”

[469] Sir John Saville’s.

[470] Harry George Powlett, 4th Duke of Cleveland, who died August 21, 1891.

[471] Afterwards Duchess of Portland.

[472] Louisa, daughter of Henry Drummond, Esq., died 1890.

[473] Algernon-George, 6th Duke of Northumberland.

[474] How well I remember, when somebody remonstrated with Lady Marian for “burning the candle at both ends,” the quickness with which she answered—“Why, I thought that was the very way to make two ends meet.”

[475] Her father, Benjamin Bathurst (third son of Henry Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich), travelling as envoy from the British Government to the Emperor Francis, was about to enter his carriage at the door of the Swan Inn at Perleberg, between Berlin and Hamburg, when he disappeared and was never heard of again. Her brother was killed by a fall from his horse in a race at Rome. Her sister, Emmeline, who married (1830) Lord Castle Stuart, and afterwards (1867) Signor Pistocchi, I have often seen at Rome.

[476] From “South-Eastern France.”

[477] From “South-Western France.”

[478] From “South-Eastern France.”

[479] From “South-Western France.”

[480] Mr. Challoner Chute, of the Vyne, died, deeply regretted, May 30, 1892.

[481] The picture belongs to Mr. Morison.

[482] From “South-Eastern France.”

[483] From “Venice.”

[484] A few months after this happy visit to my dear friend Sir Howard Elphinstone came the terrible news of his sudden death at sea.

[485] Georgiana, third daughter of Charles, 4th Duke of Richmond.

[486] The four seraphim are recognised by the Moslems as Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Israel. Before the birth of the Prophet they were supposed to speak, and to give warning of coming catastrophes. Thus they have been permitted to survive the other ancient mosaics of St. Sophia.

[487] Marion Crawford’s novel.

[488] Joseph Maier, the eminent wood-sculptor.

[489] “Die Früchte der Passionbetrachtung.”

[490] “I know no guilt like that of incontinent speech. How long Christ was silent before He spoke, and how little He then said.”—Carlyle, in Reid’s Life of Lord Houghton.

[491] A passage in Richard Kurd’s Sermons (vol. ii.), which I had read long ago, would come back to me during this terrible hour. “In this awfully stupendous manner, at which Reason stands aghast, and Faith herself is half-confounded, was the grace of God to man at length manifested.”

[492] John Inglesant.

[493] Paul Verlaine.

[494] The birth of John, Henry, and Thomas Palmer is perhaps the only well-authenticated instance of a fortnight intervening between the eldest and the youngest child produced at a birth. It is described by Fuller. Their mother was Alice, daughter of John Clement. Sir Henry lost his life in the defence of Guisnes, of which he was governor. Sir Thomas was beheaded for the part which he took for Lady Jane Grey.

[495] Née Magniac.

[496] Austin Dobson, “Angiola in Heaven.”

[497] From “Biographical Sketches.”

[498] From “Northern Italy.”

[499] Onions and lettuces. The lower classes in Rome call all the smaller vegetables fruit.

[500] “Yes, lady; it is enough for me to think of that shoemaker who made me pay seven francs instead of five, and I cry directly.”

[501] A mineral fountain near Rome.

[502] William Wetmore Story died—deeply loved by children, friends, indeed by all who came within his genial and invigorating influence—at Vallombrosa, Oct. 7, 1895, aged 77. His excellent wife had passed away before him.

[503] From “Days near Rome.”

[504] Planted by S. Dominic, and supposed to flourish or fail with the fortunes of the Dominican Order.

[505] From “Days near Rome.”

[506] From “Venice.”

[507] Lady Emily Pierrepont, daughter of Earl Manvers, widow of Frederick Lygon, 6th Earl Beauchamp.

[508] Horatio William Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford.

[509] I have since heard that this was Louise de Rohan Chabot, whom his father forbade Lord Orford to marry, because she was a Roman Catholic. She was the love of his life, which was wrecked, and he became a Roman Catholic himself—such is Nemesis!

[510] This was the man who one day went up to the great, the beloved Bishop Brooks, the most popular man in America since Washington, and said, “And do you really believe all that you say?” “I wanted to knock him down, the little moth-eaten angel,” said the Bishop in recounting it afterwards.

