“When Lord Stanhope was dying, he said touchingly to Lady Mohun, ‘You know what my dearest Emily asked of me in her last words. I have tried to do as she wished, and you, my dear, have been such a good and kind daughter to me, you have almost made me wish to live.’

“I have been spending charming days with Hugh Pearson. He says, ‘What will become of a country in which the upper classes are content to be fed upon Farrar’s ‘Life of Christ’ and the middle classes upon Moody and Sankey?’ He told me of Justice Knight Bruce’s capital lines—

“It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and to be of no character or significancy in it.”—Steele.

But in spite of these little catastrophes attending its publication, I am certain that “Cities of Northern and Central Italy,” which cost me far more pains and labour, and which is more entirely original, than all my earlier books put together, was by far the best of my writings, up to that time.

Before the book was out, I was already devoted to a new work, suggested by the great delight I had long found in London, and by the desire of awakening others to an enjoyment of its little-known treasures. A set of lectures delivered at Sir John Shaw-Lefevre’s house in Seymour Street, and a series of articles in Good Words, laid the foundation for my “Walks in London.” When employed in this work, as in all my others, I felt all those portions of life to be the most interesting which were spent in following out any one single purpose.

Journal.

“Jan. 19.—Yesterday I went to Lady Taunton. She has a beautiful portrait of her daughter by young Richmond—a sort of play upon every possible tone of yellow—a yellow gown, a yellow background, a great cushion worked with yellow sunflowers, yellow hair looped up with pearls, only a great white living lily to throw it all back. It is a most poetical picture.

“In the evening I went to a supper at the house of young F. P. to meet a whole society of young actors, artists, &c. Eden was there, known in the stage world as Herbert, a name he took to save the feelings of his episcopal uncle, Lord Auckland. His is a fine and a charming face, but rather sad.... There were about fourteen men present, very good singing, and then supper, much kindness and cordiality, and not a word which all their mothers and sisters might not have heard. It would not have been so at college or in a mess-room: so much for maligned actors.”

“It poured, so I sat some time with R. on one of the seats. He talked long and openly of all the temptations of his life, and endlessly about himself. I urged that the best way of ennobling his own nature must be through others, that self-introspection would never do, and could only lead to egotism and selfishness, but that in trying to help others he would unconsciously help himself. I find it most difficult to say anything of this kind without making illustrations out of my own life, which I have certainly no right to think exemplary.

“As we were going away, a lady who had stared long and hard at us, and whom I thought to be some waif turned up from my Roman lectures, came up to me. ‘I think, sir, that you were standing close to my sister just now, and she has lost her purse.’—‘I am very sorry your sister has lost her purse; it is very unfortunate.’—‘Yes, but my sister has lost her purse, and you, you were standing by her when she lost it.’—‘I think after what you have said I had better give you my card.’—‘Oh, no, no, no.’—’ Oh, yes, yes, yes: after what you have said I must insist upon giving you my card.’ What an odd experience, to be taken for a pickpocket! R. thought the lady had really picked my pocket, but she had not.”

“Monk’s Orchard, Jan. 23.—This is a fine big house, be-pictured, be-statued, with a terraced garden, a lake, and a great flat park. A Mr. and Mrs. Rodd are here with their son Rennell, a pleasant-looking boy, wonderfully precocious and clever, though, as every one listens to him, he has—not unnaturally—a very good opinion of himself: still one feels at once that he is the sort of boy who will be heard of again some day.

“Our host, Mr. Lewis Loyd, is in some ways one of the most absent men in the world. One day, meeting a friend, he said, ‘Hallo! what a long time it is since I’ve seen you! How’s your father?’—‘Oh, my father’s dead.’—‘God bless me! I’m very sorry,’ &c. The next year he met the same man again, and had forgotten all about it, so began with, ‘Hallo! what a long time since I’ve seen you! How’s your father?’-‘Oh, my father’s dead still!’

“We have been to church at Shirley—one of Scott’s new country churches. In the churchyard is a cross to poor Sir John Anson, and beside it a granite altar-tomb with an inscription saying that it is to Ruskin’s father—‘a perfectly honest merchant,’ and that ‘his son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak the truth, says this.’

“I dined on the 26th with Lady E. Adeane. Mr. Percy Doyle was very amusing. Talking of the anxiety of ministers in America to change their posts, he said, ‘If my father had bequeathed to me Hell and Texas, I should have lived in Hell and let Texas.’

