Memoirs of Life and Literature Part 6

A Few Country Houses of Various Types--Castles and Manor Houses from Cornwall to Sutherland

The pleasantest form of society in country houses--I speak here for myself--is not to be found on occasions such as that of a great shooting party or a party for a country ball, but rather in gatherings of a smaller and more intimate kind.

As an ill.u.s.tration of my own views in this respect, I may mention an incident which may appeal, perhaps, to the sympathies of others whose tastes or distastes are like my own. I was asked to stay in Shrops.h.i.+re with some friends whom I knew so intimately that they did not care how they treated me; and on this occasion they had treated me very ill. As I was approaching my destination by way of a little local line, I was surprised at seeing on the platform of one station after another an extraordinary amount of luggage, together with a number of footmen and unmistakable ladies' maids. What could be the meaning of this? At last the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that.

That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it."

I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat, lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door--that of my hostess--saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.

The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friends.h.i.+p. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding--some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present owners--have been houses which represented for me that old order of things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family traditions and a.s.sociations--elements rooted in the soil of a national and immemorial past--such were the factors by which the life of these houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits--many of them very bad--on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses, except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fas.h.i.+on would be absent, while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element.

Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong resemblance to Catholic society in London.

But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fas.h.i.+onable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context.

Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward.

What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?

Further, let me observe this--I have here an eye on my own case in particular--that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life, the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact--the very important fact--that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a disturbance.

Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled together on account of the positions which they occupy--namely, the extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.

The whole population of the great county of Sutherland is hardly so much as two-thirds of the population of Wimbledon, and, except for some minute portions, was, prior to certain recent sales, a single gigantic property. Dunrobin Castle, with a million silent acres of mountain and moor behind it, looks down from a cliff over the wastes of the North Sea, but is on the landward side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate gla.s.s. But through the plate gla.s.s on one side is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside the dining room. So remote is this great house from any center of modern industry that the carts, dogcarts, and wagonettes used by the estate and the family were built and repaired by a staff of men on the premises. My first visit to Dunrobin was in the days of the d.u.c.h.ess Annie. The duke was away on his yacht, but during my visit he returned, and the d.u.c.h.ess and I went to meet him at the station--a private station in the grounds.

Those were the early days of agrarian agitation in the Highlands--an agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London.

One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently ill.u.s.trated by what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke, not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, "you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"

St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being, except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose granite balconies are grazed by the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of ascending sea birds.

Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed in them, the celebrated words of Keats:

Magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

are, it is needless to say, exceptions rather than types. Of the others which I may appropriately mention, a few may be taken as belonging to an exceptional cla.s.s also, on account of their unusual size; and these I may again divide into genuine and ancient castles, as distinct from modern imitations on the one hand, and what are properly palatial villas of the cla.s.sical type on the other; the remainder being smaller, though often of great magnitude, and commonly known by such names as "halls,"

"parks," or "manors."

Of more or less genuine castles I have known a considerable number, many of them much smaller than houses less ambitiously named; but, with the possible exception of Alnwick, the interior of which is undisguisedly modern, there is one which, in point of magnitude and continuity of occupation, forms a cla.s.s by itself. This castle is Raby, which has never been uninhabited since the days of Stephen, when the first smoke wreaths rose from its kitchen chimney. The house is a huge block, rising at intervals into towers, with a small court in the middle of it, across which carriages drive, having pa.s.sed through a tunnel of arches, and deposit their occupants in a hall, from which stairs, at both ends of it, lead to the various living rooms, among these being an upper hall more than fifty yards in length. This whole block stands in a walled area, entered by a castellated gateway and encircled by a moat, a portion of which still holds water, and in which the towers reflect themselves. When I stayed there as a guest of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland, an atmosphere of the past not only pervaded the castle, but seemed to extend itself for some miles into the neighborhood. When I and others who had arrived by the same train issued from the station doors, the carriages awaiting us in the twilight comprised old yellow chariots, with postilions, like that of my grandfather in which I had swung myself when a child. I said to Augustus Hare, who happened to be one of the party, "One would think that we all of us were going to Gretna Green."

When we approached the castle, whose towers were blots in the November evening, I felt we were approaching a castle in a child's fairy tale. In point of magnitude, combined with ancient and absolutely continuous occupation, there is, so far as my own experience goes, no private dwelling in the kingdom which excels, or even equals, Raby. The d.u.c.h.ess kept a great alb.u.m in which each of her guests was asked to inscribe some record of his or of her visit, which record was to take the form of answers to certain printed questions, or of a sketch, or some original verses. I preferred to take refuge in the last, my own metrical record being this:

Some scoff at what was, and some shrink from what may be Or is; but they all must be pleased with a place Where even what was looks enchanting in Raby, And where even what is is redeemed by Her Grace.

