“Called on Mrs. Stewart. She said that the evening before she had asked Mr. Froude what she should reply to Mr. Tennyson if he asked her what she thought of his last wretched poems. ‘Oh, say, “Blessed sir, would I presume?”’ returned Mr. Froude.
“Two days ago I went to Lady Airlie’s, where a large party was collected to hear Mr. Browning read. I never heard any one, even a child of ten, read so atrociously. It was two of his own poems—‘Good News to Ghent’ and ‘Ivan Ivanowitch,’ the latter always most horrible and unsuitable for reading aloud, but in this case rendered utterly unintelligible by the melodramatic vocal contortions of the reader.”
“July 23.—By invitation of Mrs. Stephen Winkworth to see Lewis Campbell’s translation of the ‘Agamemnon’ acted. Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin took the parts of both Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and was very grand in both, especially the latter. She has an infinity of action, but it is all graceful and very Greek. The chorus loses much, because each of the old men is made to say his speech separately, whereas in the original Greek they evidently all talked together.”
“July 24, Milford.—I have ended a very happy season by leaving London immediately after the marriage of Evelyn Bromley Davenport with Tom Legh of Lyme. Here, at Mrs. Greville’s, I find Lady Archibald Campbell, a pale, beautiful young woman, strangely occupied with spiritualism, and Mr. Watts, one of the principal writers in the Athenæum, and the man who, living with Swinburne, has, by his personal influence, cured him of the habit of drinking.”
“July 25.—A hot Sunday afternoon, spent chiefly in sitting on the terrace, where great orange-trees are set in tubs as in a French garden, and in listening to the discursive conversation of Mr. Watts and Lady Archie about Swinburne and Rossetti.
“I am very sorry, now that it is too late, that, in my last visit here, when asked to choose which I would be taken to see, I did not say George Eliot instead of Tennyson. Mrs. Greville went to see her with an aching heart after Lewes’s death, and ‘found them all in the drawing-room playing battledore and shuttlecock, nothing changed but the man.’
“Mrs. Greville’s mother, sweet Mrs. Thellusson, was one of the claimants for the great Thellusson fortune—an unsuccessful claimant. She is lovely still in her old age. Mrs. Greville has a picture of a young man in a dress of the beginning of this century. She described his return lately from India. ‘He came to Milford, and paid me endless attentions and made me endless presents; I really thought he wished to marry me, until he proposed to—my mother!’”[349]
“Ammerdown Park, August 2.—I have been several days with Lady Waterford—always charming, always so full of holy teaching, that she recalls the closing lines of St. Patrick’s Hymn—
‘Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.’