“Yesterday I went to luncheon with the Vaughans at the Temple, and met there Miss Rye, who has a home for homeless children at Clapham, and takes them off by batches to America, to establish them there as servants, &c. She produced from her pocket about a hundred cartes-de-visite of the children, wild, unkempt, and wicked-looking, and of the same children after they had been under cultivation. Certainly the change was marvellous, but then she had employed a good photographer for the redeemed children and a very bad one for the little ruffians.”

“Feb. 8.—The opening of Parliament. I went to Lord Overstone’s. At a quarter to two the procession passed beneath—the fine old carriages and gorgeous footmen, one stream of gold and red, pouring through the black crowd and leafless trees. We all counted the carriages differently—eight, twelve, fifteen; and there were only six! All one saw of royalty was the waving of a white cap-string, as the Queen, sitting well back in the carriage, bowed to the people.”

“Feb. 13.—Dined at the Dowager Lady Barrington’s—the great topic being dinner past, present, and prospective. George, Lord Barrington, said that he had dined at the Brazilian Minister’s, and he was sure the cookery was good and also the wine, for he had eaten of every dish and drunk fourteen kinds of wine, and had passed a perfectly good night and been quite well the next morning. He also dined with Mr. Brand the Speaker, and complimented Mrs. Brand upon the dinner. She told her cook. He said, ‘We are three, Lord Granville’s, Mr. Russell Sturgis’s, and myself; there are only three cooks in London.’ When Lord Harrington afterwards saw Mrs. Brand, she told him the cook had asked who had praised him, and ‘when he heard,’ continued Mrs. Brand, ‘he also gave you his little meed of praise.’ ‘Ah, M. Barrington,’ he said, ‘c’est une bonne fourchette.’ He had been at Kinmel, but said he had ‘dismissed Mr. Hughes.’”

“Lord Cardwell was in the habit of using the Church prayers at family prayers. One day his valet came to him and said, ‘I must leave your lordship’s service at once.’—‘Why, what have you to complain of?’—‘Nothing personally, but your lordship will repeat every morning—“We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and have left undone those things which we ought to have done:”—now I freely admit that I have often done things I ought not, but that I have left undone things that I ought to have done, I utterly deny: and I will not stay here to hear it said.’”

“Feb. 19.—A charming walk with Charlie Wood to St. Paul’s, along the Embankment and then a labyrinth of quaint City streets. He called it his half-holiday, and I am sure it was so to me to mount into his pure unworldly atmosphere even for two hours. He is really the only young man I know who at once thinks no evil, believes no evil, and does no evil.”

“Coming to a river, the ‘fare’ asked, ‘What do you call this river?’—‘It’s not a river at all, your honour; it’s only a strame.’—‘Well, but what do you call it?’—‘Oh, we don’t call it at all, your honour; it just comes of itself.’”

“Feb. 24.—Dined at Lord Strathmore’s, and went on with Hedworth and Lizzie Williamson to Lady Bloomfield’s, where sixty-eight cousins assembled to take leave of Lord and Lady Lytton on their departure for India.”

If any one has ever the patience to read this memoir through, they will have been struck by the way in which, for many years before the time I am writing of, the persons with whom I lived were quite different from those amongst whom my childhood was spent. Arthur Stanley had never got over the publication of the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” though he was always at a loss to say what he objected to in it, and Mary Stanley I never saw at all. From Lady Augusta alone I continued to receive frequent and affectionate messages.

Journal.

“Holmhurst, March 12.—I have been again up to London for dear Augusta Stanley’s funeral on the 9th. It was a beautiful day. All the approaches to Westminster were filled with people in mourning.

“It seemed most strange thus to go to the Deanery again—that the doors closed for six years were opened wide by death, by the death of one who had always remained my friend, and whom no efforts of others could alienate. Red cloth showed that royalty was coming, and I went at once to the library, where an immense crowd of cousins were assembled. As I went down the little staircase with Kate Vaughan, four ladies in deep mourning passed to the dining-room, carrying immense wreaths of lovely white flowers: they were the Queen and three of her daughters. The Queen seemed in a perfect anguish of grief. She remained for a short time alone with the coffin, I believe knelt by it, and was then taken to the gallery overhanging the Abbey.

“The procession of mourners went round the Abbey from the choir by a longer way to the chapel on account of the people. As it passed the corner of the transept, the strange little figure of Mr. Carlyle slipped out. He had been very fond of Augusta, was full of feeling for Arthur, and seemed quite unconscious of who and where he was. He ran along, before the chief mourners, by the side of the coffin, and in the chapel itself he stood at the head of the grave, making the strangest ejaculations at intervals through the service.”

I insert some poor lines which I wrote “In Memoriam.”

