[[8]] Such were nearly all our Benedictine priories in England—a circumstance which added to their historic interest, if not to their architectural homogeneity.
[[9]] I was once invited to write an article on the "six finest houses in London." The word "finest," of course, wants defining. However, my selection, in order of merit, was:—Holland House (perhaps rather a country house in the metropolitan area than a London house), Dorchester, Stafford, Bridgewater, and Montagu Houses, and Gwydyr House, Whitehall. How many Londoners know the last-named?
[[10]] Built about a century previously, to provide proper access to Worcester College, then and long afterwards dubbed (from its remoteness and inaccessibility) "Botany Bay." The only approach to it had been by a narrow lane, across which linen from the wash used to hang, and once impeded the dignified progress of a Vice-Chancellor. "If there is a college there," cried the potentate in a passion, "there must be a road to it." And the result was Beaumont Street!
[[11]] Oxonians know the tradition that an All Souls candidate is invited to dinner at high table, and given cherry pie; and that careful note is taken as to the manner in which he deals with the stones!
[[12]] A subsequent legend related that the undergraduates of his new college were greatly interested in discovering (from reference to an encyclopædia) that a Latter-day Saint was equivalent to a Mormon. "Where were the freshman's wives?" was the natural inquiry. Answer came there none; but the excitement grew intense when it was rumoured that he had applied to a fellow of Magdalen for six ladies' tickets for the chapel service.
[[13]] "And I call to my assistance her who is ever a Virgin
And who ever looks on all the sufferings among men."
—SOPH. AJAX. v. 835.
[[14]] "My lord! my lord!" a Midlothian farmer (who had just been served with an iced soufflé) whispered to his host at a tenants' dinner at Dalmeny: "I'm afraid there's something wrang wi' the pudden: it's stane cauld." Lord Rosebery instantly called a footman, and spoke to him in an undertone. "No, do you know?" he said, turning to his guest with a smile, "it is quite right. I find that this kind of pudding is meant to be cold!"
[[15]] Less so, however, than the then Earl of Leicester (the second), between whose eldest daughter (already a grandmother) and youngest child there was an interval of some fifty years. Lord Ronald Gower once told Queen Victoria (who liked such titbits of family gossip) the astonishing, if not unique, fact that Lord Leicester married exactly a century after his father. The Queen flatly refused to believe it; and as the Court was at the moment at Aix-les-Bains, Lord Ronald was for the time unable to adduce documentary evidence that he was not "pulling her Majesty's leg." The respective dates were, as a matter of fact, 1775 and 1875.
[[16]] Lord Bute could never do anything quite like other people; and his legacies to Galloway and Argyll had been hampered by conditions to which no Catholic bishop, even if he accepted them for himself, could possibly bind his successor.