1908
I passed the closing days of the summer term of 1908 very pleasantly at
Oxford, receiving many kindnesses from old friends, mingled with
expressions of regret that my official connection with the university
was approaching its close. I recall an interesting dinner-party at
Black Hall, the Morrells' delightful old house in St. Giles's, where my
neighbour was Miss Rhoda Broughton, at that time resident near Oxford.
We talked, of course, of her novels; and the pleasant-faced,
grey-haired lady was amused to hear that my sisters were not allowed to
read _Cometh Up as a Flower_, and _Red as a Rose is She_[1] (considered
strong literary food in the early 'seventies), until they "came out."
Mrs. Temple, the archbishop's widow, was also a fellow-guest: she had
taken a house in Oxford, close to "dear Keble"; but said that the noise
and uproar emanating at night from the college of "low living and high
thinking" was so great that she thought she would have to move. A
member of the lately-established {114} Faculty, or Institute, of
Forestry, who was of our party, told us some "things not generally
known" about trees, which I noted down. The biggest tree known in the
world was, he said, not in America (what a relief!), but the great
chestnut at the foot of Mount Etna, called the Chestnut of a Hundred
Horses, with a trunk over 200 ft. round, and a hole through it through
which two carriages can drive abreast. The biggest orange-tree known
was, said our oracle, in Terre Bonne, Louisiana: 50 ft. high, 15 ft.
round at base, and yielding 10,000 oranges annually. Finally, the most
valuable tree in existence was the plane-tree in Wood Street, in the
City, occupying a space worth, if rented, L300 a year--a capital value
of L9,000 or thereabouts. All these facts I thought curious.
Term over, I stayed for a little time with a sister in Kensington Gore,
very handy for Kensington Gardens, where I sat an hour or two every
morning enjoying the fresh air and verdure of that most charming of
"London's lungs," and surrounded by frolicking children, including my
small nephew. One of his little playfellows, a grandson of Lord
Portman, suddenly disappeared from the gay scene; I inquired where he
was, and was told that he had gone for a rest-cure. "Great heavens!" I
said, "a child of three!--but why, and where?"--"Oh," was the reply,
"Master Portman was taking too much notice of the busses and motor-cars
and such-like, and wouldn't go to sleep; so he is taking a rest-cure in
his nursery at the top of the house, looking over the chimney-pots!"
The modern child! but then I do not of course profess to understand
infants and their ways and needs.
{115}
The White City, with its Irish village, and a notable exhibition of
French and English pictures, was a great attraction this summer. A
kind cousin motored me thither once or twice; and I met a little later
at her house some pleasant Italian cavalry officers, smart in their
Eton blue uniforms, who were going to jump at the horse-show at
Olympia. I went, at their urgent invitation, to see their performance,
and was both interested and impressed. As an exhibition of the art of
show-jumping it seemed to me unsurpassable. The horse answered the
very slightest movement of the leg or body of its rider, who, as he
rose to each leap, was so perfectly pivoted on the insides of his knees
that his balance remained absolutely unaffected. The French
competitors combined pace and dash with their excellent horsemanship;
and the finest horses were certainly those ridden by the English. But
the cool, quiet, scientific, deliberate riding of the Italians, trained
in the finest school in the world, made all their rivals seem, somehow,
a little rough and flurried and amateurish; and they gained, as they
undoubtedly deserved, the chief honours of the show.
The heat in July was great; and I was so depressed, visiting the great
National Rose Show in the Botanic Gardens, by the spectacle of 100,000
once lovely blossoms hopelessly wilted and shrivelled, that I fled from
London to a brother's shady river-side home near Shepperton. It was
reposeful under the big elms overhanging his garden, to watch the
boat-laden Thames gliding past; and another pleasure which I enjoyed
whilst there was a quite admirable organ-recital given at a
neighbouring church--Littleton, I think it was. The kind rector showed
us round {116} and gave us tea; and the sight of the many tattered
regimental colours (Grenadier Guards and others) hanging on the church
walls drew down upon him the following lines, which I sent him next day
in acknowledgment of his courtesy:--
THE COLOURS
(Hung in churches: no longer [1908] taken into action.)