Apart from genuine castles of feudal type and origin, the greatest houses I have known, if regarded as architectural structures, are Blenheim, Trentham (the Brentham of Lord Beaconsfield's _Lothair_), and Cliveden. In this cla.s.s I should, perhaps, include also Sir Robert Walpole's Houghton, where I have stayed as the guest of Cora, Lady Strafford, who occupied it for many years as a tenant, and with singular taste and knowledge so arranged the interior that every chair, sideboard, and table then in common use had been Sir Robert Walpole's own. I wrote my letters one morning in his study, at his own writing table, and using his own inkstand. The walls were lined with books, most of them presents from his contemporaries, and some of them extremely curious. I may mention one in particular. It related to the South Sea Bubble, and contained what was practically a list of the largest commercial fortunes existing then in England.

Other houses which in point of magnitude belong to the same group are Stowe, with its frontage of more than a thousand feet, Hamilton Palace, Wentworth Wodehouse, and Eaton. By those whose knowledge is greater than mine, the list, in any case small, might, no doubt, be extended. I speak here only of those at which I have myself stayed. But, in any case, no one, however wealthy, would think of building on a similar scale now.

Their magnitude was useful only in days other than ours, when visitors stayed for a month or six weeks at a time, and brought with them their own carriages and the necessary grooms and coachmen. It is only on very rare occasions that such houses could be even half filled to-day; and they dwarf, rather than subserve, the only possible life that a reasonable man could live in them. Blenheim impresses a visitor as though it were built for giants. Alfred Montgomery, when staying for the first time at Eaton, could not, on coming downstairs, find his way to the breakfast room till he encountered a friend who guided him. "Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed as he entered the desired apartment, "I don't want to eat my breakfast in a cathedral." Mere magnitude, indeed, beyond a certain point is not a luxury, but an oppression. The greatest private dwelling ever erected in England is said to have been Audley End, when its original builder completed it. James I said of it, "It is a house fit only for a king"; and before it could be rendered habitable three-fourths of it had to be pulled down. Such was the verdict of experience on overbuilding in the past; and though many conditions have changed, a similar practical criticism is occasionally being p.r.o.nounced to-day. Trentham is practically gone. Hamilton Palace, it is said, will soon exist no longer.

When, however, we turn to genuine castles, pseudo-castles, or houses which, large though many of them are, are small as compared with these, my memory provides me with examples of them which are scattered all over the kingdom, but of which, since they are types rather than grandiose exceptions, it will for the moment be enough to describe a few, others being reserved for mention in connection with particular circ.u.mstances.

Of castles other than the greatest, were I asked to name the most romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales--woods full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been, when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been occupied by Charles I there was hardly a piece of furniture which was not coeval with himself.

The dining room, as I remember it, had been frescoed by a Dutch artist in the reign of William and Mary.

In respect of mere romantic situation, the English house which I remember as coming nearest to Powis is Glenthorne, the seat of the Hallidays, which not so very long ago was thirty miles from a railway on one side, and seventeen on another. It fronts the Bristol Channel on the confines of Devon and Somerset. I have described it accurately in my novel _The Heart of Life_. In its general aspect it resembles my own early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it precipitous woods rise like a wall to an alt.i.tude of more than twelve hundred feet. The only approach to the house is by a carriage drive three miles long, which descends to it in zigzags from the upper world of Exmoor.

Hardly less romantic is Ugbrooke, the seat of the Cliffords, about twelve miles from Torquay, a.s.sociated with the name of Dryden, who was a frequent guest there, and haunted by the Catholicism of a long series of generations. The chapel is approached through, and transmits its incense to, a library which hardly contains a book more recent than the days of the nonjurors, and I have often spent long mornings there examining the files of journals belonging to the epoch of Queen Anne, of the first two Georges, and of Pope. I have kindred recollections of Lulworth Castle in Dorsets.h.i.+re, where the old religious regime so casts its spell over everything that I should hardly have been surprised if a keeper, encountered in the twilight park, had turned out to be carrying, not a gun, but a crossbow.

Of other houses connected with Catholic memories I may mention two in Yorks.h.i.+re--Everingham Park and Houghton, then the respective homes of the late Lord Herries and his kinsman, Mr. Charles Langdale. Both were hereditary and absolutely unquestioning Catholics; and, strange to say, a large part of their tenantry were hereditary Catholics also. Each of these houses has a great chapel attached to it, and every Sunday processions of farmers' dogcarts would deposit their occupants at doors the decorations of which plainly showed that for these stalwart Englishmen the Protestant Reformation was no more than a dream.

But putting the question of Catholic atmosphere aside, and reverting once more to castles, I may begin with a mention of Chillingham, sheltered by the shadowy woods and surrounded by the moors of Northumberland.