[511] At Lincoln he had “a fair tomb of marble,” with the punning legend, “Longa terra mansura ejus, Dominus dedit.” The reference is to the Vulgate—Job xi. 9. At Eton he had an epitaph on brass.

[512] I never saw the beloved Lord Arthur Hervey again: he died June 1894.

[513] From “Sussex.”

[514] From “Sussex.”

[515] Lord John George Beresford.

[516] G. V. Watts, R.A.

[517] Henry Fuseli or Fuessli, an Anglo-Swiss.

[518] The famous J. M. W. Turner.

[519] The Marquises of Sligo are Earls of Altamont.

[520] From “The Gurneys of Earlham.”

[521] Carlyle.

[522] Chateaubriand.

[523] From “North-Western France.”

[524] From “North-Western France.”

[525] From “North-Western France.”

[526] From “North-Western France.”

[527] From “Biographical Sketches.”

[528] Alas! this was actually the case a very few months afterwards. The dear Canon Venables died of influenza on the 5th of March 1895, and his gentle loving wife only survived him one day.

[529] She was daughter of an Earl of Thanet.

[530] Shakspeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

[531] “Whose voice seemed faint through long disuse of speech.”

[532] Of “Diana Tempest,” &c.

[533] In “The High Tide in Lincolnshire.”

[534] Philip Henry, 4th Earl.

[535] Jerome K. Jerome.

[536] Memoires de “Madame.”

[537] “John Inglesant.”

[538] Henri Frederic Amiel.

[539] Louisa May, daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott.

[540] In three years the sale amounted to 87,000 copies.

[541] Daughter of Rev. Edward Payson, afterwards Mrs. Hopkins.

[542] Thomas Hardy, the novelist, resides at Max Gale, near Dorchester, amid the scenery of his Wessex novels and stories.

[543] Mrs. Beecher Stowe in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

[544] The others were Lady Wellesley, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. M’Tavish.

[545] Bought out of a cart in Paris, died 1753.

[546] The second saying, ‘I have been here three months, and have seen a little;’—the third, ‘I have been here three years, and am only beginning to understand it.’

[547] Alfred Tennyson in 1892.

[548] George Eliot’s Letters.

[549] This very popular and promising son of Lord Carlisle was killed at the battle of Omdurman, September 2, 1898.

[550] Wordsworth.

[551] Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude.’

[552] “Arridet placidum radiis crispantibus aequor.”—Rutilius.

[553] Lady Winchelsea’s “Reverie.”

[554] Eccl. vii. 29.

[555] De Musset.

[556] Author of “A Lilac Sun-Bonnet,” &c.

[557] Author of “A Window in Thrums,” which brought him £4000.

[558] Madame de Staël.

[559] Afterwards bought by his descendant for £8000.

[560] Killed, alas! in the South African War of 1900.

[561] Died 1839.

[562] The American edition, omitting nothing and doing full justice to the woodcuts, is in two rather thin volumes.

[563] Washington Irving’s Letters.

[564] Anthony Hope in “Mr. Witt’s Widow.”

[565] Née De Bunsen.

[566] Said by Wasisewski of Catherine II. of Russia.

[567] Florence Montgomery in “Colonel Norton.”

[568] “Colonel Norton.”

[569] See Vol. i.

[570] Elisée Reclus.

[571] Carlyle.

[572] Rev. Joseph Parker.

[573] Burns.

[574] John Bright.

[575] Purg. v. 13-15.

[576] Browning.

[577] Of 60 Grosvenor Street.

[578] Tennyson.

[579] Pierre Loti.

[580] Frances, daughter of Pierce Butler of Philadelphia by Fanny Kemble, his wife, married to the Hon. James Wentworth Leigh, Dean of Hereford.

[581] Politian.

[582] Henry Taylor, “The Eve of the Conquest.”

[583] Catherine Stanley—Mrs. C. Vaughan.

[584] S. Simon.

[585] Trans. by Lowell.

[586] “Von dem Fesseln geistiger Berniertheit.”—Goethe.

[587] Gabrielle d’Annunzio.

[588] Tennyson.

[589] Margaret L. Woods.

