of my time was given to “The Gurneys of Earlham,” which gave me plenty
of very hard and anxious work. I could not help feeling, as I attacked
the mines and mountains of self-introspection in the form of religious
journals which each one of the Gurney brothers and sisters left behind
them, how unsuited I was for the task, how little I could enter into
their feelings. Indeed Catherine Vaughan had written to me--“You are
unworthy even to unfasten the shoe-latchets of those saints,” and I
quite agreed with her. Still, into the beauty of their _actions_, of
their devoted and unselfish lives, I could fully enter, and when the
peculiar shibboleth of those times is sifted from their words, they said
a great deal that was most beautiful and touching. The work has brought
me into contact with many good people. And the Gurneys are still, as
they were in the early days of Earlham, most liberal to all who do not
agree with them, if only they are trying to follow the same Lord and
Saviour--the dearest friend of the Gurneys of old time, and I think of
most of those of present date.
At Christmas I was with the Halifaxes.
* * * * *
_To_ W. H. MILLIGAN.
“_Hickleton, Dec. 28, 1894._--Can it be I? I say to myself, when I am
called in pitch darkness in these winter mornings, and hurry in the dawn
through the still dark shrubberies to the brilliantly lighted church,
where, amid clouds of incense and the chanted salutation of the Blessed
Sacrament, I receive ‘the mass,’ kneeling under the shadow of a great
crucifix. Then, after breakfast, there is matins, what we should call
early morning service, at which there are few worshippers; but when it
is over, and you think you are going away, not a bit of it; there is a
sound like the sea rushing in, and instantly the church is
filled--thronged with people--and these come, not to receive the
Sacrament, but to adore it! Charlie Halifax says, ‘How strangely things
come round. My uncle, a lawyer--who had his home here with my father and
mother, and died when I was five years old--used to be a great friend of
Newman and Lord Devon, and others who thought as they did, and his
beautiful spiritual letters and his religious sonnets remain to us. He
longed for what he thought was the impossible; he longed to have it
here, and now here it is. At that time there was only celebration here
four times in a year; he never hoped it could be otherwise, and yet what
he so longed for--what I, too, so longed for as a boy--has been all
realised.
“‘Do you know that when Miss Margot Tennant (Mrs. Asquith) said to
Jowett, “What do you _really_ think of God?” he said nothing for a
moment, and then answered, “I think all that signifies is what God
really thinks of me.”’
“I have had many delightful talks with Charlie. When I am with him I
feel imperceptibly lifted heavenwards. I do not agree with him in
everything, but oh! I _love_ him always. With him, as indeed with every
one else, even where I most disagree, I am careful never to speak
slightingly of anything he holds sacred. If it made any difference at
all, it would only cause him to hold the cloak tighter.”
* * * * *
“_Hatfield, Jan. 30._--After a visit to Lord and Lady Knightley at
Fawsley, in bitter cold and snow, I came here to meet a huge
party--Cadogans, Iveaghs, Hampdens, and very many others. Most of the
company have skated in the morning, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the
equably warm passages and rooms of this immense house. Arthur Balfour is
here, with charming manners, quite unspoilt. He stays in his room and
does not appear till luncheon-time, so getting many quiet hours for
work. Lord Warkworth was here for one night, a most promising youth, who
breaks the silence of the Percies. Lord Rowton also is here, and most
agreeable in his natural ripple of pleasant talk. He says that he once
asked Disraeli what was the most remarkable, the most self-sustained and
powerful sentence he knew. Dizzy paused for a moment, and then said,
‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’
“Disraeli used to say that, _apropos_ of history, he should always
remember going to a breakfast at Lord Houghton’s, and, as the door
opened, hearing the loud voice of Bunsen exclaim, ‘Modern history! why,
modern history begins with Abraham!’
“He described how the Duke of Wellington would always arrange everything
for a battle--he did before Waterloo--and then would sleep soundly for
an hour. ‘How could you sleep so soundly?’--‘Why, I had arranged
everything.’
“Lady Salisbury said that her _masseuse_ went constantly to the Queen.
She told Lady Salisbury that what appeared to be lameness in the Queen
was merely that her feet were too small to support the weight of her
body. Her hands are those of a little child.
“She gave the most graphic description of an awful storm she encountered
in going to S. Tropez. ‘The rivers, you know, generally flow into the
sea, but then the sea flowed into the rivers: it was such a reversion
of things.’
