I went to Downside in March, for the solemn blessing of the new abbot, my kind and learned friend Dom Cuthbert Butler. The elaborate ceremony took nearly three hours: we were mercifully spared a sermon, but, en revanche, the episcopal and abbatial speeches at the subsequent luncheon were long and rather wearisome. At Fort Augustus, whatever the occasion, we never in those days derogated from the good old monastic usage of silence, and public reading, in the refectory. Summum ibi fiat silentium, said Saint Benedict: "let no mussitatio [delicious Low Latin word for "whispering">[ be heard there, or any voice save that of the reader alone." The custom was one, I think, as congenial to our guests as to their monastic hosts.
I was preoccupied at this time with the rapidly-failing health of my oldest Oxford friend, H. D. Grissell of Brasenose, who spent half his year in Rome, and the other half in what seemed a bit of old Rome transported to Oxford. He was the most pertinacious and indefatigable collector I ever knew: coins, books and bindings, brass-rubbings, autographs, book-plates, holy relics, postage-stamps, even birds' eggs—all was fish that came to his far-flung net; and he laboured incessantly to make all his collections, as far as possible, complete. I found the old man at this time, rather pathetically, trying to complete the collection of eggshells which he had begun as a Harrow boy sixty years before. He insisted on exhibiting every drawer of his cabinet, and was greatly pleased with the motto which, I told him, Sir Walter Trevelyan had inscribed on his egg-cabinet: "Hic Argus esto, non Briareus"; or, in plain English, "Look, but don't touch!"[[11]] Grissell said he would like to affix this classical caution to all his collections of curios; but he did not live to do this, or indeed to do much else of any kind. He left England before Easter for Rome; and there (as perhaps he would have wished) he died very suddenly a few weeks later. By his own desire his body was brought back to England, at great trouble and cost (these post mortem migrations never appealed to me), and was laid near his parents' graves in the pretty country churchyard of Mickleham, in Surrey. There was a large gathering in the pouring rain, Professor Robinson Ellis and I representing his many Oxford friends. As his literary executor, I came into possession of a great number of curious and interesting letters and documents, dealing chiefly with Roman matters and the early days of the Ritual movement at Oxford and elsewhere.
The Corpus Professor of Latin, old Robinson Ellis, and I saw subsequently (perhaps drawn together by the loss of our common friend) a good deal of one another. At "meat tea," a meal he dearly loved, we used to sit long together, and talk classics, the only subject in which he seemed in the least interested. I wish I had noted down all the odd bits of erudition with which he used to entertain me. Cicero's last words, he said (I cannot imagine on what authority) were "Causa causarum, miserere mei!"[[12]] A curious story (perhaps mediæval) of Ovid was of how two monks visited his tomb, and in gratitude for the noble line—the best, in his own opinion, that he had ever written—"Virtus est licitis abstinuisse bonis," began reciting Paters and Aves for his soul. The poet's spirit, unhappily, was unappreciative of their charity; and a voice was heard from the tomb declaiming the irreverent pentameter: "Nolo Paternoster: carpe, viator, iter!" The professor told me that in his opinion the best elegiac couplet ever written in English was:
"Three Patagonian apes with their arms extended akimbo:
Three on a rock were they—seedy, but happy withal."
He said that one of Dr. Johnson's acutest literary criticisms was his remark that Tacitus seemed rather to have made notes for a historical work than to have written a history. The word "jour," he pointed out to me, was derived from "dies" (though every single letter was different) through the Italian—"dies, diurnus, giorno, jour." He asked if I could tell him the authorship of the striking couplet—
"Mors mortis! morti mortem nisi morte dedisses,
Æternae vitæ janua clausa foret."
This I was unable to do: on the other hand, I evoked a chuckle (whimsical etymologies always pleased him) by telling him how a fifteenth-century writer[[13]] had rendered the "Royal Collegiate Church of Windsor" into Latin as "Collegium Domini Regis de Ventomorbido!"
At the end of Lent Term I spent a few days at Eastbourne, which struck me (as the Honourable Mrs. Skewton struck Mr. Dombey) as being "perfectly genteel"—no shops on the front, no minstrels or pierrots or cockshys or vulgarity. The hill behind seemed to swarm with schools: my host took me to one where he had two sons—a fine situation, capital playgrounds, and the head a pleasant capable-seeming little man, who trotted briskly about on his little Chippendale legs, clad in knickerbockers, and was as keen on his Aberdeen terriers as on his young pupils. I remember at Eastbourne a quite appallingly ugly Town Hall, and a surprisingly beautiful fourteenth-century church, I suppose the only bit of old Eastbourne left. I went on to Arundel for my usual pleasant Easter-tide visit; and after hearing much florid church-music there, I enjoyed, on Low Sunday, the well-rendered plain-chant at Westminster Cathedral; but I did not enjoy a terrible motett composed by an eminent Jew—the words unintelligible and the music frankly pagan. My nephew Kelburn and his wife ran me down one day to Chatham in their new motor—cream-colour lined with crimson, very smart indeed. He had been lately posted as first lieutenant to H.M.S. Cochrane, and took us all over the great grey monster, vastly interesting. We buzzed home through Cobham and Rochester, stopping to look over the grand old Norman cathedral. "How strange," observed the simple sailor, looking at the sculptured images round the west doorway, "to see all these old Roman Catholic saints in a Protestant cathedral!" How I wished some of my young Oxford friends had been by to hear him! Our whole drive to town was of course redolent of Dickens and "Pickwick"—to me, but not to my modern nephew and niece.
For the last week of the vacation a friend was bent on taking me to Belgium; but great guns were blowing when we reached the coast, so we alighted at Dover and stayed there! finding it quite an interesting place of sojourn. I was astonished at the antiquity, extent, and interest of the Castle, especially of its church, once a Roman barrack, and its tower, the ancient Pharos or lighthouse. Gilbert Scott and the Royal Engineers between them had done their best (or their worst) in the way of "restoration," disjoining the Pharos from the main building, and adding an Early English (!) front, windows, and door; but it still was, and is, by far the oldest edifice in England used for religious worship, and of the greatest antiquarian interest.
The event of the summer at Oxford was the installation of our new Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who was by no means content, like the Duke of Wellington, Lord Salisbury, and others of his not indistinguished predecessors, to be quietly inducted into office by the university officials at his own country residence. There was a great function at the Sheldonian, and a Latin harangue from my lord which was both elegant and well delivered, though it was thought by some that his emotional reference to his late wife was a little out of place.