the Bishop of London has given you an introduction: as it is he who has
introduced you, you will certainly not get the living.’--‘Well, so the
Bishop said, my lord,’ replied the clergyman. ‘Did the Bishop say so?’
thundered Lord Thurlow: ‘then he’s a damned liar, and I’ll prove him so:
you _shall_ have the living,’ and the man got it.
“At Arundel the guests were astonished by the butler coming in one day
abruptly and saying to the Duke, ‘May it please your Grace, Lord Thurlow
has laid an egg.’ It was one of the owls which existed at Arundel till
the time of the present owner. Lord Thurlow’s daughter, going round
their cages in the wall, had stopped opposite one of them, and, looking
at the blinking bird, said, ‘Why, he’s just like papa.’ The bird was
ever after called Lord Thurlow.”
* * * * *
“_July 16._--At Mrs. Ralph Dutton’s I took Mrs. Procter in to
dinner--Barry Cornwall’s widow, always full of interest and excellence,
and of many unknown kindnesses. She talked of her early days, of the
charm of Monckton Milnes when young--his brightness and vigour: of the
decadence of society now, when at least a thousand persons were invited
to Grosvenor House whom our grandmothers would not consent to be in the
same room with; but that society now required high seasoning, and
royalty the strongest pepper of all: that in former days no guest would
have continued in a house where he was received on entering by a wet
sponge from ----: that the abbreviation of P. B.’s in use for
‘professional beauties’ was a sign of the depth to which we have fallen.
“Mrs. Stewart told me a characteristic story of Mrs. Procter’s wit. ‘The
Lionel Tennysons--dear good excellent people--asked that woman Sarah
Bernhardt, the actress, to luncheon, asked her to go all the way to them
in Kensington, and invited some good, quiet, simple folk to meet her,
just trusting in his prestige as the laureate’s son. I need hardly say
that, though they waited luncheon for Sarah Bernhardt till four o’clock,
she never came. She knew the company she was to meet, and she did not
think it worth while. They told Mrs. Procter of it. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘if
people will invite monkeys, they must provide them with _nuts_.’
“‘Dear Mrs. Procter is so satirical,’ says Mrs. Stewart, ‘that when I go
to her and find other people in the room, I always stay till the last,
that she may have no one to discuss me with.’
“When Mrs. Procter dies, her last daughter will probably go into a
convent. She has had three daughters; two have become Roman Catholics,
and one is already in a convent. ‘I have another daughter, but you will
never see her,’ is the only way in which the mother alludes to this.”
* * * * *
“_July 17._--Sat by Matthew Arnold at breakfast. Speaking of the odd
effect misspelt words often produced, he quoted a begging letter he had
just received from a lady who said she had a decided claim upon charity,
being ‘the sole support of an aged Ant’ (_sic_).
[Illustration: MRS. DUNCAN STEWART]
“Called on Mrs. Stewart. She said that the evening before she had asked
Mr. Froude what she should reply to Mr. Tennyson if he asked her what
she thought of his last wretched poems. ‘Oh, say, “Blessed sir, would I
presume?”’ returned Mr. Froude.
“Two days ago I went to Lady Airlie’s, where a large party was collected
to hear Mr. Browning read. I never heard any one, even a child of ten,
read so atrociously. It was two of his own poems--‘Good News to Ghent’
and ‘Ivan Ivanowitch,’ the latter always most horrible and unsuitable
for reading aloud, but in this case rendered utterly unintelligible by
the melodramatic vocal contortions of the reader.”
* * * * *
“_July 23._--By invitation of Mrs. Stephen Winkworth to see Lewis
Campbell’s translation of the ‘Agamemnon’ acted. Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin
took the parts of both Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and was very grand in
both, especially the latter. She has an infinity of action, but it is
all graceful and very Greek. The chorus loses much, because each of the
old men is made to say his speech separately, whereas in the original
Greek they evidently all talked together.”
* * * * *
“_July 24, Milford._--I have ended a very happy season by leaving London
immediately after the marriage of Evelyn Bromley Davenport with Tom Legh
of Lyme. Here, at Mrs. Greville’s, I find Lady Archibald Campbell, a
pale, beautiful young woman, strangely occupied with spiritualism, and
Mr. Watts, one of the principal writers in the _Athenæum_, and the man
who, living with Swinburne, has, by his personal influence, cured him of
the habit of drinking.”
* * * * *
“_July 25._--A hot Sunday afternoon, spent chiefly in sitting on the
terrace, where great orange-trees are set in tubs as in a French garden,
and in listening to the discursive conversation of Mr. Watts and Lady
Archie about Swinburne and Rossetti.
