LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNJA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 -
 
 RALPH MILBANKE. LORD WENTWORTH 
 . 25 30.
 
 RALPH EARL OF 
 LOVELACE 
 
 A MEMOIR 
 
 BY 
 
 MARY COUNTESS OF LOVELACE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHRISTOPHERS 
 
 22 BERNERS STREET, W. 1
 
 firtt puhlit/wd in 1920.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 MANY years ago a small company of chil- 
 dren were wont to gather in an old house 
 near London, where the famous Jenny 
 Lind, then a friendly neighbour, would come and 
 sing to them. She chose for them old ballads and 
 folk songs, often those of our own northern border- 
 country, and, great artist that she was, she subdued 
 her glorious voice and made it her only care that no 
 word of the stories that she had to tell should be lost 
 upon her little hearers. So, then, for ever after their 
 minds were stored with dim pictures of peasant lives 
 in far-off lands and ancient legends of war and love 
 and death. I was one of those children, and one of 
 those songs has often come back of late years to my 
 mind. If I shut my eyes I seem still, after a whole 
 life-time, to hear the low tender notes, charged with 
 all the sorrow of the world, and the syllables of the 
 wild refrain falling slowly one by one in the hushed 
 room : 
 
 There were three ravens sat on a tree, 
 Down a down, hey down, hey down ; 
 They were as black as they might be ; 
 With a down .
 
 PREFACE 
 
 And one of them said to his mate, 
 
 " Where shall we our breakfast take ? " 
 
 With a down, deny deny, deny down down. 
 
 Ah, well-a-day ; in yonder field. 
 
 Down a down, hey down, hey down : 
 
 A knight lies slain beneath his shield ; 
 
 With a down . . . 
 
 Against his feet his hounds you see, 
 
 They guard their lord right faithfully. 
 
 With a down, deny deny, deny down down. 
 
 His hawks about him ever fly, 
 Down a down, hey down, hey down ; 
 There's not a bird that ventures nigh ! 
 With a down . . . 
 
 Not many of us, happily, see the ravens of calumny 
 hovering over oar beloved dead, but who so callous 
 as to deny the duty of driving them away ? On 
 him, of whom this is the memoir, this duty fell with 
 a crushing weight, insomuch as he could not do 
 justice to her who had been to him, as he said, 
 " father and mother in one " without acknow- 
 ledging the guilt of another equally near in blood, 
 though not in love and gratitude. When he had 
 carried out this duty by writing his book " Astarte " 
 a labour of love in some ways, but in others an 
 intensely distasteful task blame and misrepresenta- 
 tion fell on him in his turn. It was after his death 
 that the abuse reached its climax ; and though it was 
 of course far less in amount and in bitterness than 
 that which had been poured out upon Lady Byron,
 
 PREFACE v 
 
 it was felt to be very odious by his family and 
 friends. 
 
 There was also a curious want of general compre- 
 hension of his position. Few seemed to remember 
 that certain facts regarding Byron had been once for 
 all disclosed to the world by a stranger ; and that in 
 the inevitable discussions of the story, which never 
 really ceased, he, as the living representative of the 
 actors in it, had to choose between countenancing a 
 system of constant lying, and an acknowledgment, 
 once for all, of the truth. The fact that his book 
 was published in a very restricted way, and was 
 therefore accessible to few readers, while it was widely 
 known by hearsay, no doubt led to this want of 
 comprehension. 
 
 But the few persons who really understood the 
 matter, especially those who had loved and appre- 
 ciated Lovelace himself, have always urged upon me 
 the duty of bringing out some clear explanation of 
 his motives and of the obstacles and uncertainties 
 with which he had to contend. The story covered 
 many years, and no one knew it accurately except 
 myself. I had, therefore, all unpractised in writing 
 as I am, to undertake the task. And as the tale 
 unfolded itself, how could I help trying to depict the 
 man himself, and the true bent of his mind, apart 
 from the constant necessity for occupying himself 
 with that miserable old story of other people's sins, 
 which was the burden of his life ? With all my heart
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 I wish that I had known better how to carry out my 
 task, but at least I can plead that I have striven to 
 do it " right faithfully." 
 
 1920. M. C. L. 
 
 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 A new edition of " Astarte ' ' including 
 many hitherto unpublished letters from 
 Lord and Lady Byron, Mrs. Leigh, and 
 Mrs. Villiers, is in preparation at the 
 time of going to press.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 I. EARLY DAYS , . 1 
 
 H. MRS. BEECHER STOWE's STORt . . . 27 
 
 ID. RESTLESSNESS 46 
 
 IV. ALPINE LETTERS . . / . .73 
 
 v. ALPINE LETTERS (contimied) . , . 91 
 
 VL HOME LIFE . . . . . . . 112 
 
 VH THE BYRON PAPERS . . . . . .128 
 
 VIII. " ASTAIITE " . . . . . . .144 
 
 APPENDIX ... 165
 
 /
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING 
 PAOE 
 
 RALPH MILBANKE, LORD WENTWORTH . Frontispiece 
 
 LADY BYRON IN HER OLD AGE .... 30 
 
 LADY ANNE BLUNT . . . . -.- 52 
 
 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE . 124
 
 EALPH EAEL OF LOVELACE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY DAYS 
 
 IN the late sixties of the last century there 
 appeared in London society a slender, dark-eyed 
 youth, whose name Lord Wentworfh at once 
 arrested the interest of the older generation. Diffi- 
 dent and awkward in manner, with gentle voice and 
 formal, hesitating speech, he formed a singular con- 
 trast with other young men of his age and class. The 
 mark of the home-bred boy was on him. He had no 
 school friendships, and he could not talk slang. To 
 those who took pains to draw him out it was plain 
 that he lived in the world of books rather than of 
 men. His mind was feeling about bewildered among 
 the commonplace realities of life, but originality and 
 independence of thought were already manifest in 
 him. It was not, however, among those of his own 
 age that he found the sympathy which understands. 
 There are no judgments so harsh and so narrow as 
 those of a community of young people all imbued 
 with the same traditions and habits, physical and 
 mental. To the young men stamped with the hall- 
 mark of Eton and Oxford or of some fashionable 
 L. i
 
 2 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 regiment, and to the young women for whom these 
 were the ideal of manhood, he seemed like a being 
 from another planet. He knew nothing of sport nor 
 games, he could not dance nor even dress in the one 
 and only acceptable way, and if the question of 
 admitting him to the comradeship of their joyous 
 band had ever been seriously considered by them 
 (which it was not), he would have been suspect 
 because he had no single early intimacy of his own 
 age to boast of. 
 
 Many legends were current about him. His mother 
 that Ada Byron who never knew her illustrious 
 father was dead, and his father, William King, first 
 Earl of Lovelace, had married again. It was known 
 that he had been entirely brought up by his grand- 
 mother, Lady Byron, widow of the poet, and that a 
 quarrel between her and Lord Lovelace had made the 
 boy a stranger in his father's house. That father, if 
 he was more feared than loved by family and friends, 
 was at least widely known and respected as a man of 
 great intellectual gifts and vigour of character, and 
 the fact that his son had been deprived of his care 
 was generally regarded as a great misfortune to him. 
 Lady Byron, on the other hand, though not long 
 dead, was but a shadowy figure even to her surviving 
 contemporaries. Prejudice, vague but noxious, still 
 lingered against her as the supposedly unappreciative 
 wife of a man of genius. As an older woman, she 
 had been almost unknown except in connection with
 
 EARLY DAYS 8 
 
 various educational and philanthropic schemes, some 
 of which were thought eccentric and unpractical. It 
 was reputed that her grandson was her principal 
 educational experiment, which was true. But it was 
 not true that she had sent him to a peasant school in 
 Switzerland, there to be educated among the roughest 
 class in the roughest possible manner. The founda- 
 tion of this absurd story was apparently Lady 
 Byron's friendship with the family of the well- 
 known Swiss educationalist, Emmanuel de Fellen- 
 berg, and the fact that little Ralph King (as he then 
 was) once spent a month at Hofwyl, not in the 
 famous school itself, but as a visitor in the house of 
 the founder's son and successor. His upbringing had 
 been in fact the very reverse of de Fellenberg's whole- 
 some and manly system, which, as is well known, 
 was by no means intended or established only for 
 peasants. 1 
 
 Ralph's education was almost entirely bookish, 
 sedentary, solitary. He was isolated from boys and 
 girls of his own age, and his only contact with the 
 
 1 Emmanuel de Fellenberg, patrician of Berne, had converted 
 his family estate at Hofwyl into a vast educational institution, his 
 leading idea being to combine the best possible literary teaching 
 with an outdoor life and training in all that pertains to agriculture. 
 This institution comprised : (1) a farm-school for working boys ; 
 (2) an " academy for the sons of wealthier persons " ; (3) an 
 agricultural institute connected with a small experimental farm ; 
 (4) a manufactory of farming machinery and implements. A full 
 account of this celebrated school, the founder of which was a 
 pioneer in some of the best modern educational ideas, may be 
 found in the Edinburgh Eeview for December, 1818, and October, 
 1819. The articles are said to be by Lord Brougham. 
 
 12
 
 4 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 male sex was in the persons of a dreary succession of 
 tutors, only one or two of whom seem to have been 
 at all fitted for their office. If Lady Byron showed 
 but little judgment in the choice of these unlucky 
 gentlemen, she could at least be very firm with them 
 when they had proved their incapacity, and the result 
 was continual change and the lack of any continuity 
 and discipline, which their pupil greatly regretted in 
 after life. Lady Byron, herself an only child and 
 mother of an only daughter, must have been gaining 
 some knowledge of " the human boy " for the first 
 time in her life. She wrote (1850 52) : " Master 
 Ralph is making some experiments on Tutors' 
 nature. I could prevent them, but I do not wish to 
 mix an element which would falsify the result." 
 This was sensible, and there is abundant evidence 
 that, as time went on, a very deep affection and an 
 amount of mutual comprehension unusual in such a 
 relationship subsisted between the old woman and 
 the growing lad. Nevertheless, in spite of some con- 
 tumacious actions and letters on his part, she pro- 
 bably never realised his increasing restiveness under 
 the shackles that she imposed upon him. She seems 
 to have had unbounded belief in the power to mould 
 character by education, and her fixed idea was to 
 shield her grandson from the kind of influences that 
 she thought had corrupted Byron as a boy. Many 
 years later, when he had begun to analyse his family 
 history, and especially Lady Byron's character and
 
 EARLY DAYS 5 
 
 conduct after her separation, he thus wrote to his 
 
 sister : 
 
 ... I have lost I think by the " education " she 
 substituted for a public school. I should not have 
 lamented any loss if I could have been entirely formed 
 and instructed by her but, alas ! I was frequently 
 with people of a very low order (such as Kensett) and 
 sent to visit people of much too great an age for a 
 boy, as : Lady Caroline Bathurst, Dr. King and for 
 the sake of not losing time from studies (from which I 
 derived no benefit) I was prevented from taking 
 advantage of some of the few opportunities of making 
 really good acquaintances, i.e., with other boys and 
 
 girls. Either I had no similarity to B (Byron) 
 
 or a mistake was made as to what had been most 
 injurious in his education. The strength of certain 
 tendencies of my character (which it was determined 
 to repress) was underrated consequently they did 
 not develop in a beneficial way, while it was not (as 
 expected) possible to destroy them. It may have 
 been partly my fault from the want of power to com- 
 municate what was innermos bin my heart. . . . I was 
 supposed to possess such a vigorous genius as to need 
 a very serious, solitary and depressing education. 
 I had not, as it turned out, sufficient mental and 
 moral vitality to thrive under such restrictions. 
 
 Alas ! for the " want of power to communicate 
 what was innermost in my heart," which is the secret 
 of many an unhappy childhood ! 
 
 When the time came for Ralph to go to Oxford he 
 was not allowed to live as an ordinary undergraduate. 
 It was arranged that he should be received as a
 
 6 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 boarder in the family of Professor Donkin ; and he 
 was sent to University College, apparently because it 
 was unfashionable and the chance of his meeting 
 there with any young men of his own kindred, or 
 bound by ties of friendship with his family, was 
 extremely slender. Lady Byron no doubt intended, 
 when the right time should come, herself to superin- 
 tend the entry of her grandson into some sort of 
 social life, but it was not to be. His course at 
 Oxford was only half run when, in May, 1860, after 
 a few weeks' illness, she died at the age of sixty- 
 seven, and Ralph found himself homeless and very 
 desolate. His father's house might have been open 
 to him, but in the freshness of his grief for his grand- 
 mother he could not turn to her antagonist, 1 and his 
 sister lived with her father. He requested the autho- 
 rities of his College to allow him to occupy rooms 
 there during the Long Vacation, and, when they 
 refused, there was no one to hinder him from taking 
 the bit between his teeth and cutting short his 
 Oxford career altogether. Lady Byron had always 
 hitherto restrained his passion for solitary travel, 
 but now he was free, and, accordingly, for the next 
 two years, except for short intervals, he was absent 
 from England. It was on his return from a year's 
 sojourn in Iceland that he found his elder brother dying 
 of consumption as a result of hardships endured at sea. 
 
 1 Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace had not spoken to each other 
 since the death of Lady Lovelace in 1852.
 
 EARLY DAYS 7 
 
 The identity of this elder brother, Byron Noel 
 King, Viscount Ockham, has been often confused 
 with that of his junior, who has accordingly been 
 credited with some eccentricities that were not his. 
 Young Ockham seems to have been a dreamy, silent 
 child, capable of considerable contumacy at times. 
 He went early into the Navy, and when, after his first 
 voyage, he begged and prayed to be released from it, 
 his father always a stern disciplinarian insisted 
 upon sending him to sea again. The result of this 
 harshness was that he deserted his ship, found his 
 way on to a small trading vessel, and worked his way 
 home from the Black Sea before the mast. The 
 voyage lasted many months, during which he was 
 completely lost sight of by his family. Finally he 
 landed at Hull, very ill and in rags. Fortunately he 
 was able to make himself known to some Yorkshire 
 friends of Lady Byron's, who took him in and shel- 
 tered him, until relatives intervened and insisted 
 upon some provision being made for him by his 
 father, who never forgave him. 
 
 I could not if I would relate all the vicissitudes of 
 this sad young life. The best-known episode is that 
 for some time he worked in a shipbuilder's yard as 
 an ordinary mechanic under the name of John Okey. 
 He had early developed socialistic and revolutionary 
 ideas, and desired to repudiate his rank and all the 
 advantages of his inherited place in the world. I 
 have some childish letters in which he holds up the
 
 leaders of the French Bevolution to the admiration 
 of his small brother, aged eleven. Such ideas were 
 unspeakably distasteful to his autocratic father. To 
 others they seemed to be a not unnatural reaction 
 from the tyrannical discipline of his home, and from 
 that father's obvious pride of caste. Lord Lovelace 
 was a man of great ability and learning, who owed 
 the high place that he held among his contemporaries 
 far more to his character and actions than to any 
 advantages of position. He was a self-taught archi- 
 tect and engineer, and many are the buildings and 
 other constructions which remain as mementoes of his 
 talent, especially the beautiful home which he carved 
 out of the hillside at Ashley Combe, in Somerset. His 
 various public activities as Lord-Lieutenant of Surrey 
 I have no space to describe here. 
 
 It is sad to have to record that the effect of his 
 tyranny, and of his total lack of comprehension and 
 sympathy for ideas other than his own, upon the three 
 children of his first marriage, was to make them all 
 their lives unable to appreciate the better aspects of 
 his character. 
 
 By his brother's death in September, 1862, Balph 
 became his father's heir. He had only a year before, 
 according to direction in Lady Byron's will, assumed 
 her name of Milbanke. 1 He now had to undergo 
 another change, and he decided not to bear the same 
 
 1 He figures as " Kalph Milbanke " in the " Dictionary of 
 National Biography," Second Supplement, 1912.
 
 EARLY DAYS 9 
 
 courtesy title as his brother, but to claim the old 
 barony, the right to which he had inherited from 
 Lady Byron. Accordingly, in May, 1864, after 
 establishing his claim before the Committee of 
 Privileges in the House of Lords, he took his seat 
 there as Lord Wentworth, thirteenth of the name ; 
 and for thirty years was in the somewhat unusual 
 position of sitting in that assembly contemporane- 
 ously with his own father. 
 
 The result was a transformation of the recluse 
 which was startling to his friends, and old Miss Mont- 
 gomery 1 wrote to her nephew at Oxford : 
 
 . . . What do you think of Ralph's entry into the 
 gay world after coating, hatting and gloving himself 
 like other people ? He accepts all manner of invita- 
 tions showered down on the " neu gebacken " lord, 
 and has even danced at Lady Palmerston's ball. 
 Besides these frivolities, he attends the House of 
 Lords daily to learn his business there, sitting on the 
 cross-benches until he shall have determined on the 
 side to be taken. 
 
 When Wentworth (as we must now call him), after 
 Lady Byron's death, mused over the prepossessions 
 which had caused the peculiarities and disadvantages 
 of his own education, it was natural that he should 
 also study and speculate upon the words and acts of 
 his famous grandfather, especially as having been the 
 
 1 Mary Millicent Montgomery, of the family now represented 
 by Hugh de Fellenberg Montgomery, of Blessingbourne, co. 
 Tyrone, Lady Byron's lifelong and most intimate friend.
 
 10 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 cause of these prepossessions. He was twenty-three 
 years old when he first guessed at the dark story which 
 grew in time to be so heavy an oppression on his own 
 life. Forty years later he wrote * : 
 
 The truth bursts from Byron's lines on first read- 
 ing them. It was from them that it flashed as an 
 entire surprise upon two generations of his descen- 
 dants with no previous knowledge of family secrets 
 or hints from anyone. First his daughter, and 
 twenty or thirty years later the present writer, some 
 two years after Lady Byron's death, were startled 
 by Lord Byron's own revelations, which were long 
 afterwards confirmed by acquaintance with private 
 letters. 
 
 He had at this time no means of verifying his 
 intuitions. Three trustees had been appointed to 
 the care of Lady Byron's papers under her will : 
 Miss Mary Carpenter, well known as a philanthro- 
 pist, 2 Miss Frances Carr, sister-in-law of Dr. Lush- 
 ington, and Mr. Henry Allen Bathurst, of Doctors' 
 Commons. Of these the two women were the elders 
 and the stronger personalities, both having been 
 intimate friends and almost contemporaries of Lady 
 Byron herself. One of them, Miss Carr, was much 
 
 i " Astarte," p. 47. 
 
 8 Mary Carpenter (1807 1877), friend of Harriet Martineau 
 and Frances Power Cobbe. Founded in 1846 a ragged school at 
 Bristol, and later (with, financial help from Lady Byron and 
 others) reformatory schools for young delinquents at the same 
 place. Was the author of various works on education and the 
 treatment of paupers and criminals. (See " Dictionary of National 
 Biography," Vol. IX.)
 
 EARLY DAYS 11 
 
 guided by her brother-in-law, Dr. Lushington, now 
 past eighty years of age, who, as Lady Byron's life- 
 long legal adviser, was inclined to assume a kind of 
 pontifical authority^n all that concerned her memory. 
 To such a tribunal Wentworth and his sister were 
 mere children, to be kept as long as possible from the 
 knowledge of their elders' secrets. They must have 
 been well aware of this attitude of mind, and no 
 organised effort seems to have been made by them 
 to gain possession of their family records until the 
 autumn of 1865 five years after Lady Byron's 
 death. That there had, however, already been some 
 discussions on the subject with the trustees is proved 
 by the following fragment of a letter from Wentworth 
 to his sister : 
 
 To Lady Anne Isabella Noel King. 1 
 I saw Mr. Ford yesterday. I introduced the 
 subject of the papers in the keeping of the three 
 trustees, (and) after some conversation we agreed 
 that steps should be taken in writing. I gave him 
 instructions in your name as well as in mine to write 
 to each of the three trustees, saying that you and I 
 agreed that we ought to know those events in our 
 family which are recorded in my grandmother's 
 papers, and that we claim for ourselves as her descen- 
 dants the right to examine and peruse the whole of 
 them. No doubt Dr. Lushington will intrigue 
 against us, and after Miss Carr has received Ford's 
 
 1 Lord Lovelace, as life tenant of the Noel estates in right of 
 his dead wife, had assumed that name for himself and his children, 
 in addition to their patronymic of King.
 
