“The Percies are Irvingites now, as well as the Duke and Duchess. Her father, Mr. Drummond, was ‘one of the twelve apostles,’ in whose time it is a tenet of faith that the Lord must return. Now only one ‘apostle’ is alive, and when he dies what will happen? Meantime, though a very old man, he is hard at work beating up recruits and inciting proselytism. The family go to the church here, but then the vicar of Alnwick is also an Irvingite. All the gibberish which the Irvingites talk when seized by the spirit is taken down and treasured up as ‘prophecy.’”
“Nov. 5.—This Irvingite family is constantly waiting and looking out for the millennium: it is terribly anxious work. But their faith is most simple and touching. When one of the Percy boys was very ill, they had him anointed with oil; after that he recovered. ‘We had no doubt it would be so,’ said Lady Percy, ‘no doubt whatever.’ After the anointing, the friends of a patient have altogether done with human agency, and leave everything in the Divine hands. It is curious to hear members of this family say casually—‘The angel was here on Monday, and will be here again on Friday.’
“I have had an interesting hour with the Duchess in her own sitting-room, where she showed me all the treasures in her cabinet—two miniatures of Elizabeth, contemporary, for they are painted without any shadow, which she forbade, upon her face, and two others, evidently painted afterwards, and naturally much more becoming; a miniature of Mary Queen of Scots painted in prison, with the fat face and thick neck which want of exercise caused in one used to so much riding; some of the hair of Charles I., cut off by Sir Henry Halford when the king’s coffin was opened at Windsor; miniatures of James I., Anne of Denmark, and three of their children; the splendid ‘George’ of the fifth Earl of Northumberland, made with the blue enamel which is now a lost art; one of the amber snuff-boxes which Queen Charlotte had constructed in Germany for her ladies, with her miniature on the outside, her dog inside the lid, and her monkey at the bottom of the box; the pencil-case of Lord Chesterfield, with a diamond at the end, being the pencil mentioned by Pope. Not less interesting is a little (Dutch) silver woman, which runs by clockwork, because it was the means of saving all the family plate. For when burglars broke into Sion, it scampered about the floor when they were going to pack it up, which made them think the plate was possessed, and they took to flight, leaving all their booty behind, with the baskets in which they had intended to carry it off.”
“Nov. 6.—All this morning I was left to ‘browse in the library,’ as Dr. Johnson expresses it. In the afternoon I had a walk with the Duke and Percy to Alnwick Abbey—utterly unknown to history, and with only the ruin of its fine gateway standing, yet which must have been one of the most important buildings in the North of England. Its substructions were sought and dug for in exact accordance with the rules laid down for building a Premonstratensian abbey, and so they were found. The church must have been grand as any cathedral.”
To Miss LEYCESTER.
“Holmhurst, Nov. 27, 1887.—I am greatly enjoying a little solitude in this time so congenial for hard work, when all nature seems wrapped in a swampy mist-cloud. There are great improvements in the garden. Along that little upper walk to the field, where the frames were, is now a rockery with rare heaths, and behind it a bed of kalmias, and then the cypress hedge of my especial little garden. Rock and fern are also put on the steep descent to the pond, opposite the line of tree-fuchsias.
“I wonder if you remember hearing of the extraordinary visitation of crickets on the night of (my mother’s death) Nov. 12-13, seventeen years ago—the uproar, like the sea in a storm, all night, scarcely allowing a voice to be heard: then heard no more till the night, twelve years after, in which dear Lea passed away. I was so struck by coming across an allusion to it when reading the last chapter of Ecclesiastes as the lesson in church last Sunday—‘And the grasshopper shall become a burden, because man goeth to his long home.’”