“I am very sorry, now that it is too late, that, in my last visit here,
when asked to choose which I would be taken to see, I did not say George
Eliot instead of Tennyson. Mrs. Greville went to see her with an aching
heart after Lewes’s death, and ‘found them all in the drawing-room
playing battledore and shuttlecock, nothing changed but the man.’
“Mrs. Greville’s mother, sweet Mrs. Thellusson, was one of the claimants
for the great Thellusson fortune--an unsuccessful claimant. She is
lovely still in her old age. Mrs. Greville has a picture of a young man
in a dress of the beginning of this century. She described his return
lately from India. ‘He came to Milford, and paid me endless attentions
and made me endless presents; I really thought he wished to marry me,
until he proposed to--my mother!’”[349]
* * * * *
“_Ammerdown Park, August 2._--I have been several days with Lady
Waterford--always charming, always so full of holy teaching, that she
recalls the closing lines of St. Patrick’s Hymn--
‘Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.’
Yet this visit leaves nothing especially to remember except a story of
Lord Waterford pursuing a robber who had broken into his house, finding
him in a public-house some four miles off, and convicting him amongst a
number of other men by insisting upon feeling all their hearts; the man
whose heart was still beating quickly was the one who had just done
running.
“On Saturday I came to Wells, the lovely old city of orchards and clear
running brooks, whence Lord Hylton fetched me to Ammerdown. Sir Augustus
Paget and all his family are here, the daughter a lovely, bright,
natural girl,[350] and the sons, Victor and Ralph, most charming,
kind-hearted, winning fellows. We have been to Mells--an overgrown park
with pretty natural features, which was the favourite manor of the Abbot
of Glastonbury. At the dissolution, Mr. Horner was sent to take up the
parchments of the abbatial lands to Windsor, and for better security
took them in a pasty. On the way he put in his thumb and pulled out for
himself the title-deeds of Mells, the best plum of all, which has ever
since remained in the family of ‘Little Jack Horner.’”
* * * * *
“_Ryde, Oct. 10._--I have spent a quiet, peaceful summer: so little from
the outer world seems to ruffle me now, and the storms of four terrible
years have been succeeded by six years of calm. It has been a constant
pleasure to visit the dear Mrs. Grove, now confined to the upper floor
of her house. Charlotte Leycester has been long at Holmhurst, and other
guests have come and gone, relics from my dearest Mother’s life, and
waifs and strays from my own, by many of whom I am sadly overrated; the
moral of which is, I suppose, that one should try really to clamber up
to that high shelf on which one is placed in imagination. Of original
work I have done little enough, except one article on ‘Lucca’ for _Good
Words_.
“One of my chief occupations has been editing the life of the nun Amalie
von Lassaux, translated from the German by Fräulein von Weling. As
‘Sister Augustine,’ her story possesses that interest which is always
attached to a struggle in the cause of truth amid many persecutions and
torments, rather mental than physical.
“I was away twice for a few days--first with young Mrs. Hamilton Seymour
at Aylesford, a charming little old town on the sluggish Medway, with
‘The Friars’ close by, where pleasant Lady Aylesford lives in a
beautiful old house, with oak staircase, gateway, water-gate, clipped
yew-trees and terraces. Then I was two days at Hampton Court with witty
old Lady Lyndhurst, and greatly delighted in the glories of the old
palace and its gardens. And now I am with dear old George Liddell,[351]
enjoying this otherwise dull watering-place through his genial
hospitality.”
* * * * *
“_Melchet, Hants, Oct. 23._--From Ryde I went to Amesbury to stay with
Sir Edmund and Lady Antrobus, who are some of the kindest and most
hospitable people in London, and have a fine house in Piccadilly. Their
house in Wiltshire is very fine too, though it has never been finished.
Gay’s Duchess of Queensberry lived there, and in the grounds are a cave
and summer-house where the poet wrote verses to her. But the great
interest of Amesbury lies in its being the scene of Guinevere’s penance,
and it recalls Tennyson’s poem in the swirling mists which arise with
morning and evening. Each morning we drew at Stonehenge amongst the
hoary and mighty stones standing out against the ethereal lights and
shadows of the plain.
