A New Medley of Memories

Oswald Hunter Blair

A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES

BY THE

RIGHT REV. SIR DAVID HUNTER-BLAIR

BT., O.S.B., M.A.

TITULAR ABBOT OF DUNFERMLINE

WITH PORTRAIT

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD & CO.
1922

[All rights reserved]

TO THE
MASTER AND SCHOLARS
OF
SAINT BENET'S HALL, OXFORD,
IN MEMORY OF
TEN HAPPY YEARS.

FOREWORD

Some kindly critics of my Medley of Memories, and not a few private correspondents (most of them unknown to me) have been good enough to express a lively hope that I would continue my reminiscences down to a later date than the year 1903, when I closed the volume with my jubilee birthday.

It is in response to this wish that I have here set down some of my recollections of the succeeding decade, concluding with the outbreak of the Great War.

One is rather "treading on eggshells" when printing impressions of events and persons so near our own time. But I trust that there is nothing unkind in these more recent memories, any more than in the former. There should not be; for I have experienced little but kindness during a now long life; and I approach the Psalmist's limit of days with only grateful sentiments towards the many friends who have helped to make that life a happy as well as a varied one.

DAVID O. HUNTER-BLAIR, O.S.B.

S. Paulo, Brazil,
March, 1922.

CONTENTS

PAGE
CHAPTER I.—1903-1904.
The Premier Duke—Oxford Chancellorship—A Silver Jubilee—In
Canterbury Close—Hyde Park Oratory—Oxford under Water—"Twopence
each" at Christ Church—Church Music—Gregorian Centenary in
Rome—Pope Pius X.—Pilgrims and Autograph—Cradle of the
Benedictine Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [1]
CHAPTER II.—1904.
"Sermons from Stones"—Alcestis at Bradfield—Whimsical
Texts—Old Masters at Ushaw—A Mozart-Wagner Festival—Bismarck
and William II.—"Longest Word" Competition—Medal-week at
St. Andrews—Oxford Rhodes Scholars—Liddell and Scott—Lord
Rosebery at the Union—Oxford Portraits—Wytham
Abbey—Christmas in Bute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [19]
CHAPTER III.—1905.
A "Catholic Demonstration"—Boy-prodigies—Spring Days in
Naples—"C.-B." at Oxford—Medical Sceptics—Blenheim
Hospitality—A Scoto-Irish Wedding—Dunskey
Transformed—Lunatics up-to-date—Eton War Memorial—Four
Thousand Guests at Arundel—At Exton Park—Abbotsford and
Blairquhan—Lothair's Bride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [37]
CHAPTER IV.—1905-1906.
Modern Gothic—Contrasts in South Wales—Chamberlain's Last
Speech—A Catholic Dining-club—Lovat Scouts' Memorial—A Tory
débâcle—Hampshire Marriages—On the Côte d'Azur—Three
Weddings—An Old Irish Peer—Guernsey in June—A Coming of Age
on the Cotswolds—The Warwick Pageant—Bank Holiday at
Scarborough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [56]
CHAPTER V.—1906-1907.
Melrose and Westminster—Newman Memorial Church—The Evil
Eye—Catholic Scholars at Oxford—Grace before Meat—A
Literary Dinner—A Jamaica Tragedy—An Abbatial
Blessing—Deaths of Oxford friends—Robinson Ellis—A Genteel
Watering-place—Visit to Dover—Pageants at Oxford and
Bury—Hugh Benson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [74]
CHAPTER VI.—1907-1908.
Benedictine Honours at Oxford—Anecdotes from Sir
Hubert—Everingham and Bramham—Early Rising—Mass in a
Deer-forest—A Bishop's Visiting-cards—A Miniature College—Our
New Chancellor—Bodley's Librarian—Dean Burgon—A Welsh
Bishop—Illness and Convalescence—H.M.S. Victory . . . . . . . [94]

CHAPTER VII.—1908.
Miss Broughton at Oxford—Notable Trees—An Infantile
Rest-cure—Equestrians from Italy—"The Colours"—A
Parson's Statistics—Two Anxious Mammas—"Let us Kill
Something"—Scottish Dessert—A Highland Bazaar—I Resign
Mastership of Hall—Notes on Newman—Scriptural
Heraldry—Myres Macership—Scots Catholic Judge—At a
château in Picardy—Excursions from Oxford—St. Andrew's
Day at Cardiff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [113]
CHAPTER VIII.—1908-1909.
Christmas at Beaufort—Annus mirabilis—Kenelm Vaughan—A
"Heathen Turk"—Sven Hedin—Centenary of Darwin—Oxford
and Louvain—Hugh Cecil on the House of Commons—Arundel
itself again—The Bridegroom's Father weeps—Cambridge
Fisher Society—Bodleian Congestion—Shackleton at Albert
Hall—Oakamoor, Faber, and Pugin—Welsh Pageant—Hampton
Court—Father Hell and Mr. Dams!—A Bishop's
Portrait—Gleann Mor Gathering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [132]
CHAPTER IX.—1909-1910.
The White Garden at Beaufort—Andrew Lang—A Holy Well—The
new Ladycross—"My terrible Great-uncle!"—Off to
Brazil—-King's Birthday on Board—-The New City
Beautiful—Arrival at S. Paulo—-An Abbey
Rebuilding—Cosmopolitan State and City—College of S.
Bento—Stray Englishmen—Progressive Paulistas—Education in
Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [151]
CHAPTER X.—1910.
Provost Hornby—Christmas in Brazil—Architecture in S.
Paulo—The Snake-farm—Guests at the Abbey—End of the
Isolation of Fort Augustus—A Benedictine Festival—Sinister
Italians—Death of Edward VII.—Brazilian Funerals—Popular
Devotion—"Fradesj estrangeiros"—Football in the
Tropics—Homeward Voyage—Santos and Madeira—Sir John Benn . . [170]
CHAPTER XI.—1910-1911.
A Wiesbaden Eye Klinik—The Rhine in Rain—Cologne and
Brussels—Wedding in the Hop-Country—The New Departure at
Fort Augustus—St. Andrew's without Angus—Oxford
Again—Highland Marriage at Oratory—One Eye versus Two—Cambridge versus Oxford—-A Question of Colour—Ex-King
Manuel—A Great Church at Norwich—Ave Verum in the
Kirk—Fort Augustus Post-bag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [189]
CHAPTER XII.—1911.
Monks and Salmon—FitzAlan Chapel—April on Thames-side—My
sacerdotal Jubilee—Kinemacolor—Apparition at an
Abbey—St. Lucius—Faithful Highlanders—Hay Centenary—Nuns
for S. Paulo—A Brief Marriage Ceremony—Pagan
Mass-music—Seventeen New Cardinals—Doune Castle—A Quest
for our Abbey Church—Great Coal Strike—at Stonyhurst and
Ware—Katherine Howard—Twentieth-Century Chinese—An
Anglo-Italian Abbey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [208]

CHAPTER XIII.—1912-1913.
A Concert for Cripples—Queen Amélie—May at Aix-les-Bains—A
Sample Savoyards—Hautecombe—A "Picture of the Year"—A
Benedictine O.T.C.—Pugin's "Blue Pencil"—My nomination
as Prior—Fort Augustus and the Navy—Work in the
Monastery—Ladies in the Enclosure—A Bishop's Jubilee—A
Modern Major Pendennis—My Election to Abbacy—Installation
Ceremonies—Empress Eugénie at Farnborough—A Week at Monte
Cassino—Fatiguing Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [227]
CHAPTER XIV.—1913-1914.
St Anselm's, Rome—Election of a Primate—My Uncle's
Grave—Milan and Maredsous—Canterbury Revisited—An Oratorian
Festival—Poetical Bathos—A Benedictine Chapter—King of
Uganda at Fort Augustus—Threefold Work of our Abbey—Funeral
of Bishop Turner—Bute Chapel at Westminster—A
Patriarchal Lay-brother—Abbot Gasquet a Cardinal—Corpus
Christi at Arundel—Eucharistic Congress at Cardiff—The Great
War—Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [246]
APPENDIX I. Novissima Verba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [267] II. Darwin's Credo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [269]
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [271]

A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES

CHAPTER I

1903-1904

I take up again the thread of these random recollections in the autumn of 1903, the same autumn in which I kept my jubilee birthday at St. Andrews. I went from there successively to the Herries' at Kinharvie, the Ralph Kerrs at Woodburn, near Edinburgh, and the Butes at Mountstuart, meeting, curiously enough, at all three places Norfolk and his sister, Lady Mary Howard—though it was not so curious after all, as the Duke was accustomed to visit every autumn his Scottish relatives at these places, as well as the Loudouns in their big rather out-at-elbows castle in Ayrshire. He had no taste at all either for shooting, fishing, or riding, or for other country pursuits such as farming, forestry, or the like; but he made himself perfectly happy during these country house visits. The least exacting of guests, he never required to be amused, contenting himself with a game of croquet (the only outdoor game he favoured), an occasional long walk, and a daily romp with his young relatives, the children of the house, who were all devoted to him. He read the newspapers perfunctorily, but seldom opened a book: he knew and cared little for literature, science, or art, with the single exception of architecture, in which he was keenly interested. The most devout of Catholics, he was nothing of an ecclesiologist: official and hereditary chief of the College of Arms, he was profoundly uninterested in heraldry, whether practically or historically:[[1]] the head of the nobility of England, he was so little of a genealogist that he was never at pains to correct the proof—annually submitted to him as to others—of the preposterous details of his pedigree as set forth in the pages of "Burke." I seem to be describing an ignoramus; but the interesting thing was that the Duke, with all his limitations, was really nothing of the kind. He could, and did, converse on a great variety of subjects in a very clear-headed and intelligent way; there was something engaging about his utter unpretentiousness and deference to the opinions of others; and he had mastered the truth that the secret of successful conversation is to talk about what interests the other man and not what interests oneself. No one could, in fact, talk to the Duke much, or long, without getting to love him; and every one who came into contact with him in their several degrees, from princes and prelates and politicians to cabmen and crossing-sweepers, did love him. "His Grace 'as a good 'eart, that's what 'e 'as," said the old lady who used to keep the crossing nearly opposite Norfolk House, and sat against the railings with her cat and her clean white apron (I think she did her sweeping by deputy); "he'll never cross the square, whatever 'urry 'e's in, without saying a kind word to me." One sees him striding down Pall Mall in his shabby suit, one gloveless hand plucking at his black beard, the other wagging in constant salutation of passing friends, and his kind brown eyes peering from under the brim of a hat calculated to make the late Lord Hardwicke turn in his grave. A genuine man—earnest, simple, affable, sincere, and yet ducal too; with a certain grave native dignity which sat strangely well on him, and on which it was impossible ever to presume. Panoplied in such dignity when occasion required, as in great public ceremonies, our homely little Duke played his part with curious efficiency; and it was often remarked that in State pageants the figure of the Earl Marshal was always one of the most striking in the splendid picture.

The only country seat which the premier Duke owned besides Arundel Castle was Derwent Hall, a fine old Jacobean house in the Derwent valley, on the borders of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. The Duke had lent this place for some years past to his only brother as his country residence (he later bequeathed it to him by will); and herein this same autumn I paid a pleasant visit to Lord and Lady Edmund Talbot, on my way south to Oxford. In London I went to see the rich and sombre chapel of the Holy Souls just finished in Westminster Cathedral, at the expense of my old friend Mrs. Walmesley (née Weld Blundell). The Archbishop's white marble cathedra was in course of erection in the sanctuary, and preparations were going forward for his enthronement.[[2]] Eight immense pillars of onyx were lying on the floor, and the great painted rood leaned against the wall. I was glad to see some signs of progress.

Our principal domestic interest, on reassembling at Oxford for Michaelmas Term, was the prospect of exchanging the remote and incommodious semi-detached villa, in which our Benedictine Hall had been hitherto housed, for the curious mansion near Folly Bridge, built on arches above the river, "standing in its own grounds," as auctioneers say (it could not well stand in any one else's!), and known to most Oxonians as Grandpont House. Besides the Thames bubbling and swirling at its foundations, it had a little lake of its own, and was (except by a very circuitous détour) accessible only by punt. Rather fascinating! we all thought; but when the pundits from Ampleforth Abbey came to inspect, the floods happened to be out everywhere, and our prospective Hall looked so like Noah's Ark floating on a waste of waters, that they did not "see their way"[[3]] to approve of either the site or the house.

Oxford was preoccupied at this time with the question of who was to succeed to the Chancellorship vacant by the death of Lord Salisbury. I attended a meeting of the Conservative caucus summoned to discuss the matter at the President's lodgings at St. John's. These gatherings were generally amusing, as the President (most unbending of old Tories) used to make occasional remarks of a disconcerting kind. On this occasion he treated us to some reminiscences of the great Chancellors of the past, adding, "I look round the ranks of prominent men in the country, including cabinet ministers and ex-ministers, and I see few if any men of outstanding or even second-rate ability"—the point of the joke being that next to him was seated the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, whose presence and counsel had been specially invited. The names of Lords Goschen, Lansdowne, Rosebery, and Curzon were mentioned, the first-named being evidently the favourite. "Scholar, statesman, financier, educationalist," I wrote of him in the Westminster Gazette a day or two later, "a distinguished son of Oriel, versatile, prudent and popular.... The Fates seem to point to Lord Goschen as the one who shall sit in the vacant chair."[[4]]

Another less famous Oriel man, my old friend Mgr. Tylee, was in Oxford this autumn, on his annual visitation of his old college, and came to see me several times. He gravely assured me that he had "preached his last sermon in India"; but this was a false alarm. The good monsignore was as great a "farewellist" as Madame Patti or the late Mr. Sims Reeves, and at least three years later I heard that he was meditating another descent on Hindostan; though why he went there, or why he stayed away, I imagine few people either knew or cared.[[5]]

We were all interested this term in the award of the senior Kennicott Hebrew scholarship to a Catholic, Frederic Ingle of St. John's, who had already, previous to his change of creed, gained the Pusey and Ellerton Prize, and other honours in Scriptural subjects. One could not help wondering whether it came as a little surprise to the Anglican examiners to find that they had awarded the scholarship to a young man studying for the Catholic priesthood at the Collegio Beda in Rome, an institution specially founded for the ecclesiastical education of converts to the Roman Church. The "Hertford" this year, by the way, the Blue Ribbon of Latin scholarship, was also held by a Catholic, a young Jesuit of Pope's Hall—Cyril Martindale, the most brilliant scholar of his time at Oxford, who carried off practically every classical distinction the university had to offer. The "Hertford" was won next year (1904) by another Catholic, Wilfrid Greene, scholar of Christ Church.

I celebrated in 1903 not only my fiftieth birthday, but the silver jubilee of my entrance into the Benedictine Order; and I went to keep the latter interesting anniversary at Belmont Priory in Herefordshire, where twenty-five years before (December 8, 1878) I had received the novice's habit. Two or three of the older members of the community, who had been my fellow-novices in those far-off days, were still in residence there; and from them and all I received a warm welcome and many kind congratulations. These jubilees, golden and silver, are apt to make one moralize; and some words from an unknown or forgotten source were in my mind at this time:

Such dates are milestones on the grey, monotonous road of our lives: they are eddying pools in the stream of time, in which the memory rests for a moment, like the whirling leaf in the torrent, until it is caught up anew, and carried on by the resistless current towards the everlasting ocean.

Soon after the end of term I made my way northwards, to spend Christmas, as so many before, with the Lovats at Beaufort, where the topic of interest was the engagement, just announced, of Norfolk to his cousin, elder daughter of Lord Herries. We played our traditional game of croquet in the sunshine of Christmas Day, and spent a pleasant fortnight, of which, however, the end was saddened for me by the premature death of my niece's husband, Charles Orr Ewing, M.P. They had only just finished the beautiful house they had built on the site of my old home, Dunskey, and were looking forward to happy years there.

I was at Arundel for a few days after New Year, and found the Duke very busy with improvements, inspecting new gardening operations, and so on; "and after all," he said, "some one will be coming by-and-by who may not like it!" From Arundel I dawdled along the south coast to Canterbury, and paid a delightful visit to my old friends Canon and Mrs. Moore at their charming residence (incorporating the ancient monastic guest-house) in the close. I spent hours exploring the glorious cathedral—the most interesting (me judice) if not the most beautiful in England. The close, too, really is a close, with a watchman singing out in the small hours, "Past two o'clock—misty morning—a-all's we-e-ell!" and the enclosure so complete that though we could hear the Bishop of Dover's dinner-bell on the other side of the wall, my host and hostess had to drive quite a long way round, through the mediæval gate-house, to join the episcopal dinner-party. Their schoolboy son invited me that night to accompany the watchman (an old greybeard sailor with a Guy Fawkes lantern, who looked himself like a relic of the Middle Ages) in his eleven o'clock peregrination round the cathedral. A weird experience! the vast edifice totally dark[[6]] save for the flickering gleam of the single candle, in whose wavering light pillars and arches and chantries and tombs peered momentarily out of the gloom like petrified ghosts.