Journal.

“Dined at the Tower of London with Everard Primrose; only young Lord Mayo there. At 11 P.M. the old ceremony of relieving guard took place. I stood with Everard and a file of soldiers on a little raised terrace. A figure with a lanthorn emerged from a dark hole.

“‘Who goes there?’ shouted the soldiers.

“‘The Queen.’

“‘What Queen?’

“‘Queen Victoria.’

“‘And whose keys are those?’

“‘Queen Victoria’s keys.’

“Upon which the figure, advancing into the broad moonlight, said ‘God bless Queen Victoria!’ and all the soldiers shouted ‘Amen’ and dispersed.”

“March 28.—My lecture on ‘The Strand and the Inns of Court’ took place in 41 Seymour Street. I felt at Tyburn till I began, and then got on pretty well. There was a very large attendance. I was very much alarmed at the whole party, but had an individual dread of Lord Houghton, though I was soon relieved by seeing that he was fast asleep, and remained so all the time.”

“Here are some more of her sayings:—

“‘Here’s a pretty how-d’ye-do! It’s the master finding fault!—it’s one day one thing and one another. Old bachelors and old maids are all alike. They don’t know what they want, they don’t; but I know: the old maids want husbands, and the old bachelors want wives, that’s what they want.’

“‘It’s the mischief of the farming now-a-days that the farmers always say ‘Go.’ ... My father used to say a farmer never ought to say ‘Go;’ if he did, the work was sure to be neglected: a farmer should always say ‘Come, lads,’ and then the work would be done.’

“‘It’s hailing is it? then there’ll be frost, for

as the saying is.’

“‘How you do make him (a sick young man) laugh!

“‘Well, and there’s nothing does him so much good. He’d mope, mope, mope, and that’s nothing. It makes him fat, like babies. Boys must laugh, or they won’t get fat. Girls may cry: it always does them good: it stretches their muscles and such like: but boys mustn’t cry; it’s bad for them: that’s how the old saying goes.’

“‘How do you like them?

“‘Eh! how do I know? We must summer ’em and winter ’em afore we can tell, must’na we, wench: aye, and a good many summers and winters it must be too, and then they may deceive ye. I have’na lived more than twenty years over half a century, but I’ve found that out.’

“I have’na heard the cuckoo this spring. I don’t know what’s come over the things. Heathfield fair is over ever so long, and “The old woman lets the cuckoo out of her basket at Heathfield fair,” that’s the old saying.’”

“May 7.—An amusing tea at the Duchess of Cleveland’s—young Lord Stanhope and Mr. Bourke there. The Duchess talked of Pimlico, the bought property of Lord Grosvenor, formerly called ‘The Five Fields.’ The Court wished to buy it because it was so close to Buckingham Palace, but thought the sum asked was too much. Lord Grosvenor gave £30,000 for it. Lord Cowper had wished to buy it, and sent his agent for the purpose, but he came back without having done so, and when Lord Cowper upbraided him, said, ‘Really, my lord, I could not find it in my heart to give £200 more for it than it was worth.’ Cubitt afterwards offered a ground-rent of £60,000.”

“May 8.—Dined with Mrs. Thellusson to meet Lady Waterford. Whistler the artist was there. He has a milk-white tuft growing out of his black hair, a peculiarity which he declares to be hereditary in his family, as in that of the Caëtani.”

“May 10.—I was ‘at home’ in the morning to a sketching-party in Bunhill Fields Cemetery. It was very sunny there and very quiet, till the Militia and a troop of attendant boys found us out. One of the latter stole my umbrella, but I pursued him and captured it again as he passed through the gate.

“The Prince of Wales arrived (from India) at 7 P.M. I waited two hours at the Spottiswoodes’ house in Grosvenor Place to see him, and saw nothing but the flash of light on his bald head. It was a pleasant party, but how seldom in London society does one hear anything one can carry away. Most people are like those Mme. du Deffand describes—‘des machines à ressort qui vont, viennent, parlent, vivent, sans penser, sans réfléchir, sans sentir, chacun jouant son rôle par habitude.’”

“May 12.—Trouble with Murray the publisher, who insists on believing that because some points in my ‘Cities of Italy’ resemble his Handbooks, they must be taken from them, which they most assuredly are not. I had no Handbooks with me when I was writing, but where there is only one thing to say about places, two people sometimes say it.”

“May 13.—A delightful morning, drawing in the Savoy Churchyard.”

“May 15.—Drawing-party in dirty, picturesque St. Bartholomew’s. For the first time this year no one asked me to dinner, and I was most profoundly bored.”

