An excursion or two from Oxford I remember this autumn: one to Downside, where it was always a happiness to go and spend a church-festival with my Benedictine brethren; another to Eton, where I gazed with dismay on the new school-hall with its unsightly dome, and wondered if this was really the best the Committee of Taste could achieve by way of South African War Memorial.[[9]] I met afterwards quite a contingent of Scotsmen (Arthur Hay, the Duke of Roxburghe's brother, etc.) at luncheon with the Irish Guards at Victoria Barracks, where I used to breakfast of a Sunday morning—a dissipation forbidden, I believe, to modern Etonians—with an uncle in the Scots Fusilier Guards, in my own school days. I went to London that evening to dine with, and read afterwards a paper on "Jerusalem of To-day" to, the Guild of SS. Gregory and Luke, my host being Sir John Knill, Sheriff of London, who was two years later to occupy the civic chair, as his excellent father had done before him. On another evening I attended our Westminster Dining-club, to hear Fr. R. H. Benson read us an essay on "The Value of Fiction"—interesting, as coming from a successful novelist, and of course brilliant; but I agreed with only about half of it.
Ninian Crichton Stuart had engaged me to go and support him at the St. Andrew's Day banquet of the Caledonian Society of Cardiff, the suffrages of which city he was at that time wooing as Conservative candidate, much assisted by his clever and charming wife. I stayed with them at their pretty home near Llandaff, and we motored in to the patriotic banquet, which began at 6.30 and lasted nearly five hours! I proposed the principal toast, and had of course no difficulty in showing (as one of the newspaper reports remarked) that all the chief posts in the Empire—political, ecclesiastical, legal and administrative, were, with the most insignificant exceptions, held by Scotsmen. Bagpipes, of course, skirled and whisky flowed freely; and the national enthusiasm reached its height when the haggis was borne round the hall in procession, carried by the white-clad chef and preceded by the pipe-major, playing his best and loudest in honour of the "chief of pudding race." I left Llandaff next morning, Ringan, Lady Ninian's pretty baby, crowing good-bye to me from his mother's arms,[[10]] and spent an hour or two in Cardiff with Bishop Hedley, who expressed his hope that I would help Kennard at Oxford as long as I could, and would ultimately succeed him as chaplain. We visited together the new and splendid town-hall, the finest municipal building I had ever seen. The Oxford term ended in the following week, and I made my way north to Fort Augustus, where I found discussion in progress as whether we should or should not sell our house and estate of Ardachie, for which we had several good offers. I said yes; for the place, though not without its attractions, had been altogether more of a burden than a profit to us for a good many years.[[11]] Whilst at Fort Augustus, I addressed, by desire of the community, letters to the Abbot-Primate in Rome, as well as to our own bishop, urging, for many weighty reasons, the reincorporation of our abbey into the English Benedictine Congregation, from which it had been separated for just twenty-six years.
[[1]] Parodied in Punch (I think by that inveterate punster the then editor, F. C. Burnand), under the titles of Goeth Down as an Oyster and Red in the Nose is She. It is the Scottish hero of one of these romances, I forget which (I mean, of course, the original, not the parody), who shows his emotion at a critical moment by "cramming half a yard of yellow beard into his mouth!"
[[2]] The bag consisted of an assortment of miscellaneous fowl. Bute was at this period of his career something of the typical Briton whose idea of happiness, according to some French observer, is more or less summed up in the formula: "My friends, it is a fine day: let us go out and kill something!"
[[3]] In the preface to Rod, Root, and Flower. The passage was quite new to me.
[[4]] From the Boke of St. Albans (1486).
[[5]] An antique privilege of the kind would appeal irresistibly to Bute—tenaci propositi viro; he stuck to his guns, not only claiming the right of presentation, but actually exercising it at the next vacancy. I am not qualified to pronounce on the vexed question; but my experience is that in such matters the big man usually gets his way, and the smaller has to go to the wall. What was settled after Bute's death I know not. Anyhow—the last Lord of Falkland lies among the lilies in a war cemetery in France; and the memorial chapel in his park, near by the House of Falkland, was designed by the present laird of Myres.
[[6]] George Angus, for nearly a quarter of a century resident priest at St. Andrews, died there on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), 1909.
[[7]] Less pleasing was it to notice the outside walls and very doors of the old church plastered all over with flaring affiches of music-hall performances, pictures of ballet-dancers, etc. "Cette canaille de République!" murmured in my ear, as we drove off, my friend and host, whose sympathies were entirely with the ancien régime.
[[8]] More of a man, in short. "Dear old Charlie," he said to me, "was good at games when he was at Harrow, and a capital runner. All the same, he was always a bit of an old woman, and always will be!"