To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.
“Dec. 7, 1890.—I have had an interesting visit to the De Capel Brookes in the old grey Tudor house of Great Oakley Hall in Northamptonshire. Thence I saw two of the finest houses in England. Rushton (Mr. Clarke Thornhill’s) is a great Tudor house with a screen like that of a Genoese palace. In the garden is ‘Dryden’s Walk,’ and the three-cornered lodge built by Richard Tresham (with Lyveden and the town-hall of Rothwell) as a strange votive offering to propitiate the Trinity for success in the enterprise of the Gunpowder Plot. Rockingham is even more interesting. Once the hunting-palace of King John, it was inhabited ever afterwards by the English kings till the time of Henry VII., since which the Watsons have possessed it. The position is splendid, with a wide view of map-like Northamptonshire country, and it is approached by a gateway between noble Plantagenet towers. All additions have been made in the best taste, and the great drawing-room is magnificent. King John’s treasure-chest remains in the hall. There is a noble Sir Joshua, and a most beautiful Angelica Kauffmann, probably her finest work. Other interesting pictures came to the Watsons through marriages, many of Lord Strafford and his surroundings through the marriage of his daughter with Lord Rockingham; those of Henry Pelham, the Duke of Newcastle, &c., through the daughter of the former.
“How interesting is the Parnell crisis! At Miss Seymour’s I met a Countess Ziski, who talked of how curious it was that abroad, if a woman misconducts herself, she is boycotted, but no notice is taken of the misconduct of the man: here, if a woman misconducts herself, an easy-going society makes excuses for her, but the man is cashiered for ever.
“The Dean of Chester says that a friend of his was once baptizing a child of six. All went well, till it came to making the sign of the cross, when the child exclaimed, ‘If you do that again, I’ll hit yer in the eye.’ At a recent Board-school examination ‘Education’ was defined as ‘that which enables you to despise the opinions of others, and conduces to situations of considerable emolument.’ I think it was Miss Cobbe who defined ‘Conscience’ as ‘that which supplies you with an excellent motive for doing that which you desire to do, and which fills you with self-satisfaction when you have done it.’”
To W. H. Milligan.
“Llandaff, Dec. 18, 1890.—I was a week at Ammerdown, meeting Lord and Lady Temple, the Phelips’s of Montacute, and a charming Miss Devereux, Lord Hereford’s daughter.... The Dean of —— had been out with a shooting party in the neighbourhood. ‘I hope you sent some pheasants the Dean’s way,’ said the owner of the ground to a keeper. ‘Oh yes, that I have, and his holiness has been pepperin’ away as stiff as a biscuit.’
“Here at Llandaff it has been interesting to meet Mr. Herbert Ward of the African Stanley rearguard, a most frank, simple, and evidently most truthful fellow, who speaks with great moderation of the leader of the expedition, to whom they owed so much of suffering, misery, death, and slander.
“Have you never remarked how hypnotism is described in Wisdom xvii.?”
To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.
“Honingham, Norfolk, January 8, 1891.—I enjoyed my Christmas visit to the Lowthers, though it was rather spoilt by what novelists would call the incipient agonies of a cold, which has about attained its perfection now, and I am glad to be in this warm house of the hospitable Ailwyn Fellowes’s, where I am well looked after.