“Milford Cottage, Oct. 8.—I came here with Miss Bromley on Saturday to visit Mrs. Greville and her most engaging mother, Mrs. Thellusson. It is a red house, standing almost in the village street, but with a French-looking garden behind, with clipped hedges and orange trees in tubs. It was left to Mrs. Greville by her husband, an old gentleman whom she married when the Thellussons were ruined, and he said, ‘You had better marry me; there is nothing else that I can do for you.’ He always treated her with the greatest generosity and kindness, but died very suddenly, intending to leave his wife very rich. There was, however, some mistake about the will, and she only inherited this cottage and just enough to live upon. I found at Milford, Lady Elizabeth Bryan, a Paget, who goes out visiting with four dogs, one of whom, Constance Kent, is most beautiful, and she has adopted a little cousin and presented her with six-and-thirty dolls. I went to see the adopted daughter in bed; two little dogs were cuddled in her bosom, and seven dolls lay at her feet with their heads out. Lately, the little girl has displayed signs of vanity, paraded her small person before a mirror, and exulted in fine clothes, and on these occasions she is always dressed in ‘Sukey,’ a little workhouse girl’s gown, to remind her that ‘in the sight of God she is no better.’
“This afternoon I have been with Mrs. Greville to Mr. Tennyson at Haselmere. It is a wild, high, brown heath, with ragged edges of birch, and an almost limitless view of blue Sussex distances. Jammed into a hollow is the house, a gothic house, built by Mr. Knowles, the editor of the Nineteenth Century—‘that young bricklayer fellow that Alfred is so fond of,’ as Mr. Carlyle calls him. Though the place is a bleak, wind-stricken height, where the flowers in the garden can never sit still, the house is pleasant inside and well and simply furnished, but is without any library whatever. Tennyson is older looking than I expected, so that his unkempt appearance signifies less. He has an abrupt, bearish manner, and seems thoroughly hard and unpoetical: one would think of him as a man in whom the direst prose of life was absolutely ingrained. Mrs. Greville kissed his hand as he came in, which he received without any protest. He asked if I would like to go out, and we walked round the gardens. By way of breaking the silence I said, ‘How fine your arbūtus is.’—‘Well, I would say arbūtus,’ he answered, ‘otherwise you are as bad as the gardeners, who say Clemātis.’ When we returned to the house, Hallam Tennyson brought in his mother very tenderly and put her on a sofa. She is a very sweet-looking woman, with ‘the glittering blue eyes’ which fascinated Carlyle, and a lady-abbess look from her head-dress—a kind of veil. Mrs. Greville revealed that she had broken her promise of not repeating an unpublished poem of Tennyson’s by reciting it to Mr. Carlyle, who said, ‘But did Alfred give you leave to say it?’ and Tennyson said, ‘You are the wickedest old woman I ever met with: it is most profligate conduct’—and he half meant it too. Tennyson then insisted that I should tell him some stories. I did not like it, but found it was no use to resist; I should have to do it in the end. He asked for ‘a village tragedy,’ so I told him the story of Caroline Crowhurst: he said he should write it in a play or a poem. Then I told him the stories of Mademoiselle von Raasloff and of Croglin Grange. He was atrociously bad audience, and constantly interrupted with questions. He himself repeated a little story, which Mr. Greene of the ‘English History’ had told him—of a man who felt that his fiddle, to which he was devoted, was the source of temptation to him by leading him to taverns where he got drunk. On the Mississippi river, he said, he heard a voice saying to him that he must destroy the fiddle; so he went down, kissed the fiddle, and then broke it to pieces. ‘I put in that kiss,’ said Tennyson, ‘because I thought it sounded better.’
“On the whole, the wayward poet leaves a favourable impression. He could scarcely be less egotistic with all the flattery he has, and I am glad to have seen him so quietly. The maid who opened the door was Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful model, and there were pictures of her by Mrs. Cameron all about the house.
“For the poet’s bearish manners the Tennyson family are to blame, in making him think himself a demigod. One day, on arriving at Mrs. Greville’s, he said at once, ‘Give me a pipe; I want to smoke.’ She at once went off by herself down the village to the shop, and returning with two pipes, offered them to him with all becoming subservience. He never looked at her or thanked her, but, as he took them, growled out, ‘Where are the matches? I suppose now you’ve forgotten the matches!’—‘Oh dear! I never thought of those.’