That rent is Talavera; that patch is Inkerman:
A hundred times in a hundred climes the battle round them ran.
But that is an ended chapter--they will not go to-day:
Hang them above as a link of love, where the people come to pray.
* * * * *
Perhaps when all is quiet, and the moon looks through the pane,
Under that shred the splendid dead are marshalled once again,
And hear the guns in the desert, and see the lines on the hill,
And follow the steel of the lance, and feel that England is
England still.
I found it very little cooler in Yorkshire than in London; but there
were noble trees and welcome shade in the beautiful park of Langdon,
near Northallerton, where I spent some July days, in an atmosphere a
thought too equine for my taste; however, my kind hosts (the Fifes)
were as fond of their flowers as of their horses, and were busy adding
wildernesses and rockeries and other informal beauty-spots to the
formal gardens of their new home, which they had recently bought from
Lord Teignmouth. I was driven over one day to see the Hospital of St.
John of God at Scorton, where a hundred inmates, all crippled or
disabled, were tended with admirable care and devotion by a religious
brotherhood. A local clergyman, I remember, dined with us that evening
at Langdon--a man whose mission, or hobby, seemed to be to collect and
retail such odd and out-of-the-way facts as one finds in the {117}
statistical column of _Tit-Bits_. In the course of the evening he
informed us (1) that a pound of thread spun by a silkworm will make a
thread 600 miles long; (2) that there are in the skin of the average
man 2,304,000 pores; and (3) that about 30,000 snails are eaten every
day in the city of Paris. What one feels about such facts, dumped down
on one promiscuously, is that they do not lead anywhere, or afford any
kind of opening for rational conversation.
I had rather hoped to escape the burden of my Oxford Local Examination
work this summer; but as it was apparently difficult to replace me, I
went up to Dumfries for my usual week in July. Our Convent-school
being the only centre in the district for these examinations, there
were, as usual, several candidates from outside. Among them were two
pairs of Protestant sisters (Wedderburn-Maxwells and Goldie-Scotts),
whose mamma and governess respectively sat all day in the corridor
outside the big schoolroom, keeping watch and ward, it was understood,
against the danger of their children being "got at" between the papers
by the nuns--or possibly the Benedictine examiner!--and influenced in
the direction of Popery. Our children were much amused by the way in
which these little girls were whisked away, during the intervals, from
any possible contact with their "Roman" fellow-candidates; but the
little girls themselves looked somewhat disconsolate, having perhaps
had pleasant anticipations of games, between examination-hours, in the
well-equipped playground of the school.
The kind abbot of Fort Augustus would not let me return to the
monastery, as I had expected to do when my Dumfries work was over, but
{118} suggested instead some further rest (for I was still far from
robust) with my own people in the west of Scotland. I spent a few
pleasant days first at Mountstuart, and was rather amused on the first
of August (the end of the "close season" for small birds) to see my
young host sally forth--a sailor, an architect, and an artist in his
wake--on a shooting-expedition, with as much ceremony and preparation
as if it had been the Twelfth![2] We motored out after them, and
lunched on one of the highest points of the island; drinking in, as we
ate our Irish stew, an entrancing prospect of the blue Firth, the long
sinuous Ayrshire coast, and the lofty serrated peaks of Arran. From
Bute I went on to Dunskey, a place full to me always--even under its
new, altered, and improved conditions--of a hundred happy memories.
There was an _al fresco_ entertainment--tea, music, and dancing on the
lawn--given by my niece to the tenants and their families one
afternoon; and I (mindful of old days) was happy to watch her and her
boy, the little heir, welcoming their guests. Some of their names,
Thorburns, Withers and MacWilliams, recalled the past; and they greeted
me with the friendly simple cordiality characteristic of Galloway folk.
