1907-1908
The opening of the Long Vacation of 1907 was pleasantly signalized for
us Benedictines by the gratifying successes in the Final Schools of our
little Hall, which secured two first classes (in "Greats" and History),
and a second class in Theology. The _Oxford Magazine_ was kind enough
to point out that this was a remarkable achievement for a Hall
numbering nine undergraduates, and compared favourably with the
percentage of honours at any college in the university. I was given to
understand that my young theologian would also have secured his "first"
had he not objected to the matter and form of some of the questions set
him, and declined to answer them!
This cheerful news sent me in good spirits up to Dumfries for my usual
week's examinations at the Benedictine convent school there. I found
almost eighty nuns in residence, including the exiled community of the
mother house of Arras, whom (the Prioress was eighty-five, and there
were several old ladies on crutches) the great French Republic had
driven out of house and home as a "danger to the State!" I had several
interesting talks with "Madame la Prieure," who had been professed in
the reign of Louis Philippe, and who bore her cruel {95} uprootal with
true French (and Christian) resignation and cheerfulness. I do not
know if the tradition about St. Swithun holds good in Scotland; but
these days succeeding his festival (July 15) were certainly almost
continuously wet. One of the French nuns said that in her country
(Picardy) St. Medard was credited with a similar influence, and quoted
the lines--
Quan ploon per San Medar,
Ploon quarante jhiours pus tard;
and I recalled the Italian distich about St. Bibiana (December 2)--
Se piove il giorno di Santa Bibiana,
Piovera per quaranta giorni ed una settimana.
I spent a few days at Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's Border
castle, when my work at Dumfries was finished, and found my host, as
usual, excellent company, and full of anecdotes, both French and
English. Speaking of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund at
Pontigny in which he had joined some years before, he said that an
English newspaper described an open-air benediction given by the
"Bishops of Estrade and Monte"; the reporters having doubtless been
informed that the bishops would _mount_ on the _platform_ to give the
blessing! He showed us a cutting from another English newspaper,
stating that MM. Navire, Chavire, and Bourrasque had been shipwrecked
and drowned at sea! Sir Hubert had a complete set of the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_ in his library; and I hunted up for his delectation a
passage in which M. Forgues, writing on English clerical life, _a
propos_ of George Eliot's first book, {96} gave an original etymology
for the word _tract_. "Il [Rev. Amos Barton] a sa _Track Society_, qui
va mettre en Fair toutes les bonnes femmes du pays, enregimentees pour
depister (track) les pauvres heres susceptibles de conversion." The
same writer rendered the epithet "Gallio-like" (applied by the minister
to the parishioners of Shepperton) by "pareils a des Francais!"
Yorkshire, after Northumberland, claimed me for two pleasant
visits--the first to the Herries' at Everingham, with its beautiful
chapel copied from the Maison Carree at Nimes, and its famous
deer-park, one of the oldest in England (so Lord Herries told me), and
a very different thing, as one of Disraeli's country squires in
_Lothair_ remarks, from a mere park with deer in it. The weather was
bright and hot; and it was a pretty sight to see the droves of
fallow-deer, bucks and does together, clustering for shade under the
great trees near the house. From Everingham I went on to Bramham,
where George Lane Fox was spending a happy summer in his old home. He
took me everywhere, through the lovely gardens laid out by Lenotre, and
(in a brougham drawn by an ancient hunter and driven by a stud-groom
not less ancient) all over the park, and up the noble beech avenue
called Bingley's Walk. My friend had lost his splendid inheritance for
conscience' sake; and it was pleasant to see him, in old age and
enfeebled health, passing happy days, through his nephew's hospitality
and kindness, at the well-loved home of his boyhood and youth.
I was glad to find myself settled for some golden weeks of August and
September at our abbey among {97} the Highland hills, where we were
this autumn favoured with almost continuous sunshine. Our many guests
came and went--some of them busy city men, enjoying to the full the
pure air, lovely surroundings, and quiet life in our guest-house, all
to the accompaniment of chiming bells and chanted psalms. Whether they
found our "brown Gregorians" as devotional as the sentimentalist of Mr.