I saw other interesting things at Canterbury, notably St. Martin's old church (perhaps the most venerable in the kingdom),[[7]] and left for London, where, walking through Hyde Park on a sunshiny Sunday morning, I lingered awhile to watch the perfervid stump-orators wasting their eloquence on the most listless of audiences. "Come along, Mary Ann, let's give one of the other blokes a turn," was the prevailing sentiment; but I did manage to catch one gem from a Free Thought spouter, whose advocacy of post mortem annihilation was being violently assailed by one of his hearers. "Do you mean to tell me," shouted the heckler, "that when I am dead I fade absolutely away and am done with for ever?"—to which query came the prompt reply, "I sincerely hope so, sir!"[[8]] Lord Cathcart (a great frequenter of the Park), to whom I repeated the above repartee, amused me by quoting an unconsciously funny phrase he had heard from a labour orator near the Marble Arch: "What abaht the working man? The working man is the backbone of this country—and I tell you strite, that backbone 'as got to come to the front!"[[9]]

I left Paddington for Oxford in absolutely the blackest fog I had ever seen: it turned brown at Baling, grey at Maidenhead, and at Didcot the sun was shining quite cheerfully. I found the floods almost unprecedentedly high, and the "loved city" abundantly justifying its playful sobriquet of "Spires and Ponds." A Catholic freshman, housed in the ground floor of Christ Church Meadow-buildings, described to me his dismay at the boldness and voracity of the rats which invaded his rooms from the meadows when the floods were out. The feelings of Lady Bute when she visited Oxford about this time, and found her treasured son—who had boarded at a private tutor's at Harrow, and had never roughed it in his life—literally immured in an underground cellar beneath Peckwater Quad, may be better imagined than described. It is fair to add that the youth himself had made no complaint, and shouted with laughter when I paid him a visit in his extraordinary subterranean quarters in the richest college in Oxford.

The last words remind me of a visit paid me during this term by Dom Ferotin and a colleague from Farnborough Abbey. Escorting my guests through Christ Church, I mentioned the revenue of the House as approximately £80,000 a year, a sum which sounded colossal when translated into francs. "Deux millions par an! mais c'est incroyable," was their comment, as we mounted the great Jacobean staircase. "Twopence each, please," said the nondescript individual who threw open the hall door. It was an anti-climax; but we "did" the pictures without further remark, and I remember noticing an extraordinary resemblance (which the guide also observed) to the distinguished French Benedictine in the striking portrait of Dr. Liddon hanging near the fireplace. We lunched with my friend Grissell in High Street, meeting there the Baron de Bertouche, a young man with a Danish father and a Scottish mother, born in Italy, educated in France, owning property in Belgium, and living in Wales—too much of a cosmopolitan, it seemed to me, to be likely to get the commission in the Pope's Noble Guard which appeared at that time to be his chief ambition.[[10]]

I remember two lectures about this time: one to the Newman Society about Dickens, by old Percy Fitzgerald, who almost wept at hearing irreverent undergraduates avow that the Master's pathos was "all piffle," and that Paul Dombey and Little Nell made them sick; the other a paper on "Armour" (his special hobby) by Lord Dillon. I asked him if he could corroborate what I had heard as a boy, that men who took down their ancestral armour from their castle walls to buckle on for the great Eglinton Tournament, seventy years ago, found that they could not get into it! I was surprised that this fact (if it be a fact) was new to so great an authority as Lord Dillon; but we had no time to discuss the matter. Mr. Justice Walton, the Catholic judge, also came down and addressed the "Newman," I forget on what subject; but I remember his being "heckled" on the question as to whether a barrister was justified in conscience in defending (say) a murderer of whose guilt he was personally convinced. The judge maintained that he was.

February 15 was Norfolk's wedding-day—a quiet and pious ceremony, after his own heart, in the private chapel at Everingham. I recollect the date, because I attended that evening a French play—Molière's Les Femmes Savantes—at an Oxford convent school. It was quite well done, entirely by girls; but the unique feature was that the "men" of the comedy were attired as to coats, waistcoats, wigs and lace jabots in perfectly correct Louis XIV. style, but below the waist—in petticoats! the result being that they ensconced themselves as far as possible, throughout the play, behind tables and chairs, and showed no more of their legs than the Queen of Spain.

Going down to Arundel for Holy Week and Easter, I read in The Times Hugh Macnaghten's strangely moving lines on Hector Macdonald,[[11]] whose tragic death was announced this week. Easter was late this year, the weather balmy, and the spring advanced; and the park and the whole countryside starred with daffodils and anemones, primroses and hyacinths. Between the many church services we enjoyed some delightful rambles; and the Duke's marriage had made no difference to his love of croquet and of the inevitable game of "ten questions" after dinner. The great church looked beautiful on Easter morning, with its wealth of spring flowers; and the florid music was no doubt finely rendered, though I do not like Gounod in church at Easter or at any other time. I refrained, however, when my friend the organist asked me what I thought of his choir, from replying, as Cardinal Capranica did to a similar question from Pope Nicholas V.—"that it seemed to him like a sack of young swine, for he heard a great noise, but could distinguish nothing articulate!"[[12]]

All the clergy of St. Philip's church dined at the castle on Easter Sunday evening; and the young Duchess, wearing her necklace of big diamonds (Sheffield's wedding present), was a most kind and pleasant hostess. Two days later my friend Father MacCall and I left England en route for Rome, crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe in three-quarters of a gale. Infandum jubes.... The boat was miserable, so was the passage; but we survived it, hurried on through France and Italy (our direttissimo halting at all kinds of unnecessary places), and reached Rome at the hour of Ave Maria, almost exactly twenty-six years since my previous visit. What memories, as from our modest pension in the Via Sistina we looked once again on the familiar and matchless prospect! My companion hurried off at once to the bedside of a fever-stricken friend; and my first pilgrimage was of course to St. Peter's. I felt, as I swung aside the heavy "baby-crusher,"[[13]] and entered, almost holding my breath, that strange sense of exhilaration which Eugénie de Ferronays described so perfectly.[[14]] Preparations were on foot for the coming festa,[[15]] and the "Sanpietrini" flying, as of old, a hundred feet from the floor, hanging crimson brocades—a fearsome spectacle. On Sunday we Benedictines kept the Gregorian festival at our own great basilica of St. Paul's; but the chief celebration was next day at St. Peter's, where Pope Pius X. himself pontificated in the presence of 40,000 people, and a choir of a thousand monks (of which I had the privilege of being one) rendered the Gregorian music with thrilling effect. All was as in the great days of old—the Papal March blown on silver trumpets; the long procession up the great nave of abbots, bishops, and cardinals, conspicuous among them Cardinals Rampolla, with his fine features and grave penetrating look, and Merry del Val (the youthful Secretary of State), tall, dark, and strikingly handsome; the Pontifical Court, chamberlains in their quaint mediæval dress; and, finally, high on his sedia gestatoria, with the white peacock-feather fans waving on right and left, the venerable figure of the Pope, mitred, and wearing his long embroidered manto: turning kind eyes from side to side on the vast concourse, and blessing them with uplifted hand as he passed. His Holiness celebrated the Mass with wonderful devotion, as quiet and collected as if he had been alone in his oratory. High above our heads, at the Elevation, the silver trumpets sounded the well-known melody, and the Swiss Guards round the altar brought down their halberts with a crash on the pavement.[[16]] After the great function I lunched with the Giustiniani Bandinis in the Foro Trajano, where three generations of the princely family were living together, in Roman patriarchal fashion. But (quantum mutatus!) the old Prince had sold his historic palace in the Corso;[[17]] and his heir, Mondragone, who talked to me of sending his son to Christ Church as the Master of Kynnaird, seemed to shy at the expense.[[18]] They had all been at St. Peter's, in the tribune of the "Patriciato," that morning, and were unanimous (so like Romans!) in their verdict that the glorious Gregorian music would have been much more appropriate to a funeral!

I was happy to enjoy a nearer view of the Holy Father before leaving Rome, in a private audience which he gave to the English Catholic Union. A slightly stooping figure, bushy grey hair, a rather care-worn kind face, a large penetrating eye—this was my first impression. His manner was wonderfully simple and courteous; and by his wish ("s'accommodarsi") we sat down in a little group around him. This absence of formality was, I thought, no excuse for the bad manners of a lady of rank, who pulled out a fountain pen, and asked his Holiness to sign the photograph of her extensive family.[[19]] The Pope looked at the little implement and shook his head. "Non capisco queste cose de nuova moda," he said; and we followed him into another room—I think his private library—where he seated himself before a great golden inkstand, and with a long quill pen wrote beneath the family group a verse from the hundred and twenty-seventh Psalm.[[20]] I had an opportunity of asking, not for an autograph, but for a blessing on our Oxford Benedictines, and on my mother-house at Fort Augustus.

Next day my friend and I left Rome for Monte Cassino—my first visit to the cradle of our venerable Order. I was deeply impressed, and felt, perhaps, on the summit of the holy mount, nearer heaven, both materially and spiritually, than I had ever done before. To celebrate Mass above the shrine of Saint Benedict, at an altar designed by Raphael, was my Sunday privilege. The visitors at the abbey and a devout crowd of contadini (many of them from the foot of the mountain) were my congregation; and the monks sang the plain-chant mass grouped round a huge illuminated Graduale on an enormous lectern. Three memorable days here, and I had to hasten northward, halting very briefly to renew old enchanting memories of Florence and Milan, and reaching Oxford just in time for the opening of the summer term.

[[1]] Lord Bute once told me that it was from him that the Earl Marshal first learned the meaning and origin of the honourable augmentation (the demi-lion of Scotland) which he bore on his coat-armorial.

[[2]] One of the first acts of Pope Pius X. had been to translate Bishop Bourne of Southwark to the metropolitan see of Westminster, in succession to Cardinal Vaughan, who had died on June 19. Archbishop Bourne became a Cardinal in 1911.

[[3]] My father used to hate this "new-fangled phrase," as he called it. "'See my way'! What does the man mean by 'see my way'? No, I do not 'see my way,'" he used to protest when a request for a subscription or donation was prefaced by this unlucky formula, and the appeal was instantly consigned to the waste-paper basket.

[[4]] Lord Goschen was elected on November 2 without a contest, the only other candidate "in the running" (Lord Rosebery) having declined to stand unless unopposed. Our new Chancellor lived to hold the office for little more than three years, dying in February, 1907.

[[5]] Tylee's sole connection with India was that he had once been domestic chaplain to Lord Ripon, who, however (much to his chagrin), left him behind in England when he went out as Viceroy. When the monsignore preached at St. Andrews, as he occasionally did when visiting George Angus there, the latter used to advertise him in the local newspaper as "ex-chaplain to the late Viceroy of India," which pleased him not a little. He was fond of preaching, and carried about with him in a tin box (proof against white ants) a pile of sermons, mostly translated by himself from the great French orators of the eighteenth century, and laboriously committed to memory. I remember his once firing off at the astonished congregation of a small seaside chapel, à propos des bottes, Bossuet's funeral oration on Queen Henrietta Maria.

Through a friend at the Vatican, Tylee got a brief or rescript from the Pope, who was told that he went to preach in India, and commended him in the document, with some reference to the missionary labours of St. Francis Xavier in that country. The monsignore was immensely proud of this. "Haven't you seen my Papal Bull?" he would cry when India cropped up in conversation, as it generally did in his presence. The fact was that when in India the good man used to stay with a Commissioner or General commanding, and deliver one of his famous sermons in the station or garrison church, to a handful of British Catholics or Irish soldiers. He never learned a word of any native language, and did no more missionary work in India than if he had stayed at home in his Kensington villa.

[[6]] The Dean, my host told me, whilst prowling about the crypt in semi-darkness once noticed one of the chapels lit up by a rosy gleam. The Chapter was promptly summoned, and the canon-sacrist interrogated as to how and why a votive red lamp had been suspended before an altar without decanal authority. The crypt verger was called in to explain the phenomenon. "Bless your heart, Mr. Dean," said the good man, "that ain't no red lamp you saw—only an old oil stove which I fished up and put in that chapel to try and dry up the damp a bit."

[[7]] I suppose that there had been a Christian church on the site for thirteen centuries. On the day of my visit it was locked and barred—discouraging to pilgrims.

[[8]] The converse of this story is that of the orthodox but sadly prosy preacher who was demonstrating at great length the certainty of his own immortality. "Yes, my brethren, the mighty mountains shall one day be cast into the sea, but I shall live on. Nay, the seas themselves, the vast oceans which cover the greater part of the earth, shall dry up; but not I—not I!" And the congregation really thought that he never would!

[[9]] One more instance of Park repartee I must chronicle: the Radical politician shouting, "I want land reform—I want housing reform—I want education reform—I want——" and the disconcerting interruption, "Chloroform!"

[[10]] His mother, though a Catholic like himself, was a devotee of "Father Ignatius," and lived at Llanthony. She travelled about everywhere with the visionary "Monk of the Church of England," acting as pew-opener, money-taker, and general mistress of the ceremonies at his lectures, and had published an extraordinary biography of him.

[[11]] Have they ever been reprinted? I know not. Here they are:—

"Leave him alone:
The death forgotten, and the truth unknown.
Enough to know
Whate'er he feared, he never feared a foe.
Believe the best,
O English hearts! and leave him to his rest."

[[12]] These words were penned in 1449 by one whom a contemporary layman described on his death as "the wisest, the most perfect, the most learned, and the holiest prelate whom the Church has in our day possessed." His beautiful tomb is in the Minerva church in Rome. Exactly a century later (1549) Cirillo Franchi wrote on the same subject, and in the same vein, to Ugolino Gualteruzzi: "It is their greatest happiness to contrive that while one is saying Sanctus, the other should say Sabaoth, and a third Gloria tua, with certain howls, bellowings, and guttural sounds, so that they more resemble cats in January than flowers in May!"

Who recalls now Ruskin's famous invective against modern Italian music, in which, after lauding a part-song, "done beautifully and joyfully," which he heard in a smithy in Perugia, he goes on: "Of bestial howling, and entirely frantic vomiting up of hopelessly damned souls through their still carnal throats, I have heard more than, please God, I will endeavour to hear ever again, in one of his summers." It is fair to say that the reference here is probably not to church music.

[[13]] The name which we English used playfully to give to the great heavy leather curtains which hang at the entrance of the Roman churches.

[[14]] Speaking of the impression of triumph which one receives on entering St. Peter's, she continues: "Tandis que dans les églises gothiques, l'impression est de s'agenouiller, de joindre les mains avec un sentiment d'humble prière et de profond regret, dans St. Pierre, au contraire, le mouvement involuntaire serait d'ouvrir les bras en signe de joie, de relever la tête avec bonheur et épanouissement."—Récit d'une Soeur, ii. 298.

[[15]] The thirteenth centenary of St. Gregory the Great (d. March 12, 1904).

[[16]] It was at this supreme moment that an Englishman of the baser sort once rose to his feet, and looking round exclaimed, "Is there no one in this vast assemblage who will lift up his voice with me, and protest against this idolatry?" "If you don't get down in double quick time," retorted an American who was on his knees close by, "there's one man in this vast assemblage who will lift up his foot and kick you out of the church!"

[[17]] A day or two after writing these lines (1921) I heard that this famous palazzo had been acquired as an official residence by the Brazilian Ambassador to the Quirinal.

[[18]] The Scottish Earldom of Newburgh (1660), of which Kynnaird was the second title, had been adjudged to Prince Bandini's mother by the House of Lords in 1858. The Duca Mandragone consulted me as to the expense of three years at Oxford for his son. He thought the sum I named very reasonable; but I really believe he supposed me to be quoting the figure in lire, not in pounds sterling, which he found quite impossible.

[[19]] Would Lady X—— (who was familiar with Courts) have acted thus in an audience granted her by King Edward VII.? I rather think not.

[[20]] Verse 4. "Filii tui sicut noveliæ olivarum, in circuitu mensæ tuæ."

CHAPTER II

1904

Abbot Gasquet, who had many friends in Oxford, was much in residence there during the summer of 1904, as he was giving the weekly conferences to our undergraduates. His host, Mgr. Kennard, usually asked me to dinner on Sundays, "to keep the Abbot going," which released me from the chilly collation (cold mutton and cold rhubarb pie), the orthodox Sabbath evening fare in so many households.[[1]] I recall the lovely Sundays of this summer term, and the crowds of peripatetic dons and clerics in the parks and on the river bank: many of them, I fancy, the serious-minded persons who would have thought it their duty, a year previously, to attend the afternoon university sermon, lately abolished. The afternoon discourse had come to be allotted to the second-rate preachers; and I had heard of a clergyman who, when charged with walking in the country instead of attending at St. Mary's, defended himself by saying that he preferred "sermons from stones" to sermons from "sticks!"[[2]]

The biggest clerical gathering I ever saw in Oxford was on a bright May afternoon in 1904, when hundreds of parsons were whipped up from the country to oppose the abolition of the statute restricting the honour-theology examinerships to clergymen. Scores of black-coats were hanging about the Clarendon Buildings, waiting to go in and vote; and they "boo'd" and cat-called in the theatre, refusing to let their opponents be heard. They carried their point by an enormous majority.[[3]]

Kennard took me to London, on another day in May, to see the Academy—some astonishing Sargents, Mrs. Wertheimer all in black, with diamonds which made you wink, and the Duchess of Sutherland in arsenic green, painted against a background of dewy magnolia-leaves, extraordinarily vivid and brilliant. I was at Blenheim a few days later, and admired there (besides the wonderful tapestries and a roomful of Reynolds's) two striking portraits—one by Helleu, the other by Carolus-Duran—of the young American Duchess of Marlborough.

