“April 3.—I came to London on the 19th, and dined that day with Lady Margaret Beaumont, hearing there of the dear kind old Lord Ravensworth being found dead that day on the floor of the Windsor rooms at Ravensworth, when his daughter Nellie sent for him because he did not come in to luncheon.”
“On Monday, March 25, as I was breakfasting at the Athenæum, I glanced into the paper, and the first thing which met my eyes was the news of the total loss of the Eurydice, with dear good Marcus Hare and more than three hundred men. It was a terrible shock, and seemed to carry away a whole mass of one’s life in recollections from childhood.... It is many days ago now, and the dreadful fact has seemed ever since to be hammering itself into one’s brain with ceaselessly increasing horror. How small now seem the failings in Marcus’s unselfish and loving character, how great the many virtues. It is difficult also to realise that there is now scarcely any one left who really cares for the old traditions of the Hare family, the old portraits, the old memorials, which were always so much to him, and which I hoped, through him, would be handed down to another generation.”
“April 14.—On the day on which the Eurydice was lost, Sir J. Cowell and Sir John McNeill were standing together in a window of Windsor Castle which overlooks a wide extent of country. Suddenly Sir J. McNeill seemed to be dreaming and speaking aloud. ‘What a terrible storm,’ he said. ‘Oh, do you see that ship? It will be lost: oh, how horrible! Good God, it’s gone!’ It was at that moment that the Eurydice went down.[277]
“I have little to tell of London beyond the ordinary experiences, except perhaps having been more than ever shocked by the slanderous malignity of so-called ‘religious people,’ as I have been charmed by the chivalrous disinterestedness of many who do not aspire to that denomination. One often finds Archbishop Whately’s saying too true—‘The God of Calvinists is the devil, with God written on their foreheads.’ Of the many dinner-parties I have attended, I cannot recollect anything except that some one—I cannot remember who—spoke of D’Israeli as ‘that old Jew gentleman who is sitting on the top of chaos.’
“Last Sunday I went to luncheon at Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck’s. I arrived at two, having been requested to be punctual. No hostess was there, and the many guests sat round the room like patients in a dentist’s anteroom, or, as a young Italian present said, when I made his acquaintance—‘like lumps of ice.’ Lady Waterford came in and Mr. Bentinck, and we went in to luncheon. There was a table for about forty, who sat where they liked. Mrs. Bentinck came in when all were seated, greeting nobody in particular. The lady next me, a perfect stranger, suddenly said, ‘I want you to tell me what I must do to get good. I do not feel good at all, and I want to be better: what must I do?’
“‘That depends on your peculiar form of badness,’ I replied.
“‘Well, I live where I have a church on each side of me, and a church on the top of the hill under which my house is situated. But they do me no good. Now I wonder if that is owing to the inefficiency of the churches, or to the depravity of my own heart?’
“‘Probably half to one and half to the other,’ I said.
“I asked afterwards who the lady was, but neither her hostess nor any one else had an idea.
“Yesterday I dined with the Pole-Carews. Mrs. Carew told me that Dr. Benson, Bishop of Truro,[278] told her:—