Hichens's novel[1] I know not; but anyhow to me our monastic
plain-chant was restful and pleasant after the odd stuff in the way of
"church music" which had elsewhere assailed my ears. I confess that
after our more normal Oxford hours (though I hope we were not sluggards
at our Hall), I reconciled myself with difficulty to "the hour of our
uprising" in the monastery. The four o'clock matin-bell had always
been more or less of a penance to me (as I suppose it was to most of my
brethren), though I tried to fortify myself with Dr. Johnson's
argument--a purely academic one in the case of that lie-abed old
sage--that "it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many more
hours the _consciousness of being_"; but an American guest of ours, to
whom I cited this dictum, countered it by a forcibly-expressed opinion
"on the other side" by one of the most eminent living specialists in
insanity.[2]
{98}
One recalls delicious rambles with our brethren or our guests during
those sunlit autumn days: sometimes among the verdant Glengarry woods,
sometimes at our outlying "chapel-of-ease," some miles up the most
beautiful of the glens which run from Central Inverness-shire to the
sea. A veritable oasis this among the hills, with its green meadows,
waving pines, and graceful bridge spanning the rushing river; and all
framing the humble chapel, its eastern wall adorned with a fresco (from
the brush of one of our artist monks[3]) which the little flock--sadly
diminished of late years by emigration--greatly admired and venerated.
A week-end was sometimes spent pleasantly and not unprofitably at some
remote shooting-lodge, saying mass for Catholic tenants, and perhaps a
handful of faithful {99} Highlanders. One such visit I remember this
autumn at a lodge in Glencarron, a wild wind-swept place, with the
surrounding hilltops already snow-coated, which Lord Wimborne (for some
years Lovat's tenant at Beaufort) had recently acquired. Although in
the heart of the forest, the lodge was but two hundred yards from the
railway; there was no station, but the train would obligingly stop when
signalled by the wave of a napkin from the front door! A crofter's cow
strayed on the line one day of my stay, was, by bad luck, run over by
one of the infrequent trains, and (as a newspaper report once said of a
similar mischance) "cut literally into _calves_."[4] The night before
I left Glencarron, we were all wakened, and some of us not a little
perturbed, by two very perceptible shocks of earthquake--a phenomenon
not unusual in the district. We heard afterwards that at Glenelg, on
the west coast, the shocks had been more severe, and some damage had
been done; but, as a witty member of our party remarked, Glenelg might
have been turned inside out, or upside down, without suffering any
appreciable change.[5] On my way back to Fort Augustus I stayed a day
at Beaufort to wish _bon voyage_ to Lovat's brother-in-law and sister,
who were just off {100} to visit another married sister at our Embassy
in Japan, and (incidentally) to travel round the world. I met on the
steamer on my way home one of my Wauchope cousins, a spinster lady who
had gone some time before to live in Rome, and had asked me for letters
of introduction to "two or three Cardinals." Tired of Rome, she was
now making for the somewhat different _milieu_ of Rotherhithe, with
some work of the kind popularly called "slumming" in view.
I visited, on my way south, a married brother at his charming home in
Berwickshire, where there was much tennis, and pleasant expeditions by
motor to interesting spots on both sides of the Border. One lovely
autumn day we spent at Manderston, where our hostess had her brother,
my lord chancellor of Oxford University, staying with her. The great
man was very affable, and asked me to go and see him in Michaelmas
Term, when he would be in residence at the "Judge's Lodgings" in St.
Giles's. I joined a family gathering at Newhailes, a few days later,
for the pretty wedding of my niece, Christian Dalrymple--"a very
composed bride," remarked one of the reporters present, "as befitted a
lady who had acted as hostess to the leading lights of the Conservative
party ever since she left the schoolroom."[6] Her uncle, the Bishop of
Bath and Wells, tied the knot (of course "impressively"), and I was
glad to find myself at Newhailes in his always pleasant {101} company.