An enjoyable event in June was the quadrennial open-air Greek play at Bradfield College—Alcestis on this occasion, not so thrilling as Agamemnon four years ago, but very well done, and the death of the heroine really very touching. A showery garden party at beautiful Osterley followed close on this: the Crown Prince of Sweden, who was the guest of honour, had forgotten to announce the hour of his arrival, was not met at the station, and walked up in the rain. I sat for a time with Bishop Patterson and the old Duke of Rutland (looking very tottery), and we spoke of odd texts for sermons. The Bishop mentioned a "total abstinence" preacher who could find nothing more suitable than "The young men who carried the bier stood still"! The Duke's contribution was the verse "Let him that is on the housetop not come down," the sermon being against "chignons," and the actual text the last half of the verse—"Top-knot come down"! They were both pleased with my reminiscence of a sermon preached against Galileo, in 1615, from the text, "Viri Galilæi, quid statis aspicientes in coelum?"

As soon as I could after term I went north to Scotland, where I was engaged to superintend the Oxford Local examinations at the Benedictine convent school at Dumfries. It was a new experience for me to preside over school-girls! I found them much less fidgety than boys, but it struck me that the masses of hair tumbling into their eyes and over their desks must be a nuisance: however, I suppose they are used to it. The convent, founded by old Lady Herries, was delightfully placed atop of a high hill, overlooking the river Nith, the picturesque old Border town, and a wide expanse of my native Galloway. My work over, I went on to visit the Edmonstoune-Cranstouns at their charming home close to the tumbling Clyde. I found them entertaining a party of Canadian bowlers and their ladies; and in the course of the day we were all decorated with the Order of the Maple-leaf! I went south after this to spend a few days with my good old friend Bishop Wilkinson, at Ushaw College, near Durham, of which he was president. An old Harrovian, and one of the few survivors of Newman's companions at Littlemore, he was himself a Durham man (his father had owned a large estate in the county), and had been a keen farmer, as well as an excellent parish priest, before his elevation to the bishopric of Hexham. He showed me all over the finely equipped college (which he had done much to improve), and pointing out a Dutch landscape, with cattle grazing, hanging in a corridor, remarked, "That is by a famous 'old master.' I don't know much about pictures, but I do know something about cows; and God never made a cow like that one!"[[4]] The good old man held an ordination during my visit, and was quite delighted (being himself a thorough John Bull) that "John Bull" happened to be the name of one of his candidates for the priesthood. "Come again soon," he said, when I kissed his ring as I took my leave; "they give us wine at table when there is a guest, and I do like a glass of sherry with my lunch." The old bishop lived for nearly four years longer, but I never saw him again.

I was delighted with a visit I paid a little later to Hawkesyard Priory, the newly acquired property of the Dominicans in Staffordshire: a handsome modern house (now their school) in a finely-timbered park, and close by the new monastery, its spacious chapel, with carved oak stalls, a great sculptured reredos recalling All Souls or New College, and an organ which had been in our chapel at Eton in my school days. I made acquaintance here with the young Blackfriar who was to matriculate in the autumn at our Benedictine Hall—the first swallow, it was hoped, of the Dominican summer, the revival of the venerable Order of Preachers in gremio universitatis.[[5]]

A kind and musical friend[[6]] insisted on carrying me off this August to Munich, to attend the Mozart-Wagner festival there. We stayed at the famous old "Four Seasons," and I enjoyed renewing acquaintance, after more than thirty years, with a city which seemed to me very like what it was in 1871. The Mozart operas (at the small Residenz-theater) were rather disappointing. The title-rôle in Don Giovanni was perfectly done by Feinhals; but Anna and Elvira squalled, not even in tune. The enchanting music of Zauberflöte hardly compensated for the tedious story; and no one except the Sarastro (one Hesch, a Viennese) was first-class. The Wagner plays, in the noble new Prinz Regenten theatre, pleased me much more: Knote and Van Rooy were quite excellent, and Feinhals even better as the Flying Dutchman than as Don Giovanni. I heard more Mozart on the Assumption in our Benedictine basilica of St. Boniface—the Twelfth Mass, done by a mixed choir in the gallery! I preferred the Sunday high mass at the beautiful old Frauenkirche, with its exquisite stained glass, and its towers crowned with the curious renaissance cupolas which the Müncheners first called "Italian caps," and later "masskrüge," or beer-mugs. I admired the attention and devotion of the great congregation at the cathedral: a few stood, nearly all knelt, throughout the long service, but no one seemed to think of sitting.

We made one day the pleasant steamer trip round Lake Starnberg, with its pretty wooded shores, and the dim mysterious snow-clad Alps (Wetterstein and other peaks) looming in the background. A middle-aged Graf on board (I think an ex-diplomatist) talked interestingly on many subjects, Bismarck among others. He said that the only serious attempt at reconciliation between him and the Kaiser, ten years before, had been frustrated not by the latter but by Bismarck himself, who was constantly ridiculing the young Emperor both in public and in private. It was odd, he added, how the number three had pervaded Bismarck's life and personality. His motto was "In Trinitate robur": he had served three emperors, fought in three wars, signed three treaties of peace, established the Triple Alliance, had three children and three estates; and his arms were a trefoil and three oak-leaves. Talking of Austria, our friend quoted a dictum of Talleyrand (very interesting in 1921)—"Austria is the House of Lords of Europe: as long as it is not dissolved it will restrain the Commons." Dining together in our hotel at Munich, he told us that the "Four Seasons" possessed, or had possessed, the finest wine in Europe, having bought up Prince Metternich's famous cellar (including his priceless Johannisberger and Steinberger Cabinet hocks) at his death. Of Metternich he said it was a fact that in 1825 Cardinal Albani was instructed by the Pope to sound the great statesman as to whether he desired a Cardinal's hat—"in which case," added his Holiness, "I will propose him in the next Secret Consistory."

We were much amused at reading in a local newspaper the result of a "longest word" competition. The prize-winners were "Transvaaltruppentropentransport trampelthiertreibentrauungsthränentragödie," and "Mekkamuselmannenmeuchelmördermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher"![[7]] I had hitherto considered the longest existing word to be the Cherokee "Winitawigeginaliskawlungtanawneletisesti"; it was given me by a French missionary to that North American tribe, whom I once met at the Comte de Franqueville's house in Paris, and who said it meant, "They-will-now-have-finished-their-compliments-to-you-and-to-me"! I remember the same good priest telling me that when the first French missionary bishop went to New Zealand, he found the natives incapable of pronouncing the word "eveque" or "bishop," their language consisting of only thirteen letters, mostly vowels and liquids. He therefore coined the word picopo, from "episcopus," which the natives applied to all Catholics. English Catholics they called picopo poroyaxono, from Port Jackson (Sydney), which most of them had visited in trading ships; while French Catholics were known as picopo wee-wee, from the constantly-heard words, "Oui, oui."

Our pleasant sojourn at Munich over, we made a bee-line home (as we had done from England to Bavaria), without stopping anywhere en route, as I was bound to be present at certain religious celebrations at Woodchester Priory, in the Vale of Stroud. I was always much attracted by the Gloucestershire home of the Dominican Order: it was built of the warm cream-coloured stone of the district, and with its gables, low spire, and high-pitched roofs looked as if it really belonged to the pretty village, and was not, like most modern monasteries, a mere accretion of incongruous buildings round an uninteresting dwelling-house.[[8]] From Woodchester I went over one day to Weston Birt, a vast ornate neo-Jacobean mansion set in the loveliest gardens, and a not unworthy country pendant to the owner's palace in Park Lane, to which (as I told my hostess) I once adjudged the second place among the great houses of London.[[9]]

I spent the rest of the Long Vacation at Fort Augustus, whither the summer-like autumn had attracted many visitors, and where a golf-course had been lately opened. Golf, too, and nothing but golf, was in the air during my annual visit to St. Andrews, which coincided with the Medal Week there. A lady told me that, looking for a book to give her golfing daughter on her birthday, she was tempted by a pretty volume called Evangeline, Tale of a Caddie, and was disappointed to find that Longfellow meant something quite different by "Acadie!" "Medal Day" was perfect, and the crowd enormous. I was passing the links as two famous competitors (Laidlaw and Mure Fergusson) came in—a cordon round the putting-green, and masses of spectators watching with bated breath. No cheers or enthusiasm as at cricket or football—a curious (and I thought depressing) spectacle. In the club I came on old Lord —— (of Session), anathematizing his luck and his partner, as his manner was. Some one told me that it was only at golf that he really let himself go. Once in Court he addressed a small boy, whose head hardly appeared above the witness-box, with dignified solicitude: "Tell me, my boy, do you understand the nature of an oath?" "Aye, my lord," came the youngster's prompt response, "ain't I your caddie?"

I think that it was at the climax of the medal-week festivities that the news came of the sudden death (in his sleep) of Sir William Harcourt at Nuneham, to which he had only lately succeeded. He had survived just ten years the crowning disappointment of his life, his passing-over for the premiership on the final resignation of Gladstone. He had long outlived (no small achievement) the intense unpopularity of his early years; and it seemed almost legendary to recall how three members of parliament had once resolved to invite to dinner the individual they disliked most in the world. Covers were laid (as the reporters say) for six; but only one guest turned up—Sir William Vernon Harcourt, who had been invited by all three!

I reached Oxford in October to find our Benedictine Hall migrated from the suburbs to a much more commodious site in dull but rather dignified Beaumont Street.[[10]] The proximity of a hideous "Gothic" hotel, and of the ponderous pseudo-Italian Ashmolean Galleries, did not appeal to us; but the site was conveniently central, and was moreover holy ground, for we were within the actual enclosure of the old Carmelite Priory, and close to Benedictine Worcester, beyond which Cistercian Rowley (on the actual site of whose high altar now stands the bookstall of the L.N.W.R. station!) and Augustinian Oseney had stretched out into the country. One of my first guests in Beaumont Street was Alfred Plowden, the witty and genial Metropolitan magistrate, then just sixty, but as good-looking as ever, and full of amusing yarns about his Westminster and Brasenose days. I think he was the best raconteur I ever met, and one of the most eloquent of speakers when once "off" on a subject in which he was really interested. On this occasion he got started on Jamaica, where he had been private secretary to the Governor after leaving Oxford; and his description of his experiences in that fascinating island was delightful to listen to.

Lord Ralph Kerr's son Philip, who got his First Class in history in June, came up this term to try for an All Souls fellowship. There is a sharp competition nowadays for these university plums; and the qualification is no longer, as the old jibe ran, "bene natus, bene vestitus, medocriter doctus." I prefer the older and sounder standard—"bene legere, bene construere, bene cantare." There seemed, by the way, a certain whimsicality in some cases in the qualifications for the Rhodes Scholarships here. I had a call about this time from the Archbishop of St. John's, Newfoundland, who wished to interest me in a scholar from that colony (called Sidney Herbert!) who was coming up after Christmas. His Grace said that the youth had been required to pass three "tests"—a religious one from his parish priest, an intellectual one, from the authorities of his college, and a social one, from his classmates; and I felt some curiosity as to the nature of the last-named.[[11]] Amusing stories were current at this time about the Rhodes Scholars. One young don told me that an American scholar had replied, when asked what was his religion, "Well, sir, I can best describe myself as a quasi-Christian scientist."—"Do you think," the don asked me, "he meant the word 'quasi' to apply to 'Christian' or to 'scientist'?" Another young American drifted into Keble, but never attended chapel—a circumstance unheard-of in that exclusively Anglican preserve. Questioned as to whether he was not a member of the "Protestant Episcopal Church" (if not, what on earth was he doing at Keble?), he rejoined, "Certainly not; he was a 'Latter-day Saint'!" He was deported without delay to a rather insignificant college, where it was unkindly said that the Head was so delighted to get a saint of any kind that he welcomed him with open arms.[[12]]

A Rhodes Scholar, who had been also a fellow of his university in U.S.A., showed himself so lamentably below the expected standard, that his Oxford tutor expressed his surprise at a scholar and a fellow knowing so little. "I think you somewhat misapprehend the position," was the reply. "In the University of X—— fellowships are awarded for purely political reasons." To another college tutor, who voiced his disappointment that after a complete course at his own university a Rhodes Scholar should be so deplorably deficient in Greek and Latin, came the ready explanation: "In the university where I was raised, sir, we only skim the classics!" A Balliol Rhodes Scholar, who had failed to present the essential weekly essay, replied to his tutor's expostulation, in the inimitable drawl of the Middle West: "Well, sir, I have not found myself able to com-pose an essay on the theme indicated by the college authorities; but I have brought you instead a few notes of my own on the po-sition of South Dakota in American politics."

The mention of classics reminds me that the question of the retention or abolition of compulsory Greek was a burning one at this time. Congregation had voted for its abolition in the summer of 1904; but on November 29 we reversed that decision by a majority of 36. I met Dean Liddell's widow at dinner that week, and said that I supposed that she, like myself, was old-fashioned enough to want Greek retained. "Of course I am," said the old lady: "Think of the Lexicon!" which I had in truth forgotten for the moment, as well as the comfortable addition which it no doubt made to her jointure. Rushforth of St. Mary Hall, to whom I repeated this little dialogue after dinner, told me that he possessed a letter from Scott to Liddell, calling his attention to Aristoph. Lys., v. 1263, and adding, "Do you think that [Greek: chunagè parséne] in this line means 'a hunting parson'?" Talking of Greek, I interested my friends by citing two lines from the Ajax, which (I had never seen this noticed) required only a change from plural to singular to be a perfect invocation to the Blessed Virgin:

[Greek: Kalô darógon tèn te párthena,
aeí th horônta panta ten brotois pathè.][[13]]

A distinguished visitor to Oxford this autumn was Lord Rosebery, who came up to open—no, that is not the word: to unveil—but I do not think it was ever veiled: let us say to inaugurate, Frampton's fine bust of Lord Salisbury in the Union debating-hall. To pronounce the panegyric of a political opponent, with whose principles, practice, and ideals he had always been profoundly at variance, was just the task for Lord Rosebery to perform with perfect tact, eloquence and taste. His speech was a complete success, and so was his graceful and polished tribute to the young president of the Union, W. G. Gladstone, whose likeness, with his high collar and sleekly-brushed black hair, to the youthful portrait of his illustrious grandfather, immediately behind him, was quite noticeable.

A whimsical incident in connection with this visit of the ex-premier may be, at this distance of time, recalled without offence. I had repeated to his Oxford hostess a story told me by the Principal of a Scottish university, of how Lord Rosebery, engaged to speak at a great Liberal meeting in a northern city, found himself previously dining with a fanatically teetotal Provost, who provided for his guests no other liquid refreshment than orangeade in large glass jugs. As this depressing beverage circulated, the Liberal leader's spirits fell almost to zero; and it was by the advice of my friend the principal that, between the dinner and the meeting, he drove ventre à terre to an hotel, and quaffed a pint of dry champagne before mounting the platform and making a speech of fiery eloquence, which the good provost attributed entirely to the orangeade! The lady, unknown to me, passed on this delectable story to one of the Union Committee, who took it very seriously: the result being that when Lord Rosebery reached the committee-room, just before the inauguration ceremony, a grave young man whispered to him confidentially: "There are tea and coffee here; but I have got your pint of chaœpagne behind that screen: will you come and have it now?" "Well, do you know?" said the great man with his usual tact,[[14]] "I think for once in a way I will have a cup of coffee!" I do not suppose he ever knew exactly why this untimely pint of champagne was proffered to him by his undergraduate hosts; and he probably thought no more about the matter.

Lunching with my friend Bishop Mitchinson, the little Master of Pembroke, I was shown his new portrait in the hall—quite a good painting, but not a bit like him, though not in that respect singular among our Oxford portraits. The supposed picture of Devorguilla, foundress of Balliol, is, I have been assured, the likeness of an Oxford baker's daughter, who was tried for bigamy in the eighteenth century. An even more barefaced imposture is the "portrait" of Egglesfield (chaplain to Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, and founder of Queen's), which hangs, or hung, in the hall of that college. It is really, and manifestly, the likeness of a seventeenth-century French prelate—probably Bossuet—in the episcopal dress of the time of Louis XIV! Most of our Magdalen portraits are, I think, authentic; but then they do not profess to represent personages of the early Middle Ages! The best and most interesting portraits at Oxford belong to the nineteenth century. I always enjoyed showing my friends those of Tait and Manning, side by side in Balliol Hall, and recalling how their college tutor once remarked, when they had left his room after a lecture: "Those two undergraduates are worthy and talented young men: I hope I shall live to see them both archbishops!" His prophetic wish was duly fulfilled, though he had probably never dreamt of Canterbury and Westminster!

I remember pleasant visits this autumn to the Abingdons at Wytham Abbey, their fine old place, set in loveliest woods, within an easy drive of Oxford. "Why Abbey?" I asked my host, who did not seem to know that the place had never been a monastery, though part of the house was of the fifteenth century. Lord Abingdon himself was a kind of patriarch,[[15]] with a daughter married four and twenty years, and a small son not yet four. He was trying to dispose of some of his land for building, but without great success. The Berkshire side of the Thames (to my mind far the most beautiful and attractive) was not the popular quarter for extensions from Oxford, which was spreading far out towards the north in the uninteresting directions of Banbury and Woodstock.

