“When at sunset, chill and dark,
Sunset thins the swarming park,
Bearing home his social gleaning—
Jests and riddles fraught with meaning,
Scandals, anecdotes, reports,—
Seeks The Owl a maze of courts
Which, with aspect towards the west,
Fringe the street of Sainted James,
Where a warm, secluded nest
As his sole domain he claims;
From his wing a feather draws,
Shapes for use a dainty nib,
Pens his parody or squib;
Combs his down and trims his claws,
And repairs where windows bright
Flood the sleepless Square with light.”
[60] Greville, vii. 223, quotes from a letter written after Inkerman to the Prince Consort by Colonel Steele, saying “that he had no idea how great a mind Raglan really had, but that he now saw it, for in the midst of distresses and difficulties of every kind in which the army was involved, he was perfectly serene and undisturbed.”
[63] “Go quietly” might have been his motto: even on horseback he seemed never to be in a hurry. Airey used to come in from their rides round the outposts shuddering with cold, and complaining that the Chief would never move his horse out of a walk. “I daresay,” said Carlyle, “Lord Raglan will rise quite quietly at the last trump, and remain entirely composed during the whole day, and show the most perfect civility to both parties.”
[64] The first death! out of how many he nowhere reckons: he shrinks from estimates of carnage, and we thank him for it. But an accomplished naturalist tells me that the vulture, a bird unknown in the Crimea before hostilities began, swarmed there after the Alma fight, and remained till the war was over, disappearing meanwhile from the whole North African littoral.
[66] “D—n your eyes!” he said once, in a moment of irritation, to his attaché, Mr. Hay. “D—n your Excellency’s eyes!” was the answer, delivered with deep respect but with sufficient emphasis. Dismissed on the spot, the candid attaché went in great anger to pack up, but was followed after a time by Lady Canning, habitual peacemaker in the household, who besought him if not to apologize at least to bid his Chief good-bye. After much persuasion he consented. “Hardly had he entered the room when Sir Stratford had him by the hand. ‘My dear Hay, this will never do; what a devil of a temper you have!’ The two were firmer friends than ever after this” (Lane Poole’s Life of Lord Stratford, chapter xiii.).
[68] The story of an old quarrel between Sir Stratford Canning and the then Grand Duke Nicholas at St. Petersburg in 1825 is disproved by Canning’s own statement. The two met once only in their lives, at a purely formal reception at Paris in 1814.
[82] La Femme was a “Miss” or “Mrs.” Howard. She followed Louis Napoleon to France in 1848, and lived openly with him as his mistress. In the once famous “Letters of an Englishman” we are told how shortly after the December massacre the élite of English visitors in Paris were not ashamed to dine at her house in the President’s company: and in 1860, Mrs. Simpson, in France with her father, Nassau Senior, found her, decorated with the title of Madame de Beauregard, inhabiting La Celle, near Versailles, once the abode of Madame de Pompadour, “with the national flag flying over it, to the great scandal of the neighbourhood.”
[87] Bachaumont’s criticism of Latour. Lady Dilke’s “French Painters,” p. 165.
[96] Here is one of the stanzas:
“L’Autriche—dit-on—et la Russie
Se brouillent pour la Turquie.
Dès aujourd’hui il n’en est plus question.
En invitant une femme charmante,
Le Turc—et je l’en complimente—
Est devenu pour nous un trait d’union.”