“Describing his great-grandfather, Lord Salisbury said he swore so
horribly that he used to be called ‘Blastus, the king’s chamberlain.’
“I said how one of the things I most wished to see, Lady Anne
Grimston’s[529] tomb, was in Hertfordshire. ‘Oh,’ said Lady Salisbury,
‘I will drive you there in my sledge;’ and so she did, across the
snow-laden roads. It is the most extraordinary sight. Lady Anne Grimston
was a sceptic, and when she lay upon her deathbed in 1717, her family
were most anxious to make her believe in a future state, but she
wouldn’t. ‘It is as likely,’ she said, ‘that I should rise again as that
a tree should grow out of my body when I’m dead.’
“Lady Anne Grimston died, and was buried in Tewin churchyard, and over
her grave was placed a great altar-tomb, with a huge massive stone slab
on the top of it. In a year or two, this slab showed signs of internal
combustion, and out of the middle of it--out of the very middle of
it--grew a tree (some say six different trees, but one could not see in
winter), and increased, till, in the time which has elapsed, it has
become one of the largest trees in Hertfordshire. Not only that, but the
branches of the tree have writhed about the tomb like the feelers of an
octopus, have seized it, and lifted it into the air, so that the very
base of the tomb is high up now, one with the tree or trees, so are
they welded together. Then a railing was put round the tomb, and the
tree has seized upon it in the same way, has twisted the strong iron
rails like pack-thread, and they are to be seen tangled and twirled high
in the branches of the tree. Another railing has now been put, and the
tree will behave to it just as before.
“If this tree were abroad, it would become the most popular place of
pilgrimage in the world. As it is, thousands visit it--even across the
snow a regular path was worn to it. Tewin churchyard preaches more
sermons than a thousand clergymen.
“‘I have brought back Mr. Hare a most firm believer in a future state,’
said Lady Salisbury as we re-entered the Golden Gallery at Hatfield,
where all the guests were sitting.”
* * * * *
“_London, Feb. 2._--I dined with my two friends, Lewis Gilbertson and
Frank Cookson, who live so happily together in the charming little
canonical house of the former in Amen Court. Gilbertson told me how Mr.
Spooner of Oxford, celebrated for his absence of mind, was one evening
found wandering disconsolately about the streets of Greenwich. ‘I’ve
been here hours,’ he said. ‘I had an important appointment to meet some
one at “The Dull Man, Greenwich,” and I can’t find it anywhere; and the
odd thing is no one seems to have heard of it.’ Late at night he went
back to Oxford. ‘You idiot!’ exclaimed his wife; ‘why, it was the Green
Man, Dulwich, you had to go to.’”
* * * * *
_To_ HERBERT VAUGHAN OF LLANGOEDMORE.
“_April 21._--My visit at Elton has been most pleasant, Lord and Lady
Carysfort so kind, the house a climax of comfort, and the party one of
old friends, Knightleys, Peels, Lady Tollemache, and beautiful Lady
Claude Hamilton the elder. Then the gardens and groves are quite
beautiful, especially at this time--
‘When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.’[530]
But what I really cared for most was that I accomplished my
long-wished-for pilgrimage to Little Gidding.
“It is a most attractive spot, a bosky hollow in the uplands, with a
pool and an oak-wood. The monastic house is gone, but probably stood
where a farmhouse stands now, and whence the raised path which led to
the still existing chapel is yet visible in the turf. An ancient
box-tree with a stem like an oak, contemporary with the old house,
stands on the grass. An old contemporary book in the library at Elton
had made me even more familiar than ‘John Inglesant’ had done with
Nicholas Ferrar, his sister--‘a tall ancient gentlewoman about eighty
years of age, she being matron of the house’--and with Mrs. Collet and
her sixteen children, including the seven sisters named after the
Christian virtues--the Patient, the Cheerful, the Affectionate, the
Submiss, the Moderate, and the Charitable--who spent their home hours in
making such wonderful books of Christian Harmonies.
