“The only other guests at Mountfield are a Mr. Baker, a Gloucestershire squire, and his wife. He is an excellent man, and was the first who instituted a Reformatory. This he did first at his own expense, but the Government bought it from him. He speaks with the most dreary voice. Mr. Newton says it is ‘just the sort of utterance he should be grateful for if he was making his last speech upon the scaffold.’”
“Sonning, Dec. 30.—My ever-kind friend Lord Stanhope died on Christmas Eve. It was only two years from the time of dear Lady Stanhope’s death, on New Year’s Eve, 1873. She left a paper for her husband—what she called her ‘Last Words’—imploring him, for her sake, to go back to his literary interests, not to give up what had been his work, to try to fill up the blank in his life.
“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—
‘The ladies praise our curate’s eyes;
I cannot see their light divine:
He always shuts them when he prays,
And, when he preaches, closes mine.’”
XVIII
LONDON WALKS AND SOCIETY
“It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and to be of no character or significancy in it.”—Steele.
“Arranging long-locked drawers and shelves
Of cabinets, shut up for years,
What a strange task we’ve set ourselves!
How still the lonely room appears!
How strange this mass of ancient treasures,
Mementos of past pains and pleasures.”
“Be wisely worldly, be not worldly wise.”—Quarles.