‘And thy eternal summer shall not fade,’
is a line of Shakspeare which seems ever to apply to her. Here are some fragments from her lips:—
“‘That is like the priest who, when he was remonstrated with for eating meat on Friday, said, “All flesh is grass.”
“‘When I was young, I delighted in Tittenhanger.[465] We used to post down from London—a most delightful drive then. I thought it all charming—the old house, and a wood with bluebells, and the Colne, a mere dull sluggish stream, I suppose, but it had frogs and bulrushes, and I found it enchanting. A few years ago I thought I would post down to Tittenhanger in the old way, but it was a street all the way to Barnet, and when the people saw the white horses and postillion in blue, they came crowding round; for, though it was only my little maid Boardman and me, they thought, “Now we shall see them: now we shall see the newly-married pair.”
“The Duc d’Aumale is married. He married Mademoiselle Clinchamps, who was lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Salerno, the Duchesse d’Aumale’s mother. She does the honours of his house, but it is a sort of morganatic marriage.... Madame Adelaide was married too to one of the generals.... I remember the Aumales riding through the green avenues near Ossington; Mary Boyle was with them. She was a most excellent horsewoman, but a great gust of wind came, and the whole edifice of her chignon was blown off before she could stop it. The little Prince de Condé was very young then, and he was riding with her. He picked it up and said, “I will keep it in my pocket, and then, when we reach Thoresby, you can go away quietly and get it put on;” and so she did. That young Condé used to say, “I am not le grand Condé; I am le petit Condé.” ... Madame de Genlis used to write to Louis Philippe—“Sire et cher enfant.”
“‘That Lord Shrewsbury[466] you were speaking of received Henri V. at Alton Towers—received him as king of France, and dressed up all the people of the different lodges to represent the different nations of Europe giving him welcome. It was he who made the beautiful gardens. There is a bust of him there, and inscribed beneath it—“He made the desert to smile.” “And I don’t wonder at it,” said Lady Marian (Alford) when she saw the bust: he was so comically hideous.’”
Whilst I was away on my visits, I had left my dear old cousin Charlotte Leycester provided with companions at Holmhurst during the annual summer visit of several months, which had never failed since my mother’s death. I felt that thus my mother’s home, thus her own especial room, were fulfilling what she would most have wished for them. And (though, unlike my gentle mother, Calvinistic, vehement, with a habit of constantly “improving the occasion,” and utterly intolerant still of all that did not agree with her in religious matters), the beloved and beautiful old cousin, at nearly ninety, was this year more than ever occupied by plans and thoughts for the good of all around her, more full of spiritual meditation herself, lifting her own heart and mind into celestial dwelling-places. For her truly one might say, “The poetry of earth is never dead,” and I often found that I knew little of the natural charms of my own little home till she had shown them. “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee” is a verse of Job for which she had a constant application, and the shrubs and flowers—at Holmhurst always planted in the same places—were intimate and familiar friends to her—