One of our house-party had just arrived (by yacht) from the Isle of
Man, where he had been staying for some weeks. He had stories of the
quaint customs of the Men of Man, and wrote down for me the oath
administered in their courts. {119} The closing simile is delightfully
unconventional:--
By this book, and by the holy contents thereof, and by the wonderful
works that God has miraculously wrought in heaven above and in the
earth beneath in six days and seven nights, I do swear that I will,
without respect of favour or friendship, love or gain, consanguinity or
affinity, execute the laws of this isle, and between party and party as
indifferently as the herring's backbone doth lie in the middle of the
fish.
At Blairquhan I found a large party assembling for August 12: naval
cronies of my sailor brother (including the captain of H.M.S.
_Britannia_), the master of the Whaddon Chase Hunt, Selby Lowndes, with
his wife and daughter, and other pleasant people. Shooting, dancing,
bridge and golf filled up their days agreeably enough. I essayed the
last-named sport, but was mortified to find myself still as weak as a
kitten. The weather was glorious, but my brother complained that the
long drought had left not a fruit in the garden; whereupon I suggested
the substitute mentioned by Captain Topham in his _Letters from
Edinburgh_ a century and a half ago:--
The little variety of fruit which this climate brings to perfection is
the cause that the inhabitants set anything on their tables, after
dinner, that has the appearance of it; and I have often observed at the
houses of principal people a dish of small turnips, which they call
neeps, introduced in the dessert, and ate with as much avidity as if
they had been fruit of the first perfection.
The perfect summer weather accompanied me north to Beaufort, which was
doubly fortunate, as a great party was gathered there for a gigantic
bazaar, organized by one of the daughters of the house to raise funds
for a county sanatorium for consumption, in which she was greatly
interested. The difficulty of attracting _men_ to a show of the kind,
{120} especially in the shooting season, was cleverly met by including
among the attractions a novel and unique exhibition of stags' heads,
lent from all the great Highland forests. The interest of this drew
sportsmen from far and near to Beaufort, where a notable company was
assembled, including the whole Lovat family, most of the Chiefs of
clans and their wives, and, last not least, Ranguia, a genuine
chieftain from New Zealand, clad in what was understood to be his
native dress, and gifted with an astonishing voice (_tenore
robustissimo_), in which he sang Maori songs of love and war in the
great gallery at intervals during the two days of the bazaar. The most
charming of British Duchesses opened the proceedings with a speech of
enticing eloquence: sales were brisk, the weather perfect, and the
attendance enormous; and the profits, if I remember right, were
something like L4,000, so that the affair was altogether a success. We
recreated ourselves, after these fatiguing days, by a pleasant motor
drive to Oromarty, to see the splendid fleet (the Fifth Cruiser
Squadron (and some battleships of the Home Fleet) mustered in the
Firth. We went all over the _Dreadnought_, and drank tea on Kelburn's
ship, the _Cochrane_, burst a tyre on our way home and took refuge at
Balnagowan, where Lady Ross gave us dinner and sang to us perfectly
delightfully: a full and interesting day.
Ampleforth Abbey having now Masters of Arts of its own qualified to
take over the Mastership of its Oxford Hall, I took the occasion of my
enforced temporary retirement to resign the office which I had held for
nearly ten years. The inevitable regrets were tempered by the kind
tributes I received {121} both from Ampleforth and from the
Vice-chancellor of the University; and also by my friend Mgr. Kennard's
urgent invitation (which I was authorized to accept) that I should
return to Oxford for a time as his guest and assistant-chaplain. This
settled, I went south to visit the Loudouns at Loudoun Castle,
cheerfully repainted and decorated in honour of the arrival of the
family pictures, an accession to Loudoun since his brother Paulyn
Hastings' death. At Woodburn, whither I went from Loudoun, I found
Philip Kerr at home from Johannesburg (where he was, I think, Secretary
to the High Commissioner)--looking as young as ever, the cynosure of
his adoring family and of a circle of admiring friends, one or two of
whom (I think old schoolfellows at Edgbaston) were staying at Woodburn.
