“Froude informs the Scottish youth
Parsons seldom speak the truth;
While at Cambridge Kingsley cries
‘History is a pack of lies!’
Whence these judgments so malign?
A little thought will solve the mystery.
For Froude thinks Kingsley a divine
And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.”
The Galloways when we first made their acquaintance lived at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street. In 1875 we occupied 17a Great Cumberland Street—and in 1876 a nice house belonging to Mr. Bassett in Charles Street—but in 1877 we bought 3 Great Stanhope Street, being rather tired of taking houses for the season. My second (surviving) daughter Mary was born here on May 26th—a beautiful baby, god-daughter to Lady Galloway and Julia Wombwell. My third and youngest daughter, Beatrice, was born at Folkestone October 12th, 1880, and the family was completed three years later by Arthur, born November 24th, 1883, to our great joy, as it endowed us with a second son just before his elder brother went to Mr. Chignell’s school—Castlemount—at Dover.
In the same month, but just before Arthur was born, our tenant at Osterley, the old Duchess of Cleveland (Caroline), died. She was a fine old lady and an excellent tenant, caring for the house as if it had been her own. She had most generous instincts, and once when part of the stonework round the roof of Osterley had been destroyed by a storm she wrote to my husband saying that she had placed a considerable sum with his bankers to aid in its restoration. This was unexpected and certainly unsolicited, which made it all the more acceptable. We should never have thought of disturbing her during her lifetime, and even when she died our first idea was to relet the place to a suitable tenant. I had never lived there (though we once slept for a night during the Duchess’s tenure), so had no associations with, and had never realised, the beauty of, the place. However, after her death we thought we would give one garden-party before reletting, which we did in 1884. The day was perfect, and an unexpected number of guests arrived. We were fascinated with the place and decided to keep it as a “suburban” home instead of letting, and it became the joy of my life and a great pleasure to my husband.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
I will speak of some of our guests later on, but I must first mention some of those whom we knew at Great Stanhope Street and Middleton during the earlier years of our married life. One of our great friends was the American Minister Mr. Lowell. Looking through some of his letters, I recall his perfect charm of manner in speaking and in writing. The simplest occurrence, such as changing the date of a dinner-party in 1882, gave him the opportunity of words which might have befitted a courtier of old days:
“Her Majesty—long life to her—has gone and appointed Saturday, June 3rd, to be born on. After sixty-three years to learn wisdom in, she can do nothing better than take my Saturday away from me—for I must go to drink her health at the Foreign Office! ’Tis enough to make a democrat of any Tory that ever was except you. I have moved on my poor little dinner to 5th. I can make no other combination in the near future, what with Her Majesty’s engagements and mine, but that. Can you come then? Or is my table to lose its pearl? If you can’t, I shall make another specially for you.”
Before I knew Mr. Lowell personally I was introduced to his works by Mr. Tom Hughes (“Tom Brown” of the “Schooldays”) who stayed with us at Middleton at the beginning of 1880 and gave me a copy of Lowell’s poems carefully marked with those he preferred. Four years later in August Lowell stayed with us there. It was a real hot summer, and he wrote into Hughes’ gift these verses which certainly make the volume doubly precious:
“Turbid from London’s noise and smoke,
Here found I air and quiet too,
Air filtered through the beech and oak,
Quiet that nothing harsher broke
Than stockdoves’ meditative coo.
“So I turn Tory for the nonce
And find the Radical a bore
Who cannot see (thick-witted dunce!)
That what was good for people once
Must be as good for evermore.
“Sun, sink no deeper down the sky,
Nature, ne’er leave this summer mood,
Breeze, loiter thus for ever by,
Stir the dead leaf or let it lie,
Since I am happy, all is good!”
T. HUGHES AND J. R. LOWELL
This poem was afterwards republished under the title “The Optimist” in a collection called Heartsease and Rue. Lowell added four additional stanzas between the first and the last two, elaborating the description and the underlying idea. I think, however, that the three original ones are the best, particularly the gentle hit at the “Tory”—with whom he loved to identify me. The “stockdoves” were the woodpigeons whose cooing on our lawn soothed and delighted him. Mr. Hughes told me that he had first made Mr. Lowell’s acquaintance by correspondence, having written to him to express his admiration of one of his works. I have just discovered that in an Introduction to his Collected Works published 1891 Hughes says that Trübner asked him in 1859 to write a preface to the English edition of the Biglow Papers which gave him the long-desired opportunity of writing to the author. He also told me—which he also describes in the Introduction—how nervous he was when about at last to meet his unknown friend lest he should not come up to the ideal which he had formed, and how overjoyed he was to find him even more delightful than his letters. In a fit of generosity Hughes, quite unasked, gave me a very interesting letter which Lowell wrote him on his appointment to England in 1880. It is a long letter, some of it dealing with private matters, but one passage may be transcribed: