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.

To Viscount Halifax.

“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.

enlarge-image
IN THE WALKS, HOLMHURST.
IN THE WALKS, HOLMHURST.

“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.’

“These are some snatches from the Holmhurst tea-table.”

To Herbert Vaughan.

“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.”

To Viscount Halifax.

“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.”

To W. H. Milligan and Journal.

“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.”

To George Cockerton.

“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.”

To Viscount Halifax.

“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.”

To Miss Garden at Rome.

“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!”

To W. H. Milligan.

“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.”

To W. H. Milligan.

“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 coeur.’ 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.

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THE TERRACE DOOR, HOLMHURST.
THE TERRACE DOOR, HOLMHURST.

“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.’”

To Francis Cookson.

“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.

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THE NAYLOR LANDING, HOLMHURST.
THE NAYLOR LANDING, HOLMHURST.

“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—

Journal and Letters.

“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.”

To Miss Garden at Rome.

“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.’”

To Viscount Halifax.

“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!

enlarge-image
THE ARSON STEPS, HOLMHURST.
THE ARSON STEPS, HOLMHURST.

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:—

And so—

Journal.

“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.”

To Mrs. C. Vaughan.

“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.”

To Hugh Bryan and Journal.

“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.

To the Countess of Darnley.

“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.”

To Mrs. C Vaughan.

“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.”

To Francis Cookson.

“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.

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IN THE WALPOLE CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST.
IN THE WALPOLE CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST.

“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—

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WARBLETON PRIORY, ON APPROACHING.
WARBLETON PRIORY, ON APPROACHING.

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WARBLETON PRIORY, SEEN FROM BEHIND.
WARBLETON PRIORY, SEEN FROM BEHIND.

“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.”

Journal and Letter to W. H. Milligan.

“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.”

To Mrs. C. Vaughan.

“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.

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PORCH OF HOSPICE, HOLMHURST.
PORCH OF HOSPICE, HOLMHURST.

“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—

is a capital Feejee proverb.[585]

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THE AVE-VALE STEPS, HOLMHURST.
THE AVE-VALE STEPS, HOLMHURST.

“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?’”

To Miss Garden at Lucca, and Journal.

“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.’”

To Viscount Halifax.

“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—

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IN THE CHURCHYARD, HURSTMONCEAUX.
IN THE CHURCHYARD, HURSTMONCEAUX.

‘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.’”

To W. H. Milligan.

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THE AVE-VALE GATE, HOLMHURST.
THE AVE-VALE GATE, HOLMHURST.

“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.”

To Mrs. C. Vaughan.

“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.

“Over the chapel door is inscribed—

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.”

To W. H. Milligan, and Journal.

“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.’”

Journal.

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IN THE UPPER CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST.
IN THE UPPER CORRIDOR, HOLMHURST.

“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!”

Journal and Letters.

“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 moeurs,” 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.’”

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THE PORCH, HOLMHURST.
THE PORCH, HOLMHURST.

“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.’”

Journal.

“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.”

To Mrs. and Miss Agnes Thornycroft (after a happy visit to
them at Torquay).

“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.”