A visit to Arundel a little later was signalized by great festivities in honour of the birth of the Duke's little daughter. The four thousand guests who, as the fancy took them, danced in the tilting-yard (converted into a great open-air ballroom), listened to martial music from military bands, roamed through the beautiful state-rooms, or gazed admiringly at the myriad fairy lamps which glowed many-coloured on castle walls, battlements, and towers, were literally of every class. Peers and peeresses, officers and deans and doctors, and Sussex county magnates, mingled freely with the farmers, artisans, and workmen who were their fellow-guests. The fête wound up with a grand display of fireworks in the park, and the host and hostess (the latter looking very nice in her white summer frock, with flowing crimson sash and a string of great pearls round her neck), made every one happy with their affability and kindness.
On my way north I stayed a few days with the Gainsboroughs at Exton, near Oakham—my first visit to the little shire of Rutland. A most attractive place, I thought: a charming modern Jacobean house (the ruins of the Elizabethan hall, burnt down a century before, stood close by): beautiful gardens and a nobly-timbered park, in which stands the fine old parish church with its singularly graceful spire. Tennis, al fresco teas, and much music, occupied a few days very agreeably; and I then went on to St. Andrews for my usual autumn sojourn, which I always enjoyed. But my most memorable Scottish visit this autumn was to Abbotsford, which, curiously enough, I had never yet seen, though I had known its owners for thirty years. My grandfather and Sir Walter Scott had been friends for many years: they were planning and building at the same time their respective homes in the western and eastern Lowlands, and often exchanged visits and letters. Here is a little note (undated) in which Sir Walter acknowledged, with an apt Shakespearian reference, a gift of game from Blairquhan:—
My Dear Sir David,—
I thank you much for your kind present. The pheasants arrived in excellent condition, and showing, like Shakespeare's Yeomen, "the mettle of their pasture."[[13]]
When are you and Lady Blair going to take another run down Tweed?
Your obliged humble servant,
WALTER SCOTT.
My father had stayed at Abbotsford as a little boy, before he entered the Navy, and two or three years before Sir Walter's death in 1832. He had not the customary reminiscence of having sat on the great man's knee;[[14]] but he remembered a beautiful collie which lay outside the study door, and refused to let any one enter in his master's absence. We were all brought up on Scott—his Tales of a Grandfather, his novels and poems. My father seemed to know the latter all by heart: he would reel them off (with fine elocution, too) by the hour, and we children loved the stirring music of the Border songs, the Lady of the Lake and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which only in our later and more sophisticated days suggested the answer to a flippant conundrum.[[15]]
To me, of course, Abbotsford had, and has, a special and peculiar charm, as having been for more than sixty years one of the "Catholic Homes of Scotland."[[16]] The "incongruous pile" sneered at by Ruskin, the bizarre architecture which, I suppose, made Dean Stanley describe it as a place to be visited once and never again, are open to criticism and easily criticized. I prefer the judgment of Andrew Lang, that "it is hallowed ground, and one may not judge it by common standards." To Catholics it is doubly hallowed—as a Catholic centre in the sweet Border-land which Scott knew and loved so well, and as the "darling seat" of one who by the magic of his writings made the Catholic past of Scotland live again, and the last words on whose dying lips were lines from two of the noblest and most sacred hymns in the Catholic liturgy.[[17]]
The Dowager Lady Bute was the occupant of Abbotsford during my visit there, and had hoped to make it her home for some time; but her stay was cut short by a serious motor accident, in which she and her daughter sustained rather severe injuries. I was at the time at Dumfries House, where Bute and his bride were happily settled for the autumn; and there was of course great concern at the Abbotsford disaster, which fortunately turned out less grave than was at first feared. I was interested in the recent additions to Dumfries House, including a fine Byzantine chapel, a saloon lit from the roof for the Stair tapestries,[[18]] and a new library-billiard-room, all so cleverly tucked in by the architect behind the existing wings, that the beautiful Adam front remains as it was. Lady Bute, smartly frocked, and twinkling with diamonds, sapphires, and ropes of pearls, was quite "Lothair's bride." On Sunday we had the regulation walk to the lovely old garden, stables, farm, and poultry-yard. A great
"wale" of cocks and hens,[[19]] among which our hostess dropped one of her priceless earrings, and we had a long hunt for it. Reading my Glasgow paper in the train next day, on my way south, I came on a paragraph announcing the "reception into the Roman Church" of the Professor of Greek (J. S. Phillimore) at Glasgow University—a Christ Church man, and a scholar of the highest distinction. What (I thought) will the "unco guid" of Glasgow say now?[[20]]