Driving with him to pay a call or two in the neighbourhood, I amused
him with an _a propos_ story of the bishop who rode out on a long round
of leaving-calls, attended by his groom, who was sent into the house,
before starting, to get some cards. When they reached the last house,
the order came, "Leave two cards here, James"; and the unexpected reply
followed: "I can't, my lord; there's only the ace of spades left!"
After a few days at Niddrie Marischal, the fascinating old seat of the
Wauchopes near Edinburgh (General "Andie" Wauchope's widow had lived
there since her husband's gallant death at Magersfontein), I went to
Cumbrae to visit Lady Bute at the Garrison, her home on that quaint
island in the Firth of Clyde. The house, too, was quaint though
comfortable, built in semi-ecclesiastical Gothic, with a sunk garden in
front, and a charming moonlight view from my window of the broad Firth,
with the twinkling lights of the tiny town in the foreground. Millport
was a favourite "doon-the-water" resort for Glasgow folk on holiday;
and I had quite a congregation at my Sunday mass in the little chapel
in the grounds, as well as a considerable catechism-class afterwards.
Winifred Lady Howard of Glossop, my lady's stepmother, was paying her a
visit, and as an inveterate globe-trotter (if the word may be
respectfully applied to an elderly peeress) kept us entertained by
stories of men and things in many lands. I spent one afternoon at the
college and "cathedral" of the Isles, the quaint group of buildings,
redolent of Butterfield and looking like an Oxford college and chapel
through the wrong end of a telescope, which the sixth Earl of Glasgow
(my {102} brother-in-law's predecessor) had more or less ruined himself
in erecting. Provost Ball, whom I found at tea with his sisters,
received me kindly, and showed me the whole establishment, which looked
rather derelict and neglected (I fancy there was very little money to
keep it going); and the college had been closed for some years. Some
of us crossed the Firth next day in an absurd little cockle of a
motor-boat (unsuitable, I thought, for those sometimes stormy seas),
and I was glad to find myself on _terra firma_, in a comfortable White
steam-car--my first experience of that mode of propulsion--which
whirled us smoothly and swiftly to Glasgow, in time for me to take the
night train to London and Oxford.
In university circles I found a certain amount of uneasy trepidation
owing to the official presence of Lord Curzon. A resident Chancellor
was a phenomenon unprecedented for centuries, and one unprovided for in
the traditional university ritual, in which the first place was
naturally assigned to the Vice-chancellor. There was much talk as to
when, and in what direction, the new broom would begin to sweep, and
amusing stories (probably _ben trovati_) of dignified heads of houses
being called over the coals at meetings of the Hebdomadal Council.
Personally the Chancellor made himself very agreeable, entertaining
everybody who was anybody at his fine old mansion, once the "town
house" of the Dukes of Marlborough. It was all, perhaps, a little
Vice-regal for us simple Oxonians, who were not accustomed to write our
names in a big book when we made an afternoon call, or to be received
by a secretary or other underling instead of by our host when we went
out to luncheon or dinner. But it {103} was all rather novel and
interesting; and in any case the little ripples caused on the surface
of Oxford society by our Chancellor's sayings and doings soon subsided;
for, as far as I remember, his term of residence did not exceed a month
or so altogether. I was kept busy all this autumn term by the
considerable work I had undertaken (the contribution of nearly eighty
articles) for the American _Catholic Encyclopaedia_. One of the longest
was on Cambridge; and I felt on its completion that I knew much more
about the "sister university" than about my own! Most of my work was
done in the Bodleian Library; and it was a pleasant and welcome change
to find oneself installed in the new, well-lighted and comfortable
reading-room arranged in one of the long picture-galleries, instead of
(as heretofore) in an obscure and inconvenient corner of Duke
Humphrey's mediaeval chamber. The then Bodley's Librarian was a bit of
an oddity, and perhaps not an ideal holder of one of the most difficult
and exacting offices in the university; but he was always kindness
itself to me, and, whatever his preoccupations, was always ready to put
at my service his unrivalled knowledge of books and their writers. His
memory was stored with all kinds of whimsical rhymes: sometimes he
would stop me in the street, and--at imminent peril of being run over,
for he was extraordinarily short-sighted--would peer in my face through
his big spectacles, and say, "Did you ever hear of
----the learned Archdeacon of York,
Who _would_ eat his soup with a knife and a fork:
A feat which he managed so neatly and cleverly,
That they made him the Suffragan Bishop of Beverley!"