[590] “Nich. Brome slew ye minister of Baddesley church, findynge him in his pier (parlour) chockinge his wife under ye chinne, and to expiate these bloody offences and crimes, he built ye steeple and raysed ye church body 10 foote higher, as is seene at this day in ye churche, and boughte 3 belles for ye same churche. In his epitaph in ye churche, ye building of ye churche and steeple was expressed; he died ye 29 daye of August, ano 1517. I have seen ye king’s pdon for itt, and ye Pope’s pdon, and the penance there enjoined him.”—MS. of Henry Ferrers, quoted by Dugdale. (Nich. Brome really died October 1517.)

[591] “Quiet Hours.”

[592] Johnson on Levett.

[593] Shakspeare, ‘King Lear.’

[594] See vol. i. p. 186.

[595] Lowell.

[596] Whittier.

[597] S. T. Coleridge, Letter to Thomas Poole.

[598] Old Play.

[599] George Eliot.

[600] J. Greenleaf Whittier, Letters, 1867.

[601] “Roderick.”

[602] Blake.

[603] Henri Frédéric Amiel.

[604] From the Introduction to the Bùstàn of Shaikh Mushlihu-d-dín Sa’di Shírází. Translated by Sir E. Strachey.

[605] E. Spenser.

AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.From a photograph by Hill and Sounders. (Photogravure)	Frontispiece
PAGE
HIGHCLIFFE, THE KING’S ORIEL	9
FRANCIS GEORGE HARE.(Photogravure)	To Face 20
THE CHURCHYARD AT HURSTMONCEAUX	15
GIBRALTAR FROM ALGECIRAS.(Full-page woodcut)	To face 34
TOLEDO. (Full-page woodcut)	To face 38
SEGOVIA. (Full-page woodcut)	To face 42
FOUNTAIN OF S. CLOUD	45
FROM THE LIBRARY WINDOW, FORD	52
HATFIELD	75
FIDENAE	86
VIEW FROM THE TEMPIETTO, ROME	91
SUBIACO.(Full-page woodcut)	To face 96
ISOLA FARNESE	96
PONTE DELL’ ISOLA, VEII	97
CASTEL FUSANO	100
CYCLOPEAN GATE OF ALATRI	104
THE INN AT FERENTINO	105
PAPAL PALACE, ANAGNI	106
TEMPLES OF CORI	107
NINFA	108
S. ORESTE, FROM SORACTE	109
CONVENT OF S. SILVESTRO, SUMMIT OF SORACTE	111
SUTRI	112
CAPRAROLA	113
PAPAL PALACE, VITERBO	114
FROM THE WALLS OF ORVIETO	115
PORCH OF CREMONA	120
PIAZZA MAGGIORE, BERGAMO	121
THE HOSPICE, HOLMHURST	130
LANGLEY FORD, IN THE CHEVIOTS	138
RABY CASTLE	146
LAMPEDUSA FROM TAGGIA	167
STAIRCASE, PALAZZO DELL’ UNIVERSITA, GENOA	168
CLOISTER OF S. MATTEO, GENOA	169
COLONNA CASTLE, PALESTRINA	172
GENAZZANO	173
SUBIACO	174
SACRO SPECO, SUBIACO	175
S. MARIA DI COLLEMAGGIO, AQUILA	176
SOLMONA	177
HERMITAGE OF PIETRO MURRONE	178
CASTLE OF AVEZZANO	179
GATE OF ARPINUM	180
TRIUMPHAL ARCH, AQUINO	181
PORTO S. LORENZO, AQUINO	182
FARFA	190
GATE OF CASAMARI	191
LA BADIA DI SETTIMO	195
AT MILAN	197
PARAY LE MONIAL	198
THE GARDEN TERRACE, HIGHCLIFFE	210
THE HAVEN HOUSE	211
THE LIBRARY, HIGHCLIFFE	214
THE FOUNTAIN, HIGHCLIFFE	216
GATEWAY, LAMBETH PALACE	220
THE BLOODY GATE, TOWER OF LONDON	221
COMPIÈGNE	225
HOLLAND HOUSE	227
HOLMHURST, THE ROCK WALK	229
HOLLAND HOUSE (GENERAL VIEW)	231
HOLLAND HOUSE, THE LILY GARDEN	234
COBHAM HALL	238
LOUISA, MARCHIONESS OF WATERFORD. (Line engraving)	To face 256
THE SECRET STAIR, FORD	257
NORHAM-ON-TWEED	259
THE KING’S ROOM, FORD	263
THE PINETA, RAVENNA	302
IL SAGRO DI S. MICHELE	313
CANOSSA	314
URBINO	315
GUBBIO	316
LA VERNIA	319
CAMALDOLI	320
BOBBIO	321
FRANCES, BARONESS BUNSEN. (Line engraving)	To face 322
LOVERE, LAGO D’ISEO	322
LAMBETH, INNER COURT	324
DORCHESTER HOUSE	332
CROSBY HALL	337
THE GARDEN PORCH, HIGHCLIFFE	341
THE SUNDIAL WALK, HIGHCLIFFE	342
FOUNTAIN COURT, TEMPLE	361
IN FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S	364
CHAPEL AND GATEWAY, LINCOLN’S INN	372
STAPLE INN, HOLBORN	373
JOHN BUNYAN’S TOMB, BUNHILL FIELDS	377
TRAITOR’S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON	378
THE SAVOY CHURCHYARD	380
RAHERE’S TOMB, ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S, SMITHFIELD	381
THE SLEEPING SISTERS, ST. MARY OVERY	382
CHARLTON HALL	389
COURTYARD, FULHAM PALACE	399
HOLMHURST	405
LOUISA, MARCHIONESS OF WATERFORD. From a photograph by W.J. Reed. (Photogravure)	To face 406
CHURCHYARD OF ST. ANNE, SOHO	413
LONDON BRIDGE FROM BILLINGSGATE	485