 12 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 letter, which will not be for the next week or two, 
 you may perhaps get from her a powerfully worded 
 appeal entreating you not to ask to know what you of 
 all persons should shrink from knowing. However, 
 she may very possibly be too honourable to attempt 
 to detach you from me, but I feel great distrust of 
 Dr. Lushington's influence, as his mind is long ago 
 made up on this matter, and in a sense quite opposed 
 to my grandmother's wishes. Miss Carpenter may 
 be a useful ally, but I am afraid she is desirous of 
 knowing all herself and is fond of power. She and 
 Mr. Bathurst are perhaps accessible to reason, though 
 they may not at once consent. If they do we shall 
 have to coerce Miss Carr. Ford will send you a copy 
 of the letter as soon as he writes it, but as he would 
 not like to suggest . . . (fragment ends). 
 
 In the beginning of 1866 Wentworth's desire to 
 obtain possession of the papers was further sharpened 
 by advice from his lawyers, that in his position as 
 ultimate heir to his grandmother's estates it was 
 important that he should possess certain information 
 as to some family events in the year 1815. A 
 request to be allowed to examine Lady Byron's 
 correspondence for that year was declined by the 
 trustees, and long and earnest pleadings made on 
 his behalf and his sister's by their legal adviser and 
 friend, Mr. Gerard Ford, 1 proved entirely fruitless, 
 except for betrayal of the fact that the trustees were 
 not altogether at one among themselves. In a 
 memorandum addressed by Miss Carpenter to her 
 
 1 Of the firm of Wharton and Ford, 8, Lincoln's Inn Fields.
 
 EARLY DAYS 13 
 
 co-trustees on August 23rd, 1866, of which she sent 
 a copy to Mr. Ford, she says : 
 
 . . . the clear intentions of Lady Byron in regard 
 to the papers committed to us have not yet been ful- 
 filled, and ought to be so at the earliest possible 
 opportunity, viz. : that we should as a preliminary 
 step give such examination of the papers as will 
 enable us to form a judgment on them. 
 
 . . * there exist among the papers directions in 
 her own hand as to the publication of certain docu- 
 ments which leave us no choice as to our duty in 
 doing so. 
 
 My own general judgment is as follows. The 
 papers may be divided into different classes 
 
 1st. Those which are the special object of the 
 Trust, namely, such as contain records of family 
 history of a private character. . . . 
 
 She then describes three other classes of papers, 
 and resumes : 
 
 The first (class) should be the subject of most 
 careful consideration. I believe that many of these 
 papers ought to be destroyed because they contain 
 records of evil which ought never to be disclosed to 
 anyone. 1 . . . 
 
 The situation was complicated by the fact that 
 Miss Carpenter was at that time on the eve of a 
 journey to India. Under the terms of the will the 
 trustees could only act in concert with each other, 
 
 1 Miss Carpenter's italics.
 
 14 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 and her absence must necessarily cause a deadlock. 
 Accordingly, now for many months silence set in. 
 
 Early in 1868 appeared " the Guiccioli compila- 
 tion," as Wentworth called it, under the title " Lord 
 Byron juge par les Temoins de sa Vie." No author's 
 name was given, but when the English translation 
 came out a few months later it was openly spoken of 
 in the public press as the work of Byron's mistress, 
 the Countess Guiccioli, now Marquise de Boissy. 
 This wretched book carried the antidote to its many 
 falsehoods within itself, in its extreme tediousness. 
 But, however much they might despise such a work, 
 Lady Byron's descendants could not be indifferent 
 to the retelling in it of all the old fictions about 
 Byron's married life, and the painting of an especially 
 vile picture of his unhappy wife. Once more the 
 country girl of twenty-three was held up to odium for 
 having failed in her one short year of marriage to 
 reform a professed libertine, who was also a great 
 genius. She was described as Cold, narrow, incapable 
 of understanding her poet, etc., etc., and those who 
 loved her knew her to have adored his poetry and 
 himself while she had over and over again forgiven 
 his libertinism. Must such things be suffered for 
 ever in silence ? Was there no remedy ? The 
 answer could only be found in Lady Byron's own 
 story of her sorrows and in the other records that she 
 was known to have kept. Only after careful study 
 of these would it be possible to determine whether
 
 EARLY DAYS 15 
 
 justice could be done to her memory without that 
 full disclosure of one tragic fact, which all who knew 
 it, at that time, felt to be impossible. 
 
 Once more Mr. Ford was set to work to argue with 
 and urge the trustees, together and separately. Lady 
 Byron's heirs remembered with anxiety the dictum 
 of Miss Carpenter in 1866 that some of the papers 
 should be destroyed. They now endeavoured to 
 obtain a promise that at least this should not be done 
 without their concurrence. In vain. Long and 
 weary correspondence set in. The two elderly ladies 
 lived respectively at Bristol and in Surrey; their 
 colleague was a busy professional man in London. 
 They could always parry all enquiries and sugges- 
 tions by declaring that for the present it was im- 
 possible for them to confer together. Some signs 
 of weakening, however, they began to show. Went- 
 worth was ' now twenty-nine, and even the octo- 
 genarian Dr. Lushington must have acknowledged 
 his claim to be permitted to investigate circumstances 
 intimately affecting his family honour. Once more 
 Miss Mary Carpenter expressed herself as not only 
 willing but anxious to give time (under her circum- 
 stances a real sacrifice) to that thorough examination 
 of the papers which was the necessary preliminary to 
 any surrender of them. Her friendship with Lady 
 Byron had been real and close, and it was to her that 
 Lady Byron had written from her deathbed to con- 
 fide the memorials of her life. It was no wonder
 
 16 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 that the moral obligations involved in this trust 
 would seem to have been realised by her more keenly 
 and intimately than by her coadjutors. She now in 
 August, 1868, came up from Bristol to London, and 
 by consent of Miss Carr she and Mr. Bathurst spent 
 some days in examination of the papers. The result 
 was that they gave up a small portion of them to the 
 heirs, but the concession was so inadequate that once 
 more Wentworth found himself obliged to remon- 
 strate. I have before me a long and earnest letter 
 that he wrote to Mr. Bathurst, in which he pleaded 
 that the three trustees were all " strangers in blood " 
 to Lord and Lady Byron, and that there was no 
 reason to think that the latter ever intended that her 
 own descendants should be permanently superseded 
 in the exercise of their natural rights and duties. 
 
 He had prevailed at last. On October 15th, 1868, 
 the principal bulk of the papers, including all Lady 
 Byron's MSS. then in the trustees' hands " bearing 
 upon her union with and separation from Lord 
 Byron," were delivered up to him. 
 
 A project had long been more or less vaguely 
 formed in Wentworth's mind, and warmly supported 
 by some of Lady Byron's surviving friends, of 
 endeavouring to depict her personal life and character 
 while leaving aside as far as possible the story of her 
 marriage and separation. To a small circle of inti- 
 mates her character while she lived and her memory 
 after death were almost a religion. They con-
 
 EARLY DAYS 1? 
 
 sidered that by her intellectual distinction and rare 
 nobility of character, as well as by the generous and 
 whole-hearted support that she gave to all kinds of 
 charitable and philanthropic objects, she had earned 
 the right to her own niche in the temple of fame. 
 Some idea of the personal magnetism that she had 
 exercised may be gathered from the following 
 description, found in a fragment of autobiography 
 left by her cousin Robert Noel, 1 her junior by about 
 ten years : 
 
 I looked up to her with admiration and in a 
 spirit of veneration, and I found a peculiar fascina- 
 tion in her beautiful diction and in the calm earnest 
 way she had of expressing her sentiments and 
 opinions. Her views on practical subjects, especially 
 those relating to the characters of others and what 
 might be expected of them in the future, always 
 impressed me as if they had been spoken by an 
 oracle, and it never entered my head to criticise any- 
 thing she said, or to doubt the soundness of her 
 judgments. 
 
 However, in his eager study of the long coveted 
 papers, Wentworth's mind was for the moment far 
 from being occupied in composing the sober narrative 
 of a virtuous life. The story of that forbidden 
 
 1 Robert Ralph Noel, born 1803, died 1883, major, Leicester- 
 shire Militia, a distinguished phrenologist, author of "Physical 
 Basis of Mental Life," " Notes illustrating a Collection of Casts," 
 and other works. 
 
 His collection of casts, made from the heads of many persons of 
 note, and also of prominent criminals, is now in the possession of 
 the Francis Galton Eugenic Society, University College, London. 
 
 L. 2
 
 18 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 period of 1814 16, which was not to be given to the 
 public, was all-absorbing. First he had to make his 
 own judgment, as to the guilt or innocence of Byron 
 and Augusta. Secondly, to reconcile his own mental 
 picture of the tender guardian of his childhood, the 
 loving mother, the steadfast friend, the living 
 embodiment of generosity and liberal ideas, with the 
 hateful portrait traced of her by her own husband, 
 and with his cruel accusation of her as " the moral 
 Clytemnestra of her lord." And the interest of her 
 character was made more poignant to him by the 
 knowledge that the prejudices born of her bitter 
 experience had been all-powerful in shaping his own 
 youthful life. His own letters may now take up the 
 tale. 
 
 To Lady Anne Isabella Noel King. 
 
 86, ST. JAMES'S STREET, S.W. 
 Thursday, November 5th, 1868. 
 
 Yesterday I had a conversation with in 
 
 which he spoke of A. I. B. 1 as a narrow methodical 
 systematiser quite incapable of sympathising with 
 a man like Byron. " She had formed a rigid theory 
 of morality and religion which she most intolerantly 
 forced on herself and everyone who came near her. 
 B. would have been happy with a woman of a lower 
 but more amiable character who would have bent her- 
 self to his will and who had a sensual love for him." 
 X. spoke with indulgent contempt of B.'s Calvinistic 
 belief as caused merely by want of such scientific 
 
 1 Lady Byron, his grandmother.
 
 EARLY DAYS 19 
 
 enlightenment as X is so ready to impart in season 
 and out of season considers Lady B. perfectly wrong 
 not to be convinced that morality is entirely 
 dependent on time and place. 
 
 There was a genuine though unconscious aversion 
 that must long have been in his mind against his 
 kind friend I told you once that Miss Montgomery x 
 had once used to me a few bitter words of condemna- 
 tion of his feelings about her. 
 
 I think you and I both know there were traits of 
 imperfection in her character, but such an atrocious 
 perversion of her real qualities as he wished to pass 
 off for truth will prevent me from ever consenting to 
 renew the subject with him. I told him so. I fear 
 with too much expression of the anger and pain I 
 really felt. He says he is aware of the " cause of 
 separation," meaning I suppose, Augusta. He said 
 the present Sir F. Doyle had told him ; and he agreed 
 with me as to Dr. Lushington's (influence) in pre- 
 venting any reconciliation. I myself do not believe 
 Augusta was the cause of her leaving B. : but that 
 she thought it her duty to shun the moral tempta- 
 tion with which she herself was beset, and she felt 
 horror at the idea B. might become answerable for 
 her moral destruction. This X. is incapable of 
 seeing. . . . 
 
 To the same. 
 
 LONDON, 
 Thursday, November l$th, 1868. 
 
 This evening I have been to a drama made 
 out of Victor Hugo's " Outcasts." I think too much is 
 
 1 See note, p. 9. 
 
 22
 
 20 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 sacrificed to scenery in the pieces now played. Their 
 authors seem to try and diverge as widely as possible 
 from the old unities of time and place, which I think 
 may sometimes be very advantageously kept. After 
 seeing it a few times, that constant change of scene 
 loses its charm, but good acting (especially where 
 accompanied by good looks) grows in fascination 
 every time. The public applaud sentiments they 
 approve of vulgarly delivered, quite as much as good 
 acting, and scenic effects such as the burning of a 
 house with real fire which we had to-night more 
 than either. . . . 
 
 In a later letter : 
 
 What has disgusted me beyond all here (London) 
 was a week's " amusement " at the theatres. . . . 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Thursday, November 26&, 1868. 
 As for the wish to find relations in the right I do 
 not understand how lovers of truth could prefer to 
 make them out either better or worse than they 
 actually were. It could be no pleasure to persuade 
 oneself that friends had merits unexisting in fact or 
 to fabricate evil deeds for " mine enemy." None but 
 a fool could desire to believe in illusions, and none 
 but a knave to make others believe them. 
 
 To the same. 
 86, ST. JAMES'S STEEET, S.W. 
 
 Tuesday, February 16&, 1869. 
 I send you The Times review of the Guiccioli com- 
 pilation it is by Mrs. Norton it is perhaps the
 
 EARLY DAYS 21 
 
 ablest. It is too hostile to B. for my taste, 
 though not so violent as the abuse of A. I. B. in the 
 work itself. 
 
 I mean to be presented at the levee on March 5th by 
 Lord Granville, as the Queen herself is present. I 
 was determined never to go till she should hold one 
 herself, and the new court dress makes it less ridicu- 
 lous. Lord de Tabley inquired about you. Of 
 ladies there was a large but not a brilliant array. 1 I 
 should think 100 peers were sworn to-day, four of 
 us at a time, rapidly repeating the short oath, hold- 
 ing the N.T. between our four hands and at the words 
 " kiss the book " pretending to do so. I don't know 
 what I promised to believe or to do ; the clerk was 
 galloping over the words, as if at family prayers, and 
 all I remember is that the two majesties were brought 
 together. . . . 
 
 To the same. 
 86, ST. JAMES'S STREET, S.W. 
 
 Friday, March 5th, 1869. 
 
 I have been with Major Noel this evening. He 
 has heard on two occasions (the last a few weeks 
 before A. I. B.'s death) the same history as Sir F. 
 Doyle about E. M. L., 2 who was so kindly received 
 by her (Lady Byron) at Esher, and who left her in 
 1843 and died afterwards in the south of France of 
 consumption. He has kindly undertaken to write 
 all he can remember, as well as what he believes to 
 have been her feelings as to B. and the past. He 
 
 1 At the House of Lords. 
 
 * Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born April, 1814. (Refer " Astarte," 
 pp. 131 and 251, 252.)
 
 22 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 said he could not get rid of the impression made by 
 his last conversation with her that she lingered 
 regretfully over the past, as if half sorry that the 
 separation was accepted by her. She was thinking 
 deeply of B.'s dying but unuttered message to her. 
 
 To the same. 
 Wednesday, March llth, 1869. 
 
 I will not delay informing you that the promised 
 letters to Mrs. Villiers 1 have just been sent by Mr. 
 Villiers Lister of the Foreign Office. Among them 
 are twenty-eight letters of 181 6, which give precise and 
 complete information as to everything, letters of the 
 following years in continuation of the same subject, 
 none from 1832 to 1851, and twenty- three very con- 
 fidential letters of 1852 3. . . . Altogether the 
 trustees, etc., may find that they are checkmated. 
 But I shall not now communicate to them the re- 
 covery of these treasures, which for the year 1816 
 probably exceed in importance all that they have 
 reserved. We can go to them at any time we please, 
 and say that as they have pleased themselves by 
 trying to act independently of us, we shall in future, 
 if we please to publish or suppress, not consult them 
 at all. . . . Having read the Villiers letters I find 
 that Augusta is not put in too painful a light for 
 publication, if it be decided to publish the facts at all. 
 Some omissions would be necessary, I think, as to deeds 
 B. was thought to have intended but never carried 
 out. Augusta seems to have very strongly asserted 
 innocence after 1814 (though the circumstances were 
 
 1 Hon. Mrs. George Villiers (1775 1856), intimate friend of 
 both Mrs. Leigh and Lady Byron. (See " Astarte," note, p. 154.)
 
 EARLY DAYS 23 
 
 very suspicious) but admitted previous error. But 
 then Augusta seems to have thought there was no 
 harm (or small) in any action, provided the intention 
 were not vicious and other persons were not made 
 unhappy. Mr. Lister says he has a few more letters 
 in the country and will send in the course of the 
 summer. They probably refer to Elizabeth Medora 
 Leigh. 
 
 Augusta's character is more sympathetic through 
 what I have read than from what I knew before but 
 a character not to be trusted. 
 
 To the same. 
 Thursday, March IBth, 1869. 
 
 Friday. Edward Noel 1 and Boss here to lunch 
 E. N. much startled that she (Lady Byron) should 
 have ever wavered in her belief in Augusta's con- 
 tinuance in the same course for the whole time, for 
 he had heard that she was witness of a scene . . . 
 which could hardly receive any other interpretation. 
 This immediately preceded if it did not cause the 
 departure, and was (so I understood E. N.) what gave 
 rise to the resolution not to come back. In E. N.'s 
 opinion (and mine), there was a certain implaca- 
 bility of character which forces us to allow the use 
 of the word " unforgiving." Eoss could not deny 
 this, and is, I think, coming to see that her disposition 
 and acts ought not, and cannot, be made out to be 
 absolutely perfect. He sees certainly that to follow 
 
 1 Edward Noel, son of Rev. T. Noel, rector of Kirkby Mallory, 
 and brother of Major Robert Ralph Noel. (See note, p. 17.)
 
 24 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 a blind impulse to " defend " and make out a good 
 case would do much harm even for that object. . . . 
 
 Ross 1 says the story as repeated from Sir F. Doyle 
 would have been blurted out in print already, but for 
 an endeavour (I believe his), to stop it for the present 
 by hinting that an authentic work was promised. As 
 my inclinations for long have not been averse to 
 telling, I do not wish to lay too much weight on the 
 reasons for [it] but E. Noel has taken these papers 
 with him to study, and I should rely quite on his 
 opinion what is right to do. As to the expediency, 
 there would surely be some unpleasant talk as to our 
 agency in producing the truth. There would be 
 much difficulty in saying as much only as she wished 
 to be said, and I am sure the mystery would do harm. 
 Dr. Lushington and Miss Carr are so far consistent 
 when they assert the difficulty or impossibility of 
 picking and choosing what to tell, if one begins at 
 all. They say " tout ou rien," so say I, but without 
 at once deciding which but it costs them not a 
 moment's hesitation to decree according to the 
 Doctor's inclination, without troubling themselves 
 too much for reasons. Fortunately, his will com- 
 mands no obedience from us ... he does not like 
 to feel the subject slipping out of his hands. His 
 
 1 Eev. Alexander Ross (afterwards D.D.), who had begun life 
 as a Presbyterian minister, and later taken orders in the Church 
 of England. At this time he was vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney. 
 In H. Crabb Robinson's diary he is mentioned (February, 1851) 
 as follows : " The interesting man of the party was Ross, the 
 Presbyterian minister, with whom I had much talk on theology, 
 more indeed than would seem right ; but I am told that we 
 interested the company. Ross is learned in German theology, 
 and a great admirer, as well as friend, of Julius Hare. Therefore 
 liberal beyond the ordinary measure allowed to the ministers of 
 the Scotch Church."
 
 EARLY DAYS 25 
 
 original advice never to be reconciled does not to me 
 recommend his views. If anything is said, I must 
 put in condemnation and reprobation of the part he 
 took, according to his own admission. Sir Ralph and 
 Lady Noel were also wrong, though excusable, in 
 opposing reunion. 
 