{104} Or it would be, perhaps, "Listen to this new version of an old
saw:
Teach not your parent's mother to extract
The embryo juices of an egg by suction:
The aged lady can the feat enact
Quite irrespective of your kind instruction."
And before I had time to smile at the quip I would be dragging my
friend off the roadway on to the pavement to escape the oncoming
tramcar, bicycle or hansom cab. Sometimes we walked together, usually
in quest of some relic of antiquity in the neighbourhood, in which he
would display the most lively interest, though I really believe it was
all but invisible to his bodily eyes. One such walk was to inspect the
old lepers' chapel of St. Bartholomew, in the fields near Cowley--a
lovely derelict fragment of the ages of faith, which the local Anglican
clergy had expressed their intention of "restoring to the ancient
worship." "_You_," said my friend the librarian, with his ironic
smile, "will doubtless regard this promise as what our friend Dean
Burgon would have called 'polished banter,'" the allusion being to a
phrase in a sermon preached by the future Dean of Chichester at St.
Mary's at the time when the spread of the so-called "aesthetic movement"
was causing some concern to sensible people. "These are days," he
cried, "when we hear men speak, not in polished banter, but in sober
earnest, of 'living up to their blue china!'" I heard him speak these
words myself; and recalling that inimitable tone and accent, can
imagine the impression made by a more memorable utterance from the same
pulpit, when the new doctrines of Darwin were in the air, and the
alleged affinity of man with monkey was {105} fluttering orthodox
dovecotes. "O ye men of science! O ye men of science! leave me my
ancestors in Paradise, and I will willingly leave you yours in the
Zoological Gardens!"
I had the pleasure in November of paying a short visit to the wise and
good Bishop of Newport, for a church-opening at Cardiff. A profit as
well as a pleasure, one may hope; for indeed no one could spend any
time in Dr. Hedley's company without instruction as well as
edification. We spoke of the late Lord Bute's remarkable philological
gifts; and I asked the Bishop if he had found his ignorance of Welsh
any practical hindrance to the work of his diocese. "No," was his
reply. "Fortunately for me (for I am no Mezzofanti) I find English a
good enough means of communication with my people, the majority of whom
are neither Welsh nor English, but Irish." I told him, much to his
amusement, of the advice once given to an Englishman appointed to a
Welsh (Anglican) see, as to the proper pronunciation of the Welsh
double _l_. "May it please your lordship to place your episcopal
tongue lightly against your right reverend teeth, and to hiss like a
goose!" A young Oxford friend of mine whom I met at Cardiff carried me
thence to Lichfield to stay a night at the Choristers' House of which
his father was master. It chanced to be "Guy Fawkes Day," and I
assisted at the fireworks and bonfires of the little singing-boys, who
(I was rather interested to find) did not associate their celebration
in the slightest degree with the old "No Popery" tradition. The merry
evening concluded with some delightful part-singing.
