Oh change, stupendous change!
There lies the soulless clod;
The sun eternal breaks,
The new immortal wakes—
Wakes with his God.’
“I was at his funeral some days afterwards, the poor old man carried to the grave by our workmen, and followed by seventeen of his descendants, children and grandchildren. He has left me a chair which came out of Hurstmonceaux Castle.”
“Feb. 26, 1890.—Went to see Lady De Ros,[485] aged ninety-five. She brought out for me her greatest treasure, a beautifully printed Church of England Prayer-book in Spanish. It belonged to the great Duke of Ormonde, and descended from him to Lady Eleanor Butler, by whom and Miss Ponsonby—‘ladies of Llangollen’—it was given to the Duke of Wellington as a boy. He taught himself Spanish by following its services, as he himself says in an inscription on the fly-leaf. In his old age, when Lady De Ros was with him at Strathfieldsaye, she found it in the library, and told him what a valuable book she thought it. ‘Then, if you think it such a valuable thing, I will give it you, my dear.’—‘So, as Douro and Charles were just coming, I took my book away at once,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘for fear they should stop me.’ Some years afterwards the Duke asked Lady De Ros to lend him the book to show to some great librarian. She let it go, but made it a condition that, before it was returned, the Duke should write its history in the book with his own hands; and this he did.
“Lady De Ros also showed me a brush of hogs’-bristles, mounted in ebony, and with a silver plate. And she told how, when she was hunting wild boars with the Duke on Mont St. Jean near Cambrai, an immense boar sprang out of the thicket close by her. The Duke speared it. It was a horrid sight and she shrank from it. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Duke, ‘you must not mind it, for I am prouder of having killed that boar than of the battle of Waterloo.’
“Lady De Ros was very full of her dispute with Sir William Fraser about the house in which the ball was given at Brussels by her father, the Duke of Richmond, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. She was quite certain of her facts, and that the house was now gone. She had been living in the house itself, in the Rue de la Blanchisserie (‘where the Duke would direct to me “in the wash-house“‘), and cited as a proof that the ball was given in her own house, the fact that her youngest sister, who had been sent to bed, stole out, and watched the company arrive through the banisters. ‘I believe Sir William Fraser asserts,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘that I am confused and doting now through my great age, but you know very old people remember the long-ago as if it was to-day, and that is the case with me. In 1860 I went back to see Brussels, and I could not find our house then; the whole street was swept away. At last, as I was walking up and down, I was attracted by the name on a pastry-cook’s shop: it was a name I remembered in that long-ago time. So I went in and asked if they knew anything of our house. “Oh, a house in the Rue de la Blanchisserie,” they said; “it has been pulled down years and years ago.”’
XXVI
AT HOME AND ABROAD
“Le monde n’est éternel pour personne; laisse le passer, et t’attache à celui qui l’a fait.”—Diderot, “Sarrasins.”
“Time there was, but it is gone;
Time there may be—who can tell?
Time there is to act upon,
Help me, Lord, to use it well.”
—Lady Waterford’s Note-Book.
“Non aver tema, disse il mio Signore:
Fatti sicuro, chè noi siamo a buon punto:
Non stringer, ma rallarga ogni vigore.”
—Dante, “Purgatorio,” Canto ix.