Lunching with my friend Bishop Mitchinson, the little Master of Pembroke, I was shown his new portrait in the hall—quite a good painting, but not a bit like him, though not in that respect singular among our Oxford portraits. The supposed picture of Devorguilla, foundress of Balliol, is, I have been assured, the likeness of an Oxford baker's daughter, who was tried for bigamy in the eighteenth century. An even more barefaced imposture is the "portrait" of Egglesfield (chaplain to Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, and founder of Queen's), which hangs, or hung, in the hall of that college. It is really, and manifestly, the likeness of a seventeenth-century French prelate—probably Bossuet—in the episcopal dress of the time of Louis XIV! Most of our Magdalen portraits are, I think, authentic; but then they do not profess to represent personages of the early Middle Ages! The best and most interesting portraits at Oxford belong to the nineteenth century. I always enjoyed showing my friends those of Tait and Manning, side by side in Balliol Hall, and recalling how their college tutor once remarked, when they had left his room after a lecture: "Those two undergraduates are worthy and talented young men: I hope I shall live to see them both archbishops!" His prophetic wish was duly fulfilled, though he had probably never dreamt of Canterbury and Westminster!
I remember pleasant visits this autumn to the Abingdons at Wytham Abbey, their fine old place, set in loveliest woods, within an easy drive of Oxford. "Why Abbey?" I asked my host, who did not seem to know that the place had never been a monastery, though part of the house was of the fifteenth century. Lord Abingdon himself was a kind of patriarch,[[15]] with a daughter married four and twenty years, and a small son not yet four. He was trying to dispose of some of his land for building, but without great success. The Berkshire side of the Thames (to my mind far the most beautiful and attractive) was not the popular quarter for extensions from Oxford, which was spreading far out towards the north in the uninteresting directions of Banbury and Woodstock.
Term over, I went north to spend Christmas with the Butes at Mountstuart, where I found my young host, as was only natural, much interested in a recent decision of the Scottish Courts, which had diverted into his pocket £40,000 which his father had bequeathed to two of the Scottish Catholic dioceses.[[16]] My Christmas here (the first for many years) was saddened by old memories; for I missed at every turn the pervading presence of my lost friend, to whose taste and genius the varied beauty of his island home was so largely due. However, our large party of young people gave the right note of hilarity to the time; and if there was little sunshine without (I noted that we had never a gleam from Christmas to New Year), there was plenty of warmth and brightness and merriment within. The graceful crypt (all that was yet available) of the lovely chapel was fragrant and bright with tuberoses, chrysanthemums and white hyacinths; and the religious services of the season were carried out with the care and reverence which had been the rule, under Lord Bute's supervision, for more than thirty years. The day after New Year, young Bute left home for London and Central Africa (the attraction of the black man never seemed to pall on him), and I made my way to our Highland Abbey to spend the remainder of the Christmas vacation.
[[1]] "Do you very much mind dining in the middle of the day?" a would-be hostess at St. Andrews once asked George Angus. "Oh, not a bit," was his reply, "as long as I get another dinner in the evening!"
[[2]] It was, I think, a Scottish critic who suggested an emendation of the line, "Sermons from stones, books in the running brooks." Obviously, he said, the transposition was a clerical error, the true reading being, "Sermons from books, stones in the running brooks!"
[[3]] Another attempt, nine years later, to abolish the same statute was decisively defeated; but in 1920 the restriction of degrees in divinity to Anglican clergymen was removed by a unanimous vote, though the examinerships are still confined to clergymen.
[[4]] "Well, now, that is not my idea of an owl," said a casual visitor to a bird-stuffer's shop, looking at one sitting on a perch in a rather dark corner. "Isn't it?" replied the bird-stuffer dryly, peering up over his spectacles. "Well, it's God's, anyhow." The owl was a live one!
[[5]] The "young Blackfriar" obtained (in History) the first First Class gained in our Hall, rose to be Provincial of his Order in England, and had the happiness of seeing, on August 15, 1921, the foundation stone of a Dominican church and priory laid at Oxford.
[[6]] Music was his hobby: by profession he was a chemist, and the City Analyst of Oxford. I introduced him as such to dear Mgr. Kennard, who promptly asked us both to dinner, and during the meal laboriously discussed the mediæval history of Oxford, which he had carefully "mugged up" beforehand. He had understood me to say that my friend's position was that of City Annalist!
[[7]] The English of these uncouth concatenations, which are at least evidence of the facility with which any number of German words can be strung together into one, appears to be (as far as I can unravel them): 1. "The tearful tragedy of the marriage of a dromedary-driver on the transport of Transvaal troops to the tropics." 2. "The maker of a marble monument for the Moorish mother of a wholesale assassin among the Mussulmans at Mecca." Pro-dee-gious!