“He told the story of a man in France, condemned to death for the murder of his father and mother, who, when asked if he could give any reason why he should not undergo the extreme penalty of the law, clasped his hands, and said, ‘Ayez pitié d’un pauvre orphelin.’”

“May 31.—An evening party at Lord Houghton’s, an omnium-gatherum, but very amusing. It recalled Carlyle’s speech, who, when some ecclesiastic gloomily inquired in his presence ‘What would happen if Jesus Christ returned to earth now?’ retorted—‘Happen! why Dickie Milnes would ask him to dinner, to be sure, and would ask Pontius Pilate to meet him.’

“It took half-an-hour to get up the staircase. Miss Rhoda Broughton was there, beautifully dressed, pressed upon by bishops and clergy: Salvini and Irving were affectionately greeting: Lady Stanley of Alderley, under a perfect stack of diamonds, was declaiming very loud in her unknown tongue to an astonished and bewildered audience; and through all the groups upstairs the young King of the Belgians was smiling and bowing a retreat to his escape by a back-staircase.”

“First, close to London, the endless brick-kilns, and the last streets stretching out into the blackened fields like fingers of a skeleton hand. Then across the green meadows, all intersected by elms, branchless and tufted like great brooms, the grey coronal of Windsor. Then the red houses and pretentious prison of Reading and the glassy reaches of the Thames, with its vigorous growth of sturdy water-plants at Pangbourne and Maple Durham.

“Next we enter Berkshire, bare and featureless except near the river and where the White Horse appears, a scraggy creature rudely scratched in the turf above a soft hollow in the downs. Chippenham is a little town in a wooded hollow, with a grey spire and stone bridge over the Avon. Then one reaches a stony country. The houses are no longer of brick, but all of stone. The Box tunnel is a result of the hills. The villas near Bath, of grey stone, cling to the sides of the heights from whose quarries they were taken. In the valley are Hampton church and ferry.

“By Kelsey Oaks we rush on to smoky Bristol, all energy and ugliness: then a great strange rift in the hills shows where the Avon winds beneath the rocks and hanging bridge of Clifton.

“Now there is a change to softer scenery at Clevedon, Woodspring Priory, the odd hill of Weston. The houses grow warmer as well as the country—no longer of grey, but of red sandstone: the Somersetshire churches, proverbially fine, have pink-grey towers, their projections gilded with lichen. Now we pass through apple-orchards, and the thorns, snow-drifted with bloom, stand knee-deep in the long mowing grass. In the flats rises Bridgewater, then Taunton with its beautiful and picturesque towers standing out against the low grey hills; Exeter, capped by the stumpy towers of its cathedral; and then the salt estuary of the Teign laps the bank of the railway and we enter the woods of Powderham.”

“June 12.—On Saturday we were called at daybreak, and went to Totness by rail, and thence in waggonettes eighteen miles through deep bosky lanes, and then over breezy uplands to the Moult, Lord Devon’s enchanting little place near Salcombe. Here the blue-green transparent sea glances through the thick foliage deep below the windings of the road, and the quiet bay is encircled by rocky hills tufted with wood, which in parts feathers down into the water. We rested at North Sands Cottage, a lovely wee place of Lord Devon’s, and then walked through the grounds of his larger place of the Moult. Aloes grow and flourish here to an immense size. Beyond this a path—‘Lord Courtenay’s Walk’—runs half-way up the steep precipices above the sea.

“One of the principal farmers belonging to an agricultural club near this lost his wife lately, and in his kind way Lord Devon alluded to her at the annual club dinner,—speaking of her as an admirable, kind, and industrious woman, and saying how he could feel with such a loss, having had himself a bereavement which was ever present to him. But at last the farmer interrupted him—‘I doan’t know what his Lordship be a talking about; but I du know that she was an awful cranky, tiresome old woman, and God Almighty’s very welcome to she.’

“Yesterday was Sunday. I went to the service at Powderham with Lord Devon and Lady Mary Fortescue in a chapel opposite the white recumbent marble figure of Lady Devon. The afternoon was spent in the ‘plantation garden,’ where an Australian gum-tree was in full flower. In the evening there were prayers—‘Compline,’ they called it—a very living, earnest service in the chapel.... Truly I felt, as I took leave of Charlie, that above the door of every house that is his home might be inscribed the words of S. Bernard engraved over the threshold of many Cistercian houses—‘Bonum est nos hic esse, quia homo vivit purius, cadit rarius, surgit velocius, incedit cautius, quiescit securius, moritur felicius, purgatur citius, praemiatur copiosius.’”