The talk turned, as so often in this house, on Newman and the Oratory;
and Lord Ralph Kerr read a striking passage written by Coventry
Patmore[3] soon after the great Cardinal's death:--
The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work: that tongue which had the
weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent.
I recalled a characteristic sentence or two (half jest, half earnest),
from one of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's letters to Mrs. Sarjent:--
Newman was at Ryder's, but I thought it best not to see him. I heard
that unmistakable voice like a volcano's roar, tamed into the softness
of the flute-stop, and got a glimpse (may I say it to you?) of the
serpentine form through an open door--the Father Superior!
{122}
In lighter vein Philip told us some odd Johannesburg stories. One was
of a man who had arrived there some years before with absolutely no
assets except a tin of condensed milk and a needle. He spread a report
that smallpox was on its way through the country, gave out that he was
a surgeon, and vaccinated the entire community with his needle and
condensed milk, at 5_s._ a head! From this beginning he rose to be a
wealthy capitalist, with the monopoly of selling liquor within the
precincts of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Woodburn was admirably handy for the Edinburgh libraries, in which I
put in several days' work (much belated during my illness) for the
_Encyclopaedia_. September I spent happily at St. Andrews, where my
friend and host George Angus, though now a good deal of an invalid, was
as kind and pleasant as ever. We had talks on heraldry, a favourite
subject with us both; and I remember his rubbing his hands with delight
on reading (on the authority of Juliana Berners, prioress of Sopewell),
that the four Evangelists were "gentlemen come by the right line of
that worthy conqueror Judas Maccabaeus"; and also that the Four Latin
Doctors, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory, were gentlemen of
blood and coat-armour."[4] I copied from one of his early heraldic
books the arms anciently assigned to:--
_Adam_ (before the Fall)--a shield gules, whereon a shield argent borne
on an escutcheon of pretence [arms of _Eve_, she being an heiress].
_Do._ (after the Fall)--paly tranche, divided every way, and tinctured
of every colour.
{123}
_Joseph_--chequy, sable and argent.
_David_--argent a harp or.
_Gideon_--sable, a fleece argent, a chief azure gutte d'eau.
_Samson_--gules, a lion couchant or, within an orle argent, seme of
bees sable.
I saw something at St. Andrews of another old acquaintance, Jock
Dalrymple, now Stair, who had some little time before succeeded his
father (the kind old friend of my youth), and had grown grey, portly,
and rather solemn since coming into his kingdom. He was Captain of the
Royal and Ancient this year; and although he boasted of "hating
politics," and would not trouble to vote in Parliament on the most
vital Imperial question, would sit for hours in the chair at a club
meeting, discussing the minutiae of golfing rules with a zest and
patience that never failed. Men are curiously made!
I went, while at St. Andrews, to spend a weekend with the Fairlies at
their neighbouring castle of Myres (set in the most enchanting old
Scottish garden), and said mass in a billiard-room converted by my
friend into a decorous chapel, just as had been done by Bishop Hedley
in his episcopal villa near Cardiff. I noticed with interest the mace
sculptured on one of the angular turrets. Thereby hung a tale--and a
grievance; and my host told me how the presentation of a macership in
the Court of Session went with the ownership of Myres, i.e. of the
castle, as he maintained. But though he had bought the castle, my Lord
Bute had bought the estate (marching with his lands of Falkland); and
_his_ contention was that the estate, not the castle, carried with it
the macership.[5] _Hinc illae lacrymae_.
{124}
I left St. Andrews early on a bright autumn morning, my kind old
friend, who had insisted on getting up to serve my mass, waving me
good-bye under his hospitable porch--a last good-bye it proved to be,
for I never saw him again.[6] Before going south I spent a few days at
Aberdeen, having some business with our good bishop. I stayed with
Malcolm Hay of Seaton (one of my very few Catholic relations) at his
pretty old place on Donside. From the windows one looked across the
river, and up a wooded brae, to the venerable towers of St. Machar's
Cathedral. Malcolm motored me one day to Blairs College; I had not
before seen the new buildings and church of our Scottish seminary,
quite an imposing pile as viewed from the much-frequented Deeside road.