 Mr. Ross had been for some time desirous of editing 
 a collection of Lady Byron's letters. He had himself 
 been a constant correspondent of hers during the last 
 decade of her life, mainly on religious questions, on 
 which they were in close sympathy. He had also at 
 different intervals acted as tutor to Wentworth him- 
 self, who retained a great esteem for him. The 
 papers of H. Crabb Robinson, the diarist, and of the 
 Rev. Frederick Robertson, the famous preacher of 
 Brighton, were now being prepared for publication. 
 Both had been friends of Lady Byron, and Mr. Ross 
 played a friendly and helpful part as intermediary 
 between Wentworth and their respective executors 
 with regard to the possible publication and disposal 
 of her letters to them. The idea of revealing Lady 
 Byron's character by means of her correspondence 
 was now taking definite shape in Wentworth's mind, 
 and collaboration with Mr. Ross had almost been 
 agreed to by both, when the current of events swept 
 him away in a new direction. For both him and his 
 sister the year 1869 was one of far-reaching change. 
 On June 8th Anne Isabella Noel King was married 
 to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and on August 25th
 
 26 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Wentworth himself married Fanny, daughter of the 
 Kev. George Heriot. 
 
 Of this marriage it is enough to say that within two 
 years Wentworth found it necessary to separate him- 
 self abruptly from his wife. He never saw her again.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE*S STORY 
 
 IT was on September 1st, 1869, that Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe's x so-called " True Story of Lady Byron's 
 Life " was published simultaneously in England 
 and America, 2 and it was, therefore, in the midst of 
 an absorbing crisis in his own life that the bomb-shell 
 exploded at Wentworth's feet. Mrs. Stowe wrote 
 to refute the falsehoods long current about Lady 
 Byron's married life and repeated in the Guiccioli 
 book, the English translation of which she stated 
 " sells rapidly, and appears to meet with universal 
 favour." Her pages burn with an honest indigna- 
 tion which commands respect, and though they con- 
 tain various mistakes and inaccuracies, and though 
 her excessive eulogy of her subject and corresponding 
 vituperation of Lord Byron offend our English taste, 
 they are for the most part true. Here are the words 
 with which she electrified the public : " He (Byron) 
 fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue 
 with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity that 
 discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion 
 from civilised society." 
 
 1 Author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," " Dred," etc., etc. 
 8 In Macmillan's Magazine and in the Atlantic Monthly.
 
 28 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Her account of how this revelation was made to 
 her is as follows : 
 
 On the occasion of a second visit to England, in 
 1856, the writer received a note from Lady Byron, 
 indicating that she wished to have some private 
 confidential conversation upon important subjects, 
 and inviting her for that purpose to spend a day with 
 her at her country-seat near London. 
 
 The writer went and spent a day with Lady Byron 
 alone, and the object of the visit was explained to 
 her. Lady Byron was in such a state of health that 
 her physicians had warned her that she had very little 
 time to live. She was engaged in those duties and 
 reviews which every thoughtful person finds neces- 
 sary, who is coming deliberately and with open eyes 
 to the boundaries of this mortal life. 
 
 At that time there was a cheap edition of Byron's 
 works in contemplation, intended to bring his 
 writings into circulation among the masses, and the 
 pathos arising from the story of his domestic mis- 
 fortunes would doubtless have greatly aided in giving 
 it currency. 
 
 Under these circumstances, some of Lady Byron's 
 friends had proposed the question to her, whether she 
 had not a responsibility to society for the truth ; whether 
 she did right to allow these writings to gain influence 
 over the popular mind, by giving a silent consent 
 to what she knew to be utter falsehoods. 
 
 As Lady Byron's whole life had been passed in the 
 most heroic self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, the 
 question was now proposed to her, whether one more 
 act of self-denial was not required of her, before 
 leaving this world ; namely, to declare the absolute
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 29 
 
 truth, no matter at what expense to her own 
 feelings. 
 
 For this purpose it was her desire to recount the 
 whole history to a person of another country, and 
 entirely out of the whole sphere of personal and 
 local feelings, which might be supposed to influence 
 those in the country and station of life where the 
 events really happened, in order that she might be 
 helped by such a person's views in making up an 
 opinion as to her own duty. 
 
 The interview had almost the solemnity of a 
 death-bed avowal. Lady Byron recounted the his- 
 tory which has been embodied in this article, and 
 gave to the writer a paper containing a brief memo- 
 randum of the whole with the date affixed. 
 
 It may be noted that Mrs. Stowe did not claim to 
 have had permission or direction from Lady Byron 
 to make the story public. 
 
 The uproar caused by Mrs. Stowe's publication 
 was indescribable. The September number of Mac- 
 millan's Magazine had been but a few hours in the 
 booksellers' shops before a stream of letters had 
 begun to flow into the newspaper offices. For many 
 weeks whole sheets of The Times and other important 
 dailies were filled with correspondence. Weekly and 
 monthly publications followed suit with long articles, 
 and comments signed and unsigned. The prevailing 
 note was unmeasured condemnation of Mrs. Stowe 
 and determination to disbelieve the accusation, 
 which, as was generally recognised, could only refer
 
 80 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 to Byron's relations with his half-sister Augusta (Mrs. 
 Leigh), daughter of Captain John Byron by his first 
 marriage Byron himself having been born four 
 years later by a second marriage. 1 
 
 But Lady Byron did not escape her share of blame. 
 Even those who did not discredit the story could not 
 endure that it should have been told ; and it seemed 
 as though her long life of patience and silence under 
 calumny counted as nothing against the fact that, 
 when nearing her end, she had dared to discuss with 
 a friend in confidence the possibility of obtaining 
 justice in the eyes of posterity especially her own 
 posterity. And the story had been so badly told 
 that criticism of details and charges of distorted 
 imagination or memory were absolutely invited 
 by it. 
 
 " A great deal of it," said Dr. Lushington, "was 
 untrue and could not have been stated by Lady 
 Byron." 2 
 
 Wentworth wrote in later years : 3 
 
 The article in the Atlantic Monthly stated not 
 untruly that the mystery of Astarte in " Manfred " 
 was founded on fact, and (erroneously) that those 
 circumstances had continued, and been the direct 
 cause of the separation. 
 
 1 Captain John Byron married, first, Amelia D'Arcy, Baroness 
 Gonyers in her own right, divorced wife of the Marquess of Car- 
 marthen (afterwards fifth Duke of Leeds). Lady Conyers died 
 January 26th, 1784, in giving birth to a daughter, Augusta Mary 
 Byron, who married, in August, 1807, Colonel George Leigh. 
 
 2 Letter to William, Earl of Lovelace, September, 1869. 
 " Astarte," pp. 3941.
 
 LADY BYRON IN HER OLD AGE
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 81 
 
 Recollections of interviews are not evidence 
 against a person reported, except by consent and 
 with other reserves. Those who quote confidential 
 matter without leave may discredit themselves but 
 really commit no one else. The most uncertain of 
 hearsays are conversations long afterwards imputed 
 posthumously, as was done here by Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe nine years after Lady Byron's death. And 
 yet every error of fact that was either found or 
 imagined in the apocryphal version of Lady Byron's 
 story, was attributed to her, contrary to truth and 
 probability. Failure of memory was far more 
 likely in Mrs. Stowe than in Lady Byron. No doubt 
 it was proper to credit Mrs. Stowe with as much good 
 faith as was consistent with her undeniable treachery, 
 but under such conditions her accuracy was at least 
 doubtful, whilst Lady Byron's veracity never was 
 doubted by careful and unprejudiced minds. Lord 
 Byron himself averred that she was " truth itself." 
 It was a misplaced delicacy towards Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe to pass over her untrustworthiness so lightly, 
 and beg the whole question by pretending that the 
 rancour of misfortune had falsified Lady Byron's 
 memory. 
 
 Lady Byron was unquestionably entitled to be 
 silent or speak as she thought fit about her history. 
 She was free of all obligations, whether moral or 
 material, to any other human being, but could not 
 evade having to decide what should ultimately 
 become of the records. She Was perfectly justified 
 in making confidences to any friend whose opinion 
 or sympathy she valued. . . . 
 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe's character and genius had
 
 82 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 received universal recognition, which was almost 
 deserved. She only wanted two or three of the more 
 unobtrusive virtues : accuracy, fidelity, good taste 
 and tact, for lack of which she unconsciously turned 
 traitor like the other publicists who busied them- 
 selves about Lord Byron. Her miserable puff of 
 Lady Byron was no madder or baser than countless 
 advertisements of Lord Byron which provoked no 
 uproar. But as soon as Lady Byron's narrative had 
 been robbed, perverted, and sold to her enemies, 
 great was the cawing in the rookery. . . . 
 
 Some slight warning of what was in preparation 
 had reached Wentworth through Mr. Boss on 
 August 23rd, and endeavours were made on his 
 behalf to induce Messrs. Macmillan to suspend the 
 publication, at least for a time. It, was, however, 
 already too late. On August 27th the ever faithful 
 Mr. Ford obtained an advance copy of Macmillan's 
 Magazine and went down with it to Dover, where his 
 client was staying with his bride on his way to the 
 Continent. Wentworth's first feeling was one of 
 overwhelming indignation with Mrs. Stowe, and he 
 thankfully acquiesced in Mr. Ford's proposal to write 
 in the name of his firm to discredit the story to the 
 uttermost. Accordingly, on September 2nd, there 
 appeared a long letter to The Times, in which Messrs. 
 Wharton and Ford, " as the family solicitors beg 
 most distinctly to state that the article is not a com- 
 plete or authentic statement of the facts connected 
 with the separation, that it cannot be regarded as
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 33 
 
 Lady Byron's own statement, and that it does not 
 involve any direct evidence on Lady Byron's his- 
 tory." And so on, with a great deal about Mrs. 
 Beecher Stowe's breach of trust, her inaccuracy and 
 her entire lack of documents, and with some infor- 
 mation as to the existence of important papers in 
 the hands of trustees. On this letter The Times 
 editorial comment was : 
 
 . . . We need hardly express our belief that 
 Messrs. Wharton and Ford would not come forward 
 in the matter as they have done unless they had 
 ample grounds for doing so. If, therefore, they dis- 
 tinctly contradicted Mrs. Stowe's assertion, we con- 
 fess we should be inclined to prefer their evidence to 
 hers, as the more likely to be accurate. But for these 
 very reasons it seems to us a significant fact that, 
 though thus coming forward apparently in direct 
 opposition to Mrs. Stowe, and manifesting the 
 greatest anxiety to discredit her story, Messrs. 
 Wharton and Ford do not, nevertheless, altogether 
 contradict it. ... 
 
 What more could Lady Byron's family do ? Even 
 if they could have forgiven Mrs. Stowe's act of 
 treachery and have brought themselves to endorse 
 her revelations, not one of them had at that time 
 access to the whole of the available e\idence. Amid 
 the hurricane that had been raised, only the fullest 
 and most clear-cut of narratives would have carried 
 conviction. No one person could then have pro- 
 duced it.
 
 34 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 As to action by the trustees, 1 
 
 Besides other obstacles which had nothing to do 
 with the merits of the case, though they caused great 
 inconvenience, the term of thirty years fixed by Lady 
 Byron in 1850 stood in the way of reparation to her 
 for ten years more. " Procrastinator's argument, 
 ' wait a little, this is not the time,' 2 still reigned for 
 another decade before it could be displaced, though 
 every remaining reason for silence might drop away. 
 And as circumstances change in one way, the guar- 
 dians of truth change in another. They grow old and 
 cautious about facing trouble and odium, and repeat 
 with more obstinacy than ever : ' The time has not 
 yet come ! ' And it never does come if they can 
 keep it off. Blind silence becomes an end in itself 
 identified with their very being "... 
 
 As will be seen from Wentworth's narrative (see 
 "Astarte," pp. 135, 136), Lady Byron left her 
 husband's house, first because he commanded her to 
 go, second because, believing him to be at least tem- 
 porarily insane, she thought that her absence was 
 necessary for his restoration. It was therefore easy, 
 in reply to direct questions, to affirm that she did not 
 leave her husband because of Mrs. Leigh ; and thus 
 for many years the family, when driven to the wall, 
 were wont to defend themselves against the prying 
 multitude. To be compelled to such subterfuges was 
 in itself misery. And for years to come, those whose 
 family history was subjected to incessant dissection 
 
 ' i " Astarte," pp. 6566. 
 * Sydney Smith on Bentham's " Book of Fallacies.'
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE S STORY 35 
 
 and outrage felt themselves to be standing with heads 
 bowed and bare to the storm, buffeted and drenched 
 and helpless. To his dying day Went worth never 
 forgot the bitter experience. 
 
 Among the many publications on this theme in 
 1869 70, two stand out as specially important a 
 series of five or six articles in the Saturday Review, 1 
 and two essays in the Quarterly Review. 2 The writer 
 in the Saturday Review says of Mrs. Stowe's story, 
 ' We are sorry to say that we believe it to be the true 
 one," and renders homage to a previous anonymous 
 writer who, in the Temple Bar Magazine, 3 three 
 months before Mrs. Stowe's publication, had "in an 
 article remarkable for ability, good taste and right 
 feeling," pointed to the probability of some such 
 cause as was now revealed for Lord Byron's separa- 
 tion from his wife. The analysis in .the Saturday 
 Review of all the circumstances then known, and 
 comparison of them with Byron's own writings, very 
 brilliantly and closely reasoned, was thought at the 
 time to be by some eminent lawyer. The conclusions 
 were not determined by any bias in favour of Lady 
 Byron, of whom it is written : " her character is 
 very unique, very unintelligible, and one with which 
 as we have no sympathy, so about it we have little 
 
 1 September 4th to December 25th, 1869. 
 
 a October, 1869, and January, 1870. 
 
 8 "Lord Byron's Married Life" : Temple Bar, June, 1869. 
 Published later with other matter under the title of " Vindication 
 of Lady Byron " : Bentley, 1871. 
 
 32
 
 36 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 knowledge." Wentworth sought in vain both at that 
 time, and in later years, to learn by whom these articles 
 had been written. He printed large extracts from 
 them in the appendix to " Astarte," and he wrote of 
 them : 
 
 These able and eloquent pages are still of interest, 
 being one of the few bright spots in a dreary tangle 
 of misrepresentation. It would be unfortunate if 
 the identity of the acute Saturday essayist were lost 
 now that former services to a just cause ought to be 
 recognised. . . . 
 
 Later he learnt, on the authority of Mr. Swinburne, 
 that the writer was Mrs. Lynn Linton. 
 
 In great contrast with these were the articles in 
 the Quarterly Eeview, the author's name, Abraham 
 Hayward, being from the first an open secret. No 
 impartiality here ! They were an avowed and 
 thoroughgoing defence of Lord Byron, coupled with 
 unsparing condemnation of his accuser. The reader 
 is reminded of the old legal story of the counsel who 
 noted on his brief : " No case abuse the plaintiff's 
 attorney." Not only by the ability displayed in 
 them, but by their semi-official character, put for- 
 ward as they were by the successors of Byron's 
 publisher, John Murray, and their references to 
 private documents, they made a profound impression 
 on the public. 
 
 1 The proprietor of the Quarterly Eeview contrived 
 
 1 " Astarte," pp. 41 42.
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 87 
 
 to raise a contribution of materials suitable for his 
 purpose from the residuary legatee of the person 
 whose character was under discussion, that is to say, 
 Lord Byron's half-sister Augusta (the Hon. Mrs. 
 Leigh). She had left behind her, all ready and 
 arranged, a small collection of carefully selected 
 documents calculated to rebut the charge that had 
 been expected and prepared for all through her life. 
 With suicidal blindness to ultimate consequences, 
 the Leighs joined in the plan for the ruin of Lady 
 Byron's character. . . . 
 
 The choice of Abraham Hayward as counsel meant 
 much, for his utility in a bad cause was never 
 inlpaired by any tendency to straightforward fairness, 
 but he was perhaps seldom quite trusted by his 
 employers. 1 
 
 In the Byron discussions he surpassed himself in 
 the licence with which he manipulated all the in- 
 formation he could acquire. His office was like that 
 of an Old Bailey lawyer, who receives no confessions 
 and may be very imperfectly acquainted with the 
 facts, but avers his client's innocence as a matter of 
 course. He acted just as might be expected from a 
 specialist of his description, when employed to make 
 
 1 I cannot refrain from a word in Hayward's defence here, 
 for I saw him often in his old age in the house of Mr. Gladstone, 
 where he was a familiar habitut, and elsewhere. He could be a 
 staunch friend, and those to whom he was attached certainly 
 trusted him. His defence as regards the Byron articles would 
 have been the familiar morality of the paid advocate, to whom 
 every weapon is legitimate that will serve him in the fight. But 
 there is no doubt he was also unconsciously biassed by the feeling 
 common to all literary men of his generation. They adored 
 Byron's genius. He had been the idol of their youth, and to see 
 his image in the mire roused them to fury and blinded them to all 
 justice. M. C. L.
 
 38 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 the most of garbled extracts from an immense 
 correspondence to invalidate a particular fact, which 
 those same papers would completely prove if fairly 
 and frankly produced. He was presented to the 
 public with unusual ostentation as Lady Byron's 
 exterminator. His employers freely abdicated all 
 responsibility, loaded it on to him and retired from 
 the scene. It was a virtual assumption by Hayward 
 of other liabilities than his own ; and like all such 
 transfers of credit, to a large extent misleading. 
 Hayward could not have been the real inventor of all 
 that was put in or left out of the articles. He took 
 what was given him. The vast suppression of 
 material can only very partially have been his doing. 
 And many things that were included highly ques- 
 tionable suppositions, suggestions and assertions, 
 may also not have been his own. 
 
 In the Quarterly Review articles he was most him- 
 self as Mrs. Leigh's advocate, but his mode of repre- 
 senting her cause was sinister. He founded his 
 defence of her moral character on brutal physical 
 depreciation. Ugliness proved chastity ; the surest 
 evidence of vice being beauty. Hayward's studies 
 of dead roues for knowledge on the eternal subject of 
 women had left him with the notion that no woman 
 is virtuous if she can help ic. With logical simplicity 
 he set to work and exculpated Mrs. Leigh from the 
 charge of incest by robbing her of identity, almost of 
 sex, and competence for any sort of love passion. 
 Like the deformities invented by Professor Wilson's 
 friends to deface Hazlitt, Mrs. Leigh's supposed 
 unloveliness was purely imaginary. . . . 
 
 Great indulgence would be due to Mrs. Leigh's own
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 39 
 
 descendants if they had spoken out in her exculpa- 
 tion, however bitterly or unfairly. In their position 
 perfect and absolute good faith and good temper 
 could hardly be expected from them. But the manu- 
 facture of infamy for Lady Byron was not properly 
 speaking their act. They were not people to disre- 
 gard all decencies of conduct and language about 
 her. They sought to fortify their own discretion by 
 consulting their cousin, the third Earl of Chichester, 1 
 as kind and honourable an adviser as could be 
 desired. He was of course liable to be deceived 
 about the character of his aunt, Mrs. Leigh ; nor 
 was it wonderful that the truth should have been 
 repugnant to him, and that he would not understand 
 and could not like perfect justice towards Lady 
 Byron. He had not, however, forgotten what had 
 been feelingly expressed by his mother, Mrs. Leigh's 
 half-sister, 2 that some gratitude and respect were 
 due to Lady Byron from the Leighs. . . . 
 
 The plan of campaign against Lady Byron's 
 character was neither devised nor managed by any 
 of the Byrons or their representatives, kindred or 
 connections. . . . 
 
 If Lady Byron's family rejoiced in the castigation 
 of Mrs. Stowe, they felt Hayward's articles as a whole 
 to be intolerable ; and for Wentworth the appear- 
 ance of the second one (which followed on a further 
 
 1 In " Astarte " he is wrongly named as the second earl. 
 
 2 Mrs. Leigh's mother, Lady Conyers, had issue by her first 
 marriage (see note, p. 30), George, sixth Duke of Leeds, Lord 
 Francis Godolphin Osborne, and Mary, wife of the second Earl of 
 Chichester. The third earl, referred to above, was the son of th 
 latter couple.
 