MARY LEA GIDMAN. From a miniature by Barber. Photogravure	Frontispiece
PAGE
CHANTRY OF HENRY V., WESTMINSTER	12
LOWTHER LODGE	23
HOLMHURST, THE POULTRY-YARD	31
TITTENHANGER	51
SOPHIE, QUEEN OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY. Photogravure	To face 80
THE ROSENBORG PALACE, COPENHAGEN	100
ROESKILDE	101
CASTLE OF ELSINORE	102
THE JUNCTION OF LAKE MALAR AND THE BALTIC, STOCKHOLM	103
RIDDARHOLMEN	104
THE CHURCH OF OLD UPSALA	105
GRIPSHOLM	107
BOLKESJÖ	111
THE CHURCH OF HITTERDAL	112
THRONDTJEM FIORD	114
THRONDTJEM CATHEDRAL	115
S. OLAF’S WELL, THRONDTJEM	116
IN THE ROMSDAL	117
GUSTAF, CROWN PRINCE OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY. Photogravure	To face 138
CORNETO	142
CATHEDRAL OF CORNETO	143
PERUGIA	154
ASSISI	155
IN THE ENTRANCE-HALL, HOLMHURST	165
AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE. (Full-page woodcut)	To face 176
IN THE FIR-WOOD, HOLMHURST	189
LA SAINTE BAUME	192
THE JERUSALEM CHAMBER	197
THE LOLLARDS’ PRISON, LAMBETH	206
THE WAKEFIELD TOWER, TOWER OF LONDON	207
IN THE VERANDAH, HOLMHURST	235
VERANDAH STEPS, HOLMHURST	236
FROM S. GREGORIO, MESSINA	245
TAORMINA	246
ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE, SYRACUSE	248
FROM THE WALLS OF EPIPOLAE	249
ON THE RIVER CYANE	250
ACI CASTELLO	251
TEMPLE OF CONCORD, GIRGENTI	252
IN THE TEMPLE OF JUNO LUCINIA, GIRGENTI	254
IN THE TEMPLE OF HERCULES, GIRGENTI	255
TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX, GIRGENTI	256
PALERMO, FROM S. MARIA DI GESU	259
SOLUNTO	261
CLOISTERS, MONREALE	263
GATE OF MOLA	267
TARANTO	268
CASTEL DEL MONTE	269
TOMB OF BOHEMUND, CANOSA	270
MRS. DUNCAN STEWART. (Full-page woodcut)	To face 288
NORWICH FROM MOUSEHOLD	331
LAKE OF AVERNUS, NEAR NAPLES	345
CAPRI	347
SCILLA	349
FROM THE CAMPO DELLA CARITÀ, VENICE	351
REV. CANON HUGH PEARSON. Photogravure	To face 354
GATEWAY, KENSINGTON PALACE	361
SASSENPOORT, ZWOLLE	364
MILL NEAR AMSTERDAM	365
HURSTMONCEAUX CASTLE GATEWAY	379
ON THE TERRACE, HOLMHURST	388
IN THE KITCHEN, HOLMHURST	389
CATHEDRAL OF ST. ISAAC, ST. PETERSBURG	391
ST. SOPHIA OF NOVGOROD	393
KREMLIN, MOSCOW	394
THE NEW JERUSALEM	395
THE DNIEPER, KIEFF	396
THE HOLY CHAPEL OF KIEFF	397
CITADEL OF CRACOW	398
NOYON	409
SOISSONS	410
CHÂTEAU DE COUCY	411
SHRINE OF ST. ERASMUS, WESTMINSTER ABBEY	429
LE CROZANT	434
SOLIGNAC	435
ROCAMADOUR	436
CLOISTER OF CADOUIN	438
ARCADES OF MONTPAZIER	439
AT FONTEFROIDE	441
CONQUES	443
CROMER	450
GATEWAY OF BUCKHURST	456

