CASTLE YARD. BAND PLAYING.
“And now, Mr. Blathwayt,” said Mrs. Henniker, as we passed the two sentries on guard at the entrance to the great hall, and proceeded up a staircase lined with rifles and through long sunlit corridors, “you must come with me to my own special sanctum, and rest yourself, after the object lessons in history which we have been giving you this morning.” Here, in a lofty, white-panelled room, with long windows looking down upon the private gardens of the Castle in which His Excellency and Captain Streatfield, one of the A.D.C.’s, were walking up and down, Mrs. Henniker and I sat talking of the past almost more than we did of the actual present. For, though my hostess is quite a young woman, yet as a daughter of the celebrated Richard Monckton Milnes, the first Lord Houghton, she cannot fail to have the most delightful reminiscences of the many celebrities with whom her father was so fond of filling his house.
GRAND STAIRCASE, DUBLIN CASTLE.
“But,” said she, “proud as I am of my father, I am quite as proud of my grandfather, Richard Pemberton Milnes, for he was only twenty-two years of age when he refused the choice of a seat in the Cabinet, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary at War. My grandmother, Mrs. Pemberton Milnes, in her diary for 1809, says that one morning, while we were at breakfast, a king’s messenger drove up in a post-chaise and four with a despatch from Mr. Perceval, offering my husband the choice of a seat in the Cabinet. Mr. Milnes immediately said, ’Oh, no, I will not accept either; with my temperament I should be dead in a year.’ And nothing could induce him to do so either,” continued Mrs. Henniker, “nor could he be induced to accept the Peerage which was offered him by Lord Palmerston in 1856.”
“But your father was not so rigid in his views as your grandfather, was he, Mrs. Henniker?” said I.
“No,” she replied, “certainly he was not, although I don’t think that he quitted the House of Commons, which he always loved, without a pang of real regret. Amongst the many kind congratulations he received—for no man ever had more friends—was a very pretty one from his old friend, Mrs. Proctor, in which she said:
“’He enters from the common air
Into that temple dim;
He learns among those ermined Peers
The diplomatic hymn.
His Peers? Alas! when will they learn
To grow up Peers to him?’”
“You must have met many interesting people at your father’s house?” I observed, during the course of our conversation.