“Next, I went to Rushmore, to which the Lane Fox’s have succeeded, with
the name of Pitt Rivers and £36,000 a year, since the death of the 6th
Lord Rivers. It is a dull country-house on Cranbourne Chase--swooping
moors sprinkled with thorn-trees or thick woods of hazel. I was taken to
see Shaftesbury; Cranbourne, the fine old house of the Salisburys; and
Wardour, with noble cedars too closely overhanging the ruins of its
castle. Lord Arundel lives in the Park at Wardour, in an immense house
which he is too poor to keep in repair. He has another place somewhere
near the sea, where his grandfather went to reside, to the great
discomfiture of a gang of smugglers, who had previously had sole
possession, and who tried to frighten him away by ghostly sights and
sounds, but in vain. One night Lord Arundel was sitting in his room,
having locked the door, when some one knocked. He demanded who was
there, when a voice said, ‘Open and you will see:’ He opened it, and
found a very rough-looking man with a keg of spirits under his arm. The
man said, ‘Well, my Lord, we’ve done our best to frighten you, but you
won’t be frightened, so I’ve, come to make a clean breast of it, and
I’ve brought you a little offering. I only hope you won’t be hard on
us.’ ‘Oh, dear no, I won’t be hard on you,’ said Lord Arundel; and Lady
Marian Alford, to whom he told the story at Rome when she was four years
old, vividly remembers his vigorous assertion, ‘And the smuggler gave me
the very best Hollands I ever had in my life.’
“From Rushmore, after a visit to the old Shipley home at Twyford, I came
here to Lady Ashburton. Melchet is a magnificent house in a beautiful
country, and is filled with art-treasures of every kind. Lady Marian is
here, always pleasant with her ripple of conversation and anecdote. She
has been very amusing about her mother’s parrot, which used to hop about
upon the lawn. One day it was carried off by an eagle. Old John Tooch,
one of the dynasty of John Toochs who worked in the garden, was mowing
the lawn, and as the parrot, in the eagle’s gripe, was sailing over his
head, he heard a voice in the air call out, ‘We’re ridin’ noo, John
Tooch, we’re ridin’ noo;’ at which strange sound the eagle was so
dreadfully frightened that he let the parrot fall, so that John Tooch
took it home to its cage again.”
* * * * *
“_Melchet, Oct. 28._--Yesterday we went to Longford--Lord Radnor’s--a
great castellated house in a dull park, with no view, but very fine
pictures.
“In the morning the (Melchet) footman woke me with the news that the
house had been broken into. The robbers had entered through the
drawing-room window, perambulated the lower apartments, drunk up all the
wine in the dining-room, and found all the valuables too big to carry
off!”
* * * * *
“_Oct. 29._--A charming visit to Broadlands, Lord Mount-Temple’s--the
people so full of genial goodness, the house most comfortable and
gardens lovely. Lady Mount-Temple--in whom, as Miss Tollemache, Ruskin
saw such statuesque severity with womanly sweetness joined--a marvellous
union of beauty, goodness, and intelligence. The grounds, with fountain,
river, well-grouped trees, and a Palladian summer-house, are like a
beautiful Claude-Lorraine picture. The same landscape--of a river,
winding amongst cedar-shadowed lawns--forms the predella to Rossetti’s
picture of ‘The Blessed Damozel.’”
* * * * *
“_Holmhurst, Nov. 13._--Mr. and Mrs. Paterson have been here for the
day. He told me two stories:--
“A lady was awoke in the night with the disagreeable sense of not being
alone in the room, and soon felt a thud upon her bed. There was no doubt
that some one was moving to and fro in the room, and that hands were
constantly moving over her bed. She was so dreadfully frightened that at
last she fainted. When she came to herself, it was broad daylight, and
she found that the butler had walked in his sleep and had laid the table
for fourteen upon her bed.
“A lunatic, who had escaped for some time from his asylum, was
eventually captured. When he came in and saw the keeper who was
accustomed to take care of him, he said, ‘Well, I’ve been very much
occupied since I went away: I’ve been occupied in being
married.’--‘Well, and whom have you married?’ said the keeper. ‘Oh, I’ve
married the Devil’s daughter.’--‘Well, I hope it’s a happy union?’--‘Oh,
very, thank you,’ said the lunatic; ‘only I don’t much like the old
people.’”
* * * * *
“_Holmhurst, Nov. 24._--Last week I was for two days at Cambridge as the
guest of Jock Wallop, the best and kindest of hosts, under whose popular
auspices I saw the present undergraduate life to perfection. There is a
most charming set of fellows there now, all delighted to be young, and
not aiming at juvenile senility, as was the fashion in my day at
Oxford.”
* * * * *
“_Dec. 16._--Several Midland county visits afford nothing to recollect.
Certainly country-house visits are a lottery. One old lady said, ‘My
dear, I _am_ so glad to see you. It is so delightful to see any one _at
all_ pleasant. In London one can have any agreeable company one likes,
but you know God Almighty fills one’s house in the country.’