CHARLOTTE LEYCESTER. (Photogravure)	Frontispiece
PAGE
THE DEANERY, BATTLE	5
L’ARICCIA	10
GALLERIA DI SOTTO, ALBANO	11
LAKE OF BOLSENA	12
S. DOMENICO, SIENA	13
MONTE OLIVETO	14
SENS	15
THE PARACLETE	16
THE PORCH, HOLMHURST	27
RIEZ	36
GRIGNAN	37
CLOISTER OF CAVAILLON	38
MONTMAJOUR	40
LES BAUX	41
LES S. MARIES DE LA CAMARGUE	42
LA SALETTE	43
DOMREMY, VILLAGE STREET	45
HOUSE OF JEANNE DARC	46
EMBRUN	47
CHÂTEAU DE VIZILLE	49
QUAYS OF GRENOBLE	51
SCOTNEY CASTLE	55
AT WESTMINSTER	64
THE GARDEN, HOLMHURST	98
THE MANOR WALK, HOLMHURST	110
ROSNY	113
ALNWICK CASTLE	137
HOLMHURST FROM THE SHRUBBERY	140
S. FLOUR, FROM THE SOUTH	147
CHÂTEAU DU ROI, S. EMILION	148
AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE, 1888. (Photogravure)	To face 150
S. NECTAIRE	151
GATE OF LA GUERANDE	153
PONT S. LOUIS, MENTONE	165
IN S. FRANCESCO NEL DESERTO	169
THE ROCKY VALLEY, HOLMHURST	171
FROM THE WALKS, HOLMHURST	174
ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT	176
CEMETERY OF PERA, CONSTANTINOPLE	195
THE BATHS, BROUSSA	213
OBER-AMMERGAU	218
TOMB OF LADY WATERFORD, FORD	251
THE OAK WALK, HOLMHURST	254
THE VENETIAN WELL, HOLMHURST	255
BISHOP’S BRIDGE, NORWICH	260
SASSO	265
AT BORDIGHERA	266
AT REBEKAH’S WELL, NEAR S. REMO	267
AT S. REMO	268
GLEN AT S. REMO	269
CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT	274
REMAINS OF TEMPLE OF JUPITER LATIARIS, MONTE CAVI	281
VENETIAN POZZO	292
BROADHURST	322
GROOMBRIDGE PLACE	323
AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE (Photogravure)	To face 336
EARLHAM HALL	338
MONT S. MICHEL	344
S. JEAN DU DOIGT	345
AT CARNAC	346
LES ROCHERS	347
QUEEN ANNE AT HOLMHURST	349
BELLA’S LOGHOUSE, ALDERLEY MERE	352
STOKESAY	382
PITCHFORD	383
IN THE WALKS, HOLMHURST	395
THE TERRACE DOOR, HOLMHURST	426
THE NAYLOR LANDING, HOLMHURST	430
THE ARSON STEPS, HOLMHURST	450
IN THE WALPOLE CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST	469
WARBLETON PRIORY, ON APPROACHING	471
WARBLETON PRIORY, SEEN FROM BEHIND	472
PORCH OF HOSPICE, HOLMHURST	477
THE AVE-VALE STEPS, HOLMHURST	481
IN THE CHURCHYARD, HURSTMONCEAUX	489
THE AVE-VALE GATE, HOLMHURST	492
IN THE UPPER CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST	503
THE PORCH, HOLMHURST	511

