[217] Mr. E. A. Freeman—whose lengthy and disproportionate writings were never wholly without interest—died March 1892.
[218] Blanche, Countess of Sandwich, died March 1894.
[219] Letters of Alexis de Tocqueville to Mrs. Grote.
[220] Sir John Acton was commander-in-chief of the land and sea forces of Naples, and was for several years Neapolitan Prime Minister. His wife was the daughter of his brother, General Acton, and he had by her two sons (the younger of whom became Cardinal), and a daughter, afterwards Lady Throckmorton.
[221] At Sudeley Castle, where “the Mother of the English Reformation” is buried, I wrote for Mrs. Dent:—
“Here, within the chapel’s shade,
Reverent hands have gently laid,
From the suffering of her life,
From its storminess and strife,
All that rests of one who shone
For a time on England’s throne,
Ever gentle, ever kind,
Seeking human souls to bind
In a Christian’s fetters fast,
Heavenward leading at the last:
And their watch two angels keep
Over Katherine’s gentle sleep.
. . . . . . . . . .
Oh! amid this world of ours,
With its sunshine and its flowers,
Glad with light and blest with love,
Let us still so live above
All earth’s jealousies and snares,
All its fretfulness and cares,
Ever faithful, ever true,
With the noblest end in view,
Seeking human souls to raise
By the simplest, purest ways;
Then their ward will angels keep
When we too are hush’d to sleep.”
[222] Emma, daughter of John Brocklehurst, Esq., of Hurdsfield, the authoress of an admirable work on the “Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley.”
[223] The great feature in views from Stoke Rectory.
[224] The name is thus spelt in the epitaph on the tomb of Richard Pendrill at St. Giles in the Fields.
[225] Henry Strutt, who succeeded his father as 2nd Lord Belper in 1880, married Lady Margaret, sixth daughter of the 2nd Earl of Leicester.