“I have, however, been to George Curzon at Oxford. He is most
delightful, and sure to become distinguished. At the meeting of the
Conservative ‘Canning Club’ I heard a most capital paper on Ireland by
young Edward Arnold. Afterwards I was three days at Sherborne, meeting,
amongst other less interesting elements, the ever-charming Dowager Lady
Craven. Lady Sherborne sang in a way which would move the heart of a
basilisk. The country around Sherborne was the scene of innumerable
battles in Saxon times, commemorated in the names of the fields and
farms, which are supposed to owe their fertility to the carnage with
which they had been covered. This supposition makes the peasants eager
for the use of bone-dust, which they believe to be imported from the
plains of Waterloo. If a field, after having been thus manured, still
yields no crop, they say ‘Waterloo bean’t no use here!’”
* * * * *
I spent the Christmas of 1880 again with the kind Lowthers at Ampthill,
meeting, as before, Louisa, Lady Ashburton, and going, as before, to
spend a day at Woburn. In January 1881 I was at Bretton with the
Beaumonts, meeting Julia, Lady Jersey, and a large party.
We went to see Nostell, a very grand but little known house of the
Winns, full of splendid things, glorious tapestries, china, Chippendale
furniture, but, most remarkable of all, a doll’s house of the last
century, with miniature fairy furniture, exquisitely carved and painted,
a doll trousseau with point lace, and a Liliputian service of plate.
We also went a long drive to Stainborough (Wentworth Castle), through a
country which may be pretty in summer clearness, but which is hideously
black in winter. The house is a great Italian palace, half Queen Anne,
half older, with little temples in the grounds, the building of one of
which is described by Evelyn. Inside there are fine tapestries, and many
pictures of the Stuarts, ascribed to Vandyck, but probably copies. Lady
Harriet Wentworth, who showed us everything herself, gave us the
characteristic of her life when she said “I do so hate the _thraldom_ of
civilisation.” Her stately rooms have no charm for her, and, though they
are so immense, she declares she cannot breathe in them, and she lives
entirely and has all her meals in the conservatory, with a damp, warm,
marshy climate, from which she does not scruple to emerge through the
bitter winds of the Yorkshire wolds (for the conservatory does not join
the house) with nothing extra on. From Bretton I went to Tortworth--Lord
Ducie’s--in Gloucestershire.
* * * * *
JOURNAL.
“_Jan. 11, 1881._--There is a large party here (at Tortworth), but one
forgets all its other elements in dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart. ‘L’esprit
pétille sur son visage.’ Never was there a more marvellous coruscation
of wit and wisdom; and she not merely evades ever saying an ill-natured
thing of any one, but, where there is positively _nothing_ of good to be
said, has some apt line of old poetry or some proverb to bring forward
urging mercy--‘Mercy, so much grander than justice.’
“Last night she wanted to introduce me to Mrs. Grey, an American lady
who is staying here. ‘I cannot do it better,’ she said, ‘than in the
words of Alfred d’Orsay when he brought up Landseer to me, saying,
“Here, Mrs. Stewart, is Landseer, who can do everything better than he
can paint,”--so here, Mrs. Grey, is Mr. Hare, who can do everything
better than he can write.’
“To-day, at luncheon, Mrs. Stewart talked much of Paris, and of her
intercourse with a French physician there. Dr. ---- spoke to her of the
happy despatch, and unhesitatingly allowed that when he saw a patient
condemned to hopeless suffering, he practised it. ‘But of course you
insist on the acquiescence both of the patients and of their families,’
said Mrs. Stewart. ‘_Never_,’ shouted Dr. ----. ‘I should be a mean sneak
indeed if I waited for _that_.’
“She talked much of George Sand and of her journey to Italy, from which
three books resulted, _her’s_, ‘Elle et Lui:’ _his_, ‘Lui et Elle,’ and
‘Lettres d’un Voyageur.’
“She said his was most horrible.
“Afterwards Lord ---- was in a box at the opera in Paris with a number of
other young men. There was a knock at the door, and George Sand came in.
‘Il y a place pour moi?’--‘Certainly,’ they said. By-and-by one of them
inquired, ‘Et Musset?’--‘Oh, il voyage en Italie,’ she replied.
Presently the door opened, and a man came in--haggard, dishevelled, worn
to a degree. It was Musset. He shook hands with one and other of the
young men. ‘Et pas un mot pour moi?’ said George Sand. ‘Non,’ he
exclaimed. ‘Je vous haïs, je vous deteste! c’est que vous avez tué le
bonheur de ma vie.’