Term over, I went north to spend Christmas with the Butes at Mountstuart, where I found my young host, as was only natural, much interested in a recent decision of the Scottish Courts, which had diverted into his pocket £40,000 which his father had bequeathed to two of the Scottish Catholic dioceses.[[16]] My Christmas here (the first for many years) was saddened by old memories; for I missed at every turn the pervading presence of my lost friend, to whose taste and genius the varied beauty of his island home was so largely due. However, our large party of young people gave the right note of hilarity to the time; and if there was little sunshine without (I noted that we had never a gleam from Christmas to New Year), there was plenty of warmth and brightness and merriment within. The graceful crypt (all that was yet available) of the lovely chapel was fragrant and bright with tuberoses, chrysanthemums and white hyacinths; and the religious services of the season were carried out with the care and reverence which had been the rule, under Lord Bute's supervision, for more than thirty years. The day after New Year, young Bute left home for London and Central Africa (the attraction of the black man never seemed to pall on him), and I made my way to our Highland Abbey to spend the remainder of the Christmas vacation.

[[1]] "Do you very much mind dining in the middle of the day?" a would-be hostess at St. Andrews once asked George Angus. "Oh, not a bit," was his reply, "as long as I get another dinner in the evening!"

[[2]] It was, I think, a Scottish critic who suggested an emendation of the line, "Sermons from stones, books in the running brooks." Obviously, he said, the transposition was a clerical error, the true reading being, "Sermons from books, stones in the running brooks!"

[[3]] Another attempt, nine years later, to abolish the same statute was decisively defeated; but in 1920 the restriction of degrees in divinity to Anglican clergymen was removed by a unanimous vote, though the examinerships are still confined to clergymen.

[[4]] "Well, now, that is not my idea of an owl," said a casual visitor to a bird-stuffer's shop, looking at one sitting on a perch in a rather dark corner. "Isn't it?" replied the bird-stuffer dryly, peering up over his spectacles. "Well, it's God's, anyhow." The owl was a live one!

[[5]] The "young Blackfriar" obtained (in History) the first First Class gained in our Hall, rose to be Provincial of his Order in England, and had the happiness of seeing, on August 15, 1921, the foundation stone of a Dominican church and priory laid at Oxford.

[[6]] Music was his hobby: by profession he was a chemist, and the City Analyst of Oxford. I introduced him as such to dear Mgr. Kennard, who promptly asked us both to dinner, and during the meal laboriously discussed the mediæval history of Oxford, which he had carefully "mugged up" beforehand. He had understood me to say that my friend's position was that of City Annalist!

[[7]] The English of these uncouth concatenations, which are at least evidence of the facility with which any number of German words can be strung together into one, appears to be (as far as I can unravel them): 1. "The tearful tragedy of the marriage of a dromedary-driver on the transport of Transvaal troops to the tropics." 2. "The maker of a marble monument for the Moorish mother of a wholesale assassin among the Mussulmans at Mecca." Pro-dee-gious!

[[8]] Such were nearly all our Benedictine priories in England—a circumstance which added to their historic interest, if not to their architectural homogeneity.

[[9]] I was once invited to write an article on the "six finest houses in London." The word "finest," of course, wants defining. However, my selection, in order of merit, was:—Holland House (perhaps rather a country house in the metropolitan area than a London house), Dorchester, Stafford, Bridgewater, and Montagu Houses, and Gwydyr House, Whitehall. How many Londoners know the last-named?

[[10]] Built about a century previously, to provide proper access to Worcester College, then and long afterwards dubbed (from its remoteness and inaccessibility) "Botany Bay." The only approach to it had been by a narrow lane, across which linen from the wash used to hang, and once impeded the dignified progress of a Vice-Chancellor. "If there is a college there," cried the potentate in a passion, "there must be a road to it." And the result was Beaumont Street!

[[11]] Oxonians know the tradition that an All Souls candidate is invited to dinner at high table, and given cherry pie; and that careful note is taken as to the manner in which he deals with the stones!

[[12]] A subsequent legend related that the undergraduates of his new college were greatly interested in discovering (from reference to an encyclopædia) that a Latter-day Saint was equivalent to a Mormon. "Where were the freshman's wives?" was the natural inquiry. Answer came there none; but the excitement grew intense when it was rumoured that he had applied to a fellow of Magdalen for six ladies' tickets for the chapel service.

[[13]] "And I call to my assistance her who is ever a Virgin
And who ever looks on all the sufferings among men."
—SOPH. AJAX. v. 835.

[[14]] "My lord! my lord!" a Midlothian farmer (who had just been served with an iced soufflé) whispered to his host at a tenants' dinner at Dalmeny: "I'm afraid there's something wrang wi' the pudden: it's stane cauld." Lord Rosebery instantly called a footman, and spoke to him in an undertone. "No, do you know?" he said, turning to his guest with a smile, "it is quite right. I find that this kind of pudding is meant to be cold!"

[[15]] Less so, however, than the then Earl of Leicester (the second), between whose eldest daughter (already a grandmother) and youngest child there was an interval of some fifty years. Lord Ronald Gower once told Queen Victoria (who liked such titbits of family gossip) the astonishing, if not unique, fact that Lord Leicester married exactly a century after his father. The Queen flatly refused to believe it; and as the Court was at the moment at Aix-les-Bains, Lord Ronald was for the time unable to adduce documentary evidence that he was not "pulling her Majesty's leg." The respective dates were, as a matter of fact, 1775 and 1875.

[[16]] Lord Bute could never do anything quite like other people; and his legacies to Galloway and Argyll had been hampered by conditions to which no Catholic bishop, even if he accepted them for himself, could possibly bind his successor.

CHAPTER III

1905

There had been an official visitation, by Abbot Gasquet, of our abbey at Fort Augustus in January, 1905. I had been unable to attend it, but the news reached me at Oxford that one of its results had been the resignation of his office by the abbot. This was not so important as it sounded; for the Holy See did not "see its way" (horrid phrase!) to accept the proffered resignation, and the abbot remained in office.

I attended this month a Catholic "Demonstration," as it was called (a word I always hated), in honour of the Bishop of Birmingham—or the "Catholic Bishop of Oxford," as an enthusiastic convert, who had set up a bookshop in the city, with a large portrait of Bishop Ilsley in the window, chose to designate him. The function was in the town hall, and Father Bernard Vaughan made one of his most florid orations, which got terribly on the nerves of good old Sir John Day (the Catholic judge), who sat next me on the platform. "Why on earth doesn't somebody stop him?" he whispered to me in a loud "aside," as the eloquent Jesuit "let himself go" on the subject of the Pope and the King. On the other hand, I heard the Wesleyan Mayor, who was in the chair, murmur to his neighbour, "This is eloquence indeed!" "Vocal relief" (as the reporters say at classical concerts) was afforded by a capital choir, which sang with amazing energy, "Faith of our Fathers," and Faber's sentimental hymn, the opening words of which—"Full in the pant" ... are apt to call forth irreverent smiles.

I took Bernard Vaughan (who knew little of Oxford) a walk round the city on Sunday afternoon. We looked into one of the most "advanced" churches, where a young curate, his biretta well on the back of his head, was catechising a class of children. "Tell me, children," we heard him say, "who was the first Protestant?" "The Devil, Father!" came the shrill response. "Yes, quite right, the Devil!" and we left the church much edified.

There was good music to be heard in Oxford in those early days of the year; and I attended some enjoyable concerts with a music-loving member of my Hall. The boy-prodigies, of whom there were several above the horizon at this time, generally had good audiences at Oxford; and I used to find something inexplicably uncanny in the attainments and performances of these gifted youngsters—Russian, German and English. Astonishing technique—as far as was possible for half-grown fingers—one might fairly look for; but whence the sehnsucht, the passionate yearning, that one seemed to find in some, at least, of their interpretations? That they should feel it appears incredible: yet it could not have been a mere imitative monkey-trick, a mere echo of the teaching of their master. And why should there be this precocious development in music alone, of all the arts? These things want explaining psychologically. I was amused at one of these recitals to hear the eminent violinist Marie Hall (who happened to be sitting next me) say that the boy (it was the Russian Mischa Elman) could not possibly play Bazzini's Ronde des Lutins (he did play it, and admirably), and also that he had suddenly "struck," to the dismay of his impresario, against appearing as a "wunderkind" in sailor kit and short socks, and had insisted on a dress suit!

The Torpids were rowed in icy weather this year; I took Lady Gainsborough and her daughter on to Queen's barge; and Queen's (in which they were interested) made, with the help of two Rhodes Scholars, two bumps, amid shouts of "Go it, Quaggas!"—a new petit nom since my time, when only the Halls had nicknames. Tuckwell, of an older generation than mine, reports in his reminiscences how St. Edmund Hall, in his time, was encouraged by cries from the bank of "On, St. Edmund, on!" and not, as in these degenerate days, "Go it, Teddy!" It was a novelty on the river to see the coaching done from bicycles instead of from horseback. But bicycles were ubiquitous at Oxford, and doubtless of the greatest service; and my young Benedictines and I went far afield awheel on architectural and other excursions. Passing the broken and battered park railings of beautiful Nuneham (not yet repaired by Squire "Lulu"[[1]]), my companion commented on their condition; and I told him the legend of the former owner, who was so disconsolate at the death of his betrothed (a daughter of Dean Liddell) on their wedding-day, that he never painted or repaired his park railings again!

I heard at the end of February of the engagement (concluded in a beauty-spot of the Italian Riviera) of my young friend Bute—he would not be twenty-four till June—to Augusta Bellingham. A boy-and-girl attachment which had found its natural and happy conclusion—that was the whole story, though the papers, of course, were full of impossibly romantic tales about both the young people. They went off straight to Rome, in Christian fashion, to ask the Pope's blessing on their betrothal; and I just missed them there, for I had the happiness this spring of another brief visit to Italy, at the invitation of a Neapolitan friend. I spent two or three delightful weeks at the Bertolini Palace, high above dear dirty Naples, with an entrancing view over the sunlit bay, and Vesuvius (quite quiescent) in the background. I found the city not much changed in thirty years, and, as always, much more attractive than its queer and half-savage population. Watching the cab-drivers trying to urge their lumbering steeds into a canter, I thought how oddly different are the sounds employed by different nations to make their horses go. The Englishman makes the well-known untransferable click with his tongue: the Norwegian imitates the sound of a kiss: the Arab rolls an r-r-r: the Neapolitan coachman barks Wow! wow! wow! The subject is worth developing.

I met at Naples, among other people, Sir Charles Wyndham, with his unmistakable "Criterion" voice, and as cynically amusing off the stage as he generally was on it. He reminded me of what I had forgotten—that I had once shown him all over our Abbey at Fort Augustus. I told him of a lecture Beerbohm Tree had recently given at Oxford, and showed him my copy of a striking passage[[2]] which I had transcribed from a shorthand note of the lecture. "Noble words," the veteran actor agreed, "I know them well; but they were not written for his Oxford lecture. I remember them a dozen or more years ago, in an address he gave (I think in 1891) to the Playgoers' Club; and the last clause ran—'to point in the twilight of a waning century to the greater light beyond.' Those words would not of course be applicable in 1904."

I had looked forward to a day in the museum, with its wonderful sculptures and unique relics of Pompeii; but I was lost there, for the whole collection was being rearranged, and no catalogue available. The Cathedral too was closed, being under restoration—for the sixth time in six centuries! Some of the Neapolitan churches seemed to me sadly wanting in internal order and cleanliness, an exception being a spotless and perfectly-kept convent chapel on the hill, conveniently near me for daily mass. The German Emperor made, with his customary suddenness, a descent on Naples during my stay. The quays and streets were hastily decorated, and there was a ferment of excitement everywhere; but I fled from the hurly-burly by cable-railway (funicolì-funicolà!) to the heights of San Martino, to visit the desecrated and abandoned Certosa, now a "national monument": tourists trampling about the lovely church with their hats on. It made me sick, and I told the astonished guide so. The cloister garth, with its sixty white marble columns, charmed and impressed me; but all molto triste. Three old Carthusian monks, I heard, were still permitted to huddle in some corner of their monastery till they dropped and died.[[3]]

A day I spent at Lucerne on my way home, in fog, snow, and sleet (no sign of spring), I devoted partly to the "Kriegs-und-Frieden" Museum—chiefly kriegs! with an astonishingly complete collection of all things appertaining to war. I went to Downside on my arrival in England, had some talk with the kind abbot on Fort Augustus affairs, and admired the noble church, a wonderful landmark with its lofty tower, choir now quite complete externally, and chevet of flanking chapels. I got to Arundel in time for the functions of Holy Week, and thought I had seen nothing more beautiful in Italy than St. Philip's great church on Maundy Thursday, its "chapel of repose" bright with lilies, azaleas and tulips, tall silver candlesticks and hangings of rose-coloured velvet. I had landed in England speechless with a cold caught at Lucerne, and could neither sing nor preach. Summer Term at Oxford opened with a snowstorm, and May Day was glacial. I found I had been elected to the new County Club, a good house with a really charming garden, and (to paraphrase Angelo Cyrus Bantam) "rendered bewitching by the absence of —— undergraduates, who have an amalgamation of themselves at the Union." The most noteworthy visitor to the Union this term was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (then leader of the Opposition), who made a somewhat vitriolic speech, lasting an hour, against the Government. The 550 undergraduates present listened, cheered frequently—and voted against him by a large majority, a good deal (I heard afterwards) to the old gentleman's chagrin.

The Archbishop of Westminster (Dr. Bourne) came to Oxford in May as the guest of Mgr. Kennard, who illuminated in his honour the garden and quad of his pretty old house in St. Aldate's, and gave a dinner and big reception, at neither of which I could be present, being laid up from a bicycle-accident. It was Eights-week, and his Grace saw the races one evening, and I think was also present at a Newman Society debate, when a motion advocating the setting up of a Catholic University in Ireland by the Government was rejected by a considerable majority.[[4]] I was able to hobble to Balliol a few days later, when Sir Victor Horsley delivered the Boyle lecture to a crowded and distinguished audience. I noted down as interesting one thing he said (I fancy it was a quotation from somebody else[[5]]): "Every scientific truth passes through three stages: in the first it is decried as absurd; in the second it is said to be opposed to revealed religion; in the third everybody knew it before!" Sir Victor's lecture left me, rightly or wrongly, under the impression that he was something of a sceptic; and I asked my neighbour, a clerical don of note, from Keble, why so many medical bigwigs seemed inclined to atheism. He answered (oddly enough) that it was only what David had prophesied long ago when he asked despairingly (Psalm lxxxvii. 11), Numquid medici suscitabunt et confitebuntur tibi? ("Shall the physicians rise up and praise Thee?")—a curious little bit of exegesis from an Anglican.[[6]]

June 16 was a busy day—a garden party at Blenheim, with special trains for the Oxford guests; the Duchess, in blue and white and a big black hat, welcoming her guests in her low, sweet, and curiously un-American voice, and the little Duke rather affable in khaki (he was encamped with the Oxfordshire Hussars in the park). We sat about under the big cedars, and there was organ-music in the cool white library, where I noticed that Sargent's very odd group of the ducal family had been hung—with not altogether happy effect—as a pendant to the famous and beautiful group painted by Reynolds. I got back to Oxford just in time for the festival dinner of the Canning and Chatham Clubs, at which my old schoolfellow Alfred Lyttelton, Hugh Cecil, and other Tory notabilities, were guests. Alfred spoke admirably: Hugh, though loudly called upon, refused to speak at all. The President of Magdalen, by whom I sat, told me in pained tones how some Christ Church undergraduates, suadente diabolo, had recently scaled the wall into Magdalen deer-park, had dragged (Heaven knew how) over the wall two of our sacrosanct fallow deer, and had turned the poor brutes loose in the "High"—an outrage without precedent in the college annals. I duly sympathized.

A feature of Catholic and Benedictine interest in this year's Commemoration was the conferring of the honorary doctorate of letters on my old friend and fellow-novice, Dom Germain Morin, the distinguished patristic scholar.[[7]] I did not attend the hot and tiresome Encænia, but I went to the Magdalen concert, where I found myself talking between the songs to Lady Winchilsea, whose husband and brother-in-law had been friends of mine at Eton, and had acted with me, I think, in more than one school play. The lady was born a Harcourt, and talked interestingly about beautiful Nuneham in the days of her girlhood. I met her again next day at Radley College, where the annual "gaudy" was always a pleasant wind-up to the summer term. It turned wet, and the usual concert was given, not al fresco, but in the fine old panelled schoolroom with its open roof, once Sir George Bowyer's barn.[[8]] Two days later I kept yet another "silver jubilee" (following naturally on that of my receiving the Benedictine habit), namely the anniversary of my religious profession. Being in London, I spent the day with what piety was possible, in the Dominican monastery at Haverstock Hill, attending high mass in the beautiful church, dining with the good friars, and sitting awhile in their pretty shady garden. One of the fathers told me of a notice he had personally seen affixed to a pillar in Milan Cathedral in 1899. I copied it forthwith, as one of the funniest things of the kind which I had ever seen. Here it is verbatim:—

APPELE TO CHARITABLES.—The Brothers (so-called of Mercy) ask some slender Arms for their Hospital They harbour all kinds of diseases, and have no respect for religion.