 40 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 amplification of the original story, " Lady Byron 
 Vindicated," by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1870) gave 
 cause for a new uneasiness. In this Hay ward made 
 references to, and citations from, obviously impor- 
 tant papers, such as had hitherto been believed to 
 exist only in the trustees' hands. Where had he 
 found these ? Doubt and anxiety on this subject 
 were to torment Went worth for many years to come. 
 For some time it had become evident to him that the 
 documents in the care of the trustees were after all 
 not so exhaustive as had been expected. It now 
 seemed certain that some portion of Lady Byron's 
 papers must have been abstracted and got into other 
 hands. When ? And how ? His suspicions were 
 not long in going to the right quarter, and circum- 
 stances came to light as time went on which made 
 these suspicions certainties. It suffices to say here 
 that, in 1893, a box containing extremely, important 
 letters, and other records of Lady Byron's married 
 life and her relations with Mrs. -Leigh, was found to 
 have been in the possession of William, Earl of Love- 
 lace. It was handed over on his death to Wentworth 
 by his personal heirs, and its contents furnished a 
 large part of the material for the book " Astarte," 
 which he eventually wrote. Wentworth's own 
 printed record of this matter was as follows 1 : 
 
 Most improperly and unfortunately he (Hayward) 
 was permitted to see some of the Byron papers by a 
 
 1 " Astarte," Appendix, p. 334.
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 41 
 
 deceased relative of mine, in whose temporary cus- 
 tody they were. Without my knowledge, and what 
 was much worse, without the sanction of the trus- 
 tees, a lamentable indiscretion was committed, and 
 Hay ward got his opportunity to make copious 
 extracts. . . . 
 
 But in the year 1870 Went worth had no possible 
 means of verifying the sources drawn upon by Hay- 
 ward, or of ascertaining what papers, other than 
 those quoted, might exist in the same hands. He 
 was at this time going through one of those long 
 periods of estrangement which, to the misfortune of 
 both, divided the father and son for a large portion of 
 their joint lives. And even had circumstances been 
 favourable, the task of cross-questioning that for- 
 midable personage, old Lord Lovelace, about such 
 a matter could not have been lightly undertaken. If 
 he had confessed to the possession of the papers, 
 which was unlikely, he would assuredly have fiercely 
 defended his right, nay, as he regarded things, his 
 duty, to act as seemed to him best in defence of the 
 family honour. It is certain that neither the papers 
 themselves nor surrender in any form would have 
 been got from him. 
 
 It was about this time that Wentworth was 
 allowed access to an, as yet, untouched mine of 
 information on Byron's private life namely, the 
 poet's own intimate letters to Lady Melbourne, 1 
 
 1 Elizabeth Milbanke, Viscountess Melbourne, mother of the 
 Prime Minister.
 
 42 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 from the year 1812 to the date of his marriage in 
 1815. These letters, together with other papers and 
 relics, had been inherited by Mrs. Dudley Carleton 
 (afterwards Lady Dorchester) from her father, John 
 Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton, Byron's friend and 
 executor. Wentworth was permitted by her to take 
 copies of the whole series, which he did with extreme 
 care and accuracy, the labour being spread over a 
 considerable space of time, and the letters themselves 
 were seen and studied at the time by his sister and 
 her husband, Wilfrid Blunt. 
 
 These letters, familiar, witty, extraordinarily vivid, 
 are among the best that Byron ever wrote. For 
 nearly three years they give a continuous and 
 detailed narrative of his movements, his social doings, 
 and especially his love affairs. In describing his 
 relations with various married women, those who 
 resisted him and those who did not, it is plain that 
 neither he nor his correspondent regarded these 
 doings as other than quite natural and legitimate. 
 But from the summer of 1813 onwards a new note 
 is heard. Lady Melbourne is hotly remonstrating 
 about something ; Byron's own conscience is touched. 
 It is plain that no ordinary adultery was in question. 1 
 
 Recognising the extreme importance of such evi- 
 dence and anxious to secure its preservation, Went- 
 worth made a second copy in his own handwriting, 
 and in later years caused also to be made two type- 
 
 1 See " Astarte," p. 129.
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 43 
 
 written copies, carefully overlooked and corrected 
 by himself. His own first manuscript he gave to a 
 near relative, who still possesses it, the typewritten 
 copies were deposited elsewhere, and his own second 
 manuscript remained in his possession. 1 
 
 For many years, and especially in later life, Lady 
 Dorchester played with the idea of publishing these 
 letters. She used to lament that they were of such 
 a character that no virtuous woman would like to 
 edit them. She also was firmly resolved that nothing 
 which could confirm the story revealed by Mrs. 
 Beecher Stowe should see the light through her. 
 Any drastic '" bowdlerising " of the whole series 
 would have been absolutely destructive, but it would 
 have been easy to delete some half a dozen passages 
 which pointed unmistakably to the relations between 
 Byron and Augusta. It was the possibility of some 
 such mutilated publication, and the certainty that 
 it would have been hailed as negative evidence against 
 Lady Byron, that caused Wentworth to expend so 
 much industry and care to secure the existence in 
 safe hands of authentic duplicates of the original 
 letters. 
 
 1 After his death this second set of manuscript copies was 
 demanded by Lady Dorchester from his widow, and to this 
 demand (though not a legal claim) it was thought best to accede 
 rather than offend the owner of the original letters, and of many 
 other Byron relics. The sacrifice was made in vain. Lady 
 Dorchester was not propitiated, and all the Byron relics in her 
 possession have now passed away to strangers. Fortunately the 
 other copies described above still exist in the hands to which they 
 were originally entrusted.
 
 44 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Gradually there came home to him the sense that 
 under existing circumstances he was completely help- 
 less to deal with this matter that concerned him so 
 nearly. In the knowledge that there existed evidence 
 to which he was denied access, he could not even fix 
 his own beliefs with clearness, much less impose them 
 on the world. But all his memories of the noble and 
 scrupulously truthful woman who had reared him, all 
 his instinctive understanding of the mind of her 
 whose blood ran in his veins, and whose teaching had 
 moulded his own character, filled him with revolt 
 against the theory that, brooding incessantly upon 
 her wrongs, she had conceived and promulgated the 
 vilest of calumnies against her husband. As the 
 storm which had followed Mrs. Beecher Stowe's 
 revelations gradually died down, it was upon this 
 theory that the public mind appeared to settle com- 
 fortably. There were, of course, a few exceptions, 
 but the courage to assert belief in a story which was 
 widely stigmatised as the prurient invention of a 
 diseased mind was naturally rare. Lady Byron's 
 few surviving friends were all old, and mostly women. 
 All that they could do in her defence was to assert 
 their absolute belief in her sanity and veracity. Who 
 should draw the sword on her behalf ? Surely, her 
 one surviving male descendant. On him, and him 
 only, this duty lay. And most heavily upon mind 
 and soul, never long to be forgotten, rested the 
 burden during the twenty-three years which were to
 
 MRS. BEECHER STOWE'S STORY 45 
 
 lapse before he found himself at last possessed of 
 the whole truth, at last face to face with a possible 
 decision. 
 
 Meanwhile time went on, punctuated at intervals 
 by fresh publications more or less bearing on the 
 " Byron Mystery," mostly ephemeral, but all 
 supremely offensive to those whose family history 
 was thus perpetually analysed and commented on.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 RESTLESSNESS 
 
 IN 1872 there began for Wentworth a long period 
 of aimless wandering. His home was broken up, 
 he was harassed by debts that were none of his 
 making, and the scandal which had fallen on his name 
 made all society distasteful to him. He failed to 
 obtain a divorce, but the terms of the legal separation 
 granted to him secured him the custody of the one 
 child of his marriage. 1 He placed her in the care of 
 his sister ; and then, as always, the steadfast affec- 
 tion of that sister was his one unfailing resource and 
 comfort. Sometimes he would take a lodging for a 
 few months in London or Paris, and in either place 
 would live the life of a solitary student, haunting the 
 libraries and curiosity shops, now and then yielding 
 to his one extravagance the buying of books, but 
 otherwise practising extreme frugality in order to rid 
 himself of his embarrassments. For most of his time 
 he drifted from place to place, in Italy or Austria. 
 It was when summer came, and he could climb moun- 
 tains and forget himself in the wild beauty of the 
 high places, that he was happiest. A fragment of a 
 
 1 Ada Mary Milbanke, later Baroness Wentworth, died 1917.
 
 RESTLESSNESS 47 
 
 letter to his sister in answer to an invitation to join 
 her and her husband in a journey through Algeria and 
 the Sahara shows how he felt the barrenness of his 
 life at this period. 
 
 To Lady Anne Blunt. 
 VIENNA, 
 
 October Uth, 1873. 
 
 Your proposal is a very welcome one. I had 
 already made up my mind that I could not endure 
 another winter in England, both on account of 
 climate and (of) harassing discussions which kill one 
 by inches, or rather I should say tend to break up 
 both health and reason. I am very well now, but 
 I am, therefore, only the more unwilling to be ill. I 
 have not strength of mind to put painful topics quite 
 away from my thoughts when I am leading the dull 
 and depressing life of a prisoner. 
 
 I am an incurable vagrant in character. I wish it 
 were otherwise, but I get dreadfully tired of any one 
 place if for long there. . . . 
 
 Four years later his letters give a more cheerful 
 picture : 
 
 To Lady Anne Blunt. 
 
 COUBMAYEUB, 
 
 Friday, August 3rd, 1877. 
 
 I intended to answer your letter at once, but had 
 no time, or what comes to the same thing. The 
 weather has been bad for the whole of the last half
 
 48 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 of July, hardly a day passing without a fall of snow 
 in the higher Alps, but one gets into a way of lounging 
 about. Then there have been several picnics at 
 places only a few hours distant, the parties consisting 
 chiefly of Piedmontese. The society on the whole 
 is entertaining and agreeable, though it has its defects 
 petty gossip and jealousies, etc. One or two of the 
 people are charming ; among the ladies actually here 
 present there is only one I should however much care 
 ever to meet again, Madame Caccia of Nice, who is 
 French by education, manners and " esprit," but 
 Italian at heart with an intense dislike of her legal 
 nationality . . . Very few of them seem to have any 
 interests except of the most trivial sort. They never 
 touch a book, even a novel. Madame Caccia and an 
 intimate friend of hers, Madame De Filippi, are, 
 however, fond of the best Italian, French, English, 
 and German literature. It is a great astonishment 
 to some of them how two ladies can be dear friends 
 who are natives of such distant places as Nice and 
 Turin. 
 
 The majority of the ladies are rather jealous of 
 Madame Caccia's wit, grace and good looks, but they 
 are so bored when left to themselves without her 
 that they have to run after her as she will not run 
 after them. . . . 
 
 On Sunday, August 5th, I made the lst/2nd 
 ascent of the Aiguille de Peuteret, or rather the 
 higher of its two summits I named it to distinguish 
 it from the lower one, " Aiguille de la Yola," after 
 Mme. Caccia, for whom I first broke off the veritable 
 summit untouched by human foot so I brought it 
 to her to put her foot on it and so make the first ascent
 
 RESTLESSNESS 49 
 
 mine being only the second. I planted a white 
 flag with the St. George's cross, and in the middle of 
 the flag I fastened Mme. Caccia's card. 
 
 Gianotti said he should call her henceforward 
 Madame de Peuteret, the peak having become the 
 Yola. 
 
 I have written a letter to the ex-minister Quintino 
 Sella (actual president of the Club Alpino) describing 
 my ascent for communication to that body. Mme. 
 De Filippi, who is a cousin of his, will forward it 
 with a few lines from herself. . . . 
 
 Signor Quintino Sella sent him a complimentary 
 letter in which he said : 
 
 " I sent immediately your very interesting letter to 
 Cav. Baretti, with the purpose that it should be 
 published in the Bolletino del Club Alpino Italiano 
 under the head ' Salita della Cina della Yola.' ' 
 
 To Lady Anne Blunt. 
 
 ZERMATT, 
 Monday, September 3rd, 1877. 
 
 The only thing I have done here is to go up the 
 Matterhorn last Thursday and down the other side 
 since then the weather has been cloudy and windy, 
 and I must wait. There are no amusements here one 
 is thrown on one's own resources. Yesterday I read 
 a charming short story, " Come un sognio," by Barrili, 
 profoundly sad and yet not depressing it is so 
 poetical it seems to have been a great success in 
 Italy, where there seems to be now a beginning of
 
 50 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 readable literature. I have also a book of travels 
 in Spain by De Amicis which seems very amusing. 
 
 Yesterday at table a parson was talking with 
 another man of a parsonic way of thinking about 
 Tyndall and unbelief. They said " there is such 
 bravado in Tyndall's materialism that it looks as if 
 he were not very firm and convinced in his atheism." 
 How characteristic of the clergy insincere accusa- 
 tions of insincerity, pretending that the real diffi- 
 culty is to doubt not to accept the orthodox 
 dogmas ! 
 
 I have the sincerest deepest longing for God and 
 immortality, but the desire alone seems to give little 
 certainty, or even hope. What helps most is to meet 
 with sympathetic people who sympathise in that 
 feeling but what would drive me farthest away 
 from religious sentiment is to listen to " Christian " 
 cursing of infidelity or " wilful blindness " as they 
 call it. I think the fallacious logic as well as the 
 malignant bitterness of the pious (and perhaps even 
 of the anti-pious) surpasses that of the House of 
 Commons. 
 
 I have got Pollen's plan the house * is charming, 
 but I think the stable is perfectible ; there is no 
 harness-room. As I shall be in England about the 
 15th, I shall not try to settle it by post. 
 
 I do not mean to leave this before the llth, per- 
 haps the 12th, and shall then go straight through, 
 only stopping a few hours in Paris. If I go by New- 
 haven I shall ride 2 thence to Crabbet. 
 
 1 Wentworth House, Chelsea, which Mr. Pollen was to build 
 for him. 
 
 2 He had a favourite barb, " Touareg," bought in the Sahara, 
 which he had ridden also in Alpine journeys.
 
 RESTLESSNESS 51 
 
 To the same. 
 
 ZBRMATT, 
 Saturday, September Sfh, 1877. 
 
 On Thursday, 6th, I planted a flag made and 
 given to me by Mme. Caccia for that purpose on 
 another virgin summit the Pointe Giordano of the 
 Jumeaux in Valtornenche, which is more than 
 18,000 feet high it had been tried often and is 
 difficult but not very long for I left the hotel at 
 Brenil at 2 a.m. and reached the summit at 11.30. 
 
 On the same day five persons perished on the 
 Lyskamm two tourists and three guides the names 
 have been given me as Paterson Noel and Lewis 
 Arnold 1 with the three brothers Knubel of St. 
 Nicholas. All the guides leave widows one of them 
 confined last night or else expecting it at any moment. 
 One of the gentlemen was married last year the 
 other has a sister staying at the Eiffel Hotel, whence 
 he made the ascent. As they did not return in the 
 evening, yesterday a party of guides went to look 
 for them and found the whole caravan dead fas- 
 tened together by their rope at the foot of a preci- 
 pice of 200 feet. A cornice of snow on the ridge of 
 the Lyskamm over which they were proceeding 
 must have broken down under them. One of the 
 guides was found almost cut in two by the rope round 
 his waist. Perhaps he had sprung to the other side 
 of the ridge of snow from the one down which they 
 were falling, but was unable to balance the weight of 
 four and was pulled over and down. To-day it was 
 
 1 Noel H. Paterson and William Arnold Lewis. (See Alpine 
 Journal, Vol. VIII., p. 346.) 
 
 42
 
 5 2 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 too stormy, so to-morrow a large party is going to 
 fetch the remains. 
 
 I am very sorry to hear I shall not see the 
 de Hiigels, as I like them particularly. 
 
 I had not heard any mention of Sidney Herbert's * 
 engagement when I was in London at his age 
 marrying must be rather a sacrifice of independence, 
 but if she turns out to be one of the few good and 
 clever women in the world he will have more com- 
 pensation than loss. I believe there are more good 
 women than men but still so few that if it were 
 pure chance it would be 100 to 1 this is not one, but 
 perhaps Sidney Herbert is a good judge of character 
 and has been intimate enough with her family to 
 foresee that all will be well. I don't know why I 
 should interest myself about so slight an acquain- 
 tance but I both liked and admired all I saw of 
 him. 
 
 I am going to write another letter describing the 
 Twins 2 to Quintino Sella, whose name has been 
 given to the twin which had been before ascended 
 and over the top of which I went to reach the un- 
 touched twin. All these hunts after untrodden 
 ground must seem folly to most but to you I reply 
 triumphantly by pointing to Wilfrid avec son 
 d&sert? 
 
 He sent a narrative of these two ascents to the 
 
 1 Sidney Herbert, afterwards fourteenth Earl of Pembroke, 
 married August 29th, 1877, Lady Beatrix Lambton, daughter of 
 the second Earl of Durham. Lord Pembroke died March 30th, 
 1913. 
 
 2 Les Jumeaux. 
 
 Contemptuous reference of Julie, an old French servant, to 
 the Blunts' Arabian journeys.
 
 LADY ANNE BLUNT 
 .ETAT. 3035
 
 RESTLESSNESS 58 
 
 Alpine Club in London, who inserted it in their 
 Journal, Vol. IX., p. 1. 
 
 His brother-in-law Wilfrid Blunt was a member 
 of the Church of Rome, and a few years after her 
 marriage his sister joined that community. There 
 met in their house a small coterie of co-religionists, 
 and among these Went worth found for some years 
 his only intimate society. Any one familiar with 
 this circle at that time will know under whose 
 influence he passed the hostile and unjust judgment 
 on the English clergy given above. He himself was 
 now much drawn to the great Latin Church. Her 
 antiquity, her thousand beautiful legends, her 
 universality as compared with the insularity of 
 English Protestantism, all were intensely sympathetic 
 to him. But her greatest attraction for him lay, 
 perhaps unconsciously to himself, in her position 
 here, as a small and closely knit society in an unsym- 
 pathetic world. There is perhaps no better substi- 
 tute for family ties and the solidarity of the clan than 
 membership of a small, fighting, religious community. 
 To meet constantly persons having the same aims, the 
 same prejudices, the same loves, and strongest 
 bond of all the same hates, is to lose all sense of 
 loneliness. There was nothing to hold him back from 
 entering the fold. His parents had never had him 
 baptised, and he had never been taught to regard 
 himself as a son of the Church of England. Yet 
 strong as the temptation was to a man in his circum-
 
 54 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 stances, he did hold back. He could not bring him- 
 self to make the necessary act of faith. In later years 
 he acknowledged an additional and very character- 
 istic difficulty, namely that the mere idea of con- 
 fession was intolerable to him. 
 
 The following letters are addressed to two 
 prominent members of the English Roman Catholic 
 community : 
 
 To Mrs. William Froude. 1 
 BROOKS'S, 
 
 February 1st, 1877. 
 DEAR MRS. FROUDE, 
 
 I just write a line to save the last post after 
 finding your kind letter here. 
 
 I shall be very glad to go and see you from some 
 day before Sunday, February llth, till a day or two 
 afterwards. If I thought it would be half as agree- 
 able to you as to me I would gladly stay longer, but 
 perhaps I may be prevented by ... 
 
 I have often thought of your kindness to me ever 
 since I knew yoa and am extremely glad to be told 
 again of your unchanged friendship, though you are 
 one of the few persons from whom no good action or 
 kind words would surprise me. In future, though I 
 
 1 Wife of William Froude, engineer and naval architect, and 
 sister-in-law of James Anthony Froude and of Richard Hurrell 
 Froude, the friend of Newman. Wentworth's friendship with 
 Mr. W. Froude and his family dated from his Oxford days. 
 Mrs. Froude was at this time an invalid, and she died two years 
 later. She appears to have been a woman of rare distinction of 
 mind and character, and Wentworth ever afterwards spoke of 
 her with admiring affection, and with gratitude for the sympathy 
 that she gave him. He never forgot some happy weeks that he 
 had spent in her house at Chelston Cross, near Torquay.
 
 RESTLESSNESS 55 
 
 do not suppose that you would wish to be burthened 
 with more correspondence, I will write to you some- 
 times, especially if I could find anything to say that 
 would interest you, but I fear I should not succeed 
 very well. Post time ! 
 
