“Dec. 1.—To-day being a hunting day, most of the men breakfasted in pink in the hall. We drove with the Harringtons to the old Shipley house of Bodryddan,[239] where young Mrs. Conwy received us. The fine old house has been altered by Nesfield—‘restored’ they call it—but, though well done in its way, the quaint old peculiar character is gone. This generation, too, has sent its predecessors into absolute oblivion. Only the pictures keep the past alive at all, and they very little. There was a lovely portrait of a little girl with a dog in Mrs. Conwy’s sitting-room. ‘Who was it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, somebody, some sort of great-aunt,’ she supposed, ‘the dog was rather nice.’ It was Amelia Sloper,[240] Dean Shipley’s most cherished niece, the idol of that house and of all that lived in it in a past generation. One could not help remembering how that child’s little footsteps were once the sweetest music that house ever knew, and now her very existence is forgotten there, but her picture is preserved because ‘she had rather a nice little dog.’”
“Tatton Park, Dec. 2.—This is a very pleasant, roomy country-house in an ugly park. The great feature is the conservatories, in one of which a gravel walk winds between banks of rock and moss and groves of tree-fern like a scene in Tasmania.
“Lady Egerton[241] shows to great advantage in her own house. On small subjects her conversation is frivolous, but on deeper subjects she has acute observation and a capital manner of hitting the right nail on the head, and she certainly gives her opinion without respect of persons. Yesterday, Wilbraham Egerton and Lady Mary[242] dined, the latter most attractive. Lady Egerton was very amusing, especially about old Lady Shaftesbury and her having ‘established a lying-in hospital for cats.’”
“Dec. 4.—Yesterday we went to church at Rostherne. Going through the park gates, Mrs. Mitford (Emily Egerton) told the story of Dick Turpin—whose propensities were not known to his neighbours, and who constantly dined with her grandfather—having been terrified at that gate one night as he rode away, by thinking that he saw the ghost of one of his victims, and that it was believed to be haunted ever since.
“Rostherne Church stands on a terrace above the mere, into which one of its bells is said to have slipped down, and a mermaid is supposed to come up and ring it whenever one of the family at Tatton is going to die. It is the most poetical legend in Cheshire. Old Mrs. Egerton[243] told it one day at dinner. A short time after, the butler rushed into the drawing-room, and begged the gentlemen of the house to come and interfere, for two of the under-servants were murdering one another. Mrs. Egerton’s special footman had told the story of the mermaid in the servants’ hall, and another servant denied it. The footman declared that it was impossible it should not be true, for his mistress had said it, and a desperate fight ensued.
“Miss Wilbraham[244] is here from Blyth—a most pleasant, easy, natural person, who draws beautifully, and makes herself most agreeable.
“To-day we have been to luncheon at Arley. It is a noble house, raised by the present Mr. Warburton[245] on the site of an old moated building, which was, however, spoilt before his time. In front is a leaden statue of a Moor, like those at Knowsley and Clement’s Inn. The blind Mr. Warburton wrote the well-known hunting songs. He lived through his eyes, but bears the loss of them with a noble cheerfulness. All around are devoted to him, not only his own family, but tenants and workmen, and it is a touching proof of this, that, when anything new is to be constructed, the workmen always make a ‘blind plan’ of it, that he may feel and know it—a bit of wood representing one kind of wall, a ridge of sealing wax another: and so he is still the adviser and soul of it all.
“Mr. Gladstone is an old friend of his, and, with silence as to politics, was come to cheer and amuse him.
“Lady Egerton was most comical with Mr. Gladstone. ‘I told you you would never rest,’ she said; ‘how could you be so stupid as to think it? A man with brains cannot rest. Now how can you have come to do such a number of foolish things? However, if I was you, I would quiet down: indeed I do not despair of you yet.’ At luncheon Mr. Gladstone said she did a good deal of work in a very short time, for she totally demolished the Board of Education and the Church of England, and eventually established the Pope as the head of Christianity throughout the world.
“Before luncheon, Mr. Warburton took me away to see some prints in the library. We found there a Mr. Yates, a clergyman, and there was a most animated and interesting conversation between him and Mr. Gladstone on the logical difference between ‘Obedience’ and ‘Submission,’ which Mr. Yates considered to be the same and I thought so too, but quite see from Mr. Gladstone’s explanation that it is not so. He illustrated it by Strossmeyer, who was quite willing to submit to the doctrine of Papal infallibility, but turned restive at obedience, which involved subscription, and prevented any power of antagonistic action on his own faith any more. They spoke much of obedience to the decrees of a judge in Church matters. Mr. Gladstone said that while clergy were bound to submit to a judge’s decree, and while they had no right to inquire his reasons (two judges often arriving at the same decision from perfectly different reasons), he did not see why they might not state that the views they maintained, according to their own conscience, were at variance with the decision, though, as members of the Church of England, they were bound to submit to it.