But putting the question of Catholic atmosphere aside, and reverting once more to castles, I may begin with a mention of Chillingham, sheltered by the shadowy woods and surrounded by the moors of Northumberland.
As compared with Alnwick, Chillingham is a small structure. Apart from some offices added during the nineteenth century, it occupies an area measuring a hundred and twenty feet by a hundred. The outer walls are of enormous thickness, with a tower at each corner; and against these outer walls the rooms which constitute the dwelling, much less massive in their masonry, are built round a small court. They have hardly been altered since the days of Inigo Jones. When I stayed there with Sir Andrew Noble, who for many years was Lord Tankerville's tenant, the whole of the furniture seemed to have grown old with the house. The most modern contents of the bookshelves were the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose faded backs would grow young again in the flickering warmth of fires. Beneath the external windows were the box borders of a garden, and visible on distant slopes were the movements of wild cattle.
Another castle with which I was very familiar was Elvaston, near Derby, where year after year I stayed with the late Lord and Lady Harrington. Originally a red-brick manor house, it was castellated in the days of Wyatt; and though architects of to-day would smile at its artificial Gothic, it may now for this very reason be regarded as a historical monument. It is a monument of tastes and sentiments which have long since passed away. It represents not only a vanished taste in architecture, but sentiments also which are now even more remote. The Earl of Harrington, under whom the Gothic transfiguration was accomplished, seems to have regarded himself as a species of knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is supported—a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"—were strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent event, was associated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling passion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he came in contact—even the Derbyshire miners—his friends.
The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly, ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there—and this was my first introduction to Wales—for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address, most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with balls, concerts, or entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard. These were all arranged on a daïs, and sang national melodies; and when the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the soul is in its strings."
Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting personage—Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since.
Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcestershire, and to a fourth—this was in Yorkshire—for the celebration of the New Year.
The Cornish houses of which I speak were Heligan, near Mevagissy, the home of the John Tremaynes, and Trevarthenick, near Truro, the home of Sir Louis and Lady Molesworth. Pale externally with the stucco of more than a hundred and fifty years ago, neither of these substantial houses has any resemblance to a castle; but the ample rooms and staircases, the dark mahogany doors and the far-planted woods of each represented in some subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than villages, which together were represented in those days by four members of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had been made and used before the first Reform bill.
The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.
Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned, is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries the mind back to the times of John of Padua.
To pass from Hewel to Byram was to pass from one world to another, though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram, standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives, with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represents as a whole the dignified utilitarianism of the Yorkshire country gentleman as he was from a hundred to two hundred years ago. Sir John himself, familiar with political office, accomplished as a classical scholar, and endowed with one of the most charming of voices, was of all country gentlemen the most perfect whom it has ever been my lot to know. He was cradled in the traditions of Whiggism, and to me one of his most delightful attributes was inability to assimilate the spirit of modern Liberalism, whether in the sphere of politics or of social or religious thought.