I met this evening my nephew Kelburne, R.N., who had just been appointed first lieutenant on H.M.S. Renown (which was to take the Prince and Princess of Wales to India); he was looking forward to a good spell of leave and plenty of sport in the East. He seemed very keen on polo, and amused me with a yarn about his (naval) team having been offered £50 if they would kill Winston Churchill in their coming match against the House of Commons![[9]] The event of July was Bute's wedding in Ireland on the 6th. I travelled straight to Castle Bellingham two days previously, with Bute's Scots pipers in my train, much admired by the populace. I found, of course, the little Louth village, and indeed the whole countryside, en fête. The bride-elect, in inviting me, had spoken about "a quiet wedding at home"; but how was that possible? for the day could not be other than a popular festival to the warm-hearted folk among whom "Miss Augusta" had spent all her life. The wedding guests, bidden and unbidden, converged on the little country church in every imaginable conveyance, from special trains and motor-cars to the humble donkey-cart. The marriage service was simple and devout, the officiant being neither cardinal nor bishop, but the bride's own parish priest, while the music was grave plain-chant, perfectly rendered, with an exquisite motett by Palestrina. The royal Stuart tartan worn by the bridegroom, and the vivid St. Patrick's blue of the bridesmaids' cloaks and hoods, made a picturesque splash of colour against the masses of pure white lilies and marguerites with which the church was decorated. Most picturesque of all was the going-away of the happy pair from the little fishing-harbour, whither they were preceded, accompanied, and followed by troops of friends. Embarking in a white barge manned by oarsmen in the Bellingham liveries, they were rowed out to the steamer which was to take them across the sea to their honeymoon in Galloway. The pipers, following in another barge, played "Johnnie Stuart's gone awa'"; the band on the pier struck up "Come Back to Erin"; and amid cheers and tears and acclamations and blessings the white boat turned the corner of the pierhead and glided out over the rippling sunlit waters. We were regaled afterwards with some delightful part-singing by a famous Dublin choir on the castle lawn. Next day I departed with the Loudouns for Belfast, where it rained as it can rain only in Ireland, and I thought of one of Lady Dufferin's charming letters from the south of France to her Irish relatives:—

"O that I could transport a bit of that Provence sky which I have been enjoying, over your dear, dripping heads in Ireland! It is a terrible drawback on the goods of life at home to lead a web-foot existence. I sometimes fancy that I could put up with any amount of despotic monarchy taken warm, with Burgundy, rather than the British constitution, with all that cold water!"

We crossed to Stranraer in rain and mist, but found the sun shining in Galloway. The Loudouns went on to Ayrshire, and I to visit my niece at Dunskey, the new house which already looked old, with much dark oak, good pictures, and fine old prints everywhere. I liked the long and lofty terrace in front, commanding a beautiful view of the blue curve of the Irish Sea, the Mourne Mountains in the background, and, far to the south-westward, the Isle of Man[[10]] hanging like an azure cloud on the horizon. Everywhere round my dear old home,[[11]] in farms and village, gardens and woods, were signs of the changes and improvements wrought by the late owner, who had barely lived to see them. Sic vos non vobis, I sadly said to myself, as I stood on the point between the two bays at the foot of Dunskey Glen (his chosen resting-place), and looked at the simple granite cross rising above the brackens and heather. Portpatrick I found changed out of knowledge, with its red-roofed houses, electric light, golf-course, and big hotel on the brow of the hill. Tout passe. I had loved the quiet old-world village of my childhood, but I could not grudge the place its new prosperity, and all was full of interest to me. From Dunskey I went on to Kelburne and Loudoun Castle—the latter big, imposing and bare, and a little suggestive of Castle Carabas! though new pictures and redecoration did much, later on, to improve the interior. My examination-week at the Dumfries convent followed, diversified by an interesting visit to the local madhouse (euphemistically known as the "Crichton Royal Institution"), said to be the finest lunatic asylum in Britain; with splendid buildings, in perfect condition, 800 acres of fertile land, and the same number of patients, from country gentlemen to paupers. The high wall round the establishment was being replaced by a hedge, and the attendants were kept out of sight as much as possible, in accordance with the modern theory of not letting lunatics know that they were under restraint.[[12]] The luxuriousness of the whole place, in comparison with the home surroundings of most of the inmates, was very noticeable; and the spectacle of a "doited" farm-labourer seated in an arm-chair in a carpeted lounge, reading the Graphic upside down, was certainly curious, if not instructive.

I paid a visit to Eton this summer, on the occasion of the laying of the foundation of the South African war memorial by Princess Alexander of Teck (her husband and brother were both Etonians), who looked charming all in ivory white, with a long plume of Eton blue in her hat. The school O.T.C. formed the guard of honour, the only contretemps being that several of the youthful warriors were overcome by the heat, dropping down in the ranks one after another, like so many ninepins. The new building was to occupy the site of "m' tutors" ("the tallest house in college," he had said to me on my first arrival, "as I am the tallest master!"), and I walked through the hideous building for the last time—memor temporis acti—before going on to the head master's party in his charming garden sloping down to the river—a farewell function, as Dr. Warre was resigning the head mastership to Edward Lyttelton this half, and several masters were leaving with him. I went to London from Eton to attend Hyde's marriage to Miss Somers Cocks, and (though the season was over) met many friends afterwards at Lady Dudley's house in Carlton-gardens, where the wedding guests foregathered.

A visit to Arundel a little later was signalized by great festivities in honour of the birth of the Duke's little daughter. The four thousand guests who, as the fancy took them, danced in the tilting-yard (converted into a great open-air ballroom), listened to martial music from military bands, roamed through the beautiful state-rooms, or gazed admiringly at the myriad fairy lamps which glowed many-coloured on castle walls, battlements, and towers, were literally of every class. Peers and peeresses, officers and deans and doctors, and Sussex county magnates, mingled freely with the farmers, artisans, and workmen who were their fellow-guests. The fête wound up with a grand display of fireworks in the park, and the host and hostess (the latter looking very nice in her white summer frock, with flowing crimson sash and a string of great pearls round her neck), made every one happy with their affability and kindness.

On my way north I stayed a few days with the Gainsboroughs at Exton, near Oakham—my first visit to the little shire of Rutland. A most attractive place, I thought: a charming modern Jacobean house (the ruins of the Elizabethan hall, burnt down a century before, stood close by): beautiful gardens and a nobly-timbered park, in which stands the fine old parish church with its singularly graceful spire. Tennis, al fresco teas, and much music, occupied a few days very agreeably; and I then went on to St. Andrews for my usual autumn sojourn, which I always enjoyed. But my most memorable Scottish visit this autumn was to Abbotsford, which, curiously enough, I had never yet seen, though I had known its owners for thirty years. My grandfather and Sir Walter Scott had been friends for many years: they were planning and building at the same time their respective homes in the western and eastern Lowlands, and often exchanged visits and letters. Here is a little note (undated) in which Sir Walter acknowledged, with an apt Shakespearian reference, a gift of game from Blairquhan:—

My Dear Sir David,—

I thank you much for your kind present. The pheasants arrived in excellent condition, and showing, like Shakespeare's Yeomen, "the mettle of their pasture."[[13]]

When are you and Lady Blair going to take another run down Tweed?

Your obliged humble servant,
WALTER SCOTT.

My father had stayed at Abbotsford as a little boy, before he entered the Navy, and two or three years before Sir Walter's death in 1832. He had not the customary reminiscence of having sat on the great man's knee;[[14]] but he remembered a beautiful collie which lay outside the study door, and refused to let any one enter in his master's absence. We were all brought up on Scott—his Tales of a Grandfather, his novels and poems. My father seemed to know the latter all by heart: he would reel them off (with fine elocution, too) by the hour, and we children loved the stirring music of the Border songs, the Lady of the Lake and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which only in our later and more sophisticated days suggested the answer to a flippant conundrum.[[15]]

To me, of course, Abbotsford had, and has, a special and peculiar charm, as having been for more than sixty years one of the "Catholic Homes of Scotland."[[16]] The "incongruous pile" sneered at by Ruskin, the bizarre architecture which, I suppose, made Dean Stanley describe it as a place to be visited once and never again, are open to criticism and easily criticized. I prefer the judgment of Andrew Lang, that "it is hallowed ground, and one may not judge it by common standards." To Catholics it is doubly hallowed—as a Catholic centre in the sweet Border-land which Scott knew and loved so well, and as the "darling seat" of one who by the magic of his writings made the Catholic past of Scotland live again, and the last words on whose dying lips were lines from two of the noblest and most sacred hymns in the Catholic liturgy.[[17]]

The Dowager Lady Bute was the occupant of Abbotsford during my visit there, and had hoped to make it her home for some time; but her stay was cut short by a serious motor accident, in which she and her daughter sustained rather severe injuries. I was at the time at Dumfries House, where Bute and his bride were happily settled for the autumn; and there was of course great concern at the Abbotsford disaster, which fortunately turned out less grave than was at first feared. I was interested in the recent additions to Dumfries House, including a fine Byzantine chapel, a saloon lit from the roof for the Stair tapestries,[[18]] and a new library-billiard-room, all so cleverly tucked in by the architect behind the existing wings, that the beautiful Adam front remains as it was. Lady Bute, smartly frocked, and twinkling with diamonds, sapphires, and ropes of pearls, was quite "Lothair's bride." On Sunday we had the regulation walk to the lovely old garden, stables, farm, and poultry-yard. A great

"wale" of cocks and hens,[[19]] among which our hostess dropped one of her priceless earrings, and we had a long hunt for it. Reading my Glasgow paper in the train next day, on my way south, I came on a paragraph announcing the "reception into the Roman Church" of the Professor of Greek (J. S. Phillimore) at Glasgow University—a Christ Church man, and a scholar of the highest distinction. What (I thought) will the "unco guid" of Glasgow say now?[[20]]

[[1]] Sir William Harcourt's son, commonly known as "Lulu" (now Viscount Harcourt), had lately inherited Nuneham on the death of his father.

[[2]] It ran as follows: "In an age when faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, when love is regarded but as a spasm of the nervous system, and life itself as but the refrain of a music-hall song, I believe that it is still the function of art to give us light rather than darkness. Its teaching should not be to prove that we are descended from monkeys, but rather to remind us of our affinity with the angels. Its mission is not to lead us through the fogs of doubt into the bogs of despair, but to point us to the greater light beyond."

[[3]] On what principle, I could not help asking myself, are Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits (all engaged in active work, and therefore ex hypothesi dangerous), freely tolerated in Rome, and Carthusians (whose only occupation is prayer) expelled from Naples?

[[4]] On a previous occasion our Catholic Society had voted on the same motion in precisely the contrary sense. But the opinions of the "Newman," as of all university debating societies (not excluding the Union), were quite fluid and indeterminate on almost every subject.

[[5]] Sir Charles Lyell, I am inclined to believe. But I cannot "place" the quotation.

[[6]] Curious; because the Authorized translation (presumably used at Keble) ignores the medici altogether, its version being "Shall the dead arise and praise Thee?" There is, I fancy, some authority for my friend's interpretation; still, the context seems to show clearly that suscitabunt means "rise from the dead," and that what the words convey is that dead doctors, like other dead men, are done with praising God anyhow in this world.

[[7]] A monk of the abbey of Maredsous, in Belgium, but by birth a Norman, a native of Caen. He was somewhat of the destructive school of patristic critics, and I once heard it said that Dom Germain would not die happy until he had proved to his own satisfaction that all the supposed writings of St. Augustine were spurious!

[[8]] Radley House, his birthplace, had been sold to the college some years before by Sir George Bowyer, the eminent Catholic jurist and writer, who had preceded Manning into the Church in 1850, and who built the beautiful church annexed to the Catholic Hospital in Great Ormond Street (removed later to St. John's Wood). I well remember in my early Catholic days (I think about 1876) the excitement caused by the expulsion of Sir George—whose strongly-expressed views on the Roman question and other matters were highly distasteful to British Liberals—from the Reform Club.

[[9]] I think I heard afterwards that the sailors got him off his pony once or twice; but the reward was not earned, and he lived to become First Lord of the Admiralty just three years later!

[[10]] Only visible in the clearest weather. From a point farther south (the Mull of Galloway) could be descried also, across the Solway Firth, the Cumberland hills; and my grandfather, standing there, used to say that he could see five kingdoms—the kingdom of Scotland, the kingdom of Ireland, the kingdom of England, the kingdom of Man, and the kingdom of Heaven!

[[11]] I had inherited Dunskey nearly fifty years before, on my grandfather's death (1857). The place was bought in 1900 by Charles Orr Ewing, M.P., who married my niece, the Glasgows' eldest daughter.

[[12]] A theory which, reduced to practice, had its disadvantages. I remember Lord Rosebery writing to the papers complaining that the lunatics of Epsom, finding no difficulty, under the new and improved system, in escaping from duress, used occasionally to saunter from the local asylum into his grounds, and, I think, even his house, near by.

[[13]] The reference, of course, is to King Henry V., Act iii., Sc. 2:

"And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture."

[[14]] My dear old cousin Felicia Skene, whose father had been one of Scott's closest friends, told me that this had been her privilege. So also did the late George Boyle, sometime Dean of Salisbury, who, however, in his autobiography, speaks merely of having once seen Sir Walter (looking very old and ill) when he came to call on his (the Dean's) father.

[[15]] "If you happened to find an egg on a music-stool, what poem would it remind you of?"

[[16]] James Hope Scott, the eminent parliamentary lawyer, friend of Newman, Manning and Gladstone, and husband of Sir Walter's granddaughter and eventual heiress, made his submission to Rome in 1851. His daughter Mary Monica (afterwards Hon. Mrs. Joseph Maxwell Scott), inherited Abbotsford at his death; and it is now owned by her son, General Walter Maxwell Scott.

[[17]] The Dies Iræ and the Stabat Mater. See Lockhart, Life of Walter Scott (2nd Ed.), vol. x., p. 215.

[[18]] From the looms of Gobelin: presented by Louis XIV. to an Earl of Stair, British Ambassador in Paris. They had come into the Dumfries (Bute) family through the marriage of a son of the first Earl of Stair to Penelope, Countess of Dumfries in her own right. It was a standing grievance of our old friend the tenth Earl of Stair that these tapestries were not at Lochinch.

[[19]] "Wale"=choice, or selection. A Fife laird, driving home across Magus Moor after dining not wisely but too well, fell out of his gig, and his wig fell off, but was recovered by his servant. "It's no' ma wig, Davie, it's no' ma wig," he moaned as he lay in the mire, thrusting the peruke away. "You'd best take it, sir," said the serving-man dryly; "there's nae wale o' wigs on Magus Moor."

[[20]] They said much that was nasty, but they could not oust the professor (though they tried their best) from his professorship. Au contraire, he received promotion soon afterwards, being elected to the Chair of Humanity; and a protest organized by certain bigots was allowed to "lie on the table"—i.e., went into the waste-paper basket.

CHAPTER IV

1905-1906

An event of Benedictine interest in the autumn of 1905, and one which attracted many visitors to Downside, our beautiful abbey among the Mendip Hills, was the long-anticipated opening of the choir of the great church. Special trains, an overflowing guest-house, elaborate services, many congratulatory speeches, and much monastic hospitality, were, as customary on such occasions, the order of the day. Architecturally, I confess that I found the new choir disappointing: it but confirmed the impression (which after many years had become a conviction with me) that the art of building a real Gothic church on a grand scale is lost, gone beyond hope of recovery. Ecce signum! Design, material, workmanship all admirable, and the result, alas! lifeless, as lifeless as (say) the modern cathedrals of Truro and Liverpool and Edinburgh, the nave of Bristol, and the great church of Our Lady at Cambridge. I have seen Downside compared with Lichfield: nay, some one (greatly daring) placed pictures of them side by side in some magazine. Vain comparison! Lichfield, built long centuries ago, is alive still—instinct with the life breathed into it by its unknown creators in the ages of faith; but these great modern Gothic churches seem to me to have never lived at all, to have come into existence still-born. No: Gothic architecture, in this century of ours, is dead. Such life as it has is a simulated, imitative, galvanized life, which is no more real life than the tunes ground out of a pianola or a gramophone are real living music.[[1]] "'Tis true, 'tis pity: pity 'tis, 'tis true."

Another engagement which I had in the west about this time was to preach at the opening of the new Benedictine church at Merthyr Tydvil. Bishop Hedley and I travelled thither together from Cardiff, through a country which God made extremely pretty, with its deep glens and hills covered with bracken and heather, but which man, in search of coal, has blackened and defaced to an incredible extent: the whole district, of course, a hive of industry. Lying in bed at night, I saw through my blindless window the flames belching from a score of furnace-chimneys down the valley, and thought what it must be to spend one's life in such surroundings. A curious change to find oneself next day in the verdant environment of Cardiff Castle, where, once within the gates, one might be miles away from coalpits and from the great industrial city close by. My room was the quondam nursery, of which the walls had been charmingly decorated by the fanciful genius of William Burges (the restorer of the castle), with scenes from children's fairy stories—Jack the Giant-killer and Cinderella and Red Riding-hood and the rest, tripping round in delightful procession. The Welsh metropolis was en fête on the day of my arrival, in honour of the town having become a city, and its mayor a lord-mayor; and Lord Bute was giving a big luncheon to civic and other magnates in the beautiful banqueting hall, adorned with historic frescoes and rich stained glass. The family was smiling gently, during my visit, at the news published "from a reliable source," that my young host was to be the new Viceroy of Ireland. Another report, equally "reliable" (odious word!) published, a little later, his portrait and not very eventful biography, as that of the just-appointed Under-Foreign Secretary. Why not Lord Chancellor or Commander-in-chief at once? one was as likely as the other.