 To the same. 
 
 BROOKS'S, 
 Saturday, March 3rd, 1877. 
 
 I am very glad to hear any observations of yours 
 about my character and manner as I should hope to 
 make them of some practical use. As for depression 
 of spirits, I suppose these still exist, not in my mind, 
 but in a certain stiffness and shyness of manner of 
 my never in all my life having felt the ground sure 
 under my feet I mean as to other people's sympathy 
 and friendship. I suppose I am naturally discon- 
 tented. I mean to try and take advantage of your 
 remark so as not to be a depressing element in society. 
 Depression of manner would not be true to my real 
 feelings, least of all when I was staying with you, 
 where all is so bright and happy. 
 
 I have indeed no cause for unhappiness except 
 from those defects and peculiarities of character 
 which hinder me a great deal in the human struggle 
 for existence. I do not find myself well fitted either 
 to know my own mind as to what I care about getting 
 in life and how to set about it ; and unfortunately, 
 amusement and success do not come without labour. 
 Though I have gained some experience, I am now too 
 old to be able to use the greater part of it. Still I 
 do not despair, and when I have a settled home, I
 
 56 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 shall do my best to prepare a cheerful old age for 
 myself. If I should live long enough my future 
 appears to me in pretty bright colours, if not as 
 gorgeous as that of a chosen few, still far better than 
 that of the great majority of mankind. . . . 
 
 I am not now answering your letter, which I will 
 do in a day or two, but thinking aloud on subjects 
 suggested by it. I will in the meantime reflect on 
 what you say, and even if a film over my eyes should 
 prevent me from feeling quite as you do, I should 
 rely so much on your wider experience as to try to 
 follow any advice you may give, trusting to time for 
 proof of its wisdom. 
 
 I have filled my letter too much with " I " and 
 " my " and " me," and also expressed too plainly 
 what is no doubt true, that I am mainly selfish and 
 care very little for other people. But I do care for 
 such friends as you and your family, of whom I have 
 very few in the world, almost as much as for myself 
 and I wish I Post time. . . . 
 
 To the same. 
 
 LONDON, 
 
 Sunday, March 4ih, 1877. 
 
 Your kindness to me is based on one sentiment 
 that must have greater durability than that friend- 
 ship which only anticipates a brilliant career. In- 
 deed, no friendship deserves the name until it attains 
 stability through errors and voids and disasters, and 
 I find the fatigue great of always wearing the mask of 
 content and success as one must with most friends 
 even. As for contentment, one ought both to feel
 
 RESTLESSNESS 57 
 
 and to show it, but as a reality not an imposture. 
 I do not think that you at all misunderstand what 
 have been the real misfortunes of my life, but I will 
 explain at the risk of saying what you know or 
 divine already. I have been made a fool of several 
 times in my life, but my heart has never been wounded, 
 and never, I think, could be, by the bad acts of others. 
 So far as they do me actual harm I would defend 
 myself, and one's pride or vanity impels one to a 
 revenge (if possible) at least equal to the injury, and 
 till the uttermost farthing has been paid I do not 
 think I could forgive or only by forgetting. But I feel 
 no affliction, nor ever have, nor perhaps shall, at any 
 baseness sufficiently great to destroy friendship, for 
 all regard disappears the very instant conviction is 
 complete. Even the memory of past affection 
 vanishes so entirely that its existence ceases to be 
 believed in. Even the hatred and craving for an 
 eye for an eye is not (with me) derived from perverted 
 friendship, but from a desire not to be fired at without 
 having one's shot in return ! 
 
 I feel that I am harder and more selfish than you 
 can approve, but it would be still more mortifying if 
 you supposed me soft enough to continue being 
 humbugged when the fraud has once been made 
 bare. I feel towards enemies implacable enough to 
 understand eternal punishment or rather never 
 again making friends with them, for I would not go 
 on punishing after the crime has been well expiated. 
 With some people there is a complex relationship 
 they do some injury and some good then I feel 
 much pain. The best course is, I should think, to 
 keep out of their way without unkindness. This
 
 58 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 class must do either the evil or the good unintention- 
 ally, and one is very apt to mistake which. 
 
 Tuesday. So far I had got when I got your letter 
 this morning and one from Miss Froude, 1 which I 
 will try and answer at once. . . . Not a word you 
 have said is unvalued. It has all been a great pleasure 
 to me to read and will help me much in settling 
 future plans. I fully agree with you as to the great 
 amount of good and hope for the future I have left 
 to me in life, though I have wasted and lost so much 
 of it. I have no cause of unhappiness or suffering at 
 present, and the only thing that makes me at times 
 depressed is that I feel " declasse." But " tout peut 
 encore se reparer," and if I could live for ever I should 
 feel no uneasiness as to the final result. I have some 
 very kind friends who prevent the feeling of absolute 
 solitude ; and perhaps it is really destined to be a 
 good that if the latter part of my life is to be a suc- 
 cess, it can only be by strenuous and persevering 
 efforts. . . . 
 
 To Mrs. J. H. Pollen. 2 
 PARIS, 
 
 Sunday, December 2nd, 1877. 
 
 I am still in Paris rather against my will, but 
 have to wait for letters, etc. . . . 
 
 I pass on to tell you of an evening at the Opera 
 with the Lagrenes on Friday. It was to see a new 
 ballet the Fandango. In the story of the ballet are 
 two rival sets of dancers each with their own dancing 
 
 1 Mrs. Froude's daughter, now Baroness Anatole von Hiigel. 
 
 2 Wife of John Hungerford Pollen, architect. (See life pub- 
 lished by his daughter.)
 
 RESTLESSNESS 59 
 
 master ; the gypsies, who represent the romantic 
 school, dance some wild popular dances to the dis- 
 gust of the rival dancing master of the classic school, 
 who then shows them with his pupils in a minuet the 
 proper way of dancing. The Lagrenes had a visit 
 in their box from a Count " n'importe," who spends 
 most of his life in the opera, and chiefly in the 
 coulisses. He did not see the fun of a journey to 
 Bagdad, 1 but is conscientiously persuaded that the 
 grand interest of this life is in opera dancing so he 
 fulfils his mission by being the intimate friend of all 
 ces demoiselles. He showed us those who had got on 
 by merit i.e. good dancing and well-shaped limbs 
 example La Beaugrand 1st dancer, then those who 
 had had a success made for them because they 
 have the style of beauty now in fashion example 
 la petite Merante and la petite Roumier. Then 
 there are those who have no merit and no beauty 
 except in the opinion of some very influential person 
 for protection is more powerful than good works 
 and all charming qualities. Then he told us which 
 were " enfants de la maison " and which strangers, 
 which he had had to scold for carelessness in their 
 drill, and whether they had improved by his admoni- 
 tions. No people are admitted behind the scenes 
 but the abonnes and some people pay as much as 
 20,000 fr. for a box, only for the purpose of frequent- 
 ing the coulisses. But I must not exasperate you 
 by talking of the angels of the ballet they are all 
 very well for a man who is fit for nothing else, and I 
 think it is not strange people are found to prefer their 
 society to the savages of the Euphrates, but I do 
 
 1 The Blunts were going there.
 
 60 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 not myself care about either the one or the other 
 more than you do with me they would have at 
 most a success of curiosity. 
 
 On Thursday I went to the deputies', and I saw an 
 orator of the Left shake his fist in the direction of an 
 abbe, of whom he caught sight in the gallery near me, 
 while he was speaking for the invalidation of Baron 
 de Gosse's election. The soutane was his red rag, 
 and he began thundering about the baneful influence 
 of the clergy, whom he called reptiles, swindlers, 
 villains, and exhausted his stocks of refined invective. 
 The Right sometimes made an uproar, but the presi- 
 dent Grevy called them to order and took his part. 
 Grevy has a fine head and is dignified. Gambetta 
 looks like a swine he is a vulgar, coarse, heavy, 
 irascible-looking man, and when he bellows an inter- 
 ruption of some speaker of the Right, his eye gleams 
 like that of an enraged hog. 
 
 To the same. 
 58, RUE LAFAYETTE, PARIS, 
 
 April 20fc, 1878. 
 
 It is certainly exasperating when people take the 
 trouble of inventing mischievous falsehoods that 
 cannot even have the excuse of being entertaining to 
 narrator or listener. If I had not seen Lady Dor- 
 chester on Tuesday, 9th, I should suppose some one 
 had wanted to make an April fool of her. I suppose 
 I shall never know who compassed my death and 
 with what object, but as I said to Lady Dorchester 
 I would write to her from here now and then, I mean
 
 RESTLESSNESS 61 
 
 to do so a little sooner than I otherwise might, in 
 order that she may have the most direct evidence of 
 my vitality. 
 
 I have however gained this much by the malicious 
 fiction, that I have been able to see Mr. Pollen here, 
 which I might not otherwise have done, and we have 
 seen a play together and some charming pictures, had 
 a ride, and talked a great deal about my house 
 besides going to the LagreneV, where he got into a 
 friendly but determined argument with Mme. de 
 Lagrene about England and Russia. However, they 
 were so pleased with him that they made him 
 promise not to omit going to see them when he is 
 
 next in Paris. Mile, de L to-day spoke of the 
 
 charm of his conversation. I must tell you an 
 instance of modesty she told me of to-day : The 
 
 Ctsse. de C was complimented by a friend, 
 
 ' Vous avez tant d' esprit." " Non ! non ! pas 
 d'esprit du gtnie peut-6tre." I will write to you 
 again as soon and as often as I have anything 
 interesting to say . 
 
 To-day I have put the best thing I have heard 
 already into another letter to Mme. Caccia and 
 I never repeat the same thing twice in writing, 
 both on principle and from laziness supposing 
 my two correspondents met and confronted my 
 two letters plagiarising from one another they 
 would be both vexed and scornful, so I will not risk 
 that. 
 
 Mme. Caccia is coming soon to Paris, and as I 
 often write to her, my other correspondence can 
 only gain from the cessation of that one while she 
 is here.
 
 62 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 To Mrs. William Froude. 
 
 COUKMAYEUB, 
 
 Wednesday, July 31 si, 1878. 
 
 I have now nearly finished a short tour in the 
 mountains, and expect to be in England before the 
 10th. I am now waiting for fine weather to attempt 
 the ascent of one of the few peaks in the Mont Blanc 
 chain that remain unsealed. I have been here 
 already six days for that purpose, but there have 
 been continued westerly gales, which are quite as 
 great a difficulty in climbing the higher peaks as for 
 a sea voyage. There was still so much snow on the 
 high mountains in the beginning of this month that 
 I spent a fortnight in the southern Tyrol and Venetian 
 Alps, which are more beautiful, though not so high, 
 as the Swiss and Savoy Alps. On the way I visited 
 the towns of Brescia and Bassano. At Brescia I 
 made acquaintance with the works of a great painter 
 of that place Moretto, a contemporary of Tintoretto, 
 I think. I also saw there the most beautiful bronze 
 gilt statue I ever met with a victory of the best 
 Greek work and quite perfect ; it closely resembles 
 the Venus of Milo except that it is entirely draped 
 and was dug out fifty years ago in the very Roman 
 temple where it now stands the temple having been 
 converted into a museum. The heat was very great 
 ten days ago, which I like except when one is lodged in 
 small close rooms. Out of doors there is no heat I do 
 not enjoy. I shall spend the rest of the summer at 
 Crabbet with my sister ; she is, I think, going to 
 Arabia for the winter, and will perhaps start before 
 October, so I want to be home as soon as possible,
 
 RESTLESSNESS 63 
 
 but I cannot leave till I have tried my ascent for 
 next year it might be too late as I hear there is a 
 wretch who is coming here in a few days to make the 
 same ascent. He does not know of my expedition and 
 expects and means to be the first. When in England 
 I will go and make you a short visii if you like and can 
 see any people for I hope to hear you are much 
 better with the summer. 
 
 I have received the news a few days ago of the death 
 of Mary's mother. 1 My solicitor has made sure that 
 there is no doubt of the fact. I would never wish 
 beforehand for the death of any individual, however 
 beneficial the consequences might be supposed to be 
 that one must leave to Providence, but when such 
 an event is a "fait accompli," one may be allowed to 
 feel thankful for all the good that results. . . . 
 
 To Mrs. J. H. Pollen. 
 CRABBED THREE BRIDGES, SUSSEX, 
 
 Wednesday, December 4th, 1878. 
 
 I am going up to London to-morrow by the 2.14 
 train, as I do not care to be in time for the Queen's 
 speech. I almost wish I were going to stay here, as it 
 seems so uncertain whether I shall see you, and I am 
 not really fond of all that parliamentary wrangling 
 that is to take place. I shall not think it necessary to 
 sit it all out, and do not intend to vote with either 
 side. I should like to vote for the execution of both 
 sets of place-men and place-hunters. . . . 
 
 1 Fanny Heriot, Lady Wentworth. (See end of Chapter II.) 
 * Crabbet Park, belonging to his brother-in-law, Wilfrid Blunt ; 
 he was staying there in the absence of its owners.
 
 64 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 I have not seen a newspaper since Monday and find 
 it quite as amusing to be without, though Cobden said 
 there was more to be learned from one newspaper 
 than the whole literature of Rome and Greece. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 Tuesday, December IQth, 1878. 
 Five o'clock. 
 
 I saw Murray and told him there are forty- 
 six copies 1 wanted for presentation. He said that 
 would be rather a heavy handicap and what they 
 usually do is to supply the author gratis with twelve 
 copies and any number over that at trade prices. 
 The dedication is to be without the Persian 
 characters. 
 
 Eight o'clock. (From the House of Lords.) I am 
 writing in the middle of a speech by Lord Selborne, 
 who is adroitly trying to trip up Cairns, who went 
 before. I liked some of Cairns' speech, but one part, 
 supposing that Afghanistan were in Scotland and 
 also that England were smaller and saying how 
 dangerous that would be, was neatly ridiculed by 
 R. Palmer. 2 He also gave the direct negative to 
 Cairns, who had appealed saying : "Is there one of 
 your lordships who would not (if the thing were now 
 to be done over again) grant all the Ameer asked of 
 Lord Northbrook in guarantees against Russia ? " 
 Palmer replied, " I do not believe there is one of 
 your lordships not even the noble and learned 
 lord himself who would be mad enough to grant 
 
 1 " Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates," by Lady Anne Blunt, 
 1879. 
 
 2 Earl of Selborne.
 
 RESTLESSNESS 65 
 
 him that guarantee against everything and every- 
 body for which he asked." Selborne has just called 
 the Government policy one of bullying and blunder- 
 ing and he makes it out very cleverly by making 
 the missions advance without giving the Ameer a 
 reasonable delay. 
 
 Lord Bath has spoken since, and made a violent 
 and to me (who take only a spiteful pleasure in the 
 debate) agreeable attack on Lord Salisbury for 
 using language that would be called prevarication 
 
 in private life. Now is making a dull speech 
 
 evidently learned by heart and for which he is con- 
 stantly refreshing with notes. Lord Houghton in 
 the middle of his speech impudently forced Lord 
 Campbell, who had the misfortune to be near him, 
 to go out and fetch him a glass of water after five 
 minutes he returned bringing a second glass for he 
 had then already been supplied, so there he was 
 speaking between two glasses of water on the seat 
 behind him. 
 
 Our marquis J has just got up. 
 
 Now (half-past ten) it is long over and Lord 
 
 is making an odiously tiresome harangue which he 
 has been bursting with for forty-eight hours he 
 tried once to begin before we sat down. Lord Eipon's 
 speech was very sympathetic and he made a severe 
 (nicely so) remark about Lord Beaconsfield's unscru- 
 pulous motive for the war the rectification of the 
 frontier. This nefarious scheme of spoliation he 
 refused to believe his colleagues or any English 
 gentleman could share. 
 
 1 Marquis of Kipon. Mr. Pollen was his secretary and intimate 
 friend.
 
 66 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 The wretch is still speaking amidst cries of 
 " Divide ! " but I must stop. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 CRABBET, THREE BRIDGES, SUSSEX, 
 Monday, December 16th, 1878. 
 
 I have to devote an afternoon to letter writing 
 so I will begin with you, as the easiest and most 
 agreeable then comes Anne, equally agreeable but 
 longer lastly 
 
 I hope neither Grimalkin nor Grimalcone would 
 give up my fiddles to any stranger who called and 
 asked to have them delivered. Now all the skating 
 is over and your sufferings soon I hope. . . . 
 
 Since I saw Lord Hartington's declaration on 
 Friday night that his policy would be to recall Lord 
 Lytton, I have been extra glad to have voted as I 
 did, and not been tricked into joining in a manifesta- 
 tion against one who never did me any harm, and 
 who once wrote very handsomely in vindication of 
 my claim not to be disregarded about the Byron 
 memorial. It seems to me so unfair and dishonest 
 for the opposition to have concealed until after the 
 vote in the Lords their vindictive spirit against poor 
 Lytton. I can only suppose they know an honest 
 declaration of that would cost them some votes it 
 certainly would mine if I had intended to vote with 
 them for all other reasons. . . . 
 
 I have been fiddling a good deal as it has been too 
 cold to enjoy most things. How inconceivably tire- 
 some Mozart is, trivially difficult. I tried a sonata 
 of his right through, said to be one of his most
 
 RESTLESSNESS 67 
 
 charming. What must the others be ? I must 
 begin my task. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 CRABBET, 
 Thursday, January IGth, 1879. 
 
 I have so much to say to you that I cannot 
 collect together when I sit down to write. For I 
 have passed much time in thinking, but when I try 
 to remember and repeat all the thoughts I have 
 desired you should possess yourself of, they seem to 
 vanish away from distinct expression into words 
 like a vivid dream that is lost. I will certainly 
 follow your direction as to prayer and do all i can to 
 get into the habit again. But I know almost none. I 
 have been trying to remember the only one I ever 
 knew and am not sure I have it all and in the right 
 order. But I felt as if that slight effort did me 
 some good. I must try to tell you exactly in what 
 ways the Catholic faith and visible Church attract 
 and repel me. First it attracts me as being a living 
 witness of the sovereignty of God and giving us 
 with His authority promises that we shall sometime 
 be reunited to those we have loved and shall lose by 
 death. And doubts about those two convictions, 
 so essential to my peace of mind, have ever been 
 unspeakably odious to me, though I have been so 
 little able to resist misgivings that all Christian and 
 human hopes might be in vain. I cannot help being 
 influenced by the unanimity with which the children 
 of the revolution and the modern humanitarian 
 philosopher are always roaring in my ears that there
 
 68 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 is no God, and that they are His prophets. I dis- 
 trust and dislike them as men and despise their argu- 
 ments, but one is somehow depressed and frightened 
 by their noise, numbers, recklessness and a kind of 
 diabolical earnestness they seem to have. Then on 
 the other hand I actually dislike the common run of 
 priests I do not remember meeting any I much 
 liked. Besides having thought some of them tire- 
 some, I think I naturally dislike all official and social 
 superiors people who tell you what to do or prevent 
 you from doing what you like, not by virtue of the 
 friendship you have for them and the obedience you 
 voluntarily give them, but because they think them- 
 selves set over you in consequence of something 
 entirely disconnected with your consent. 
 
 But at the present moment what has most influence 
 over my sympathies and wishes, is that the Catholic 
 religion is that of some particular human beings. 
 And but for this feeling I should hardly feel drawn 
 towards it, perhaps even the other way. I may say 
 it is personified for me in certain people. This 
 personification is both a necessity and a danger. 
 Without it I could never begin to think seriously of 
 religion at all, but I am not too much blinded by 
 personal preoccupation to comprehend that no pro- 
 gress can be made in religion unless one can come to 
 place God before everything else before every 
 human object of admiration, though I suppose it is 
 permitted that meditations should contain a constant 
 recollection of people we like and ought to like. 
 There will be my great difficulty to separate the 
 religion from the personality, and I am very doubtful 
 whether I shall ever get over it. But I will if I can.
 
