“In the afternoon I drove with Lady Exeter, Lady Catherine Weyland, and Lady Jane Grimston to St. Albans, and went over the abbey with Mr. Chapel, the delightfully enthusiastic clerk of the works, who repeatedly exclaimed, ‘It is the pride of my life, sir; it is the pride of my life.’ He has most beautifully put together, from the fragments found, the two great shrines of the place, of St. Alban and St. Amphipolis (Arthur Stanley doubts the existence of the latter saint, and thinks the name was only that of a cloak), not adding or inventing a single bit; and the whole interior of the abbey has been hitherto done in the same way, being perhaps the one church in England really restored, not remodelled. In returning we stopped at St. Michael’s to see the tomb of Lord Bacon, represented as he sat in his chair—‘sic sedebat.’”
“Nov. 21.—At dinner last night and all day Lord Beaconsfield seemed absorbed, scarcely noticed any one, barely answered his hostess when spoken to. Montagu Corry[269] said that his chief declared that the greatest pleasure in life was writing a book, because ‘in that way alone man could become a creator:’ that his habit was to make marionettes, and then to live with them for some months before he put them into action. Lately he had made some marionettes; now he was living with them, and their society occupied him entirely.
“To-day Lord Verulam showed me many of the relics of the house—the decision of his ancestor, Judge Crook, releasing Hampden: a deed of free-warren from Henry II. confirming to one of his ancestors another deed of his grandfather Henry I.: the portrait of Edward Grimston (1460), the oldest known authentic portrait in England, representing a man who fought at Towton, but afterwards made peace with Edward IV., lived in retirement, and is mentioned in the Paston Letters.
“Lord Verulam told me of his discovery that Lord Lovat was seventy-three at the time of his execution, not eighty, as is generally affirmed. The supposed date of his birth and the date of his learning to fence tend to confirm this, and his smiling when he looked upon his coffin-plate on the scaffold and the line he quoted from Horace.”
“Nov. 25.—On Friday I drove with Lord Verulam in his victoria to Wrothampstead. The old house there is one of the long many-gabled houses, vine-covered, with windows and chimneys of moulded brick, standing, backed by fine trees, in a brilliant garden. Inside it is gloriously panelled, and has a staircase approached by balustraded gates with a tapestried room at the top of it. It belongs to a Mr. Lawes, who for a long time was supposed to be wasting all his time and most of his money in chemistry, but at length by his chemistry he discovered a cheap way of making a valuable manure, and ‘Lawes’s manure’ has made him a millionaire.
“Yesterday we went to Tittenhanger, already familiar to me from Lady Waterford’s descriptions. It is a charming old house, utterly Cromwellian, most attractive and engaging, depending for its effect upon its high overhanging roofs, and the simple, admirable brick ornaments of its windows. The rooms are full of beautiful pictures and china, but Lady Caledon was not there, and it is always a loss not to see the owner with a place.
“It was on hearing some one mention this house that Sydney Smith made the impromptu—
‘Oh, pray, where is Tittenhanger?
Is it anywhere by Bangor?
Or, if it is not in Wales,
Can it, perhaps, be near Versailles?
Tell me, in the name of grace,
Is there really such a place?’
“Lady Lilian Paulet was very absurd at dinner with her story of an American who said that, going down Piccadilly, he met a mad dog, so, as he could not avoid him, he thrust his hand down its throat and pulled out its inside; after which the dog ran on still, but it could no longer say ‘bow-wow,’ it could only say ‘wow-bow.’
“It was amusing seeing Lord Beaconsfield at Gorhambury: hear him I never did, except when he feebly bleated out some brief and ghastly utterance. His is an extraordinary life. He told Lord Houghton that the whole secret of his success was his power of never dwelling upon a failure; he ‘had failed often, constantly at first, yet had never dwelt on it, but always gone on to something else.’”