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of My Life, volumes 4-6

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

VOLUMES 4-6

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

PREFACE

CONTENTS PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. IV

XVI

IN MY SOLITARY LIFE

XVII

LITERARY WORK AT HOME AND ABROAD

XVIII

LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY

ERRATA

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. V

XIX

WHILST WRITING THE BUNSEN MEMOIRS

XX

ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS

XXI

A HALT IN LIFE

XXII

HOME SORROWS

XXIII

IN THE FURROWS OF LIFE

ERRATUM

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. VI

XXIV

BEYOND THE TOP OF THE HILL

XXV

IN PLEASURE AND PAIN

XXVI

AT HOME AND ABROAD

XXVII

SOCIAL REMINISCENCES

XXVIII

A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

XXIX

WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS

XXX

IN MANY PLACES

XXXI

FAREWELL

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PAGE
IN MY SOLITARY LIFE	1
LITERARY WORK AT HOME AND ABROAD	162
LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY	352

Page	60,	for	“Marocetti” read “Marochetti.”
“	136,	“	“Curramore” read “Curraghmore.”
“	232,	“	“Keats” read “Keate.”
“	435,	“	“vieillir être heureuse” read “vieillir pour être heureuse.” (corrected by the etext transcriber.)
“	478,	“	“Bedel and Bijou” read “Babil and Bijou.” (corrected by the etext transcriber.)

PAGE
WHILST WRITING THE BUNSEN MEMOIRS	1
ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS	75
A HALT IN LIFE	241
HOME SORROWS	326
IN THE FURROWS OF LIFE	382

PAGE
BEYOND THE TOP OF THE HILL	1
IN PLEASURE AND PAIN	118
AT HOME AND ABROAD	192
SOCIAL REMINISCENCES	252
A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR	295
WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS	337
IN MANY PLACES	393
FAREWELL	526
INDEX: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z	539

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of My Life, volumes 4-6

THE STORY OF MY LIFE VOLUMES 4-6

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

PREFACE

CONTENTS PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOL. IV

XVI IN MY SOLITARY LIFE

XVII LITERARY WORK AT HOME AND ABROAD

XVIII LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY

ERRATA

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOL. V

XIX WHILST WRITING THE BUNSEN MEMOIRS

XX ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS

XXI A HALT IN LIFE

XXII HOME SORROWS

XXIII IN THE FURROWS OF LIFE

ERRATUM

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOL. VI

XXIV BEYOND THE TOP OF THE HILL

XXV IN PLEASURE AND PAIN

XXVI AT HOME AND ABROAD

XXVII SOCIAL REMINISCENCES

XXVIII A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

XXIX WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS

XXX IN MANY PLACES

XXXI FAREWELL

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

VOLUMES 4-6

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. IV

XVI

IN MY SOLITARY LIFE

XVII

LITERARY WORK AT HOME AND ABROAD

XVIII

LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. V

XIX

WHILST WRITING THE BUNSEN MEMOIRS

XX

ROYAL DUTIES AND INTERESTS

XXI

A HALT IN LIFE

XXII

HOME SORROWS

XXIII

IN THE FURROWS OF LIFE

THE STORY OF
MY LIFE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. VI

XXIV

BEYOND THE TOP OF THE HILL

XXV

IN PLEASURE AND PAIN

XXVI

AT HOME AND ABROAD

XXVII

SOCIAL REMINISCENCES

XXVIII

A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

XXIX

WRITING THE GURNEY MEMOIRS

XXX

IN MANY PLACES

XXXI

FAREWELL