 RESTLESSNESS 69 
 
 I have already told you, perhaps many times, how 
 irksome some of the details of practice of religion 
 would be, and a general confession of all I have ever 
 done I do not think I could make. I could endure it 
 better for the future however tiresome it might be, 
 for I do not mean to do anything wrong and shall 
 unhesitatingly take every precaution beforehand to 
 make opportunities impossible. I hope I should not 
 act like the young man in " Adam Bede " who rides 
 over to confess and consult the good parson. (End 
 of letter missing.) 
 
 To the same. 
 
 January 18th, 1879. 
 
 I want to give you a summary of my religious 
 impressions in youth. My grandmother told ma I had 
 never been baptised, as when I was born my father 
 and mother were Unitarians, who, I believe do not use 
 those words that are necessary for validity. My 
 grandmother disapproved of what they did, or rather 
 of what they did not do, though she did not herself 
 consider any form of words essential. But she 
 thought it was the worst way of attaching importance 
 to words to omit the recognised forms intentionally. 
 In 1853 when I was thirteen, I read Sismondi's 
 "History of the Italian Kepublics," and was so im- 
 pressed by the grandeur of the character and action 
 of the Popes from Gregory VII. to Boniface VIII. that 
 I was convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, 
 and determined to adhere to it as soon as I was my 
 own master ; and this state of mind actually lasted 
 for five years, after which it faded away from sceptical 
 influences and want of moral steadiness. I do not
 
 70 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 mean that I did anything very wicked, from that I 
 was saved both by want of opportunity and a 
 fastidious repugnance to vulgar and coarse people 
 and things. I was so much afraid of my grandmother 
 that I never dared to tell her fully and frankly my 
 convictions and intentions. She would, I am sure 
 now, have been kind about it, but I was then afraid 
 of the scorn with which she migh; reply. This 
 cowardice of mine was without excuse, for she really 
 did understand perfectly well my state of mind in 
 religion and humoured me a good deal, for she had 
 personally a very friendly feeling to Catholics and 
 the bitterest contempt for No Popery. And she 
 would not have called herself a Protestant, being 
 above all a Christian and recognising no other name. 
 When well enough she went to church, by preference 
 to the Establishment, but also anywhere else to hear 
 such men as James Martineau, Dr. Candlish and I 
 believe Wiseman. On one occasion she asked me 
 point blank : " Are you a Catholic ? " I could not 
 confess the truth, and said " No." A fatal error ! If 
 I had replied that I meant to be one and asked her 
 permission to take that step, I should probably have 
 remained one and avoided most of the folly and 
 wrongdoing of my life. This was in 1855 or 1856. 
 After denying what I believed to be the truth I 
 gradually became more interested in other things 
 than religion, forgot saying my prayers, of which 
 indeed I had never learnt to say any but the Lord's 
 prayer, thought of ever having to confess with 
 shrinking, and my mind became ripe for taking an 
 impression adverse to religion, as soon as one might 
 be presented to me. And in 1858 I read a book that
 
 RESTLESSNESS 71 
 
 Bhook to ruins my religious faith : Milman's " History 
 of Latin Christianity." The polished sarcasm with 
 which he picks out by preference, and gloats over all 
 that can be turned into ridicule in the history of the 
 Church, destroyed my reverence for that I had before 
 so much admired. I have now said a great deal too 
 much and more than I intended. Fortunately you 
 glance over things very fast. I should like to send 
 you an extract from the last Bevue about Bach's 
 music, but must keep it for another day as you have 
 in this letter perhaps more than you will read. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 LONDON, 
 
 Wednesday night or Thursday 
 morning, half-past 12, 
 
 February 13th, 1879. 
 
 I have come back from the dinner which I found 
 pleasant. Mrs. Ritchie 1 was very amiable and asked 
 about my house, which I answered her by telling 
 about the architect and you, and that I had seen you 
 both lately and told you I was hoping to meet her 
 and that you had said you were soon coming to 
 Pembridge for six weeks and hoped to see her. She 
 spoke with the proper enthusiasm about you and 
 him he is so handsome and you so beautiful and 
 other nice things. She looked radiant. Of course 
 she is not grown any prettier, though I have no doubt 
 she is nicer to look at from being so smiling and kind 
 in manner, than most people of her age. She lives 
 now in or close to Kensington Square 27, Young 
 
 1 Daughter of W. M. Thackeray.
 
 72 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Street, and I am to go and see her on Wednesday. 
 She talked about her dead sister with great affection, 
 and said with much kindness that she was pleased 
 to see me again as her sister had liked me. 
 
 Thursday, midday. I have seen the architect, who 
 has been here and is gone to his Orestes at the 
 Marquisate. We meet again at Chelsea and then go 
 together to the H. of Lords and dine there.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 
 
 THE event announced in the letter to Mrs. 
 Proude of July 31st, 1878, 1 was a momentous 
 one for Went worth. He found himself un- 
 expectedly a free man, and he could once more hope 
 to found a home and to make for himself a settled 
 life in his own country. His new house at Chelsea 
 was now progressing fast under Mr. Pollen's auspices, 
 and he naturally thought of giving it a mistress. In 
 the autumn of 1879 there occurred an episode so 
 well known at the time that I cannot omit it here 
 which was a painful recollection to him all his life 
 long. He met in a Tyrolese mountain inn an Ameri- 
 can lady, well known and distinguished as a writer, 
 and after a very few days' acquaintance they became 
 engaged. About a month later he broke off the 
 engagement. For the rashness of the initial act, and 
 for the change of feeling that forced him to reverse it, 
 he would have been ready to take the fullest blame. 
 Much must be forgiven to a man, who, having already 
 had experience of a disastrous marriage, could not 
 bring himself to build his life anew upon what rightly 
 or wrongly seemed to him an insecure foundation. 
 
 It was some months after this early in 1880 
 that he chanced to meet my mother in the house of 
 
 1 P. 63.
 
 74 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 their mutual friend, Dr. Boss. She had always been 
 known to him as a distant cousin, 1 and he was now 
 glad to renew the old ties with her and with us all. 
 We were a large family, and our beloved father, 2 so 
 brave and serene under the burden of helplessness 
 and pain, was the centre of a gay and happy crowd 
 of young people. It must have been an attractive 
 atmosphere to a man who had so few intimacies and 
 who had long suffered from being almost entirely 
 shut out from family life. It was in June, 1880, 
 that he first asked me to be his wife. But I had my 
 own reasons then for hesitating about marriage, and 
 it was not till November 15th that we became 
 engaged. During the intervening months there came 
 to me a delightful series of letters, beginning " Dear 
 Miss Stuart Wortley," and ending " Yours very 
 sincerely," from which I give the following extracts : 
 
 CHELSEA, 
 
 Tuesday, August 3rd, 1880. 
 
 I cannot leave till to-morrow or later if the debate 
 
 goes on. 3 I am so vexed at being detained that I feel 
 
 ready to vote for the execution of the authors of the 
 
 bill as well as the destruction of their work. Last 
 
 1 She and William, Earl of Lovelace, were both descended 
 from George Grenville, King George III.'s Prime Minister ; their 
 sister grandmothers being Catherine Grenville, wife of Richard, 
 Lord Braybrooke, and Hester Grenville, wife of Hugh, first Earl 
 Fortescue, members of the generation that their contemporaries 
 called " The Mighty Seven." 
 
 2 James Stuart Wortley, son of James, first Lord Wharncliffe, 
 and his wife, Lady Caroline Crichton, M.P. for Island of Bute, 
 Recorder of London and Solicitor- General. Born 1805, died 1881. 
 
 On the Irish Land Bill.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 75 
 
 night the only great statesmanlike speech was Lord 
 Lansdowne's I did not know he could be so power- 
 ful. He gave it to his former colleagues well about 
 their garbled quotations from the Code Napoleon, 
 and forcing a landlord to buy at a fancy price a 
 tenant right worth nil in the market. Lord Derby 
 at first pretended to befriend the Ministers, at which 
 they looked relieved, applauded him gratefully and 
 listened to him with eager hope. But having lured 
 them' to a false security he sprung on them like a 
 Thug, strangled them as it were with their own 
 responsibility for an unjust unstatesmanlike bill, 
 which, however amended by cutting down to a 
 quarter of its dimensions as to time, space and money, 
 could not work. The county court judges must 
 either decide unjustly against the landlords, or be 
 unpopular and insulted or worse. Were the judges 
 to believe a tenant's own statement that he could 
 not pay ? If so every decision would be in the 
 tenant's favour. It would have been better if the 
 bill had never been heard of. (Loud Tory applause.) 
 Lord Derby : " I had no doubt that sentiment would 
 be popular in this house." (Laughter in which Lord 
 D. himself joined, or at least twisted his face to a 
 grin.) But as the bill was there entirely at the 
 peril and responsibility of Ministers and could not 
 now be unmade, he should vote for it always on 
 condition of transforming it to an infinitesimal part 
 of itself in committee, " if it ever gets there." 
 
 I suppose his idea was to give them rope to hang 
 themselves with, for he could not have spoken more 
 bitterly of them if they deserved impeachment 
 (which indeed I think they do).
 
 76 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 While listening to this speech in support of them, 
 the Ministers' faces looked quite contorted with pain 
 only Lord Northbrook had a grim smile as if he 
 were not much affected by the sufferings of Gran- 
 ville, Kimberley and Argyll. 
 
 Then Salisbury spoke, saying the Government 
 were trying to appease the wild beast (whom they 
 do not seem inclined to tame) by giving him their 
 hand to devour, hoping he may be satisfied with that 
 and spare the rest of their body. But they never 
 would get rid of him till they had given him every- 
 thing they had to give. . . . 
 
 HOCHKRUMBACH (VORARLBERG), 
 
 Sunday evening, August 8ih, 1880. 
 t 
 
 I am writing in a room full of dancing peasants 
 which might seem a bore if one yielded to first 
 impulses, but when I think what you would feel 
 about it, I feel sure you would make the best of it 
 and like them to amuse themselves in a harmless 
 way. Now they have gone, but the time is not as 
 short as it looks on paper as in the meantime I have 
 had my supper of bread and milk. ... I passed 
 Schrecken on the way, but would not stop there as I 
 had heard of this place as being much higher up in 
 the mountain it is about 5,600 feet above the sea 
 at the foot of some steep peaks. There are no trees, 
 but the meadows cover the mountain sides high up 
 and are of a brilliant green never seen away from the 
 hills except on some old china. I found a nice little 
 inn with friendly people. The only visitors are two 
 affable priests waiting for a fair day to cross the 
 mountains. I think they were travelling for pleasure.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 77 
 
 They were asked to say Mass in the church here 
 which has no incumbent. 
 
 It has not rained much to-day, and I took a walk 
 from half-past one till six going to the top of the 
 Widderstein a precipitous peak 8,400 feet high. At 
 first I lost my way going to the wrong side of the 
 mountain but when I was within 700 feet of the 
 summit I was stopped by a precipice impassable by 
 me. I had to descend 1,000 feet and go round the 
 base to the other side of the Widderstein, where I 
 found a path which took me up through a cleft in the 
 crags to the top, where I saw little but masses of 
 cloud only glimpses of green valleys in the sun- 
 shine. You would have smiled to see how miserably 
 timid and awkward I was in any approach to a steep 
 place you would not have thought it necessary to 
 preach prudence, but activity. But I shall be better 
 in a day or two. It was coming down that I was 
 over-cautious going up I was all right for there was 
 no possibility of slipping. I picked a few flowers to 
 send you and I found one of these yellow flowers 
 picked ; it was under a stone in a most desolate place 
 where I should have thought no one ever passed. I 
 hope there is no spell in it that brings disaster, or if 
 there is that I may absorb it all and it may do you 
 no harm. I enjoyed the solitude of my mountain 
 walk so much. I met no one, but felt nearer to 
 those I really like you know there are not (many ?). 
 
 IMST, 
 Wednesday, August llth, 1880. 
 
 Your charming and interesting letter made me 
 very happy this morning. I am so glad you thought
 
 78 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 what I wrote worth reading to your father and that 
 it entertained him. It always seems to me that 
 those leading orators in the Lords have a double 
 nature half serious men, and very much more than 
 half comedians and the audience, not excepting me, 
 is much keener about the brilliancy of the acting and 
 dexterity of manner than about the matter. When- 
 ever a hard personal hit is made, both friends and 
 enemies instantly turn their eyes in the most unblush- 
 ing way on the victim, to see the expression of his 
 countenance. 
 
 I am so glad to think of you in the delightful place 
 you describe, seeing the last of every good sunset, and 
 all the visible traces of the labour of man, agreeable 
 ones like the embankment. The mountaineer Will 
 keep the letter and spirit of his promise and hopes 
 never to do anything displeasing to the kind friend 
 who advises him and whose justiciable he will con- 
 tinue to be as long as she will allow it. ... 
 
 I should think not only are you right about not 
 dissecting those feelings, but that all self -examinations 
 do more harm than good. My grandmother said, 
 Be thyself would be a better maxim than Know thyself. 
 But there are feelings the expression of which to some 
 other person if the person exists to whom a confidence 
 can be made is in itself a relief from them. . . . 
 
 Next morning. 
 
 Tuesday, August 10th, I started at four and came 
 here. The son of the house carried my things for me and 
 shewed me the way over the Tenne pass, at the top 
 of which he shewed me the place where five men were 
 destroyed by an avalanche. This was commemorated 
 by a cross with a rude picture and inscription, . . .
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 79 
 
 The picture is impressive in its roughness, through 
 the earnest piety with which the five men are depicted 
 on their knees gazing with solemn joy and gratitude 
 on the heavenly apparition above them of the Blessed 
 Virgin and Child. Violent and sudden death is thus 
 represented as a peculiar favour and grace. I was 
 much impressed by it. Schrecken, which I had 
 passed three days before, is a pretty tiny village 
 surrounded by pine trees and hay-fields as well as 
 steep avalanche slopes. I saw it during an outburst 
 of the sun on a rainy day and it did not look a danger- 
 ous spot. To return to the day before yesterday 
 the weather was menacing and gloomy and there was 
 one violent storm. In the descent we went into a 
 chalet to get some milk. This may have been about 
 8 o'clock. The cows were going to be let out of their 
 yard, which was very spacious a stream running 
 through the middle inches deep in mud from the 
 wet weather and the treading of the animals the 
 whole walled in by a barrier of pine branches. Every 
 cow had its number suspended from its collar. As 
 soon as the gate was opened (when the milking was 
 over) the cows descended the steep valley very fast 
 to get into the forest, where they are sheltered from 
 the wind and rain. When it is fine they go uphill. 
 Then I went into the hut to get some milk and found 
 myself in a large room with an open timber roof. On 
 one of the beams was a large figure of the Saviour on 
 the cross. At one end was a huge copper caldron 
 walled into a sort of kiln and heated from a cavity 
 below reached by going down some steps. At the 
 other end the water of the stream was brought in for 
 making the butter. I was received by three very
 
 80 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 worthy men who are employed by the commune of 
 Imst for the wages of thirty-five florins each for the 
 summer of sixteen weeks, but they have their food 
 also. And it is not so hard a life as that^of the herds- 
 men of the other cattle, that give no milk, who have 
 to be always out of doors with their beasts on the 
 high mountains in all weathers. Strange to say 
 they are never ill. It seems to suit them. My three 
 hosts examined my map with great interest. I have 
 described the chalet and cowyard perhaps too long for 
 those who have not seen it. I think you would have 
 thought it a pretty picture. I reached Imst at 
 10 o'clock. 
 
 MlTTELBERG, 
 
 Friday, August 13th, 1880. 
 
 This morning, about seven, I left Imst with a man 
 to carry my things, and have been here about half 
 an hour (it is now six). This place is at the extreme 
 upper end of the Pitz Thai, and I passed by both 
 St. Leonhard and Plangeros. Tor the first three 
 hours the weather was entirely cloudy with a fresh 
 and fragrant west wind blowing ; it was pleasant 
 enough passing through cornfields, grass and groves. 
 In one thriving village I saw this inscription over a 
 barn-door : 
 
 " Tadle du nicht mich und das meine 
 Tadle zuvor dich und das deine 
 Und wenn nicht findest zu tadeln an dir 
 Als dann kannst kommen und tadeln an mir." l 
 
 RENOVATUM EST 
 1 7 9 5." 
 
 1 " Blame thou not me and mine ; 
 Blame rather thyself and thine. 
 If thou canst find no blame in thee, 
 Then canst thou come^andjjut^blame on me."
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 81 
 
 Then the valley became narrow, and the scene was all 
 the wilder and sterner that it began to rain and the 
 clouds darkened the daylight now it is frightful, and 
 I want to-morrow to cross the mountains (glaciers, 
 I believe) to Fend but I shall be prudent, and if 
 guides do not recommend going I shall wait or find a 
 safe way. . . . 
 
 SOLDEN, 
 Sunday, August 15th, Day of 
 
 the Assumption. 
 
 As I was starting on my walk between nine and 
 ten, I was caught in the biggest procession I ever 
 saw more than 500 people with three banners and 
 five images ; the men in front ; in the centre the priests 
 under a canopy ; behind the women, some of whom 
 were laughing and gossiping; but others, especially 
 the older ones, praying earnestly almost with a look 
 of pain. They made a circuit of a mile in the fields 
 before returning to the church, and stopped about 
 four times to sing and scatter incense. Meanwhile 
 the bells were ringing and guns firing. To escape 
 from them I jumped over a stream, and found myself 
 in a quicksand where I floundered for some steps 
 before getting to firm ground. 
 
 FEND OR VENT, 
 
 Monday, August 16th. 
 
 This morning I was awakened by a cock. When- 
 ever I hear one I think of a novel of Cherbuliez, 
 " Meta Holdenis," where a dying father says to his 
 son : " The only music I ever loved is the crowing of 
 a cock, and whenever you hear it think of me and 
 what it meant to me : la vie est un combat.'" In the 
 story the chant du coq occurs very opportunely.
 
 82 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 ... I hope I need no such antidote as this against 
 any serious crisis, and on this occasion all it meant 
 was that it was time to get up. I found such a lovely 
 morning. I went into the churchyard and looked at 
 the children's graves, all in a group, which I had not 
 before seen. The subject was differently treated in 
 the paintings on the plaques in the centre of the 
 crosses. In some an angel was flying upwards with 
 the child in its arms. In others the child was in a 
 boat on an extensive tranquil sheet of water. Far 
 in the background are the child's native mountains, 
 and an angel is rowing the boat rapidly towards a 
 sunny and flowery shore. In others the angel is 
 guiding the child in a pleasure ground ; it can just 
 walk with the angel's support, and is stretching both 
 hands forward with infantile delight. There are 
 others where the angel is in charge of a whole group 
 of innocent children. In another part of the FriedhoJ, 
 in a small oratory, is a heap of skulls I think thirty 
 that is under a carving of the Crucifixion with the 
 two sorrowing Maries. I much wished you had been 
 there to see the children's graves. . . . 
 
 VENT, 
 Wednesday, August 18th. 
 
 
 
 I walked up yesterday to that hovel where a 
 kind of inn is kept the place is called (I think) die 
 hohe spitze. After sleeping miserably in a bed 5 feet 
 long, I found the weather had become so stormy that I 
 gave up the ascent and returned here. In the after- 
 noon the sun came out, and I took a scrambling walk 
 by some goat tracks, to escape from the swarm of 
 smoking Germans who pervade this place.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 88 
 
 . . . But when I get on to the mountain without 
 rain I do not think of the wretchedness of the quarters. 
 I see some flowers or ferns, or a pine tree clinging to the 
 side of a crag like a creeper, or a woodpecker working 
 away at a fir cone until he gets it off and flies to his 
 home with it, or the soft glow of the evening sun on 
 the trees, or the gradual change of colour from oxy- 
 dised silver to blood red as the last rays of the 
 vanished sun fall on a mountain mass of rock. .... 
 