“To me the chapel was of most touching interest, backed by the
oak-wood--‘the fine grove and sweet walks’ which the little book
describes. A broad paved path leads to the door, but in the midst of the
path rises a high grey altar-tomb--Nicholas Ferrar’s, I suppose--and on
its paving-stones are inscriptions over graves, in which you may still
make out the oft-repeated names of Ferrar and Collet. Inside, the chapel
is lined by stalls of Charles I. date, with round-headed canopies and
divided by oak pillars. Below is the open space where the sisterhood,
who kept the six canonical hours, ‘prayed publicly three times a day
after the order of the Booke of Common Prayer,’ and where the writer of
my little book himself saw ‘the mother-matron with all her traine, which
were her daughters and daughters’ daughters, who, with four sonnes,
kneeled all the while in the body of the half-space, all being in black
gownes and round Monmouth capps, save one of the daughters, who was in a
friar’s grey gowne.’ There are brasses on one side of the chancel arch
to John Ferrar, 1637, and John Ferrar, 1719; and on the other side to
Susanna Collet, daughter of Nicholas Ferrar, who ‘had eight sons and
eight daughters, and who died at the age of 76;’ below this is a brass
to ‘Amy, wife of John Ferrar, 1702.’ And within is the chancel, where,
with the sacrament, Inglesant received stillness and peace unspeakable,
and life and light and sweetness filled his mind; where in the misty
autumn sunlight and the sweeping autumn wind, heaven itself seemed to
have opened to him.’
“There were many minor relics of those who did not wish it, but were
called ‘the Nuns of Gidding’--an embossed book-cover of their
gold-thread work, and tapestry cases to hold the sacred books; and in
the farmhouse some old church plate, given to Nicholas Ferrar, and a
chalice inscribed ‘What Sir Edmund Sandys bequeathed to the remembrance
of friendship, his friende hath consecrated to the honour of God’s
service,’ and on the handle--‘For the church of Little Gidding of
Huntington Shire.’
“The owner of the property came to dinner at Elton, and told me that
Charles Fitzwilliam, Lord Fitzwilliam’s brother, was lost many years ago
in the wilds of America. When at the very last gasp, he saw the lights
of a farmhouse, to which he made his way. The woman of the house
received him most kindly, warmed and dried him, and made him some tea.
‘It will do you good; it’s Gidding tea: I had it over from
Gidding.’--‘What! Gidding in Huntingdonshire.’--‘Yes.’--‘Why, that’s
where I come from: I’m a Fitzwilliam!’”
* * * * *
_To_ W. H. MILLIGAN.
“_July 20, 1895._--I have come away from London because all that was
interesting in the season seemed to be at an end; but I enjoyed it to
the last, though certainly what I find to delight in would not please
many others. Most of all I have liked my quiet writing-table at the
Athenæum, and the silence, not the society, of the club, where no one,
except Lord Acton and myself, seems to work in the mornings. Then, after
two o’clock, I never go back, but see people for the rest of the day.
The garden-parties make this delightful, and I had charming afternoons
at Osterley, at Roehampton, and at Sion, where the brilliant groups of
people are so picturesque under the great cedar-trees. It was a great
pleasure once more, to be welcomed to Holland House, and to find how
much those who possess it appreciate its great interest and charm. Once
a week the writing-time was broken into, and I went with drawing-parties
to the garden at Lambeth, to Waltham Abbey, and to the roof of the
Record Office, whence we tried to paint St. Paul’s and all the satellite
City churches reared up against an opal sky. In the evenings there was
less of interest, and a great party at Devonshire House left more to
recollect than the daily dinners, with little real conversation. I think
it is Bacon who says, ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a
gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is not
love.’ The last day, however, a dinner at Lady Audrey Buller’s was most
pleasant. It was in honour of her cousin Captain Townshend, the hero of
Chitral, who gave me a most graphic description of lying all day smoking
behind a barrier of earth, with a spyhole through which he could fire at
any man who showed himself, hearing the thud of the return shot against
his barrier afterwards. Returning to England, he was shocked to find no
one but boys at the balls--‘boys who shake hands with a movement like
that of kangaroos.’ I sat by ---- the widow of the historian, who talked
of other historians, especially of Mr. Freeman--how he had the head of a
Jupiter on the body of a gorilla: how he did not eat, but devour; it was
no use to put anything less than a joint before him: how scenery never
gave him the power of realising an event which he could not read of. One
day at dinner Mr. Parker was within one of him. To him Freeman talked
incessantly across the lady who was next him. At last there was a pause.
The lady thought she would have her innings. ‘It has been very hot
weather lately, Mr. Freeman,’ she said. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said
Freeman. ‘Parker, you were saying,’ &c. His biographer misses all his
characteristics, but errs most in speaking of him as a typical Teuton,
when he was undoubtedly a typical Celt.
