Lord Bute's mind was steeped in history; and on that account, though he by no means always bowed the knee to authority, his ideas, like his conversation, in matters of architecture were always interesting. Soon after the first occasion on which he did me the honour to consult me, he told me that he made it his practice not to give all his undertakings into the hands of any one architect, that he liked always to be in touch with several of the profession; it was to his advantage, he was good enough to say, as well as his pleasure, to hear the opinions of different men on the things of their trade. If I may judge by the numbers of specialists in very different departments, whom I used to meet on my visits to his lordship, he had a satisfaction in their conversation and their ways of looking at things which was perhaps similar to that which Sir Walter Scott records in his Journal that he had found in the conversation of Robert Stevenson, the engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses.
So far as I know, Lord Bute never had any building done for himself in this country after any varieties of the style of Ancient Greece. That this abstention in his particular case should be credited only to his wise sense of its unfitness for his purposes in a climate such as ours, must be the opinion of any one, who, like myself, ever had the privilege of visiting the remains of Ancient Greece in his company, and of observing the extraordinarily deep impression which they made on him.
R. ROWAND ANDERSON.
P.S.—By way of footnote to the paragraph in which I mention Peter de Luna, I may say that it was on a visit which I made to Saragossa on Lord Bute's behalf that I was fortunate enough to procure a cast of de Luna's now mummified head. The cast I have now confided to the care of St. Andrews University.
APPENDIX VI (p. [225])
OBITUARY NOTICE BY MR. F. W. H. MYERS
(From the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
November, 1900.)
THE MARQUIS OF BUTE, K.T. (VICE-PRESIDENT, S.P.R.).