 SOLDEN, 
 
 Sunday, August %%nd, 1880. 
 I have only just been to the post office and got 
 your letter. In my young days, I used sometimes, 
 when on a visit to my father, to ride to Newlands 
 Corner, Hackhurst Down, St. Martha, Albury, 1 and 
 the sand hills to the south overlooking the wood- 
 land plain of Sussex I thought all that country 
 most beautiful, and should still, I think. Wherever 
 in these mountains I come to a heathy ground it 
 takes me back to scenes I have loved in my childish 
 days. The Alps have a stern and potent fascination 
 a mixture of terror and unearthly brightness, 
 which, together with the severe and healthy exer- 
 tion of climbing, would soothe and occupy the most 
 restless and wearied spirit. But I cannot imagine 
 any one hesitating for a moment to prefer the life of 
 an English home in the lovely scenery you enjoy so 
 much to the life I lead here in rough quarters indoors, 
 and out of doors wandering partly at hazard for the 
 best part of the day. I am however contented 
 with what I can have, without regretting that I am 
 
 1 We were spending the summer in a house on Albury Heath, 
 Surrey. 
 
 62
 
 84 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 deprived of all you have. In fact, just now I am 
 better here. I am getting young and strong in this 
 savage existence my mind also, I hope, may be 
 invigorated. . . . 
 
 Now I must return to Friday, 20th, and tell you 
 what I did. I got up at one after a sleep in a room 
 with three other beds, every one occupied. At a 
 quarter to two I started with two guides for the 
 ascent of the Hohe Wilde, which is only 11,300 feet 
 high, but a harder climb than the others. For two 
 and a half hours we went by moonlight sometimes 
 obscured by dark clouds. By daylight we trod on 
 an extensive glacier, on which it took us more than 
 two hours, sometimes of a very steep ascent, to reach 
 the extreme upper end at the foot of the highest 
 peak, which was a giddy climb of three-quarters of 
 an hour remarkably steep snow slopes and rocks. 
 ... On reaching the top at 7.35, we just got into 
 an enormous black cloud, which was sweeping over 
 the peak and out of which it was snowing. In a few 
 minutes this cloud was gone bright sunshine fol- 
 lowed, and I found myself in the midst of what I 
 would call a boundless fleet of every sort and colour 
 of cloud drifting fast with the wind. In the intervals 
 between the clouds were mountains at a great dis- 
 tance, valleys half veiled in a sky-blue haze under 
 fleecy white cloudlets at my feet one of the largest 
 Alpine glaciers : the great Oetzthaler Ferner. 
 
 NEUSTIPT, 
 
 Tuesday, August 
 
 Yesterday about five I left Solden in dim 
 weather and came here over the Bildstockl Pass in a
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 85 
 
 long day of nearly thirteen hours. It is so called, I 
 suppose, from an image carved in relief of the Virgin 
 with the dead Christ on her knees and stuck on a 
 pole on some rocks at the top of the pass between 
 two glaciers, and a little lake with floating icebergs, 
 now frozen into the ice that has covered it for the 
 last three weeks' bad weather. 
 
 I went with a large party of return guides the 
 one who was roped on to me showed me with glee 
 several places on the glaciers we crossed where people 
 had fallen into crevasses and never been seen again 
 he explained they had no guides and, I believe, 
 thought it served them right. Leaving the glacier, 
 after a long steep descent I came to such a lovely 
 valley, green with hurtleberries, fern, elder, birch and 
 firs. An impetuous foaming torrent roared with ever 
 changing sound. Two fine waterfalls fell into it 
 one of prodigious height and volume had gnawed 
 everything away from the rock for a great breadth. 
 I have not quite made up my mind how much I like 
 waterfalls. Do you ? I rather want to take my 
 opinion from you. Once I did not care about them, 
 but I think I am coming round when there is much 
 mass of water and some mystery. 
 
 . . . This morning after breakfast I walked to 
 the top of the Burgstall more than 5,000 feet above 
 this village. From the top I had a beautiful glimpse 
 of the great valley of the Inn and town of Hall. I 
 met a flock of seven sheep who seemed pleased to 
 see me. They rushed up to me snorting and began 
 to lick my hands and nibble my clothes most affec- 
 tionately. They have bright eyes like wild animals 
 and have a fearless independent look about them. I
 
 86 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 got back down to the Inn after six hours' absence, 
 but not before it began to rain heavily, which I had 
 expected, for the flies had been maddening with their 
 attentions when I started. . . . 
 
 STEINACH, 
 
 Thursday, August %Qth. 
 
 I arrived here at 8.80, and at once found your 
 letter, with fern and heather from your common, 
 which made your letter still more pretty and welcome 
 for that bit of the nature that is about you. To 
 return to yesterday I found my guide was waiting 
 for me while I was waiting for him ; so I left off writing 
 and said good-bye to Neustift and walked up a wild 
 glen called the Piniser Thai, shut close in by moun- 
 tain sides clothed with dwarf fir (about the size and 
 colour of furze), topped with limestone walls and 
 steeples thousands of feet in height. I think they 
 must be dolomite from the vertical fissures and 
 variegated colour yellow, black and white. In the 
 gloomiest part the valley opened out a very little for a 
 short distance only enclosing a beautiful level grass 
 plain like a large cricket ground. In the middle 
 stood a stately house called " Auf der Isse," now 
 uninhabited and occupied for the summer months by 
 cowherds. I asked my guide why this was, but he 
 could only reply, " Es ist so! das thai wird immer 
 wilder bald hat man keine sommer mehr." Perhaps 
 there is some heredity curse. The glen is the more 
 melancholy from a dried-up river bed like those of 
 Italy and Africa. Here and there water comes out 
 of the stones and runs for a short distance to dis- 
 appear again in the bed. Before getting to my night
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 87 
 
 quarters, of course, I got the inevitable shower of 
 rain, but that I am now used to. Before me, at the 
 head of the glen, was the Habicht, 1 a dark pyramid 
 of grassy precipices capped with snow. At the foot 
 is the Kar alp and there in the cowherds' house I 
 passed the night. Besides three Italian masons 
 building a new stable, there were five of them three 
 old men, one middle-aged and a boy, who supped 
 out of one huge bowl of porridge, each dipping his 
 spoon into the part reserved to him by an imaginary 
 line. Here the cows were stabled for the night 
 unlike what I described near Imst. 
 
 . . . This morning at half-past four we started for 
 the ascent of the Hawk. When about halfway up 
 we found footprints, which my guide Pfurtscheller 
 declared were of that morning and of several persons, 
 and from their not always following the right path, 
 he discovered, with the perspicacity of hate, that they 
 had no guide. Lastly, three-quarters of an hour from 
 the summit we came upon the enemy, who had started 
 long before us from the alp of Gschnitz on the other 
 side ; and when they reached the snow near the top 
 dared not to venture on it, and being unwilling to 
 give up, were sitting rather uncomfortably in the rain 
 for it had begun to drizzle. I forgot to say that the 
 sunrise was gorgeous as a fiery illumination only, 
 after lighting the Hawk crimson, the sun was drowned 
 by impenetrable banks of inky clouds. We passed 
 the enemy, rapidly crossed the small glacier and 
 stood on the summit at eight. Then they picked up 
 courage to follow us. They had no guide and con- 
 sisted of four persons one a dowdy and untidy 
 
 i Hawk.
 
 88 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 woman. They tried to question my guide about 
 getting down on the other side, but he only told 
 them : " Das rathe ich Ihnen nicht ohne fuhrer es 
 ist verflucht steil." 1 Soon after we trod the snowy 
 summit, it began to snow very thick, but without 
 wind it looked like a real snow-storm in a ballet in 
 the Voyage a la Lune, called " Les Flocons de Neige." 
 But instead of the ballerine more or less draped in pink 
 or blue, there was the sylphide of Hall and her three 
 companions. It was very pretty to see black moun- 
 tains through a cloud of countless millions of dropping 
 flakes. And a long way off through this same veil I 
 saw the town of Steinach in the sunshine. 
 
 We left the four " vagabonds " (as I suppose 
 Pfurtscheller meant when he said they were schleifer) 
 at the top, and went down the way we had come 
 as far as the Piniser Joch, where we separated, he to 
 return to Neustift, I to go down a steep and long 
 declivity to Gschnitz. 
 
 HINTEEDUX, 
 
 Monday, August 3Qih. 
 
 Before going to bed I must write the history of 
 another day. This morning when I asked for the 
 man to carry my things I was shown a drunken- 
 looking asthmatic old man. After some hesitation, 
 however, I engaged him and left Steinach. On the 
 way I saw a curious sign to an inn, " Zum Wolf," 
 and there was a model of a wolf with a lamb in its 
 mouth. After passing St. Jodoc I found my old 
 wretch was going very slow and breathing hard, and 
 at Schmirn, where I stopped to have lunch, he pro- 
 
 1 " I advise you not to try it without a guide. It is cursed 
 steep."
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 89 
 
 posed that I should take on instead of him a younger 
 and strong man he had found. I agreed. At first 
 the old creature wanted to be paid three florins 
 (having only come two hours), his substitute receiving 
 only two florins for relieving him of the remaining 
 five and most difficult hours, but the new man cried 
 out against this, and finally I paid off the old boy 
 with two and a half florins, the other two and a half 
 florins coming to the one who did more than two- 
 thirds of his work for him. At twelve we left the 
 old reprobate at the inn at Schmirn, my new man 
 assuring me he would never stir thence till he had 
 spent all the money he got on schnapps. The porter 
 No. 2 turned out very well was cheerful and active. 
 I stopped at Kasern, an elevated hamlet nestled 
 among precipitous grass-grown mountains every bit 
 of which is mown for hay every third year. . . . 
 
 GlNZLING, 
 
 Tuesday, August 31st. 
 
 I got up at half -past four and saw a blazing dawn. 
 By a quarter-past five I got off and went down the 
 Dux valley with the Frozen Wall behind brightening 
 this charming valley for a long way down. I was 
 constantly turning round to look at its abrupt ice fall 
 and spotless upper snow. The hamlet of Hinterdux, 
 though separated from it by the laborious mountain 
 pass I came over yesterday, belongs to the commune 
 of Schmirn and till a few years ago every corpse had 
 to be carried there five weary hours, difficult and 
 dangerous in winter to ba buried, the men of toil 
 often falling up to their necks in snow during the long 
 ascent. Before I came across the frontier of Steinach 
 and the Zillerthal I passed a mighty venerable fir on
 
 90 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 to which an imposing crucifix and holy group are 
 fastened, and half-a-dozen pictures of those who have 
 perished on that spot by the fall of trees or avalanches, 
 for it is much swept by them in winter. One 
 picture represents two men crushed under an 
 avalanche above in the sky is the holy sign. They 
 were hunting chamois in the heights above (Death 
 having, I suppose, disguised himself as their game to 
 allure them to a frightful end), when they and the 
 chamois were all swept down a vast distance to the 
 spot where they were found. My informant added 
 sometimes men live for days buried under the snow of 
 the avalanche, and when dug out have been found to 
 have eaten the fingers off their hands for hunger. 
 This last I doubt. 
 
 I only went as far as a sharp promontory 3,600 feet 
 above Ginzling overlooking the valley from Mayr- 
 hofen to its head. To the south I saw a stony peak 
 which attracted me, and I find it is the Loftier, so I 
 am going to ascend it to-morrow if fine, with guides. 
 
 Thursday, September 2nd. 
 
 The ascent has failed a thing I have always par- 
 ticularly disliked. The sight of a peak one has been 
 unable to conquer is painful ; but now that I can 
 write to you, no ordinary disappointment can weigh 
 on my mind. I had rather all the Alps perished 
 than be deprived of telling you all I do. . . .
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ALPINE LETTERS (continued) 
 
 BEUCK, 
 Monday, September ftih, 1880. 
 
 
 
 I am so glad that you can endure reading my 
 letters most people would only see their defects, 
 but you see that I do my best to make clear to you 
 the chief impressions my journey makes upon me. 
 I could not write all I do to you to any one else, for 
 with you I feel secure from ridicule. As you think 
 I am more likely to violate truth by understating 
 Alpine dangers, I will try to be on my guard, both in 
 avoiding the reality and in making a clean breast of 
 it to you, if there were cause. I do not think I have 
 been in real or imaginary danger so much as twelve 
 times in my life the last time more than three years 
 ago, ascending some snow on the Grand Paradis 
 which the guide said was dangerously likely to break 
 into an avalanche. Once four years ago I think I 
 was in considerable peril coming down the Breche de 
 la Meidje. I thought I would slide down some 
 steep snow. Being tired and unwell, I lost my foot- 
 ing and shot forwards towards the crags below, when 
 happily I got my ice pickaxe stuck into the snow 
 and stopped myself. Since then I have never tried 
 a critical glissade.
 
 92 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 The present Government is a hardening process 
 for the country, but I am afraid they are more likely 
 to kill than to cure. . . . 
 
 ... If the fatigue of the summer and autumn 
 session were to send the whole crew to their last 
 account I should not mourn, but I suppose there are 
 plenty more to take their places. After all, I care 
 little for politics, as I have long made up my mind 
 the human race are not preparing a happy future 
 for themselves, and I do not think the maladie du 
 sidcle or Zeitgeist is confined to one class or party. 
 They all seem to me to want to get as much enjoyment 
 as they can out of life without earning or deserving 
 it. Quite a mistake, of course, to suppose that 
 possible, but a mistake that has led to much destruc- 
 tion and wrong, and will lead to worse than we have 
 yet seen. I wish a change might come over the spirit 
 of mankind that would falsify my anticipation. . . . 
 
 Thursday, September 9ih. 
 
 * 
 
 I think I have come to like waterfalls very well 
 now because all running water is so agreeable. But 
 a great waterfall seems to me like the death of the 
 stream the continuity of which is interrupted ; and 
 when the scattered spray is gathered together again 
 into another channel I can hardly think of it as the 
 same torrent. As a human existence free from violent 
 adventures seems to me more beautiful than a series 
 of shocks, errors, passions and catastrophes, so I 
 prefer a happy-looking stream, always active, never 
 dangerous.^. What does one so much good in nature 
 is not the exceptional but the familiar. One con- 
 stantly finds new interests and beauties in the
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 98 
 
 commonest productions. Perhaps the reason I love 
 the Alps so well is that there is nothing strange or 
 exceptional in them to me. Most of what I see I 
 have seen a thousand times before. I know the 
 plants, animals, earth, stones, and glaciers better 
 than those of England. Nature is the fairy story and 
 we the children that like it better every time it 
 is repeated. I daresay I should like English country 
 life as well when I knew it in the freedom of a home 
 of my own. But certainly this country has the 
 advantage of less cultivation nature seems more 
 wealthy. Talking of streams, I remember a pretty 
 little stream at Albury a rare thing in the south 
 of England. But now perhaps it has dried up from 
 drainage. . . . 
 
 As I write I see three pigs trespassing in a field, 
 and a dog enjoying a little too much his occupation 
 of driving them out. The pigs are shrieking pite- 
 ously, and the big bully is the most frightened of the 
 three, not for a moment showing his teeth as he 
 does to his little kinsmen. He is running so fast 
 that the latter only are exposed to the teeth of the 
 dog. . . . 
 
 FORLEITEN, 
 
 Sunday, September IZih, 1880. 
 
 September llih. The return of beautiful weather 
 somehow reminds me of all I like, and it comes 
 more naturally to think of you in connection 
 with all the curious and charming things I wander 
 among I think how you would like this or be 
 interested by that. On the other hand, when all is 
 darkened by dense rain I can only think of you to
 
 94 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 be glad you are not in such a deluge, and to fear 
 that what I write to you will be infected with the 
 dulness of all I have round me. The natives do 
 not seem depressed by bad weather. I heard yester- 
 day constant peals of laughter from the peasants 
 assembled in one of the rooms of the inn. Their 
 joviality was interrupted by a fight between two big 
 dogs under the table which was more for show than 
 d entrance. It was as if each one meant to say : 
 " Let some one seize hold of me, or I shall kill the 
 other dog." But no one seemed inclined to go 
 within reach of their teeth. However, the enraged 
 creatures let themselves be knocked asunder very 
 easily with the end of a bench. . . . 
 
 HEILIGEN BLU*, 
 
 September IQth. 
 
 I sent you the heartsease for its name as much as 
 because I liked it. All flowers may represent to us 
 the heartsease one craves for after contemplating the 
 miseries of the civil war always continuing among 
 the human race that conflict for life in which all of 
 us have been wounded. Just as flowers brighten the 
 conflict with nature that is so arduous and so violent 
 in these mountains, so I suppose kindness cheers and 
 distracts from the perils and sufferings of the heart 
 and mind. If the world is a riddle, it is one with a 
 heavy penalty sometimes death inflicted on those 
 who guess wrong. I am not at all sure I can solve 
 it so far as concerns me. I am inclined to think all 
 those of us who have the certainty of bread to eat, 
 clothes to wear, freedom to choose our own occupa- 
 tions, and health, fortunate whatever their mental 
 sufferings, because I imagine all grief to be curable
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 95 
 
 however acute, while the ordinary sufferings of 
 poverty and illness are incurable. But while it lasts 
 the pain of the mind is worse than everything 
 else. . . . May the heartsease be yours in every 
 sense ! 
 
 . . . Would you believe it or rather the thing 
 passes belief that the inhabitants of that steep 
 mountain slope have in addition to their hardships 
 and dangers begun a lawsuit against the prince ? 
 They complain that his chamois eat their corn. This 
 may be so, and if they had gone amicably to him and 
 stated their grievance, he would have granted them 
 fair compensation ; but instead they have fallen 
 into the hands of a lawyer and at his instigation 
 made exaggerated claims which the prince resists. 
 All the rest of their severe life would seem to me 
 endurable enough ; but to plunge into the intrigues 
 of cities in addition to the natural difficulties of their 
 lot looks like infatuation. 
 
 I was only once in Lady Georgiana Fullerton's * 
 company, and do not much remember her appearance, 
 only that I liked her conversation, which reminded 
 me a little of Lady Theresa Lewis Lady G. F.'s 
 and Lord Granville's grandmother, the celebrated 
 Duchess of Devonshire, was much more beautiful 
 than one would expect his ancestress to be. Did not 
 Talleyrand say to a man who boasted of his mother's 
 beauty : " C etait done monsieur votre p&re qui ri etait 
 pas si bien " ? a similar figure of insult to the reply 
 made by a man to the owner of an extensive park and 
 grounds who was showing his friend all the improve- 
 ments he had made. " I planted this. I made that 
 
 1 Author of " Ellen Middleton," etc.
 
 96 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 pond. I raised that mound," etc. The friend, who 
 was, I suppose, rather bored at not being let off an 
 
 inch of it, exclaimed : " What a ugly place it 
 
 must have been before ! " 
 
 I am rathar unhappy at the thought of the tramps 
 who infest your neighbourhood. I hope you do not 
 go out by yourself. . . . 
 
 STUDHUTTE, 
 1,500 metres above Kals, 
 
 Sunday, September 19ih. 
 