“Mrs. Greville has a note of Tennyson’s framed. It is a very pretty note; but it begins ‘Dear Madwoman.’”
“Babworth, Oct. 14.—This house overflows with loveliness in the way of amateur art, and the drawings of its mistress, Mrs. Bridgeman Simpson, are most beautiful. She is the kindest and most good-natured of hostesses.... Yesterday we went to Sandbeck, an ugly dull house in a flat, and looking bare within from paucity of furniture. Lord Scarborough, once a bold huntsman, is now patiently awaiting a second stroke of paralysis in a wheel-chair. Lumley, a pleasant boy, just going to join his regiment at Dublin, drove me after luncheon to Roche Abbey, a very pretty ruin in a glen.”
“Oct. 15.—Mrs. Simpson’s very charming Polish sister-in-law, Mrs. Drummond Baring, recounted yesterday evening a curious story out of the reminiscences of her childhood, of which her husband from knowledge confirmed every fact. Her father, Count Potocka, lived in Martinique. His wife had been married before, and her beautiful daughter, Minetta, idolised by her second husband, had made a happy marriage with the Marquis de San Luz, and resided at Port Royal about five miles from her parents. The father was a great naturalist, and had the greatest interest in introducing and naturalising all kinds of plants in the West Indies. Amongst other plants, he was most anxious to introduce strawberries. Every one said he would fail, and the neighbouring gardeners especially said so much about it that it was a positive annoyance to them when his plants all seemed to succeed, and he had a large bed of strawberries in flower. His step-daughter, Minetta, came to see them, and he always said to her that, when the strawberries were ripe, she should have the first fruit.
“A ball was given at Port Royal by the Governor, and there her parents saw Minetta, beautiful and radiant as ever; but she left the ball early, for her child was not well. As she went away, she said to her stepfather, ‘Remember my strawberries.’
“Her parents returned home in the early morning, and a day and a night succeeded. Towards dawn on the second morning, when night was just breaking into the first grey daylight, the mother felt an irresistible restlessness, and getting up and going to the window, she looked out. A figure in white was moving to and fro amongst the strawberries, carefully examining each plant and looking under the leaves. She awoke her husband, who said at once, ‘It is one of the gardeners, who are so jealous that they have come to destroy my plants;’ and jumping up, he put on his gola—a sort of dressing-gown wrapper worn in Martinique—and, taking his gun, rushed out. On first going out, he saw the figure in white moving before him, but as he came up to the strawberry beds it seemed to have disappeared. He was surprised, and turning round towards the house, saw his wife making agonised signs to him to come back. Such was her livid aspect, that he threw down his gun upon the ground and ran in to her. He found her in a dead faint upon the floor. When she recovered, she said that she had watched him from the window as he went out, and that, as he reached the strawberry beds, the figure seemed to turn round, and she saw—like a person seen through a veil and through the glass of a window, and, though perfectly distinct, transparent—her daughter Minetta. Soon after describing this, she was seized with violent convulsions. Her husband was greatly alarmed about her, and was just sending off for the doctor, who lived at some distance, when a rider on a little Porto Rico pony came clattering into the court. They thought it was the doctor, but it was not; it was a messenger from Port Royal to say that Minetta was dead. She had been seized with a chill on returning from the ball, and it had turned to fatal diphtheria. In her last hours, when her throat was so swelled and hot, she had constantly said, ‘Oh, my throat is so hot! Oh, if I had only some of those strawberries!’”
“Thoresby, Oct. 17.—Lord Manvers sent for me after luncheon three days ago, and we came with a horse fleet as the wind through the green lanes of Clumber, and across part of the (Sherwood) forest, to this immense modern palace by Salvin. All around is forest. No one was at home when I arrived, so I went out for a walk, and was joined by Lord Manvers on returning.... Lady Manvers is quite delightful, and so are her son and daughter, so I have been very glad of two days alone with the family; and the forest is enchanting from its varieties of gnarled oak, silver birch, endlessly contorted fir, and gigantic beeches, with ever-varying lights on the golden and crimson fern in its first beautiful decay. Now guests have arrived, including Mr. Frederick Tayler, the artist,[267] whose blottesque treatment of the green in the forest with only gamboge, indigo, and sepia is very interesting to see. He was very funny about the late Lord Manvers, who was a wit, and who, when Lord Ossington was rather boastful about his lake, said—‘Come, come now, Ossington, don’t speak of a lake; just wipe it up and say no more about it.’