I recall a week-end at Arundel when term was over: a large and cheerful
party, and the usual {106} "parlour games" after dinner, including
dumb-crambo, in which I was almost the only spectator; for everybody
else was acting, the Duke being a polar bear rolled up in a white
hearthrug! My customary Christmas was spent at Beaufort, in a
much-diminished family circle. Lord Lovat was on his way home from
South Africa, one brother absent on a sporting tour in Abyssinia,
another gold-mining in Rhodesia; his second sister with her husband in
Japan, and two others still _en voyage_ round the world. Some
schoolboy nephews, however, and their young sisters, were a cheerful
element in our little party, and there was a great deal of golf, good,
bad, and indifferent, on the not exactly first-class course recently
laid out in the park.[7] I had to go south soon after New Year, to tie
the knot and preach the wedding sermon at a marriage in Spanish Place
Church.[8] A thoroughly Scottish function it was, with Gordon
Highlander sergeants lining the long nave, the bridegroom's kilted
brother-officers forming a triumphal arch with their claymores, and a
big gathering of friends from the north afterwards at the Duchess of
Roxburghe's pretty house in Grosvenor Street. I attended next evening
at our Westminster dining-club, and heard {107} Father Maturin read a
clever, if not quite convincing paper, on "The Broad and Narrow Mind,"
some of his paradoxes provoking a lively subsequent discussion which I
found very interesting. I had a stimulating neighbour in Baron Anatole
von Huegel.
The opening of the Lent Term of 1908 at Oxford was dreary enough, with
a succession of the dense white fogs which only the Thames valley
generates in perfection. It is not cheering to come down morning after
morning to find what looks like a huge bale of dirty cotton-wool piled
up against one's window-panes; and the news at this time was as
depressing as the weather. We heard early in February of the brutal
murder of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal, before the eyes of
wife and mother; and I was saddened in the same month by the death of
an exemplary member of our community at Fort Augustus, though that had
been long expected. I was myself on the sick-list, and recall little
of interest during these weeks, except a most excellent lecture--of
course on boy scouts--given by General Baden-Powell, which I only
wished could have been heard, not by dons, ladies, and undergraduates,
but by the cigarette-slobbering, street-corner-loafing lads who were, I
think, more in evidence at Oxford than anywhere else. Early in March I
was in London, for the wedding of my old pupil, Charles Vaughan of
Courtfield, to the pretty niece of the Duke of Newcastle. I got to
Westminster Cathedral an hour before the appointed time: the
chapter-mass was being celebrated, and waves of sonorous plain-song
floating about the great misty domes overhead. After the ceremony I
joined the wedding guests at the Ritz for a short time, and, amid the
_frou-frou_ {108} and _va-et-vient_ of all the smart people, managed to
impart to a few intimate friends the news that I was going into
hospital in a few days, with no very certain prospect of coming out
alive!
The next fortnight or so was of course taken up with inevitable
worries--giving up work for an indefinite period, resigning for a time
(it turned out to be for good) the mastership of my Hall, and finding a
_locum tenens_ letter-writing to a host of inquiring friends, and all
this when physically fit to do nothing. I spent the last days of
freedom at Arundel, receiving from the good people there every possible
kindness; and on March 18, under the patronage of the Archangel Gabriel
(saint of the day), betook myself to my nursing home in Mandeville
Street. Nurses (mine were most kind and devoted), surgeons and
anaesthetists soon got to work; and for a time at least (in the almost
classic words of Bret Harte) "the subsequent proceedings interested me
no more."
A critical operation, followed by a slow and difficult convalescence,
ranks, of course, among the deeper experiences of a man's life. "We
were all anxious," said an Oxford friend some weeks later, a good old
chemist whom I had known for years; "for we heard that you were passing
through very deep waters." The expression was an apt one; and I
suppose no one rises from such waters quite the same man as he was
before. This is not the place to dwell on such thoughts; but one
reflection which occurs to me is that in such a time as I am now
recalling one realizes, as perhaps one had never done before, how many
kind people there are in the world, and appreciates what true
friendship is. During {109} my long stay in hospital my nearest
relations chanced to be greatly scattered, some of them in very remote
parts of the world. This made me all the more grateful for the
extraordinary kindness and attention I received, not only from approved
friends, but from many others whom I had hardly ventured to count as
such. I remember a little later compiling a kind of _libro d'oro_,
with a list of the names of all who had been good to me in word or deed
during those weary weeks. Some of them I have hardly ever seen since:
many have passed beyond the sphere of one's gratitude here on earth;
but I still sometimes con my list, and thank the dead as well as the
living for what they did for me then.
