“Lord Darnley went himself into the village of Cobham to engage lodgings at a poor woman’s cottage for a man who wanted to come there. Lady Kathleen went to see the poor woman afterwards, and found her greatly delighted. ‘As soon as my Lord was gone,’ she said, ‘up I went to my room, and down upon my knees I dropped to return thanks to the Almighty, because the Lord above, and the Lord below, were working together for my good.’”
“Jan. 10.—To tea with Mrs. Humphry Ward, almost a celebrity now as authoress of ‘Robert Elsmere,’ at her house in Russell Square. She said it tried her somewhat to receive from an American ‘Whiteley’ his circular with—‘for economy in literature we defy anything to beat our Elsmere at six cents.’”
On Shrove Tuesday, March 6, I left home for the south, and spent a fortnight at Mentone in the Hotel d’Italie, which I remembered—one of the few houses then existing—as the residence of Mrs. Usborne when we were living close by in 1869-70. My cousin Florentia Hughes was at Mentone with her youngest daughter, and we had many pleasant excursions together. In the hotel were Lord Northbrook and his daughter, with whom I dined several times, meeting the excessively entertaining Lord Alington and his pleasant daughters. On the 22nd I reached Rome, where I spent six weeks in the Hotel d’Italie, seeing many friends, correcting my “Walks in Rome,” and drawing a great deal.
Journal.
“April 7.—On Friday I went with some friends to Albano, and, whilst they drove to Neni, drew in the glen at Ariccia, and never was I so tormented by children as by a beautiful little cowherd—Amalia Maria—who, on my refusing her demand for soldi, vowed she would ‘lead me a life,’ which she did by fetching six other little demons worse than herself, when they all joined hands and danced round me and my campstool, kicking and screaming with all their might. Then they fetched a black pecorello, and having tried to make it eat my paints, danced again, the pecorello, held by a string, prancing behind them. Happily at last the cow which Amalia Maria was supposed to be chaperoning made its escape over a hedge, and whilst she was pursuing it over the country, I fled, and joined my companions at a little caffè, where we had a delicious luncheon of excellent bread, hard-boiled eggs—painted purple for Lent—and sparkling Aleatico, for fourpence a head. Afterwards we sat to draw, looking down upon that loveliest of lakes and woods full of cyclamens and anemones.
“The crowds in the Roman galleries are endless. Whole families arrive together, every member of them carrying a campstool, and they will sit down opposite each of the statues in turn, and move onwards gradually, whilst the father reads aloud from a guidebook, and they all drink it in. He often begins the description at the wrong end, but they do not find it out, and ... it does not signify! An American, a Mrs. Ruggles, coming to the Apollo Belvidere, said, ‘Is that the Apollo Belvidere?’—‘Yes, that’s the Apollo Belvidere.’—‘Well, then, if that’s the Apollo Belvidere, I don’t think much of him: give me Ruggles.’”
“April 18.—Caught in tremendous rain and hail near a warehouse at the back of the Palatine, and took refuge under a rude porch with a number of peasants and was kept there an hour. One of the men described his life as a soldier when his battalion was sent against the brigands near Pescara. Of these, the famous Angelo Maria was so horrible a monster, that his own mother determined to rid the world of such a fiend and to deliver him up. He discovered this, seized his mother, laid her on a table, ripped her up, and taking out her steaming heart—ate it! Words cannot describe the horrible gestures with which the peasant told this story, or the dramatic power with which he described the sister seeing the terrible scene through a chink in the door, and coming afterwards to the guard-house, saying that she wished to betray her brother. ‘Oh,’ said the officer, ‘you need not suppose that we trust you; this is a trap you have laid for us.’—‘Yesterday,’ she answered, ‘I might have laid a trap, but I had not then seen that monster eat my mother’s heart.’ And he was taken.