“I grumbled very much at being engaged to spend a Sunday in the country
during my London time, but never enjoyed a visit more than that to Mr.
and Mrs. Tower at the Weald, in Essex. It is only seventeen miles from
London, but wild and most beautiful, with glorious trees, a delightful
old house, and a still more delightful walled garden, with the curious
brick chapel of Mary I., a long tank, and an acre of splendid roses. We
ate rather too much and long, but the company was charming. I went and
came back with young Lord Abinger, whom I like particularly.
‘How delightful the elections are, and the blatant, self-seeking
hypocritical Radicals getting the worst of it. Do you know Luttrell’s
lines?--
‘Oh, that there might in England be
A duty on Hypocrisy,
A tax on humbug, an excise
On solemn plausibilities.”’
* * * * *
_To_ VISCOUNT HALIFAX.
“_Penrhyn Castle, Sept. 22, 1895._--I left home in the case of one
‘Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco,’[531]
[Illustration: STOKESAY.]
and have much enjoyed my holiday talking-time. How many delightful
people there are in the world. I so seldom see any one I cannot care in
the least about. One side, one aspect, seems unprepossessing, but then,
if one takes the trouble to go round on the other side, one is sure to
find something. Was it not Socrates who said, ‘It is impossible to lead
a quiet life, for that would be to disobey the Deity.’ And I am sure no
one can carry their eyes about with them through a variety of people as
I do, without learning fresh lessons of compensating qualities to be
traced in most, and the uniform case of all in the fight to be fought,
however different the enemies with which each has to contend. I saw no
end of people in Shropshire when I was at Buntingsdale--so familiar in
my long-ago--for Gertrude Percy’s wedding at Hodnet. After that I was
in quieter scenes, but oh! how lovely, on Wenlock Edge, that
eighteen-mile long strip of craggy wooded hill which stretches from
Wenlock to Craven Arms, with such fine views over the rich plain below.
Wenlock Abbey I saw the evening I arrived, with its grand ruin, and the
curious cloistered abbot’s house, so well restored as a residence by the
Milnes-Gaskells. Lutwyche, which Lord and Lady Chetwynd have hired, is a
charming old house in the very centre of all the beauty, and each day we
went to some wonderful old grange, manor, or mansion--Langley, Shipton,
Stokesay, Wilderhope, but I think you would have liked best of all
Pitchford, the gem of old black and white houses, though you would not
have enjoyed as I did the untouched pews of the church, where there is a
gigantic oaken effigy of a thirteenth-century De Pitchford. At Condover
we saw Miss Mary Cholmondeley the authoress,[532] who looks a genius,
which most authoresses I have met do not. Even in conversation, ‘les
gens d’esprit sont bêtes’ is usually as true as possible.
[Illustration: PITCHFORD.]
“Penrhyn Castle has been delightful, and my room, with its exquisite
views over sea and mountains, the most delightful thing in it. Lady
Penrhyn presides over the great place with the calm of perpetual
moonlight: sunlight is left to her beautiful and impulsive
step-daughter Miss Alice (Pennant), who orders out no end of carriages
to take guests up into the hills or wherever they want to go. And of
course I longed to go to Ogwen Bank and Capel Curig, connected with my
mother’s childhood, and more than ever admired these rude savage purple
mountains, which have so much individual character that height is quite
a secondary consideration. Then yesterday we went to that island in the
Menai Straits, where there is an old chapel of great sanctity, to which
Welsh funerals still wind along a narrow causeway, singing their
beautiful hymns as they go.
“Do you know that ‘The Gurneys of Earlham’ is out? You will not like it,
I think, and indeed I feel myself, that Carlyle would be justified in
saying it was ‘a very superfluous book.’ Still, I will anticipate your
asking me, and tell you that, up to its lights, it is not a bad piece of
work. The whole family are a singular instance of unity without
uniformity. While I have worked at the book, I have become irresistibly
and most strongly attracted by such characters as Catherine Gurney and
Richenda Cunningham, though for the great fetish of the family, the
self-opinionated, self-parading, egotistical Joseph John, I never could
have any warm feeling. Yet a descendant of one of his cousins (Lady Fry)
assures me that she was so distressed on hearing of his death in her
childhood, that she pulled down all the blinds of her doll’s house. So
he must have had his attractive points.
“The book is certainly better reading than the earlier memoirs of those
it concerns. Of those memoirs I heard an amusing story the other day.