We found the Archbishop of St. Andrews (Mgr. Smith) at tea with the
Rector and his professorial staff, who were all most kind and civil. I
heard here of the elevation of the eminent advocate, Campbell of
Skerrington, to the Scottish Bench--the first Catholic Lord of Session
for generations, if not centuries.
I was due in Oxford before the opening of the autumn term, in view of
my prospective "flitting" from our Benedictine Hall; but I first
fulfilled a long {125} overdue engagement to pay a visit to some French
friends (the Marquis de Franquetot and his wife) in Picardy. Their
pretty chateau, embowered in big chestnut-trees, was some ten miles
from Boulogne, and we drove thither on Sunday to high mass at St.
Nicholas-in-the-Market, as my host wanted me to hear the French
Bishops' joint pastoral (the first they had been permitted to issue for
a great number of years) on Christian education. M. de Franquetot said
it had been prepared under the roof of my old friend Lady Sophia
Palmer, Comtesse de Franqueville, who, with her excellent husband, had
entertained the whole hierarchy for a week at their beautiful hotel in
the Bois de Boulogne. The congregation at St. Nicholas was very large
and devout, comprising, as I was pleased to observe,[7] many men of all
ranks and ages; and the long pastoral, addressed "aux peres et meres de
famille," and interspersed with admirable comments from the good cure,
was listened to with close attention, and approval, which the "peres de
famille" occasionally showed by thumping the floor with sticks or
umbrellas, and muttering--not always _sotto voce_--"Tres bien
dit,"--"ils ont bien raison," and so on. I was very glad to have been
present. Boulogne seemed full of British trippers; and I was amused,
as we drove along the sea-front, to see the number of unmistakably
French eating-houses which labelled themselves by such enticing titles
as the "Royal English Chop {126} House" and the "Margate Bar." Some,
more accommodating still, announced in their windows that "Messrs. the
Britannic tourists who arrive furnished with their own provisions may
eat them here gratuitously." Could the _Entente_ go further? I had
hardly seen the pleasant town since I had lived for a year in its
environs with my family as a little boy; and the narrow bustling
streets looked to me much as they used to under the Empire, when my
father would point out to us the gallant Chasseurs d'Afrique swaggering
along--"the finest soldiers in the world, sir--fought beside us in the
Crimea,"--six short years before the _debacle_ of 1870. We passed
through Pont-de-Brique, and asked for the Chateau Neuf, the big
rambling house in an unkempt garden which had been our home; but no one
could point it out to us.
My French visit was brought to an agreeable close by a trip across the
Channel ("Why do you call it the _English_ Channel, you others?" my
hostess asked me; "to us it is only La Manche!") in a beautiful
schooner yacht belonging to a friend of the de Franquetots. We scudded
along the English coast in bright sunshine, before a strong
south-easterly breeze, finally landing at Southampton, whence I made my
way to Kneller Court, which I found as friendly and hospitable as ever:
Admiral Sir Percy and Lady Scott at luncheon with my kind
sister-in-law, and subalterns and sub-lieutenants dropping in later for
tennis and tea. My brother drove me up to Fort Nelson, and showed me
his 60-pounders and the interior of the fort, one of the chain erected
at enormous cost by Palmerston fifty years before, and now absolutely
useless except as barracks. {127} Next day I escorted my pretty niece
by dogcart, train and tram to Hilsea, to see the Gunners'
sports--gun-driving, tent-pegging, wrestling on horseback, and so
forth. It was my fifty-fifth birthday, and my health was pledged at
dinner, with musical honours, by the merry party of relatives and
friends. On October 1 I reached Oxford, superintended the transport of
my effects from Beaumont Street (where my successor, Dom Anselm Parker,
was already installed as Master of our Hall) to St. Aldate's, and
received a kind welcome there from my host and new "chief," Mgr.