The reference to the commander-in-chief reminds me that the Oxford Union was honoured this (October) term by a visit from Lord Roberts, who gave us a very informing lecture, illustrated with many maps, on the N.W. frontier of India and was received by a crowded house with positive shouts of welcome.[[2]] Almost equally well received, a week later, was Lord Hugh Cecil, who had held no office in the Union in his undergraduate days, but had often since taken part in its debates. His theme on this occasion was the interminable fiscal question; and the curiously poignant and personal note in his oratory appealed, as it always did, to his youthful hearers, who supported him with their votes as well as their applause.

A little later there was a great audience in the Town Hall, to hear Joe Chamberlain inveigh against the new Government,[[3]] and preach his fiscal gospel. He was in excellent form, and looked nothing like seventy, though his long speech—his last, I think, before his great break-down—certainly aged him visibly. A little incident at the opening showed his undiminished aptitude for ready repartee. He announced his intention of treating Tariff Reform from the Imperial standpoint, adding, "I am not going to deal with the subject from the economic side"; and then, as a derisive "Yah!" broke from some disgruntled Liberals at the back of the hall, going on without a moment's hesitation—"not, however, for the reason which I see suggests itself to some of the acuter minds among my audience!"

S—— H——, whom I found waiting to see me when I got home from the Town Hall, told me that after two years in the Catholic Church he was thinking of returning to the flesh-pots of Anglicanism, and said (among other foolish things) that he had "a Renaissance mind!" I ventured to remind him that he had also an immortal soul. How to increase his income seemed his chief preoccupation; and he did not "see his way" (that fatal phrase again!) to do this as a "practising" Catholic.

Wilfrid Ward, the Editor of the Dublin Review, had recently started a "dining-and-debating-club" in London with a rather interesting membership; and I went up in November to read a paper on "Catholics at the National Universities." I was less "heckled" than I expected; but there was some "good talk" (as old Johnson would have said), and I enjoyed the evening. Less enjoyable was another evening spent with our Architectural Society at Oxford, to hear a lecture by Wells (fellow and future Warden) of Wadham, on "Tudor Oxford" an interesting topic, and treated by a man who knew his subject, but disfigured by strongly Protestant interpolations about monks, Jesuits, and "Bloody Mary," much out of place in an address to a quite "undenominational" society. It recalled another paper read to us on the inoffensive subject of "Bells." The reader on that occasion adroitly founded on the text of the inscriptions on church bells a violent diatribe against the invocation of saints and other "mediæval corruptions," to the intense annoyance of my little friend the Master of Pembroke (himself an Anglican bishop), who sat next me, and whom I with difficulty restrained until the end of the lecture from rising to protest, as he ultimately did with some warmth, against "turning an archæological address into a polemical sermon."

Term over, I made my way north to Beaufort, arriving there just in time to assist at the unveiling in the village square of Beauly, of the Lovat Scouts' Memorial, for which I had written the inscription.[[4]] A pretty function, with much local enthusiasm, an excellent speech from The Mackintosh, our new Lord Lieutenant, and of course the inevitable "cake and wine" banquet, at which I toasted Lovat. Christmas followed, with a big and merry family party, the usual seasonable revels, and some delightful singing from the wife of a Ross-shire laird, an American lady with a well-trained voice of astonishing sweetness and compass. The New Year found the whole country agog about the coming General Election; and at Arundel, whither I went from Beaufort, I heard Lady Edmund Talbot falsify Johnson's cynical dictum[[5]] by making an excellent speech on behalf of her husband, who was laid up in London. He retained his seat for Chichester by a good majority; and "dear little Wigtownshire" remained faithful to a lost cause, returning Lord Stair's eldest son.[[6]] But on the whole the "Radical reaction," "turn of the tide," "swing of the pendulum"—whichever you liked to call it—was complete, the very first victim of the débâcle being my brother-in-law, Charles Dalrymple, who was dismissed at Ipswich, after twenty years' service, by nearly 2,000 votes. He had been given a Privy Councillorship by the outgoing Government; but this poorly compensated him for being ousted from the House of Commons, which had been his "nursing mother" for nearly forty years.[[7]] Manchester was absolutely swept by the Liberals, poor Sir James Fergusson going to join his brother in limbo, and Arthur Balfour being beaten by a larger majority than either of them. The final result showed—Radical members returned, 378, against 156 Unionists. The new Ministry put educational reform in the front of their programme; and we Catholics, with a section of Anglicans (for they were by no means united on the subject), organized meetings in advance against the nefarious projects of the Government. I attended some of them, and heard many speeches, some of them terribly long and "stodgy." A Hampshire parson, by whom I sat at one of these dreary meetings, told me, by way of illustrating the educational standard of his peasant parishioners, that a bridegroom would thus render the promise in the marriage-service: "With my body I thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou!" While the bride's version of her promise would be: "To 'ave an' to 'old from this day fortnight for betterer 'orse, for richerer power, in siggerness 'ealth, to love cherries and to bay!" I copied these interesting formulas into my note-book on the spot.

I was happily able to escape, at the end of term, from these political alarums and excursions to the Continent. I longed for Italy; but the friend who accompanied me (and financed us both) insisted on carrying me to Nice—a place I never loved; and it proved sunless, the palms shivering in a mistral and we shivering in sympathy. I used to escape the odious Promenade des Anglais (much more a Promenade des Allemands) by climbing the steep steps into old-world Nizza, and talking to the good simple folk, who (so the parish priest assured me) remained devout and pious, and wonderfully little affected by the manners and morals of the objectionable crowd which haunts Nice more than any other spot on the Côte d'Azur, except, I suppose, Monte Carlo. The latter resort we eschewed (my friend and host was no gambler), but we had many strolls through the toy-city of Monaco, where the tourist is little in evidence. I noticed, crowning the picturesque promontory, the new cathedral built by M. Blanc out of casino profits, which the ecclesiastical authorities accepted, I suppose, on the principle of the good old maxim, Non olet![[8]] We took a run to Milan before turning homewards, and after an hour in the cathedral—impressively vast, but not (to my thinking) impressively beautiful, either without or within—spent a long day in exploring the far more interesting churches of SS. Maurizio, Maria delle Grazie, Vittore, Lorenzo, Giorgio, and Ambrogio, every one well worth visiting, and the last-named unique, of course, in charm and interest.[[9]] Turin, where we stayed a day, was wet and cold; but the arcades which line the chief streets at least keep the rain off. At Paris the sun was actually shining, and the trees on the boulevards sprouting greenly. I read in the English papers here of the engagement of my nephew Kelburn (the family had only recently dropped the final e from both the title and the castle)[[10]] to a Miss Hyacinth Bell, whose pretty floral name conveyed nothing to me. The new Minister of Education[[11]] had also published his "Birreligious" Bill (as some wags nicknamed it): it seemed to satisfy nobody—least of all, of course, Catholics.

I spent Easter, as usual, at Arundel, where a gathering of Maxwells (the Duchess's young relatives) made the big house cheerful and homelike. The summer term at Oxford was an uneventful one, the most interesting event that I recall being our annual Canning and Chatham dinner, with a more distinguished gathering than usual. Lord Milner made a remarkable and interesting speech in reply to the toast of "The Empire," and "Smith of Wadham," M.P. (the future Lord Chancellor), was also very eloquent. The Duke of Leinster (then up at Balliol), who sat next me, spoke of the hereditary good relations between his family and Maynooth College, and amused me by saying that he thought it must be "much more interesting" to be a Catholic in England than in Ireland! I motored some of my young Benedictines over to Blenheim one day; and we were, with other sight-seers, escorted over the show-part of the palace. The little Duke burst in on us in one state-room, and retired precipitately, banging the door with an audible "D—n!" "His Grace the Dook of Marlborough!" announced, without turning a hair, the solemn butler who was acting as showman; and our party was, of course, duly impressed.

I was summoned this summer to three weddings, all of interest to me, the first being that of my nephew Kelburn, a pretty country function in Surrey. The Bishop of Worcester tied the knot—"impressively," as the reporters say (but why cannot an Anglican dignitary read the Bible without "mouthing" it?), and I afterwards found in his wife, Lady Barbara Yeatman-Biggs, an old friend of my childhood.[[12]] Many relatives, of course, were present here, and also, ten days later, in the Chelsea church where Archdeacon Sinclair ("genial and impressive," the newspapers called him) united my younger sister, en secondes noces, to Captain Cracroft Jarvis. I spent the evening of her wedding in the House of Commons, where I had a mind to see our famous new Radical Parliament-men gathered together. A very "scratch lot" they seemed to me to be; and Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, whom I found beside me in the D.S.G., seemed as little impressed as myself by their "carryings-on." His Grace was so pleased with Carlyle's definition, or description, of the House, which I quoted to him (he was apparently unfamiliar with it), that he promptly copied it down in his note-book: "a high-soaring, hopelessly-floundering, ever-babbling, inarticulate, dumb dark entity!"

My third wedding was a picturesque Irish one—that of Ninian Crichton Stuart to Lord Gormanston's only daughter, with, of course, a large party of Butes and Prestons gathered at Gormanston Castle, a huge pile mostly modern; but the quaint little chapel, Jacobean Gothic without and Empire style within, gaily adorned with lilies, marguerites, and trailing smilax, dates from 1687.[[13]] It was far too small to hold the wedding guests, who perforce remained on the lawn outside. I walked with our host, later in the day, in the splendidly timbered park, and the great picturesque untidy Irish garden; and he held forth on the hardship of having to live uncomfortably in Ireland after the luxury of Colonial governorships. "Ireland! a rotten old country, only fit, as some one said, to dig up and use as a top-dressing for England!" was the summing-up of his lordship, whose ancestors had owned the land on which we were walking for some seven centuries.[[14]] I thought his bemoanings rather pathetic; but he amused me by his recital of a prescription for "The Salvation of Ireland" which once appeared (anonymously) in a northern newspaper. "Drain your Bogs—Fat more Hogs—Lots more Lime—Lots more Chalk—LOTS MORE WORK—LOTS LESS TALK!"

I returned to Oxford in time for Commemoration, at which Lord Milner and Mgr. Duchesne, two of our be-doctored guests, were very warmly received; attended the big luncheon in All Souls' library, where the agreeable ladies who sat on my right and left were totally unknown to me; and drank coffee in the sunlit quad, where a band played and I met many friends. Next day I took ship at Southampton (a noisy, shaky, creaky ship it was) for Guernsey, on a visit to my brother, who was in command of the Gunners there. I thought the approach to the island very pretty on a still summer morning: quaint houses and church towers climbing the hill among trees and gardens, with a foreground of white sails and blue sea. Very pretty too was "Ordnance House" and its old garden, with hedges of golden calceolarias and other attractions. I spent a pleasant week here, delighted with the rocky coast (reminding me of my native Wigtownshire) and the luxuriant gardens, especially that of the Lieutenant-Governor, whose charming house (he occupied Lord de Saumarez's seat) was full, as was to be expected,[[15]] of beautiful naval prints and other relics. Of a morning I would walk down to Fort Cornet—part of it of great antiquity—and watch my brother's guns at sea-target practice, till my head ached with the roar and concussion. The shooting was excellent, but the electric firing-apparatus occasionally went wrong, which might be awkward in battle! I was interested in the fine fifteenth-century parish church of St. Peter-Port, of flamboyant Gothic: the effect of the interior nave-arches rising almost from the ground, with hardly any pillars, is most singular.

I had to hurry back to "the adjacent island of Great Britain" (as the Cumbrae minister put it),[[16]] to attend the jubilee dinner in London of St. Elisabeth's Catholic Hospital, with Norfolk in the chair: a great success, owing, I think, to the unusual circumstance that dinner and wine were provided gratis, the result being much-enhanced subscriptions from the grateful banqueters. I was present a little later at the coming-of-age celebrations of Lord Gainsborough's son and heir at Campden, the beautiful Jacobean family seat on the Cotswold slopes. We sat down seventy to dinner on the evening of Campden's birthday; and the youth acquitted himself excellently of what I consider (and I have had some experience of majority banquets, including my own) one of the most embarrassing tasks which can fall to any young man's lot. I, being unexpectedly assigned the easier duty of replying for the visitors, utilized the admirably appropriate opening which I had heard not long before from the witty and eloquent American Ambassador,[[17]] at the dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, and which was not a "chestnut" then, whatever it may be now.

From Campden I went on to Leamington to visit another brother, who had invited me to witness the Warwick Pageant, I think the first, and certainly the most effective and successful, of these spectacles, for which the craze was just beginning to spread through England. The dramatic episodes at Warwick were not always dramatic, and the dialogue and acting were perhaps not quite worthy of the superb surroundings; but the setting of the spectacle was absolutely perfect. Behind us the towers and battlements of the feudal castle rose above the woods: on our right the giant oaks of the park, in their glorious midsummer foliage: to our left the Avon glistening like a ribbon of burnished silver; and in front, beyond a great expanse of verdant lawn (the "stage" of the pageant), a prospect of enchanting wooded glades and long-drawn sylvan avenues, down which came the long processions of players, mounted and afoot, with singular and striking effect. Lord and Lady Willoughby de Broke, who appeared (with the splendidly mounted members of their hunt) as Louis XI. and Margaret of Scotland, were conspicuous, if only because the former acted his part and spoke his lines best of the whole company. The concerted singing was quite charming; and charming, too, the spectacle of the hundred boys of the famous old Warwick Grammar-school, in their pretty dresses of russet and gold, and their masters costumed as old-world pedagogues. Altogether a delightful and notable entertainment, which I was very glad to have seen; and in other respects I enjoyed my visit, my brother taking me to Kenilworth, Stoneleigh, Charlecote, and other interesting places in that most interesting country. The August Bank-holiday found me at Scarborough, of all places in the world, spending the day there with the two schoolboy sons of my host at a country house in the East Riding. I recall, at the aquarium there, my interest on discovering a "fact not generally known"—namely that fishes can, and do, yawn. We saw a turbot yawn twice, and a cod once. The cod's yawn was remarkable chiefly for its width, but the turbot's was much more noteworthy. It begins at the lips, which open as if to suck in water;[[18]] then the jaws distend themselves and so the yawn goes on, works through the back of the head, stretching the plates of the skull almost to cracking point, and finally comes out at the gills, which open showing their red lining, and are inflated for a moment; and then, with a gasping kind of shiver, the fish flattens out again, until, if unusually bored, as it appeared to be by our presence, it relieves its feelings by another yawn. I left my young friends to enjoy the varied humours of the front; and climbing up (as I had done at Nice) "far from the madding crowd," discovered many quaint and charming bits of old Scarborough. A policeman told me that they reckoned that at least 120,000 visitors were in the town that day; and they all seemed collected together to view the evening firework display above the Spa. The biggest crowds I had ever seen were at Epsom on Derby Day, between Mortlake and Putney on Boat-race Day, and in St. Peter's Square at Rome on the election-day of Leo XIII.: but this great congeries at Scarborough surpassed them all in impressiveness. I turned my back on the "set pieces" and Roman candles, gazed almost awestruck at the vast sea of upturned white faces on the beach below, lit up from time to time by the lurid glow of coloured fires, and listened to the cry "Ah-h-h!" of the great multitude as the rockets shrilled up into the starlit sky. Mirabile visu et auditu! it somehow made me think (at Scarborough on Bank Holiday evening!) of the Last Day and the Valley of Jehoshaphat. From Scarborough, before going north to Scotland, I went for a few days to Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's beautiful place near Berwick, with views on every side over the rolling Border country. "Norham's castle steep," built nine centuries before by Flambard, the "Magnificent" Bishop of Durham, was on the Longridge property; and I spent some delightful hours there with my accomplished host, who was a charming companion, and (as became a bachelier-ès-lettres of Paris University) could tell a good story as well in French as he could in English. He showed me among many curiosities a letter from an early Quaker which I thought worth copying:—

FRIEND JOHN,—

I desire thee to be so kind as to go to one of those sinful men in the flesh called an attorney, and let him take out an instrument, with a seal fixed thereto, by means whereof we may seize the outward tabernacle of George Green, and bring him before the lambskin men at Westminster, and teach him to do as he would be done by; and so I rest thy friend in the light,

M.D.

