1866, Ascent of Mount Etna
The young diarist's vivid descriptive powers are well shown in his narrative of the ascent of Etna, and the impression it made on him:
We dined [at Nicolosi] on omelet, bread, and figs, and the nastiest wine, and at about 7 p.m. started on mules. These beasts had saddles more uncomfortable than words can describe. Their pace was about 2-½ miles per hour, which it was too easy to reduce, but quite impossible to accelerate. Mine had for bridle a cord three feet long, tied to one of several large rings on one side of its head. The journey lasted till 1.30 a.m. or later.... About 1 in the morning, Mr. W. and one guide having long dropped far behind, where their shrieks and yells (now growing hoarse from despair) could be faintly heard in the darkness far down the mountain, we emerged upon the summit between the peaks; and at the same time the full moon, silver, intense, rose from behind the lower summit, and shed a flood of light over the tremendous scene of desolation. As far as the eye could reach, there was nothing visible but cinders and sky. At every step we sank eighteen inches into the black dust as we stumbled on in single file in perfect silence. A couple of miles ahead rose the great crater peak, with patches of snow at its foot and the eternal white cloud emanating and writhing from the summit. After an hour's rest at the Casa Inglese, a miserable hovel at the foot of the Cone, we started, wrapped in plaids, the cold being intense. Mr. W. had now rejoined us. The Cone is a hill about the size of Arthur's Seat, covered with rolling friable cinders, from which rise clouds of white sulphureous dust. The ascent took rather more than an hour. Mr. W. gave out half-way up, declaring he should faint. The pungent sulphur-smoke came sweeping down the hill-side, choking and blinding one. Eyes were smarting, lungs loaded, throat burnt, mouth dry and nostrils choked. On we struggled till the very ground gave forth curling clouds of smoke from every cranny. A few more steps and we were on the summit, at the very edge of the crater, which yawned into perdition within a few inches of one's foot. It is an immense glen, surrounded by a chain of heights, with tremendously precipitous sides, bright yellow in the depths, whence rises continually the cloud of smoke. The whole scene is exactly like Doré's illustrations of the Inferno.... The sun rose over Italy as we sat with our heads wrapped up and handkerchiefs in our mouths; but there was no view at all, the height is too stupendous. The horror of the whole place cannot be depicted. We were delighted to get back to the Casa Inglese, where we remounted our mules and crept away.
1866, Impressions of Eastern travel
From Sicily the travellers visited Smyrna and Chios on their way to Constantinople. Pages of the diary are taken up with descriptions of churches, and functions attended in them, and it is of interest to note that, profoundly interested as Bute was in the Greek churches and the Greek liturgy, his religious sympathies were entirely with the Latin communion. The "spiritual deadness," as he calls it, of the schismatic churches of the East, repelled and dismayed him. "It strikes me as essentially dreadful," he writes of a visit to the Church of the Transfiguration at Syra, "that the Photian Tabernacle everywhere enshrines a deserted Saviour. The daily sacrifice is not offered; the churches are closed and cold, save for a few hours on Sunday and festivals; visits to the B. Sacrament are unknown. Pictures are exposed to receive an exaggerated homage, unknown and undreamt of in the West. But it is absolutely true to say that the Perpetual Presence (to which no reverence at all is offered, by genuflection or otherwise) receives less respect than one ordinarily pays to any place of worship whatever, even a meeting-house or synagogue." Later, recording a visit to the Greek cathedral at Pera, he describes the service there as "the most disagreeable function I ever attended: the church crammed with people in a state of restlessness and irreverence characteristic of Photian schismatics; and the whole service as much spoiled as slurring, drawling, utter irreverence, bad music, and bad taste could spoil it. After breakfast I attended the High Mass at the Church of the Franciscans—a different thing indeed from the Photian Cathedral; and I went back there in the afternoon for Vespers and Benediction."
It has been sometimes said that Bute, during the period immediately preceding his reception into the Catholic Church, was even more drawn towards the "Orthodox" form of belief than he was to the prevailing religion of Western Christendom. The above extracts show that the very reverse was the case. Genuine and earnest worship stirred and impressed him everywhere: thus he writes, after witnessing an elaborate ceremonial (including the dance of the dervishes) in a mosque at Constantinople: "I left the mosque very much wrought up and excited. There are those who are not impressed by this. There are those also who laugh at a service in a language they do not know: there are those who see nothing august or awful even in the Holy Mass." Slovenliness, irreverence, tepidity in religion were what pained and repelled him; and finding those characteristics everywhere in the liturgical services of those whom he called the Photians, he was so far from being attracted towards any idea of joining their communion, that he returned to England, and to Oxford, after this Eastern journey, with the whole bent of his religious aspirations set more and more in the direction of the Catholic and Roman Church. His conversion was, in fact, accomplished before the end of this year, although circumstances, as will be seen, compelled the postponement for a considerable time of the public and formal profession of his faith.
[[1]] The Scottish Review, which Lord Bute controlled at this time, and to which he contributed many articles.
[[2]] This was the chapel on the edge of the sea, among the Mountstuart woods, which had been built for the convenience of the people living and working near the house. Lord Bute used it as a domestic chapel until the new chapel at Mountstuart was opened. He was buried there in 1900.
[[3]] Lord Bute's only daughter, Lady Margaret Crichton-Stuart, then in her twelfth year, and under the tutelage of a Greek governess.
[[4]] Adam Hay Gordon married in 1873 the beautiful granddaughter of Sir Robert Dalrymple Horn Elphinstone, and died without issue, as above recorded, in July, 1894.