Kennard. He was suffering from the peculiar constitutional
disturbance--I believe a form of suppressed gout (King Edward was in
his last years a victim to it) which keeps people always on the move;
and this chronic restlessness took him away so constantly from Oxford
that a great deal of his pastoral work--the spiritual superintendence
of fifty or sixty Catholic undergraduates, scattered all over the
university, at once devolved to great extent on me. The experiment of
sending Catholic boys to Oxford (and Cambridge) had by this time passed
out of the experimental stage, and had on the whole justified the
anticipations of those to whose initiative it had been due. There
were, of course, a few failures and a few wastrels among our small
contingent of undergraduates; but on the whole they were a good lot of
young fellows, who did credit to the various Catholic schools where
they had been trained. And their personal kindness to me was such that
it was a real pleasure to find oneself in fairly intimate relations
with them, and to be of any service to them that one could.
{128}
The good Monsignore hardly ever returned from his many absences without
bringing a friend or two with him; and his great recreation at this
time was driving his guests about in a fine motor (a new toy) which he
had lately bought from his nephew Fritz Ponsonby, the King's equerry.
Fritz and his charming wife stayed with us this autumn, as did also our
host's brother, Colonel Hegan Kennard, who was considerably the older,
but much the more vigorous and energetic of the two.[8] He attended
service on Sunday at the Evangelical church close by, and came back
indignant. "By George, sir, I never saw anything so slovenly and
slipshod in my life; disgraceful, sir, positively disgraceful!" I took
him to hear Mrs. Garrett-Fawcett speak at a woman-suffrage debate at
the Union--a most plausible lady, but we voted against her by a large
majority. I found the motor an agreeable means of visiting various
places of interest in the neighbourhood--Dorchester Abbey, an epitome
of architecture from Early Norman to Late Perpendicular, but the
interior spoilt by the bad taste of the Ritualistic fittings; the grand
old Augustinian minster of Burford; and Cuddesdon, a miniature
cathedral, with its western porch and massive central tower. It was
over this porch that the ladies of Cuddesdon, in years gone by, wishing
to do honour on some feast-day to their beloved diocesan Samuel
Wilberforce, and not less beloved Archdeacon Alfred Pott, displayed
their joint initials wrought in evergreens. "S.O.A.P.," read {129} the
Bishop as he paused before the western gable. "Surely an enemy hath
done this," he sorrowfully muttered, and proceeded on his way.
An excursion or two from Oxford I remember this autumn: one to
Downside, where it was always a happiness to go and spend a
church-festival with my Benedictine brethren; another to Eton, where I
gazed with dismay on the new school-hall with its unsightly dome, and
wondered if this was really the best the Committee of Taste could
achieve by way of South African War Memorial.[9] I met afterwards
quite a contingent of Scotsmen (Arthur Hay, the Duke of Roxburghe's
brother, etc.) at luncheon with the Irish Guards at Victoria Barracks,
where I used to breakfast of a Sunday morning--a dissipation forbidden,
I believe, to modern Etonians--with an uncle in the Scots Fusilier
Guards, in my own school days. I went to London that evening to dine
with, and read afterwards a paper on "Jerusalem of To-day" to, the
Guild of SS. Gregory and Luke, my host being Sir John Knill, Sheriff of
London, who was two years later to occupy the civic chair, as his
excellent father had done before him. On another evening I attended
our Westminster Dining-club, to hear Fr. R. H. Benson read us an essay
on "The Value of Fiction"--interesting, as coming from a successful
novelist, and of course brilliant; but I agreed with only about half of
it.