Mountstuart claimed me for a short visit when I had got across the Border; and I found the big house very cheerful under the new and youthful régime, and my hostess, now a happy mother, driving the baby Lady Mary about the island and exhibiting her to the admiring farmers' wives. I made my way up the West coast to Fort Augustus to spend the rest of the Oxford "Long," travelling thence in September to Aberdeen to read a paper at the annual conference of the Catholic Truth Society. There was a large attendance, Lady Lovat doing hostess at a big reception one evening; and it was pleasant to find oneself in a genuinely Scottish, as well as Catholic, gathering, presided over by a Highland bishop (Æneas Chisholm of beloved memory), as patriotic and popular as he was pious and pleasant. My paper, on "The Holy See and the Scottish Universities," was very well received, and the local newspapers did me the honour of reprinting it verbatim next morning, while the Scotsman devoted a leading article to it. Our principal meeting, in the largest hall of the city, wound up not only with "Faith of our Fathers" but "God save the King." "Is this necessary?" whispered a prelate of Nationalist leanings to the presiding bishop, in the middle of the loyal anthem. "It may not be necessary," replied Bishop Chisholm, in a very audible "aside," "but it is very right and extremely proper." O si sic omnes!"[[19]]

[[1]] Such seeming exceptions as the noble churches of St. John at Norwich and St. Philip at Arundel, the Duke of Newcastle's sumptuous chapel at Clumber, the impressive church of the Irvingites in Gordon Square, are only satisfactory in so far as they are more or less exact imitations of mediæval Gothic. The cloisters of Fort Augustus Abbey are beautiful because they are reproductions, from A. W. Pugin's note-books, of real live fifteenth-century tracery. The more the modern Gothic architect strives to be original (a hard saying, but a true one), the more certainly he fails. And to see how feebly ineffective even his imitations can be, one need only look at the entrance tower of St. Swithun's Quad at Magdalen, and compare it with the incomparable Founder's Tower immediately opposite.

Let me add that I have no animus against Downside in particular: it is merely an instance taken at random to illustrate my thesis. I had felt just the same, years before, about the first grandiose plans for our own church at Fort Augustus. "Go to Westminster Abbey—you can see it from your windows," I wrote to the architect, "and get an inspiration from that glorious temple of living Gothic. Your elaborate designs have no life, no reality. If they were ever realized among our Highland hills, I should expect some genie of the Arabian Nights to swoop down one day and whisk the whole impossible structure back to Victoria Street!" I still recall the pleasure and approval with which Dom Gilbert Dolan of Downside, one of the most distinguished of modern Benedictine architects, read this letter.

[[2]] Who was the reporter who once announced (I believe it was really a printer's error and not a little bit of malice) that "the Conservatives among the audience received the candidate with welcoming snouts"?

[[3]] Arthur Balfour had resigned the premiership in the previous week, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had succeeded him.

[[4]] Not an easy task! for Lovat wanted the Scouts to have all the honour, which they wished assigned to him. My inscription (I believe generally approved) ran: Erected by the Lovat Tenantry and Feuars of the Aird and Fort Augustus Districts to Commemorate the Raising of the Lovat Scouts for Service in South Africa by Simon Joseph, 16th Lord Lovat, C.V.O., C.B., D.S.O., who Desired to Show that the Martial Spirit of their Ancestors still Animates the Highlanders of To-Day, and Whose Confidence was Justified by the Success in the Field of the Gallant Corps Whose Existence was Due to His Loyalty and Patriotism. A.D. 1905.

[[5]] "A woman speaking in public is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not well done, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

[[6]] My native county remained consistently and uninterruptedly Tory for fifty years—from 1868, when it returned Lord Garlics, until 1918, when its separate representation was taken from it by the new Redistribution Act.

[[7]] Sir Charles had sat in Parliament continuously, except for a few weeks, since 1868, when he was first elected for Buteshire. It was only this very slight break which prevented him from being at one time the Father of the House of Commons.

[[8]] I heard an odd story to the effect that at the Anglican Church at Monte Carlo no one had ever heard any hymn before No. 37 announced to be sung; the reason being that the mention of any one from 1 to 36 would instantly have sent a quota of the congregation racing down to stake their money on that number! It was, and is, a current superstition that a number suggested by something as remote as possible from gambling is likely to prove a lucky one.

[[9]] Due, I think, largely to the fact that though the greater part of the church is ninth and tenth century work, it has the air of being very much older, and seems to recall the days of St. Ambrose himself.

[[10]] "Kelburn" was, I believe, the old spelling. About the same time the Duke of Athole dropped his final e also; and the name-board at the well-known station, at his castle gates, displayed, as I observed on my next journey to the Highlands, the legend "Blair Atholl," instead of "Blair Athole" as formerly.

[[11]] Augustine Birrell, the distinguished essayist, whose literary method, easy, witty, and urbane, has evoked the word "birrelling." He succeeded Mr. Bryce a little later as Irish Secretary, and retained that office (in which he was no more successful than most of his predecessors) under Mr. Asquith.

[[12]] Née Legge: one of a crowd of sisters (Ladies Louisa, Octavia, Wilhelmina, Barbara, Charlotte, and I know not how many more) with whom I made friends as a small boy when staying with my parents at Aix-la-Chapelle; and we saw much of them afterwards. We children used to call them the "Lady-legs." Their brother Augustus, who was also a friend of my childhood, became Bishop of Lichfield in 1891.

[[13]] Built in James II.'s reign (the original castle was of Henry VII.'s), when the accession of a Catholic King enabled Catholics, British and Irish, to emerge for a short time from the Catacombs.

[[14]] Lord Gormanston, like Lord Talbot de Malahide and a few others, represented the Anglo-Irish landowners of the time of Henry VII., "Lord of Ireland." My friend Lord Kenmare was typical of the enriched Elizabethan settlers in the country, while Sir Henry Bellingham was one of the seventeenth-century group of immigrants popularly known as "Cromwell's Drummers." Three out of the four mentioned were Catholics.

[[15]] The first baronet and Baron de Saumarez was second in command at the Battle of the Nile, and was raised to the peerage by William IV.

[[16]] It was the parish minister of Millport, in Cumbrae (off the coast of Ayrshire) who habitually prayed at Divine Service for the "inhabitants of the Greater and the Lesser Cumbraes, and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland!"

[[17]] The late Mr. Choate. "When I came into this assembly this evening, I felt very much like the prophet Daniel when he got into the lion's den. When Daniel looked around, and saw the company in which he was, 'Well,' he said, 'whoever's got to do the after-dinner speaking, it won't be me!'"

[[18]] A turbot's mouth is twisted on one side, rather as if it had belonged to a round fish which some one had accidentally trodden on, and had squashed half-flat.

[[19]] My friend Lord Ralph Kerr had, some time previously, refused to preside at a meeting of the same Society (of which he was president) in another Scottish city, on learning that the local committee would not permit the National Anthem to be sung at the close. The reason alleged, that "the Irish in the audience would not stand it," did not, naturally, strike the gallant Scottish general as an adequate one.

CHAPTER V

1906-1907

Before returning to Oxford for the autumn term of 1906, I spent a pleasant ten days at Abbotsford with my old friends the Lane Foxes, and visited with them Dryburgh Abbey, Galashiels, and other interesting places. Melrose, too, we thoroughly explored, agreeing that (pace Sir Walter) the time for seeing it "aright" was not "by the pale moonlight," but on a sunlit afternoon, which alone does justice to the marvellous colouring—grey shot with rose and yellow—of the old stone. Modern textbooks talk of the "decadence" of its architecture, but it has details of surpassing beauty nevertheless. It was ill exchanging the beauties of Tweedside in perfect September weather for foggy London. I arrived there on a Sunday morning, just in time for high mass at Westminster Cathedral, of which a fog rather enhances the charm, softening the raw brick walls and imparting a mysterious and shadowy splendour to the great spaces under the lofty domes. The grave polyphonic music, perfectly rendered, greatly pleased me; but the acoustics of the building seemed to be defective.[[1]] A noted preacher was discoursing to an immense congregation on "Pessimism"—so the notice-boards informed me; but it might as well have been on Optimism for anything I could hear of it. Walking homewards to Regent's Park, I looked in at a Ritualistic church in Red Lion Square, where a singular function was in progress in presence of the (schismatic) Archbishop of Sinai, under the auspices of a body styling itself "The Anglican and Orthodox Churches Union."[[2]] As I entered, a clergyman was just remarking from the pulpit that as there was no visible Church on earth, or as, at any rate, it was temporally broken to bits, there was no use in looking for a visible head! a theory which his audience may or may not have found satisfactory.[[3]]

I lingered for a day at Birmingham, on my way to Oxford, to attend the opening of the nave of the Newman Memorial Church. It was the sixty-first anniversary of Newman's reception into the Church at Littlemore, as well as the sixth of the death of Lord Bute, whose conversion was a fruit of the Oxford movement, of which Newman was the inspiring genius. I was pleased with the simplicity, even austerity, of the building, relieved to some extent by the beautiful tints of the double row of marble monoliths, and by the warm russet of the coved roof of Spanish chestnut. Eight or ten prelates (the Archbishop of Westminster was the preacher) gave dignity to the function, which was followed by a rather higgledy-piggledy luncheon at the "Plough and Harrow" next door. The Norfolk family were of course present in force at their beloved Oratory, the Duke, with sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, being prominent among the large gathering. Lord Ralph Kerr's boy, a pupil of the Fathers, showed me over the school; and I rather marvelled to see an educational establishment of such deserved repute housed in so quaint a collection of lean-to's and shanties, the only thing worth looking at being the fine refectory of the Oratory, which the schoolboys used as their dining-room.

I found Oxford swept and garnished for the new term, and my old friend the President of Magdalen installed as Vice-chancellor, and performing his multifarious duties (which included the matriculation of my two Benedictine freshmen) with the mingled dignity and urbanity which characterized him. Grissell, who was in residence this term, invited me to luncheon to meet "a Roman Prince," and a lady who had, he said, been miraculously cured by the Madonna of Pompeii. The cure, unfortunately, had been incomplete or temporary, for the lady had had a relapse, was in bed, and could not turn up. The Roman Prince, or princeling, proved to be Don Andrea Buoncompagni-Ludovisi, descendant of two Popes,[[4]] and a freshman at Merton; a pleasant youth, but his English, though fluent, was vulgar rather than princely. I wondered where he had picked it up. A different type of Italian whom I met the same week was the distinguished South Italian violinist, Signor Simonetti. He had been fiddling at our Musical Club on the previous evening—roba Napolitana, but clever and interesting. Our conversation, however, turned not on music but on the "Evil Eye," as I was anxious to know to what extent the belief in this still prevailed in Italy. He said it was as persistent as ever, especially in the south, and told us how the most famous advocate in Naples, in quite recent times, was so universally accredited with this mysterious power, that when the leader opposed to him in an impending lawsuit died on the eve of the case coming on, another lawyer was only with the greatest difficulty found to take his place. He was killed by an accident on the very morning of the trial; and the dreaded advocate was face to face with the judge, who was in fear and trembling, as he expected to have to give judgment against him. The story went that when the judge rose to speak, his spectacles accidentally fell out of place. "I am struck blind!" he cried out; "forgive me, Signor Avvocato—I have not yet pronounced against you." Suddenly his spectacles fell across his nose again. "Forgive me again," he said; "I can see after all!" The Neapolitans laughed, but they believed all the same. When this redoubtable advocate fell ill, half Naples was praying fervently for his death; and if one reproached them for desiring the death of a fellowman, the answer was, "Non è un uomo, è un jettatore!" Signor Simonetti, I felt pretty sure, himself sympathized with this sentiment, although he passed it off as a joke. I contributed a tale of a certain Count who had been pointed out to me, during my visit to Naples in the previous year, as the most dreaded jettatore in the city. He was dining alone at a restaurant, and I was told that no one, if they could avoid it, would sit down in his company. Meeting his cousin, the old Duca di M——, in the street, he gave him his arm. The Duca suddenly slipped, fell, and broke his leg. He was stunned by the shock; and his first words, on recovering consciousness, were whispered (in confidential Neapolitan patois) into the ear of his formidable kinsman: "Grazie, perchè tu me putive accidere, e te si cuntentate de m'arruinare!" ("Thanks; for you might have killed me, and you contented yourself with laming me!")[[5]]

Some of us went over to Radley College for the usual All Saints' play, the Frogs of Aristophanes, in Greek; and it was Greek, no doubt, to the majority of the audience. Books of the words in English were, however, supplied—"an attention," remarked a local paper, "which the ladies received with unconcealed satisfaction, and the gentlemen with satisfaction which they vainly endeavoured to conceal." Some of the undergraduates present doubtless, like the schoolboy in Vice Versa, "recognized several words from the Greek Grammar"; but what pleased me was an elderly clergyman who declined to share his wife's copy of the translation. "No, no, my dear," he said, "I can follow the Greek quite sufficiently well!" but before the end of the first act they were both very contentedly looking over the English version together.

Michaelmas Term is not of course the time for triumphs in the Schools; but we were all delighted with the final achievement of the invincible Cyril Martindale, S.J., who this autumn crowned his previous successes—first classes in Moderations and "Greats," the Hertford and Craven Scholarships, and the Chancellor's and Gaisford Prizes for Latin and Greek Verse—by carrying off the Derby Scholarship for the year. Another Jesuit much in evidence at Oxford at this time was Bernard Vaughan, who was preaching sermons, giving lectures, and attending discussions and debates with characteristic energy. Colum Stuart and I heard him deliver himself, at a full-dress meeting of the Union, on the subject of Egotism. His perfervid oratory made one occasionally squirm (it is the only word); but he was very well received by his young audience, and carried the House with him.

To the Jesuits and Benedictines, already domiciled in Oxford, were added this winter the Franciscan Capuchins, who opened with some ceremony their church and "seraphic college"[[6]] at Cowley. It was something of an historic event, this returning of the Friars to Oxford after a rustication of 367 years; and it evoked general and kindly interest quite outside Catholic circles. Sir Hubert Jerningham accompanied me to the inaugural function, and to dinner later at Mgr. Kennard's. We spoke of the decay of the good old custom, universal in my youth, of grace before meals. Our host recalled a country squire who, perfunctorily looking round his table, would mutter, "No parson? Thank God!"[[7]] and hastily seat himself. I told of a Scots farmer on a Caledonian Canal steam-boat, who, invited to "return thanks," delivered himself of this sentiment, "O Lord, we're all floating down the stream of time to the ocean of eternity, for Christ's sake, Amen!" and Sir Hubert had a family story of the chaplain who, if he espied champagne-glasses on the table, would begin his grace with "Bountiful Jehovah!" but if only sherry-glasses, "We are not worthy of the least of these Thy mercies." We all remembered Mr. Mallock's canon, who, glancing with clasped hands at the menu, beginning with two soups, comprising three entrées, and ending with Strasburg paté, began, "O Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, whose glory is so exceeding that even they veil their faces before Thee; consecrate to their appointed use these poor morsels before us, and make them humble instruments in the great scheme of our sanctification." I took Sir Hubert next day over the Clarendon Press, which I had never myself seen. We were both struck by two things: all the machinery was American, and there was no electric light, the whole place being lit by flaring gas-jets.[[8]] We had planned that evening to go and hear George Wyndham speak at the Union; but it occurred to us, as a happy thought, to stay comfortably at home on a foggy November night, and read his speech in next day's Times. The only important politician I heard speak this term was Bonar Law, by whom I sat at the Conservative Club dinner one evening. I found him a very pleasant neighbour, and he made as good a speech as I ever heard at a gathering of the kind.

I made my way northward to Beaufort for Christmas, feeling a bit of a wreck after a sharp bout of influenza, and enjoyed to the full the breezy sunshine which so often prevails there in mid-winter. There was a shooting-party at New Year, with pleasant al fresco luncheons in sheltered corners of leafless woods, and of an evening music, and ghost stories round a great fire of beechen logs. Of telepathy between the dying and the living Lord Hamilton gave me a striking instance. He had served in South Africa; and at dawn, sleeping on the veldt, was aroused by an unmistakable voice thrice calling his name. The voice was his father's, of whose death he heard next day by cable. The quiet conviction with which he narrated this little incident impressed me much.

Staying at an uncle's in Edinburgh on my way south, I met at dinner Lord Dunedin and some other interesting people; and there was some "good talk" on books and poetry. Some one quoted Swinburne's opinion that the two finest lines in the language[[9]] were Browning's—

"As the king-bird, with ages on his plumes,
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms."

Three unhackneyed images, from the City of the Soul, I noted as admirable:

"The distant rook's faint cawing, harsh and sweet."

"Black was his hair, as hyacinths by night."

"Wet green eyes, like a full chalk stream."

The mention of Mallock reminded me of some of his delectable similes:

"Miss Drake dropped a short curtsey, which resembled the collapse of a concertina."

"Above them a seagull passed, like the drifting petals of a magnolia."

"She advanced slowly towards the group, moving along the carpet like a clockwork mouse on wheels."

"Her eyes had the brown moisture that glimmers on a slug's back."

A cousin of mine at this dinner, lately returned from China, amused me by the information that the pigeon-English word, or phrase, for a bishop was "Number one topside heaven pidgin-man!"