As compared with Alnwick, Chillingham is a small structure. Apart from some offices added during the nineteenth century, it occupies an area measuring a hundred and twenty feet by a hundred. The outer walls are of enormous thickness, with a tower at each corner; and against these outer walls the rooms which const.i.tute the dwelling, much less ma.s.sive in their masonry, are built round a small court. They have hardly been altered since the days of Inigo Jones. When I stayed there with Sir Andrew n.o.ble, who for many years was Lord Tankerville's tenant, the whole of the furniture seemed to have grown old with the house. The most modern contents of the bookshelves were the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose faded backs would grow young again in the flickering warmth of fires. Beneath the external windows were the box borders of a garden, and visible on distant slopes were the movements of wild cattle.

Another castle with which I was very familiar was Elvaston, near Derby, where year after year I stayed with the late Lord and Lady Harrington.

Originally a red-brick manor house, it was castellated in the days of Wyatt; and though architects of to-day would smile at its artificial Gothic, it may now for this very reason be regarded as a historical monument. It is a monument of tastes and sentiments which have long since pa.s.sed away. It represents not only a vanished taste in architecture, but sentiments also which are now even more remote. The Earl of Harrington, under whom the Gothic transfiguration was accomplished, seems to have regarded himself as a species of knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is supported--a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"--were strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent event, was a.s.sociated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling pa.s.sion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he came in contact--even the Derbys.h.i.+re miners--his friends.

The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly, ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail acc.u.mulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there--and this was my first introduction to Wales--for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address, most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with b.a.l.l.s, concerts, or entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard.

These were all arranged on a das, and sang national melodies; and when the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the soul is in its strings."

Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting personage--Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since.

Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcesters.h.i.+re, and to a fourth--this was in Yorks.h.i.+re--for the celebration of the New Year.

The Cornish houses of which I speak were Heligan, near Mevagissy, the home of the John Tremaynes, and Trevarthenick, near Truro, the home of Sir Louis and Lady Molesworth. Pale externally with the stucco of more than a hundred and fifty years ago, neither of these substantial houses has any resemblance to a castle; but the ample rooms and staircases, the dark mahogany doors and the far-planted woods of each represented in some subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than villages, which together were represented in those days by four members of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had been made and used before the first Reform bill.

The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.

Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned, is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries the mind back to the times of John of Padua.

To pa.s.s from Hewel to Byram was to pa.s.s from one world to another, though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram, standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives, with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represents as a whole the dignified utilitarianism of the Yorks.h.i.+re country gentleman as he was from a hundred to two hundred years ago. Sir John himself, familiar with political office, accomplished as a cla.s.sical scholar, and endowed with one of the most charming of voices, was of all country gentlemen the most perfect whom it has ever been my lot to know. He was cradled in the traditions of Whiggism, and to me one of his most delightful attributes was inability to a.s.similate the spirit of modern Liberalism, whether in the sphere of politics or of social or religious thought.

With Byram my memory a.s.sociated two neighboring houses--Fryston, then the home of Lord Houghton, and Kippax, that of the Blands. Fryston was filled with books, and it was in my early days constantly filled with celebrities, generally of a miscellaneous, sometimes of an incongruous, kind. Sir John Ramsden told me that once, when he had been asked to dine there for the purpose of meeting some bishop whose name he could not read (for Lord Houghton wrote a very illegible hand), the most reverent of the a.s.sembled guests could hardly forbear from smiling when their host, having left them for a moment, came back bringing the bishop with him. The bishop was a negro, with a face as black as his own silk ap.r.o.n.

Kippax, which is close to Fryston, was, in the eighteenth century, a fairly large, but not notably large, building, but when Lord Rockingham began the construction of Wentworth the late Mr. Bland's ancestor declared that, whatever happened, he would not be outbuilt by anybody, and that Kippax, in spite of Wentworth, should be the longest house in Yorks.h.i.+re. He accordingly extended its frontage by the addition of two wings, which really were for the most part a succession of narrow outbuildings masked by cla.s.sical walls of imposing and balanced outline, the result being that a dwelling which is practically of very moderate dimensions confronts the world with a facade of more than seven hundred feet.

A house differing in character from any of those just mentioned is Stanway, where I have stayed as the guest of the then Lady Elcho. It variegates with its pointed gables the impending slopes and foliage of the outlying Cotswold Hills. It is a beautiful building in itself--but the key to its special charm was for me to be found in certain pictures, void of all technical merit, and relegated to twilight pa.s.sages--pictures representing, with an obvious and minute fidelity, scenes from the life lived there during the times of the first two Georges. One of these shows the milkmaids going home from their work arrayed in striped petticoats, and carrying their milk pails on their heads. Others show members of the family enjoying themselves in the garden or setting out for a ride, while the clergyman of the parish, or the chaplain, is pacing one of the walks in solitary meditation, with a telescope under his arm.