I remember my first drive--round Regent's Park, on a perfect May day,
in the steam-car of which I have already spoken; and very tiring I
found it. After a lazy fortnight at St. John's Lodge, and daily
trundles in a Bath chair among the gay flower-beds of the park, I was
able to get down into the country; and after a sojourn with Lady
Encombe and her two jolly little boys near Rickmansworth (a wonderfully
rural spot, considering its nearness to London), I made my way to
Arundel, where it was pleasant to meet the Herries's and other kind
friends. The great excitement there was the hoped-for advent of a son
and heir, who made a punctual and welcome appearance before the end of
the month, and was received, of course, with public and private
jubilations in which I was happy to be able to participate. After this
I paid quite a long visit to my soldier brother at Kneller Court, the
pretty place near Fareham which he was occupying while commanding the
Artillery in that district. There were plenty of {110} pleasant
neighbours, who treated me to pleasant motor-drives through a charming
country little known to me; and the elm-shaded hall (I believe Sir
Godfrey Kneller had really lived there once), with its gay old garden
and excellent tennis-lawn, was a popular resort for young officers from
Portsmouth and elsewhere, who dropped in almost daily to luncheon, tea,
or dinner, and doubtless found the society of a kind hostess and her
two pretty daughters a welcome diversion from their naval and military
duties. One June day we spent in Portsmouth, lunching with Sir Arthur
and Lady Fanshawe at Admiralty House, a big, cool roomy mansion like a
French chateau, full of fine old portraits. We went out afterwards on
the flag-captain's launch to see the _Victory_, a visit full of
interest, though I was unequal to climbing the companions connecting
the five decks. A man whom I sat next at tea in the Admiral's garden
said he was connected with the Patent Office (I do not think he was
actually Comptroller-General, but he was something high up in that
rather mysterious department of the Civil Service), and told me some
entertaining yarns about early patents and monopolies.[9] One was
granted in 1618 to two men called Atkinson and Morgan, "to find out
things in monasteries!" Another man, about the same time, secured the
exclusive right of importing lobsters, which had hitherto cost a penny;
but the patentee bought them out at sea from Dutch fishermen, and {111}
sold them at threepence. In Charles I.'s reign a "doctour in phisick"
called Grant got a patent for a "fishe-call, or looking-glass for
fishes in the sea, very useful for fishermen to call all manner of
fishes to their netts, seins, or hooks." In the same reign it was made
compulsory to bury the dead in woollen in order to encourage the wool
manufacture; and ten years later Widow Amy Potter got a (rather
gruesome) patent for the elegant woollen costume she devised for this
purpose.[10]
I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain
Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left
practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just
purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No
brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose
whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his
brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing
and coaching, were the salt of life. He had arranged his brother's
miscellaneous treasures, in one or two spacious rooms, with great care
and pains; and it was a curious experience to pass out of an atmosphere
and environment of religious paintings, Roman bookbindings, panels from
cardinals' coaches, Papal coins and medals, Italian ecclesiological
literature, and what the {112} French call _objets de piete_ of every
description, to the ex-lancer's own cheerful living-rooms: the walls
hung with pictures of hunters, steeplechasers, coaching and sporting
scenes; stuffed heads, tiger-skins, and other trophies of the chase
everywhere about, and the windows looking out on a pretty garden, in
the improvement and cultivation of which the owner was promising
himself unfailing interest and occupation.
"Doctor Brighton" (was not this affectionate sobriquet the invention of
Thackeray?) did much for the restoration of my health and strength; and
I was able to get to Oxford before the end of summer term, to spend a
fortnight with kind Monsignor Kennard at his charming old house in St.
Aldate's, where I had a room so close to Tom Tower that the "Great Bell
of Tom" sounded as if it were tolling at my bedside![11] In his pretty
chapel (of which the open roof was said to be a relic of Oseney Abbey),
I had the happiness, on Trinity Sunday, of celebrating Mass for the
first time for more than three months--a greatly-appreciated privilege.