On the evening of my arrival in London, a geographical friend carried me to a notable meeting of his Society at Queen's Hall—the sailor Duke of the Abruzzi lecturing, in quaint staccato Italian-English, on his ascent of Ruanzori, in Equatorial Africa. The King (with the Prince of Wales) was on the platform—stout, grey-bearded, and rather bored, I fancied, at being deprived of his after-dinner cigar: he made a nice little speech of thanks and appreciation. A day or two later came the startling news of the great earthquake in Jamaica, the only Englishman who lost his life being my dear old friend Sir James Fergusson, whose body was found beneath the ruins of a tobacconist's shop in Kingston. He was a man of many gifts and many friends, who had served his country with distinction in almost every part of the Empire; and his death was a real tragedy, as well as a very real grief to me. It was followed very shortly by that of another old friend, Susan Lady Sherborne; and two very pleasant houses in Cornwall Gardens and Brook Street, where I had spent many happy hours, were thus closed to me. There was some talk, a little later, of a memorial to Sir James, the Anglican Bishop of the West Indies suggesting that this should take the form of subscriptions to his church restoration scheme. I ventured strongly to deprecate this proposal in the columns of The Times, and my objections were emphatically endorsed by Mr. Fleming, the well-known Presbyterian minister in Belgravia.[[10]]

Two more deaths I may note in the early spring of 1907—the first that of Professor Pelham, president of Trinity; a gentleman and a scholar, a real loss to Oxford, and (incidentally) one of my kindest friends among college heads, just as his brother Sidney (famous slow bowler and future archdeacon) had been thirty years before, when I was a feather-headed freshman at Magdalen. In the same week died our worthy Chancellor, Lord Goschen, after little more than three years of office. Lords Rosebery and Curzon of Kedleston emerged as the favourites among the many candidates "in the air"; but dining with a large party at Lord Teignmouth's a little later, I heard it confidently said that the country parsons would almost certainly "bring Curzon in." They came up, as a matter of fact, in such swarms that they practically swamped the election, Lord Curzon obtaining 1,101 votes against Lord Rosebery's 440. I sat, by the way, at Lord Teignmouth's dinner next an American "scientist" (odious word!) of some kind, who told me some odd things about the Lower Mississippi. That river, he said, had, in 176 years, shortened itself by 242 miles—an average of about l 1/10 miles per year. From this it followed that in the old Oolitic-Silurian period, some 100,000 years ago, the lower Mississippi was upwards of 1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod!

I went to Downside in March, for the solemn blessing of the new abbot, my kind and learned friend Dom Cuthbert Butler. The elaborate ceremony took nearly three hours: we were mercifully spared a sermon, but, en revanche, the episcopal and abbatial speeches at the subsequent luncheon were long and rather wearisome. At Fort Augustus, whatever the occasion, we never in those days derogated from the good old monastic usage of silence, and public reading, in the refectory. Summum ibi fiat silentium, said Saint Benedict: "let no mussitatio [delicious Low Latin word for "whispering">[ be heard there, or any voice save that of the reader alone." The custom was one, I think, as congenial to our guests as to their monastic hosts.

I was preoccupied at this time with the rapidly-failing health of my oldest Oxford friend, H. D. Grissell of Brasenose, who spent half his year in Rome, and the other half in what seemed a bit of old Rome transported to Oxford. He was the most pertinacious and indefatigable collector I ever knew: coins, books and bindings, brass-rubbings, autographs, book-plates, holy relics, postage-stamps, even birds' eggs—all was fish that came to his far-flung net; and he laboured incessantly to make all his collections, as far as possible, complete. I found the old man at this time, rather pathetically, trying to complete the collection of eggshells which he had begun as a Harrow boy sixty years before. He insisted on exhibiting every drawer of his cabinet, and was greatly pleased with the motto which, I told him, Sir Walter Trevelyan had inscribed on his egg-cabinet: "Hic Argus esto, non Briareus"; or, in plain English, "Look, but don't touch!"[[11]] Grissell said he would like to affix this classical caution to all his collections of curios; but he did not live to do this, or indeed to do much else of any kind. He left England before Easter for Rome; and there (as perhaps he would have wished) he died very suddenly a few weeks later. By his own desire his body was brought back to England, at great trouble and cost (these post mortem migrations never appealed to me), and was laid near his parents' graves in the pretty country churchyard of Mickleham, in Surrey. There was a large gathering in the pouring rain, Professor Robinson Ellis and I representing his many Oxford friends. As his literary executor, I came into possession of a great number of curious and interesting letters and documents, dealing chiefly with Roman matters and the early days of the Ritual movement at Oxford and elsewhere.

The Corpus Professor of Latin, old Robinson Ellis, and I saw subsequently (perhaps drawn together by the loss of our common friend) a good deal of one another. At "meat tea," a meal he dearly loved, we used to sit long together, and talk classics, the only subject in which he seemed in the least interested. I wish I had noted down all the odd bits of erudition with which he used to entertain me. Cicero's last words, he said (I cannot imagine on what authority) were "Causa causarum, miserere mei!"[[12]] A curious story (perhaps mediæval) of Ovid was of how two monks visited his tomb, and in gratitude for the noble line—the best, in his own opinion, that he had ever written—"Virtus est licitis abstinuisse bonis," began reciting Paters and Aves for his soul. The poet's spirit, unhappily, was unappreciative of their charity; and a voice was heard from the tomb declaiming the irreverent pentameter: "Nolo Paternoster: carpe, viator, iter!" The professor told me that in his opinion the best elegiac couplet ever written in English was:

"Three Patagonian apes with their arms extended akimbo:
Three on a rock were they—seedy, but happy withal."

He said that one of Dr. Johnson's acutest literary criticisms was his remark that Tacitus seemed rather to have made notes for a historical work than to have written a history. The word "jour," he pointed out to me, was derived from "dies" (though every single letter was different) through the Italian—"dies, diurnus, giorno, jour." He asked if I could tell him the authorship of the striking couplet—

"Mors mortis! morti mortem nisi morte dedisses,
Æternae vitæ janua clausa foret."

This I was unable to do: on the other hand, I evoked a chuckle (whimsical etymologies always pleased him) by telling him how a fifteenth-century writer[[13]] had rendered the "Royal Collegiate Church of Windsor" into Latin as "Collegium Domini Regis de Ventomorbido!"

At the end of Lent Term I spent a few days at Eastbourne, which struck me (as the Honourable Mrs. Skewton struck Mr. Dombey) as being "perfectly genteel"—no shops on the front, no minstrels or pierrots or cockshys or vulgarity. The hill behind seemed to swarm with schools: my host took me to one where he had two sons—a fine situation, capital playgrounds, and the head a pleasant capable-seeming little man, who trotted briskly about on his little Chippendale legs, clad in knickerbockers, and was as keen on his Aberdeen terriers as on his young pupils. I remember at Eastbourne a quite appallingly ugly Town Hall, and a surprisingly beautiful fourteenth-century church, I suppose the only bit of old Eastbourne left. I went on to Arundel for my usual pleasant Easter-tide visit; and after hearing much florid church-music there, I enjoyed, on Low Sunday, the well-rendered plain-chant at Westminster Cathedral; but I did not enjoy a terrible motett composed by an eminent Jew—the words unintelligible and the music frankly pagan. My nephew Kelburn and his wife ran me down one day to Chatham in their new motor—cream-colour lined with crimson, very smart indeed. He had been lately posted as first lieutenant to H.M.S. Cochrane, and took us all over the great grey monster, vastly interesting. We buzzed home through Cobham and Rochester, stopping to look over the grand old Norman cathedral. "How strange," observed the simple sailor, looking at the sculptured images round the west doorway, "to see all these old Roman Catholic saints in a Protestant cathedral!" How I wished some of my young Oxford friends had been by to hear him! Our whole drive to town was of course redolent of Dickens and "Pickwick"—to me, but not to my modern nephew and niece.

For the last week of the vacation a friend was bent on taking me to Belgium; but great guns were blowing when we reached the coast, so we alighted at Dover and stayed there! finding it quite an interesting place of sojourn. I was astonished at the antiquity, extent, and interest of the Castle, especially of its church, once a Roman barrack, and its tower, the ancient Pharos or lighthouse. Gilbert Scott and the Royal Engineers between them had done their best (or their worst) in the way of "restoration," disjoining the Pharos from the main building, and adding an Early English (!) front, windows, and door; but it still was, and is, by far the oldest edifice in England used for religious worship, and of the greatest antiquarian interest.

The event of the summer at Oxford was the installation of our new Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who was by no means content, like the Duke of Wellington, Lord Salisbury, and others of his not indistinguished predecessors, to be quietly inducted into office by the university officials at his own country residence. There was a great function at the Sheldonian, and a Latin harangue from my lord which was both elegant and well delivered, though it was thought by some that his emotional reference to his late wife was a little out of place.

Oxford had caught the pageant-fever which was this summer devastating England; and a great part of the term was spent (some cynics said wasted) in the extensive preparations for our own particular show. When they were all but complete, one of the historic "rags" by which Christ Church has from time to time distinguished itself broke out, in consequence of the House becoming head of the river; and among other excesses, some damage was done to the pageant-stands already erected in the meadows. A few days after this émeute a description of it, which is really too good to be lost, appeared in the Corriere della Sera of Milan, "telephoned by our London correspondent." I translate literally from the Italian:—

Recently the students of Oxford were beaten by those of Cambridge in the great annual regatta: the other day they were defeated by the sportive group (il gruppo sportivo) of Merton College; finally, they allowed themselves to be vanquished by the sportive section (la sezione sportiva) of the Society of Christ Church, to whom was adjudged the primacy of the Thames. Yesterday, profoundly moved in their amore proprio, the students of Oxford permitted themselves to proceed to deplorable excesses, even to the point of applying fire to the stands erected on the riverside by the rival Societies. They set fire also to the tent of the Secretariat of Christ Church, feeding the flames with the chairs which they discovered in the vicinity.[[14]]

I believe that our Oxford pageant (in spite of the wet summer) proved financially successful, if not altogether so artistically. A few of the scenes were very pretty, especially the earliest (St. Frideswide), and also the one representing Charles I. and his family at Oxford. And the ecclesiastical and monastic episodes were instructive, if only as showing the incompetence of twentieth-century Anglicanism to reproduce even the externals—much more the spirit—of the Catholicism of old England. Even more deplorable was the "comic" scene (written by the Chichele professor of modern history!) in which the clarum et venerabile nomen of one of Oxford's saintliest sons was dragged in the mud: Roger Racon being depicted as a mountebank cheap-jack, hawking quack medicines from a motor-bicycle![[15]] My brother, who had entertained me at Warwick, came as my guest to witness the Oxford effort; and we had the rather interesting experience of viewing it in the company of Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. They were both pleased and interested; but it was impossible to deny that the poetic glamour of the Warwick pageant (largely due to the romantic beauty of its setting) was almost wholly wanting at Oxford.

Of the other pageants which were sprouting up all over the country during this summer (unhappily one of the wettest on record), I attended only one—that held at Bury St. Edmunds, which attracted me as being mainly concerned with Benedictines. The setting was almost as fine as at Warwick—verdant lawns, big trees and the majestic ruins of our famous abbey all "in the picture"; and the "monks," mostly represented by blameless curates, were at least presentable, not unkempt ragamuffins as at Oxford.[[16]] The appearance of "Abbot Sampson" (played, I was told, by a local archdeacon) was grotesque enough: he wore throughout a purple chasuble over a black cassock, with a white mitre, and strode about brandishing a great wooden crosier! but he spoke his lines very well. Everything, however, was spoilt by the pitiless rain, which fell unceasingly. A clever black-haired lady who played Boadicea (I believe the wife of an Ipswich dentist) had to abandon her chariot and horses and appear on foot, splashing through several inches of mud; and some of the "early British" matrons and maidens sported umbrellas and mackintoshes! I had to leave half-way through the performance, chilled to the bone, and firmly convinced that open-air drama in England was a snare and a delusion.

Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned above, was one of the miscellaneous celebrities, including Prince Arthur of Connaught and "General" Booth, whom our Chancellor nominated for honorary degrees at his first Encænia. I met Mrs. Whitelaw Reid (the American Ambassadress) at dinner at Magdalen on Commemoration evening, and lunched with her a few days later at Dorchester House. One of the attachés was told off to show me the famous "old Masters," about which I found he knew a good deal less than I did! The same agreeable young American accompanied me a little later to Bradfield, to see the boys play Antigone: a real summer's day, for once, and the performance was admirable, especially that of the title-rôle, the youth who played the part proving himself a genuine tragedian. The comments of a lady just behind us, who was profoundly bored most of the time, were amusingly fatuous.[[17]]

I was in spiritual charge this term of our Catholic undergraduates (fifty or so), their chaplain having gone off on an invalid's holiday, and left his flock in my care. I was delighted to have the company every week-end of Robert Hugh Benson, who was giving the Sunday conferences in our chapel. "Far from being the snake-like gloomy type of priest so common in fiction," a weekly paper said of him about this time, "Father Benson is a thorough man of the world, liberal, amiable, and vivacious." He was, of course, all this and a great deal more; and I greatly appreciated the opportunity which these summer weeks afforded me of becoming really intimate with him. It was the beginning of a genuine friendship, which was only interrupted (not, please God, broken) by his premature and lamented death seven years later.[[18]]

[[1]] "Very satisfactory, I think, from an architectural point of view," said the alderman to his colleague, as they surveyed together the interior of the new town hall; "but I fear the acoustics are not exactly what they ought to be." His companion sniffed several times. "Do you think not?" he said. "I don't notice anything myself!"

[[2]] [Greek: Henôsis tes anglichánês chaì tes Orthodóxou Echchlêsías.]

[[3]] It was at least a convenient method of disposing of the Pope and his claims.

[[4]] Collaterally, of course: Gregory XIII. (Buoncompagni), 1572-1585; and Gregory XV. (Ludovisi), 1621-1623. I interested Don Andrea by telling him that Gregory XIII. (reformer of the Julian Calendar and builder of the Quirinal) was probably the last Pope officially prayed for at Oxford, and that in his own college chapel. Mass certainly continued to be celebrated in Merton Chapel well into the Pontificate of Gregory XIII.

[[5]] The possession of the Evil Eye has never been considered incompatible with the highest moral excellence. Pius IX., who was venerated by his people as a saint, was nevertheless regarded by many of them as an undoubted jettatore.

[[6]] The traditional name given by the Franciscans to their monastic schools. But they had, if I remember rightly, sufficient sense of humour not to apply it to their Cowley seminary.

[[7]] Nearly, but not quite, the shortest grace on record. That palm, perhaps, belongs to the north country farmer wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after a plentiful meal, and ejaculating the single word, "Then!"

[[8]] Perhaps for the same reason as was given me by a Christ Church don, who rashly prophesied that Wolsey's great hall would never be lighted by electricity, as the additional heat given by the gas-jets was absolutely essential by way of supplement to the huge fireplaces.

[[9]] A large assumption; but Swinburne was doubtless better qualified than most people to make it. The lines are from Sordello (ed. 1863, p. 464).

[[10]] My own idea, suggested by a proposed memorial to Goschen at Rugby school, where James Fergusson had been his school-fellow, was that the memory of the latter also should be perpetuated there in some fitting manner. I received letters cordially approving this suggestion; but I never heard whether it was carried out in the case of either, or both, of these distinguished public servants.

[[11]] Is it necessary to explain that Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing guardian of Io, had a hundred eyes, and Briareus, the pugnacious son of Earth and Heaven, a hundred arms? Sir Walter's application of these myths was distinctly neat.

[[12]] Authentic or not, I added them to the collection of novissima verba of famous men which I had been long compiling. See Appendix.

[[13]] Clement Maydeston, in his Directorii Defensorium (A.D. 1495). "Windsor," of course, means the "winding shore," not the "sick wind!"

[[14]] The truth underlying the last sentence of this delectable report is that some of the wilder rioters chucked the Secretary of the Pageant's desk (containing all his papers) into the Cherwell; but it was rescued so speedily by two of their more sober comrades that no harm was done.

[[15]] This particular episode was really regarded by many people as almost an outrage; and an article called "A Blot on the Pageant," which I devoted to it in a weekly review, elicited many expressions of sympathy and approval in Oxford and elsewhere.

[[16]] The Master of the Oxford Pageant, to whom I protested emphatically against the scandalous caricatures of the Benedictines of Abingdon, calmly told me that the British public looked on a monk as a comic kind of creature, and would think itself defrauded unless he were so represented!

[[17]] The lines (vv. 824-826):

[Greek: échousa ... tàn phrygian xénan
tàn, chissòs ôs atenês,
petraía blasta davasen]

seemed to strike the good lady particularly—the sound, that is, not the sense of them. "Kisson——blast her—d—n her! Dear me!" she remarked; "what language, to be sure! I had no idea that Antigone [pronounced Antigoan] was that kind of young person!"

[[18]] The Rev. R. H. Benson died on October 19, 1914.

CHAPTER VI

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 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 Médar,
Ploon quarante jhiours pus tard;

and I recalled the Italian distich about St. Bibiana (December 2)—

Se piove il giorno di Santa Bibiana,
Pioverà 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, à propos of George Eliot's first book, 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, enrégimentées pour dépister (track) les pauvres hères susceptibles de conversion." The same writer rendered the epithet "Gallio-like" (applied by the minister to the parishioners of Shepperton) by "pareils à des Français!"

Yorkshire, after Northumberland, claimed me for two pleasant visits—the first to the Herries' at Everingham, with its beautiful chapel copied from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, 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 Lenôtre, 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 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]]

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 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 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 company. Driving with him to pay a call or two in the neighbourhood, I amused him with an à 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 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 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 Encyclopædia. 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 mediæval 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!"

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 "æsthetic 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 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 "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 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 Hügel.