At Lyme, in Ches.h.i.+re, the ancient home of the Leghs, which owes its present magnificence to Leone, the Georgian architect, by whom Chatsworth was renovated, other pictures of a similar kind abound. In the days of the first Lord Newton I visited Lyme frequently, and was often late for breakfast because as I went through the pa.s.sages I could not detach myself from a study of these appealing records.

Of houses no less typical of the country life of England I can give a further example without quitting the Cotswolds. I allude to Sherborne--the late Lord Sherborne was one of my earliest friends--with its two princ.i.p.al frontages enriched by Inigo Jones with cl.u.s.ters of Corinthian columns--a house still happily remote from railways and towering chimneys. The late Lady Sherborne, like the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland at Raby, kept an alb.u.m, to which, whenever she could, she extorted a contribution in verse, or otherwise from her friends. My own contribution on one occasion was this--it was written at the close of a visit at Whitsuntide:

When June fevers London with riot, I regretfully dream of the day When shadow and suns.h.i.+ne and quiet Were alive in your woodlands in May.

I remember your oaks and your beeches.

I remember the cuckoo's reply To the ring dove that moaned where the reaches Of the Windrush are blue with the sky.

Of country houses which I have known in Scotland I shall speak later, in connection with extraneous incidents. Of such houses in Ireland, of which I have known several, it will be enough to mention one. This is Tullamore in County Down, the home of Strange, Lord Roden and Lady Roden, to the latter of whom I have referred already. It is from my visits at Tullamore that most of my knowledge of Ireland, such as it is, is derived. For many successive years I spent at Tullamore most of the early autumn. There were a few other old friends whom, in addition to myself, Lady Roden was accustomed to ask for similar periods, while the company was constantly augmented by others, mostly Irish, who stayed there for several days. Among these was Mrs. Ronalds--one of the most popular of the American ladies of London, who spent most of her autumn with her daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, at Belfast. More kindly and accomplished entertainers than Lord and Lady Roden it would not be easy to imagine. Tullamore stands among great beech woods and gardens on one side of a valley, at the bottom of which, half hidden by rhododendrons, an amber-colored stream descends in waterfalls to the sea. The slopes opposite to the house are thickly fledged with larches up to a certain height, when they suddenly give place to the wildness of the Mourne Mountains. The house externally is of more or less modern aspect, but within, when I knew it, it was full of fine family portraits, books, and old collections of china, together with certain other objects which appealed to the sense of history rather than to that of art. The Rodens having been among the chief of the Orange families of Ireland, a series of cabinets which stood in a long gallery would be found on examination to contain a collection of engraved winegla.s.ses, each of which bore the inscription "G.o.d save King William," or else "To h.e.l.l with the Pope." I remember also that a number of fine Dutch mirrors, which were plainly designed for ladies in the act of doing their hair, had been rendered useless for this important purpose by the fact that the whole of their surfaces were covered by delineations of King William on horseback, gesticulating at the battle of the Boyne.

Such sketches of the country houses that have been known to me might be very easily multiplied--houses of which, whenever I think of them, memories come back to me like the voices of evening rooks. But these will be sufficient, so far as England and Ireland are concerned, to ill.u.s.trate certain portions of my life other than that of London, and I will for the moment turn from those portions to others, which were spent by me for many years not at home, but abroad.

Not long after my Oxford career was ended, a family with which I was closely connected was, in consequence of the illness of one of its members, advised by doctors to pa.s.s the winter at Cannes, and, as soon as my friends were settled there, I was asked to go out and join them. A diminutive villa next to their own was secured for me. Its windows opened on an equally diminutive garden, in which orange trees with their golden globes surrounded a spurting fountain, while, rising from the depths of a great garden below--a garden pertaining to a villa built like a Moorish mosque--were the tall spires of cypresses and the yellow clouds of mimosa trees. In this hermitage, which seemed, under southern moons, to open on a world like that of _The Arabian Nights_, I remained for about two months, and wrote there the later portions of my book _Is Life Worth Living?_ Social life at Cannes had all the charm and none of the constant unrest of London, and its atmosphere so enchanted me that I spent for many years the best part of my winters on the Riviera, though I subsequently varied my program by a month or so at Pau or Biarritz, and more than once at Florence. On later occasions, of which I shall speak hereafter, I went farther afield, and saw something of what life was like in an old Hungarian castle; in the half-Gothic dwellings and arcaded courts of Cyprus; in the drawing-rooms of Fifth Avenue; and also on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Michigan, along which the great esplanade of Chicago now extends itself for more than eleven miles.

Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in Devons.h.i.+re, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.