[1] "A brown Gregorian is so devotional.... Gregorians are obviously
of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent
magenta."
[2] Dr. Selden Talcott, of the State Asylum, Middleton, New York;
according to whom early rising is the most prolific cause of madness.
"A peremptory command to get up, when one's sleep is as yet unfinished,
is a command which grinds the soul, curdles the blood, swells the
spleen, destroys all good intentions, and disturbs all day the mental
activities, just as the tornado disturbs and levels with advancing ruin
the forest of mighty pines.... The free and lazy savage gets up when
he feels ready, and rarely or never becomes insane." Dr. Talcott
quotes the percentage of lunacy among country people as compared with
professional men. The latter, almost without exception, get up
comparatively late, whereas our manual labourers all leave their beds
long before they should. "The early morning hours, when everything is
still, are peculiarly fitted for sleep; and it is a _gross violation of
Nature's laws_ to tear human brains out of the sound rest they enjoy at
this time." A weighty utterance, no doubt: still, it is but fair to
point out that among monks, who perhaps, as a class, get up earlier
than any men living, the number of those whose good intentions are
destroyed and mental activities disturbed, and who finally become
lunatics, is really not alarmingly large.
[3] Dom Paulinus Gorwood, who had been a choirboy at Beverley Minster,
and draughtsman in a great shipbuilding yard, and had studied religious
art in the famous Beuron Benedictine school at Prague. He had industry
as well as talent; and there were specimens of his handiwork in places
as remote from one another as the Highland Catholic Church at Beauly,
and the college chapel at St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate.
[4] This printer's feat somehow reminds me of the statement in an
Edinburgh paper that a certain eminent tenor, who had had a bad fall
alighting from the train, was nevertheless "able to appear that evening
at the concert in several pieces." But the funniest printer's slip
which I remember in connection with trains was an announcement in a
Hampshire newspaper that "The Express Engine was seriously indisposed,
and confined to bed." The distinguished invalid was really the Empress
Eugenie!
[5] The word Glenelg is, of course, a palindrome, reading backwards and
forwards alike.
[6] Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, and Arthur Balfour were
only a few among the political magnates who had enjoyed my
brother-in-law's hospitality in the fine old Georgian mansion where
Lord Hailes had entertained Dr. Johnson. Newhailes was, of course, a
very convenient "jumping-off" place for meetings in the Scottish
metropolis.
[7] About as good, perhaps, as a certain English nine-hole course over
which the secretary invited (partly by way of advertising his club) a
famous golfer to play. "Well, what do you think of our course?" asked
the secretary with some trepidation when the game was over. "Oh well,
it might be worse," was the great man's answer. "How do you mean
exactly, might be worse?" "Well," said the eminent golfer, "there
might be eighteen holes!"
[8] That of Alister Gordon, of the Gordon Highlanders, to a sister of
Charles Edmonstoune-Cranstoun, an old pupil of mine. The bridegroom
was a fine soldier, became Brigadier-General in the European War, and
fell gallantly at Ypres in July, 1917.
[9] My well-informed friend told me, if I remember right, that statutes
having been passed in more recent times, limiting the grant of patents
to actual new inventions, scientific or otherwise, nothing so amusing
as the instances he quoted were to be found in their modern records.
[10] Not more gruesome, perhaps, than an exhibition organized at
Stafford House, in my young days about London, by Anne Duchess of
Sutherland, of _wicker-work coffins_. They were spread about the
garden, where tea was likewise provided; and a dapper and smiling young
man (I suppose the patentee) was in attendance to point out the
advantages--sanitary, economic, and aesthetic--of his invention to the
Duchess's interested guests.
[11] I could not claim the concession (I believe unique) granted to an
old Captain De Moleyns, who lived--and died--close to Christ Church,
and during whose last days the immemorial ringing of "Tom" was
suspended. He was a man of very advanced age, and used to tell how as
a little boy he was rowed across Plymouth Harbour to see Napoleon
standing on the deck of the _Bellerophon_!
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