Ninian Crichton Stuart had engaged me to go and {130} support him at
the St. Andrew's Day banquet of the Caledonian Society of Cardiff, the
suffrages of which city he was at that time wooing as Conservative
candidate, much assisted by his clever and charming wife. I stayed
with them at their pretty home near Llandaff, and we motored in to the
patriotic banquet, which began at 6.30 and lasted nearly five hours! I
proposed the principal toast, and had of course no difficulty in
showing (as one of the newspaper reports remarked) that all the chief
posts in the Empire--political, ecclesiastical, legal and
administrative, were, with the most insignificant exceptions, held by
Scotsmen. Bagpipes, of course, skirled and whisky flowed freely; and
the national enthusiasm reached its height when the haggis was borne
round the hall in procession, carried by the white-clad chef and
preceded by the pipe-major, playing his best and loudest in honour of
the "chief of pudding race." I left Llandaff next morning, Ringan,
Lady Ninian's pretty baby, crowing good-bye to me from his mother's
arms,[10] and spent an hour or two in Cardiff with Bishop Hedley, who
expressed his hope that I would help Kennard at Oxford as long as I
could, and would ultimately succeed him as chaplain. We visited
together the new and splendid town-hall, the finest municipal building
I had ever seen. The Oxford term ended in the following week, {131}
and I made my way north to Fort Augustus, where I found discussion in
progress as whether we should or should not sell our house and estate
of Ardachie, for which we had several good offers. I said yes; for the
place, though not without its attractions, had been altogether more of
a burden than a profit to us for a good many years.[11] Whilst at Fort
Augustus, I addressed, by desire of the community, letters to the
Abbot-Primate in Rome, as well as to our own bishop, urging, for many
weighty reasons, the reincorporation of our abbey into the English
Benedictine Congregation, from which it had been separated for just
twenty-six years.
[1] Parodied in _Punch_ (I think by that inveterate punster the then
editor, F. C. Burnand), under the titles of _Goeth Down as an Oyster_
and _Red in the Nose is She_. It is the Scottish hero of one of these
romances, I forget which (I mean, of course, the original, not the
parody), who shows his emotion at a critical moment by "cramming half a
yard of yellow beard into his mouth!"
[2] The bag consisted of an assortment of miscellaneous fowl. Bute was
at this period of his career something of the typical Briton whose idea
of happiness, according to some French observer, is more or less summed
up in the formula: "My friends, it is a fine day: let us go out and
kill something!"
[3] In the preface to _Rod, Root, and Flower_. The passage was quite
new to me.
[4] From the _Boke of St. Albans_ (1486).
[5] An antique privilege of the kind would appeal irresistibly to
Bute--_tenaci propositi viro_; he stuck to his guns, not only claiming
the right of presentation, but actually exercising it at the next
vacancy. I am not qualified to pronounce on the vexed question; but my
experience is that in such matters the big man usually gets his way,
and the smaller has to go to the wall. What was settled after Bute's
death I know not. Anyhow--the last Lord of Falkland lies among the
lilies in a war cemetery in France; and the memorial chapel in his
park, near by the House of Falkland, was designed by the present laird
of Myres.
[6] George Angus, for nearly a quarter of a century resident priest at
St. Andrews, died there on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), 1909.
[7] Less pleasing was it to notice the outside walls and very doors of
the old church plastered all over with flaring _affiches_ of music-hall
performances, pictures of ballet-dancers, etc. "Cette canaille de
Republique!" murmured in my ear, as we drove off, my friend and host,
whose sympathies were entirely with the _ancien regime_.
[8] More of a man, in short. "Dear old Charlie," he said to me, "was
good at games when he was at Harrow, and a capital runner. All the
same, he was always a bit of an old woman, and always will be!"
[9] I wrote, I fear, rather heatedly to good old Ainger (Secretary of
the War Fund), on what seemed to me the painful incongruity of the
building with its surroundings. "Many people, I believe," he replied
with admirable restraint, "feel quite as you do on this matter; but no
one has expressed himself quite so strongly!"
[10] Poor little Ringan! (his name was the ancient "pet" form of
"Ninian," the saint of Galloway). On the election-day, a year or so
afterwards, the burgesses of Cardiff smiled to see him driving through
the streets in a motor from which flew a bannerette recommending them
to "Vote for Daddy!" There was universal regret, a few days later, at
the sad news that the little electioneerer had succumbed to a chill
caught on the occasion of his first public appearance, when less than
two years old. See _post._ page 176.
[11] The actual tenant, Colonel Campbell, whose wife was a Catholic,
eventually bought the property.
{132}