the colour is subdued, no new gilding or smartness. She herself sat in the window embroidering, with the bright sunlight just glinting on her rippled hair and sweet face, at once a picture and a poem.”
“June 26.—A great party at Lambeth Palace, the lawn and its many groups of people very charming. Going in to tea with Miss Elliot down a narrow passage, I came suddenly upon Arthur Stanley. In that moment I am sure we both tried hard to recollect what had so entirely separated us for five years, but we could not, and shook hands. The Spanish Lady Stanley seeing this, threw up her hands—‘Gratias a Deo! O gratias a Deo! una reconciliatiōn!’
“In the evening there was an immense party at Lady Salisbury’s to meet the Sultan of Zanzibar.[177] He had a cold, so sent to say he could not have the windows opened; the consequence of which was, that with thousands of wax-lights and crowds of people, the heat was awful, positively his native climate. The Sultan has a good, sensible, clever, amused face, but cannot speak a word of any language except Arabic, of which Lady Salisbury said that she had learnt some sentences by the end of the evening, from hearing them repeated so often through the interpreter, and at last ventured to air her new acquirements herself. When the Sultan went away, the suite followed two and two—a picturesque procession. Lord Salisbury walked first, leading the Sultan, or rather holding his right hand in his own left, which it seems is the right thing to do. The Sultan was immensely struck by Lady Caithness, and no wonder, for her crown of three gigantic rows of diamonds, and then huge diamonds and emeralds, had the effect of a sunlit wave in the Mediterranean.”
“June 27, Sunday.—To Holland House. Lady Holland sat at the end window, looking on the garden, with a group round her. I went out with Lord Halifax, then with Everard Primrose, who appeared as usual from the library, and a third time with Lord Stanhope, who took me afterwards in his carriage to Airlie Lodge. There the garden was in great beauty, and we met Lady Airlie sauntering through its green walks with the Duke of Teck. We went to sit in a tent, where we found Mr. Doyle, Mr. Cheney, and a young lady who greeted me with, ‘Now, Mr. Hare, may I ask if you never can remember me, or if you always intend to cut me on purpose?’ It was Miss Rhoda Broughton.
“Lady Airlie talked of the death of Madame Rossetti. Her husband[178] felt so completely that all his living interests were buried with his wife, that he laid his unpublished poems under her dead head, and they were buried with her. But, after a year had passed, his feeling about his wife was calmed, while the longing for his poems grew daily, and people urged him that he was forcing a loss upon the world. And the coffin of the poor lady was taken up and opened to get at the poems, and behold her beautiful golden hair had grown and grown till the whole coffin was filled with it—filled with it and rippling over.[179] Lady Airlie had the account from an eye-witness. For one moment Madame Rossetti was visible in all her radiant loveliness, as if she were asleep, then she sank into dust. She was buried with her Testament under her pillow on one side and her husband’s poems on the other.
“The Duke of Teck looked very handsome and was most pleasant and amiable. He said that an old lady in Germany, an ancestress of his, had the most glorious pearl necklace in the world, and when she died, she desired that the pearl necklace might be buried with her. And the family were very sorry to part with their aged relative, but they were still more sorry to part with the family jewels; and in time their grief for the old lady was assuaged, but their grief for the pearl necklace was never assuaged at all, and at last there came a moment when they dug up the coffin, and took the pearl necklace from the aged neck. But behold the pearls were quite spoilt and had lost all their lustre and beauty. Then pearl-doctors were summoned, men who were learned in such things, and they said that the only thing which would restore the beauty of the pearls would be if three beautiful young ladies would wear them constantly, and let the pearls drink in all their youth and beauty. So the eldest daughter of the house took them and wore them constantly, and all the beauty and brilliancy of her loveliness flowed into the pearls, which grew brighter and better every day. And as her beauty faded, another daughter of the house took them, and so three beautiful young ladies took them and wore them in three generations, till, when sixty years were passed, the pearls were so beautiful and glorious, so filled with youth and radiancy, that there is no such pearl necklace in the whole world.”
“June 28.—Luncheon with dear old Lady Grey. Then to Lady Wharncliffe, who looked very lovely seated beneath a great blue-green vase filled with lilies.
“The way young men now weary their friends to ask for invitations for them is almost as contemptible as the conduct of the ladies who ask others to invite their guests for them that they may ‘get into society.’ ‘Que ne fait-on pour trouver un faux bonheur!’ says Fénélon; ‘quels rebuts, quelles traverses n’endure t’on point pour un fantôme de gloire mondaine! quelles peines pour de misérables plaisirs dont il ne reste que des remords.’ ”
“June 29.—With the Archbishop of Dublin, Miss Trench, and Lady Charles Clinton to Strawberry Hill, the ‘little plaything house’ of Horace Walpole. It had been so wet that one had almost to wade from the station to the house, and the beautiful breakfast was sopping in a tent on the mossy lawn, so little being left in the house that the Princess of Wales had to drink her tea out of a tumbler in a corner. Still the interior of the house was full of interest—the historic pictures, especially those of the three beautiful Waldegrave sisters, and of Maria, Duchess of Gloucester; and then in the gallery are, by Sant and Bucknor, all the especial friends of the house—all the beautiful persons who have stayed there.
“Lady Waldegrave[180] (assisted by art) looked twenty-five years younger than she did twenty-five years ago. The Princess of Wales, in a pink dress under black lace and a little hat to match, copied as a whole from pictures of Anne Boleyn, looked lovely.
“In the evening I went to Lady Salisbury’s reception. At the latter was the Sultan of Zanzibar. Suddenly, in the midst of the party, he said to Lady Salisbury, ‘Now, please, it is my time to say my prayers: I should like to go into your room, and to be alone for ten minutes.’ And he did, and he does it four times a day, and never allows anything whatever to interfere with it. The Archbishop of Dublin, when presented, said, ‘I am glad to have the honour of being presented to a man who has made a promise and kept it.’ The Sultan answered, ‘It can only be your goodness which makes you say that.’ ”
To Miss Leycester.
“How glad I am that we do not agree about Sunday. I think your view of ‘the Sabbath’ so entirely derogatory to all the dignity and beauty of Christianity, and I cannot understand any one not becoming an infidel, if they think God so mean as to suppose that He would consider ‘His day’ (though Sunday is only the Church’s day, all days are God’s days) dishonoured by walking with one’s intimate friends in a garden, or having tea in another garden with several persons, all infinitely better and wiser than oneself. ‘I am amazed,’ says Professor Amiel, ‘at the vast amount of Judaism, of formalism, that still exists, eighteen centuries after the Redeemer’s declaration that the letter killeth. … Christian liberty has yet to be won.’ ”
Journal.
“June 30.—A very pleasant party in the Duke of Argyll’s garden, in spite of a wet afternoon; all the little golden-haired daughters of the house very kind in entertaining the guests. I returned with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, to her beautiful Kent House. The rooms, hung with yellow, with black doors and picture-frames, are very effective. There are some semi-ruined cartoons of Paul Veronese upon the staircase.
“In the evening I went to Lady Margaret Beaumont’s to meet the Queen of the Netherlands, ‘La Reine Rouge,’ as she is often called from her revolutionary tendencies. She sat at the end of the room, a pleasant natural woman, with fuzzy hair done very wide in curls, and a quaint little diamond crown as an ornament at the back. She was most agreeable in conversation, and, as Prosper Merimée says in one of his letters to Panizzi, ‘would have been quite perfection,