Mr. Parke of Andover, a great American philosopher and thinker, at one
time quite lost the power of sleep. He said he had long tried all
remedies in vain, but at last found a remedy which never failed. It was
to have a book read to him, the story of a woman’s life. It always took
effect at once, and soothed him into the sweetest slumbers. If he was
nervous, his wife would take the book and begin--‘Elizabeth Fry was
born’--‘But,’ said Mr. Parke, ‘she has begun that book constantly for
two years, and I have never found out where she was born yet, for with
the first words I am in dreamland.’
“Here are two little stories for you. Miss R. told me how the Bishop of
Winchester and the Dean of Windsor were walking together down the street
of Windsor, when they saw a little boy struggling to reach a bell. ‘Why,
you’re not tall enough, my little man; let me ring the bell for you,’
said the Bishop. ‘Yes, if you please, sir,’ said the boy modestly. So
the Bishop gave the bell a good pull. ‘Now then, sir, run like the
devil,’ shrieked the boy, as he made off as hard as he could.
“Little E. L. was very naughty indeed the other day, and not only
scratched her governess, but spit at her. ‘How can you have been so
naughty?’ said her mother, ‘it can only have been the devil who made you
do such a thing.’ ‘Well, perhaps it was the devil who told me to scratch
her,’ replied little E----, ‘but, as for the spitting, it was entirely
my own idea.’”
* * * * *
_To_ W. H. MILLIGAN.
“_Garrowby, Yorkshire, Oct. 4._--The glorious weather which illuminated
Wales continued at Lyme, which was still in the full splendour of summer
flowers. I drew with Lady Newton each day, one day at Prestbury, where
there is a wonderful old Norman mortuary chapel, like those in Brittany.
Mrs. Mitford was at Lyme, and it was a pleasure to talk with her of the
dear Lady Egerton, whom we both so much appreciated, and who preserved
her sunny nature to the last. ‘How sad to see you suffering so!’ said
Mrs. M. to her in her last terrible illness. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but then,
you know, I have _enjoyed every day of my life_.’ Thinking of her, it is
a difficult endeavour to be ‘doux envers la mort,’ as Bossuet said after
Henrietta Maria’s death.
“I went on to flattest Lincolnshire, to Revesby Abbey, to visit my
distant cousin, dear Edward Stanhope’s widow. It is delightful to see
how, by making the effort at once, it is no effort to her now to talk of
him, and indeed he is so often spoken of, that he seems to have a part
still in the family life, and his cheerful grave, like a little garden,
under the east window of the church which he built, has nothing sad. It
is as if he had gone from this room into the next. Yet how delightful he
was, how truly lovable! I was taken, by my urgent desire, to Mavis
Enderby; but it is a little inland village with an insignificant church,
which could by no possibility have given any tidal warning; so I suppose
Jean Ingelow only took the name[533] because of its musical sound. On
the way we passed some grassy mounds. ‘What are those?’--‘The remains of
Bolingbroke--of the castle of Bolingbroke.’ How Arthur Stanley would
have loved them; yet they are amongst the things which are worth seeing
but not worth going to see. Another day we went by the remains of the
old house of Eresby, which gave its name to Willoughby d’Eresby, to
visit the grand tombs of the Willoughbys at Spilsby. They are all of
alabaster, the last representing a mother who died in childbirth, with
the infant which cost her life by her side in its cradle. Sir John
Franklin was born at Spilsby, and he and his two brothers have monuments
in the church. Their father was a small farmer close by, and when his
farm failed, he settled in the village itself, and kept its shop,
grocery on one side the door, drapery on the other. And, coming from
thence, John Franklin became the most famous of those Arctic travellers
whom Wilkie Collins aptly describes as ‘the men who go nowhere and find
nothing.’ In this drive we passed by Keil, where the church tower had
suddenly collapsed. ‘Well, now, how was it? was it a hurricane, or did
the soil give way, or what?’ said Mrs. Egerton to the sexton, who for a
minute answered nothing, and then, ‘Well, mum, ‘twere this way; her just
squatted and settled.’
“The house at Revesby was full of interesting objects. Amongst them was
a magnificent repeater watch which belonged to the old Lord
Stanhope.[534] One night, when he was out late, a man pounced upon him
with pistols and ‘Your money or your life.’ Always imperturbable, Lord
Stanhope replied very slowly, ‘My friend, I have no money with
me.’--‘No,’ said the robber, ‘but you have your watch; I must have your
watch.’--‘My friend, this watch was given to me by one very dear to me,
and I value it extremely. It is considered to be worth £100. Now, if you
will trust me, I will this evening place a hundred-pound note in the
hollow of that tree.’ And the highwayman trusted him and Lord Stanhope
placed the note there.