“Mrs. Stewart talked of the great want of appreciation of Byron--of his
wonderful satire, evinced by the lines in the ‘Age of Bronze’ on Marie
Louise and Wellington: of his philosophy, for which she cited the lines
on Don Quixote: of his marvellous condensation and combination, for
which she repeated those on the burning of Moscow.
“She also talked of Trollope’s novels, and said how Trollope had told
her of the circumstances which led to the death of Mrs. Proudie. He had
gone up to write at the round table in the library at the Athenaeum, and
spread his things all over it. It was early in the morning, and there is
seldom any one there at that time. On this occasion, however, two
country clergymen were sitting on either side of the fire reading one of
his own books: after a time they began to talk about them. ‘It is a
great pity Trollope does not get some fresh characters,’ said one.
‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘one gets so tired of meeting the same people
again and again, especially of Mrs. Proudie.’ Then Trollope got up, and
planting himself on the rug between them with his back to the fire,
said, ‘Gentlemen, I do not think it would be honest to listen to you
talking about my books any more, without telling you that I am the
victim; but I will add that I quite agree with what you have been
saying, and that I will give you my word of honour that Mrs. Proudie
shall die in the very next book I write.’”
* * * * *
“_Jan. 12._--Dr. Asa Grey, who is here, a Professor of Harvard
University, is one of the most famous botanists living; but he is also a
very charming person. Lowell describes how his
‘indefatigable hours
Have been as gaily innocent
And fragrant as his flowers.’[352]
“Mrs. Stewart talked of Madame Jerome Bonaparte, _née_ Paterson--her
beauty, her cleverness, her father to whom she always wrote of her
_succès de société_, looking down upon him; but he could always avenge
himself; he could always write to her, ‘My dear Betsy.’ ‘She would tell
him how she had been received at this court and at that, and then would
come his answer with “My dear Betsy.” Oh, it was a terrible revenge.’
“She talked of the society of her youth, when it was real society, for
people were never in a hurry. ‘One of the marked figures then was Lady
Cork,[353] who, after eighty, always dressed in white, with a little
white pulled bonnet and a gold-headed stick. Another, whom you are none
of you old enough to remember, was Lady Morgan, a little old lady, who
used to rouge up to the eyes. M. Fonblanque--he was the editor of the
_Examiner_--used to say, “She is just a spark of hell-fire, and is soon
going back to her native element.”
“‘I wonder,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘what has become of an early picture
which I remember of Leighton’s. A lady went to all the great artists in
London to get them to paint a dream of hers, and they refused, and
Leighton, who was quite a young man, undertook it. She dreamt that she
had died, and that she had gone up--up to Christ, and that He had turned
her back, and she said, “Why, Lord?” and He replied, “Because your work
on earth is not yet done.”
“‘Leighton painted the Saviour in a glory of yellow light, and the woman
being turned back by Him.’
“This reminiscence led to one of a different kind from Mr. Ashley
Ponsonby.
“‘Creswick the actor was once at a dinner where Irving absorbed all the
conversation and allowed no one else to speak. At last he could stand it
no longer, and turning round to his next neighbour, said, “I had such an
extraordinary dream last night.” Of course, the whole party were
attention at once.’
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I dreamt that I was dead, and that I went up to the
gates of heaven and knocked at them. ‘Who are you?’ said St. Peter. ‘I
am Mr. Creswick.’--‘What, Creswick the Academician?’--‘No, Creswick the
actor.’--‘Oh, then I can’t let you in here; we don’t admit any actors
here,’ said St. Peter, and he turned me away. Dreadfully crestfallen, I
went and sat down under a juniper-tree, and watched other people
arriving at the gates. Many of my friends came and were let in. Then I
took heart and went and knocked again, and when St. Peter said again
that I must go away, for he could not admit any actors, I said, ‘But
really that is not the case, for you have let in Mr. Irving.’--‘That is
true,’ said St. Peter, ‘but--he _was no actor_.’”
“‘Take care,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘or you will become that most dreadful
of all things, a self-observant valetudinarian. I was once in the house
with a lady, who, after talking of nothing else for an hour, said, “I
won’t speak of my own health, for, when I was young, a dear old wise and
judicious woman said to me, ‘When anybody asks you how you are, always
say you are very well, for nobody cares.’”
“‘Many people fall into sin,’ said Mrs. Stewart, ‘merely because they
are tired of the monotony of innocence.’
“‘He was very fallible,’ she said, ‘and yet capable of becoming that
greatest of all things--a good man.’
“‘I think it was a bishop who said, “Most people now go to seek their
ancestors at the Jardin des Plantes; for my part, I am content with the
Garden of Eden.”’
“‘Mr. Pigott is a finished critic, but with the innocence of a child
picking daisies.’