 After dinner, though many of those ragged clouds 
 so characteristic of a west wind had been driven 
 Heaven knows whence, to blot the sky before so 
 serene, I decided to come up here and take my 
 chance for the ascent of the Gross Glockner to- 
 morrow. I started at half-past two and had to 
 retrace my steps of yesterday as far as the toy 
 church, and more ; then through a green valley 
 enclosed by heights crowned with forbidding faces 
 of rock. Much of the rock which I passed is olive 
 green I think it is called chlorite in texture it is 
 as a slaty granite. Between 8,000 and 9,000 feet 
 I left the last grass for debris of chlorite which guides 
 into soft, firm green earth, nice to tread. But the 
 path was at the last marred by the fresh snow, cold 
 and damp, some of which I could not escape though 
 I made a round, and was as unwilling as a cat to get 
 my feet wet, having no change. However, I am now 
 warming myself at a small fire, and my boots are 
 hanging above. Since I began to write I have eaten 
 a capital soup my guides cooked out of butter, a 
 little flour, bread, water and salt. They are now 
 smoking and talking about their professional work.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 97 
 
 Outside I am sorry to say there is thick mist. No 
 sooner had I started than the clouds not at all to 
 my surprise multiplied and thickened and blackened. 
 It was as if Eenan's " puissance rusee qui nous 
 exploite " had a crafty satisfaction in spoiling my 
 expedition as soon as I was committed to it. In 
 vain had I taken an umbrella with me in propitiation 
 of any such malignant influence. The blue sky 
 became scanty and disappeared under the devouring 
 grey. Before the fire was lit in the hovel here, it 
 was so cold that one's breath made dense clouds. 
 Now it only makes light clouds. The hovel is well 
 built and supplied with cooking things and warm 
 wraps. It is named after its founder one Stiidl, 
 who built it at his own cost to help tourists in this 
 ascent. One of my guides (when he does not speak) 
 looks as distinguished as a diplomatist or official of 
 the old school, but when he opens his mouth with 
 patois it spoils the illusion. Good night. 
 
 WINDISOH MATRBI, 
 Wednesday, September %Znd. 
 On Monday, September 20th, on looking out of 
 doors at three in the morning I found it had snowed 
 all night and was still snowing ; so I returned to sleep 
 till daylight, if I may so call the painful dazzling of 
 the new snow which glared out of all the covering 
 dimness. But I waited till nearly ten reading 
 Lucretius, who consoles his reader for all the ills of 
 existence by saying death is the term of them all. As 
 long as men were a prey to the terror of the gods and 
 of Tartarus they were driven to commit great crimes 
 to obtain their favour ; x but an illustrious Greek 
 
 1 As Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, 
 i. 7
 
 98 
 
 (meaning I suppose Epicurus) had discovered the 
 ultimate secret of the universe ; viz., that nothing 
 could be created out of nothing, and that nature 
 flourished without the gods, who are not what a fond 
 people once were told. Have we not heard something 
 like this in our time ? only not adorned by the 
 poetical talent of the great Roman. 
 
 ... At last I gave up all hope of the weather 
 and turned away from the Gross Glockner and 
 returned to Kals. . . . 
 
 I am glad that you understand the influence 
 Doudan has had on me. One thing I like about him 
 is that he is not specially French, though he cer- 
 tainly writes his language so beautifully but I feel 
 the charm is still more in the individual and the 
 thoughts than the grammar. His style would have 
 been equally good in English or German though, 
 of course, once written in French, a great deal is 
 untranslatable it would have been differently turned 
 in a different idiom. 
 
 . . . They would be wretches if they were not 
 charmed with your sister 1 and did not think them- 
 selves fortunate to win such a relation but, though 
 they are only doing their bounden duty, there is 
 much merit in that in a world where so often the 
 clearest obligations are neglected. The highest 
 affections are implied by the word duty rightly 
 understood as Cordelia felt to her father. Doudan 
 I think says a thanksgiving to the effect : " Per- 
 mettez-moi de vous dire que vous ne faites que wire, 
 devoir " would sound meagre and yet is it not 
 
 1 Caroline, engaged to Norman Grosvenor, son of Lord and 
 Lady Ebury.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 99 
 
 sometimes more difficult to do a strict duty that 
 everyone expects from you and of course feels 
 no gratitude for than to astonish them with 
 unexpected magnanimity which brings them to 
 their knees. . . . 
 
 LlENZ, 
 
 Friday, September 24th, 1880. 
 
 Yesterday I only left Windisch Matrei at 
 half-past twelve. ... It is a peculiarity of the 
 enjoyment of mountain scenery that one soon 
 wishes to get rid of the particular mountain barrier 
 that one has before one. 
 
 The post carriage was a common open carriage 
 with a canopy on iron supports. As far as Huben I 
 was alone, for the only other traveller was a pedlar, 
 who sat on the box by the driver. I could make 
 out they were talking of how well off the inhabitants 
 of the houses and farms high up on the mountains 
 were in summer when they could keep their cows 
 with them all the time, but on the other hand how 
 hard it was for them in winter shut up by snow and 
 the danger of avalanches. . . . 
 
 " Jesus Maria das war ihr letzes Wort 
 Die Lahn da nimmt sie grimmig fort," 
 
 as is said in one of the inscriptions about accidents. 
 ... At Lienz I found a good-sized town and large 
 though old-fashioned hotel. The wall of my room 
 is 4 feet thick which makes it very dark as there 
 is only one window on to a little strip of flower and 
 vegetable garden and orchard maize fields beyond 
 and of course the obligatory mountain. . . . 
 
 72
 
 100 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 KOTSCHAOH, 
 
 Saturday, September %5ih. 
 
 * * 
 
 This large village is pretty but defective in 
 paths of egress one is choked by fences and gardens 
 for some minutes. I like a good village green with 
 a fine old lime tree (according to old German custom 
 and often to be seen hereabouts) and paths radiating 
 thence in every direction. Lienz also is rather difficult 
 to get out of between its two rivers and railways. It 
 is a curious thing to come upon a vast station at the 
 foot of so many wild mountains. I do not object. 
 Once 3,000 feet arbove it and the sight far below one 
 moves one as little as the thought of any railway 
 100 miles off would. . . . 
 
 I am going to a still colder place so I hope to get 
 fires at least, which will make the evenings cheerful. 
 As the time in the day during which one can enjoy 
 oneself out of doors becomes shorter, I look forward 
 more to the occupations of winter with bright fires 
 and good lighting and I am already making good 
 resolutions for the arrangement of time. For the 
 first time in my life for more than twenty years I 
 expect to spend the dark months in a comfortable 
 home where I shall be quite free to have no waste of 
 time and at least I hope to accomplish one thing, 
 that the days should seem too short for all I want to 
 do. But I have still four weeks more of banishment 
 in the beautiful world of nature, and then how 
 gladly should I leave it for ever if it were the last 
 time I should have to pass so long a time where you 
 are not. . . .
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 101 
 
 PLBOKEN, 
 Tuesday, September 28&, 1880. 
 
 
 
 I went up to the Italian frontier which is 
 hardly half-an-hour from here. The pass is a narrow 
 cleft between two walls of rock there were several 
 Italian customs guards lounging on the grass looking 
 out for people with merchandise. They have a 
 miserable hovel to sleep in by turns. . . . 
 
 I sent for a guide for the Kellerwand, but as he did 
 not appear I walked by myself up the Pollineck, only 
 about 1,130 metres above here where one is about 
 1,200 metres over the Adriatic. A thick hoar frost 
 covered the ground at eight when I started, but the 
 sun shone bright and warmed me up I passed a 
 deserted alp where some horses were grazing in happy 
 freedom, but except some sheep which I heard but 
 did not see I saw no more of domestic animals or 
 man till I descended again to the valley. The aban- 
 donment of the mountains is here the sign that the 
 happy summer time is gone. My way was mostly up 
 open grass sides and ridges so I constantly had views 
 of ever-increasing extent and interest. Two thou- 
 sand feet above Plecken I began to see over the 
 frontier mountains the Venetian highland province 
 of Carnia, then, through a wide gap in the mountains, 
 the hilly country about Gemma where the Taglia- 
 mento bursts into the plain further the vast level 
 plain of Udine bounded in the extreme distance 
 (eighty miles off) by the white line of the lagoons of 
 Aquileja beyond which I saw the dark open sea 
 losing itself in an unseizable horizon. ... I then 
 advanced for a little way in doubt whether a bare
 
 102 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 limestone peak to the left or a grassy one to the right 
 was the Polineck, but on reaching the col between 
 them and looking thence straight down upon Menthan 
 and Kotschach I saw from the position that the bare 
 stony peak to the left was my mountain. As I 
 ascended its steep slope of loose stones with a faint 
 track here and there I soon left the grassy mountain 
 to the right below me and got in no very long time to 
 the summit whence I had a remarkable and beauti- 
 ful view. A much more extensive stretch of the 
 Mediterranean sea was visible. To the left was the 
 Gulf of Triest with the straight low line of the cliffs 
 of Istria beyond 100 miles off I should think. The 
 sea had now caught the sun and shone with pearly 
 lustre (seemingly calm as a mill pond but at that 
 distance who can tell) as far as a clear cut horizon 
 at a distance I cannot estimate more than 100 
 miles, but how much ? Between the sea and land 
 was the double strip of littoral and lagoon. North- 
 west I saw various glaciers I supposed to be in the 
 Oetz Thai, Rainthal and the Venediger. The 
 Glockner chain was wrapped in a formidable mass 
 of vapour. 
 
 September %9ih. 
 
 The afternoon was advancing when I got out and 
 went westwards up a valley. I passed near some 
 people making bonfires at the edge of the forest, 
 for what purpose I don't know. One woman among 
 them sang some of those quaint peasant melodies 
 one hears out of doors so much in Italy ; they are of 
 few notes like Oriental melodies. This woman sang 
 in shouting tones so as to be heard across the valley 
 it had a good effect. The valley was like a prison
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 108 
 
 so locked in by forbidding precipices south the 
 inaccessible cliffs of the Kellerwand crowned by 
 steeples and scarred by caverns and clefts. 
 
 September 80$. 
 
 I saw the fires lit yesterday and still kept up by the 
 people of the Valentine Alp who had been all night 
 with their illumination. That alp is let to Italians. 
 It seems the bonfires were for Michaelmas day which 
 was yesterday that is more poetical than turning 
 it into St. Goose, though one need not have pre- 
 vented the other if they had had the creature of whom 
 I once heard Browning quote these lines : 
 
 " Of aU the British volatiles 
 The goose must be preferred 
 There is so much of nutriment 
 In that unthinking bird." . . . 
 
 Friday, October 1st. 
 
 I have scaled the Kellerwand. . . . We reached 
 the top of the Kollinkofel at nine and I stopped for 
 an hour for breakfast and then had a hard climb of 
 two hours down and up ravines, over steeples, and 
 round walls, to the highest point of the Kellerwand 
 330 feet higher than the Kollinkofel and 9,000 above 
 the sea. I got the most lovely view I have had this 
 year extending from the Hohe Wilde to Croatia, 
 the frontiers of upper Austria to the sea which was 
 however very faint and hazy. The sun was hot and 
 not a breath of wind the colouring of the countless 
 chains of peaks one behind the other beautiful as 
 fairyland. I staid an hour gazing at the little bit of 
 the world round me that seemed so vast, and returned 
 the same way to the Kollinkofel, which had been the
 
 104 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 prelude to the last difficult adventure for this year. 
 As we slowly and carefully descended its turf steps 
 we saw a lammergeier some distance below. Its 
 great size was made apparent by the great quickness 
 of its advance without seeming to go fast. On 
 approaching the Italian alp at the foot I saw their 
 cows clambering like goats in dangerous and difficult 
 places. A good-looking boy of resolute mien was 
 running about with the agility of a dog to bring them 
 under their sheds for the night, shouting and singing. 
 The hut and sheds were built touching the bottom 
 of one of the precipices enclosing the little alp the 
 rock served as one of their walls. The boy hit the 
 refractory or quarrelsome cows unmercifully with his 
 stick, which caused immediate obedience. They 
 leave the mountain in three days. As the sun was 
 setting I did not stop for the gathering in of the herd, 
 pretty as it was. 
 
 HEBMAGOE, 
 
 Sunday evening, October 3rd, 1880. 
 Here I got your letter, but I could not write at 
 once not being yet able to collect myself. I know 
 these wounds are curable, but I can hardly hope ever 
 to be cured for a reason which perhaps alone would 
 make it undesirable for you to associate your life 
 with mine I am too friendless, so we are not on 
 equal terms consequently I have none of those dis- 
 tractions to expect which in ordinary cases may 
 obliterate the acutest sickness and sadness of heart. 
 Least of all could such a sham as the pitiable cure of 
 " the grapes are sour." I might repeat the loss was 
 not great as long as you like, but I should none the 
 less continue to feel that it was.
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 105 
 
 " Und wiissten sie mein wehe 
 Die goldnen sternelein. 
 Sie kamen aus ihrer hohe 
 Und sprachen trost mir ein." 
 
 This morning it was cold and cloudy and I think 
 the Indian summer of last week is nearly over. In 
 the afternoon, however, the sun was warm. I 
 walked at haphazard, and was saddened still more 
 on starting, by some cruel men shooting a squirrel on 
 a tree close to the churchyard. The poor little thing 
 fell whining piteously. . . . 
 
 BLEIBERG, 
 
 Tuesday, October 5th. 
 . . . 
 
 When I came in to supper the landlord came and 
 talked to me. He was born in the Italian valley just 
 south of Plecken and left it barefoot when ten. 
 Now he is the proprietor of plenty of land and forest 
 at Hermagor and a large thriving inn, is married and 
 has two grown-up sons who occupy themselves with 
 agriculture, sporting, and the post and telegraph 
 office. He introduced silkworms with great success 
 till the disease came, and has tried and is trying all 
 the different sorts of maize to find which is the best. 
 He is fond of flowers and cultivates in his garden 
 some rare alpine plants, which he takes care in winter 
 to cover well with snow and ice. He gave me a 
 specimen of a flower found last year in an almost 
 inaccessible place and a species never before dis- 
 covered. He told me the Latin name which has been 
 given to it but I have already forgotten it. I did not 
 tell him who the botanist was to whom I meant to 
 send it. He also told me much about the animals
 
 106 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 small dangerous hill-vipers which every year kill 
 some barefooted children getting berries large 
 harmless marsh snakes 10 feet long which eat frogs 
 and catch them by drawing them in with their 
 breath. It seems some people eat these snakes and 
 think them delicate. Then there are lammergeiers, 
 powerful enough to knock a man down with the 
 wind from their wings, 7 feet in span. Last 
 year there was a visit from a wolf coming from 
 Carniola. After killing many foals of a precious 
 breed, and wandering about great distances ravaging 
 everywhere, he was hunted down with great difficulty 
 by hundreds of people. He was so hard pressed he 
 went many days without food and carried various 
 bullets about in him before receiving the final 
 wound. 
 
 TARVIS, 
 Thursday morning, October 1th. 
 
 On Tuesday I left Hermagor by the one-horse post 
 chaise a little before six on a cloudy autumn morn- 
 ing. The villages I passed were no longer German 
 but Slovene, a language spoken also in Carniola and 
 southern Styria, and most resembling I believe 
 Servian and Croatian. 
 
 Everywhere the maize harvest was going on, and 
 the barns full of piles of ears which people were pick- 
 ing out of the husk to hang up on their balconies. A 
 funny little pig watched his opportunity and prowled 
 into the open door of a barn to steal some, but was 
 soon whipped out. He tried to linger about but was 
 quickly driven out of sight. Before long the road 
 entered a hideous gorge full of mining works, and 
 defaced by enormous mounds of refuse covering the
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 107 
 
 mountains. A high wind rose and clouds of dust 
 rushed past. At half-past eleven I reached the inn 
 of Bleiberg. The weather was so unpromising for 
 the next day, that after waiting for some coffee I 
 set off at one for the Dobratsch up an abrupt deso- 
 late gorge down which two years ago came an ava- 
 lanche that destroyed many houses and people. 
 Some wooden houses were carried by the avalanche 
 wind bodily for some distance ; others were turned 
 upside down, many only knocked over sideways. 
 Various people were killed by curious accidents. A 
 woman's arm was caught in the stove and consumed. 
 When I arrived at the summit I found I had ascended 
 from Bleiberg 1,250 metres. ... I went down by 
 the principal path not narrow and straight like the 
 one I came up. For half the way down I had a wide 
 and distant view as far as Styria and immediately 
 below me the pretty-looking town of Villach near the 
 confluence of the Drave and Gail. As I wandered 
 rather sadly down from the Alp to the forest, I 
 seemed to myself to be on the broad road that leads 
 to ruin if not already arrived at that destination. 
 It was as if after undertaking a desperate climb a 
 stone on which I hung gave way and I must drop 
 down the abyss. But presently I was inspired with 
 a better thought than those to try and have faith 
 that we shall all meet again purified and delivered 
 from earthly miseries and mistakes. After the 
 alternate hot and cold fits of feverish dread of the 
 last three days, I felt I could be rather quieter if I 
 did not turn away from the hope that we might be 
 friends in a heavenly sense even if a time comes when 
 we may meet no more on earth. That very morning
 
 108 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 on the way from Hermagor to Notsch I had read an 
 inscription on a roadside chapel : 
 
 " Wer Gottes Wege geht 
 Der ist mit sich selbst in Frieden 
 Und hat der Himmel schon 
 In seiner Brust hienieden," 1 
 
 and been struck by its being placed there as a lesson 
 or consolation for any troubled spirit that passed 
 that way. It will be very hard sometimes, but if I 
 do lose all I care about on earth, I will try and not 
 lose hope and strength. 
 
 I got back to Bleiberg at a quarter to five. The 
 landlady would not at first believe I had been to the 
 top she said I could not have returned so soon. . . . 
 
 FLITSCH, 
 Saturday evening, October 9th. 
 
 I crossed the river Koritenza close to its con- 
 fluence with the Isouzo where the two together make 
 a delightful peninsula joined to the mainland by an 
 isthmus so narrow there is only just room to pass. 
 On the peninsula there is a grass field ending on all 
 sides with little cliffs. The Koritenza takes its name 
 from the Slavonic word Korito, meaning trough or 
 gorge. Having crossed it on a primitive plank 
 bridge, I walked up the trough of the Isouzo till I 
 found a bridge, which I crossed, and went up a strong 
 couloir where I was pelted, I believe unintentionally, 
 with some big stones by the goats above. I got into 
 
 1 " He who walks in God's way 
 Is with himself at peace 
 And hath already Heaven 
 In his own breast."
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 109 
 
 a beech wood stretching many miles without a break. 
 For a long way I was in the half daylight of these 
 trees getting hardly a glimpse of view through their 
 foliage. But at last I arrived at the sharp top of the 
 Jauerscik (Jauer means squirrel in Slavonic) which 
 is grass and rock with only a few beech shrubs. A 
 scirocco gale was blowing and had veiled all the sky 
 and most of the mountains with dim clouds now 
 and then there was a short flood of sunshine. I was 
 glad to get into the shelter of the dark melancholy 
 wood which I thought so tiresome before. The 
 Jauerscik is 5,000 feet above the sea Flitsch being 
 1,500. 
 
 The people here speak a Slovene patois which the 
 Slavonic purists are trying to free from the numerous 
 German and Italian words it contains only the 
 newly-invented Slavonic words such as dimnik for 
 chimney instead of rauchjang and mesec for moon 
 instead of luna are not yet well understood by the 
 people. When for the first time a priest preached 
 in new Slavonic from the pulpit instead of the dialect 
 they talked, none of them understood what he was 
 saying. 
 
 FLITSCH, 
 
 Monday, October llth, 1880. 
 
 This morning I came into a beech wood so 
 thick that with the gloomy weather I climbed 
 higher and higher without seeing where I was going 
 and when I came out of the trees I found myself on 
 a narrow band of turf with precipices both above and 
 below. Underneath was a forest and alp called 
 Karnica. The wall of rock above was the side of the 
 Plesjuc (the word means ballroom there is a plateau
 
 110 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 at the top). I found it would be difficult to advance 
 further so I went down again some distance and then 
 crossed sideways till I got to a labyrinth of forest 
 and crags where I began to feel at a loss what to do. 
 Just then I heard a human voice shouting and sing- 
 ing to a flock of sheep and presently I saw a girl 
 driving her flock on the edge of a precipice above me. 
 She brought them down it by some ledges and clefts 
 I had not discovered but now at once took advantage 
 of, and after some more groping in the forest I got 
 to the huts of the sheep-alp Goricica and under the 
 Veliki Verk or great peak. Goricica is the diminutive 
 of gora mountain, and means a very little mountain. 
 Verk means summit. . . . 
 
 Thursday, October 14th. 
 
 I have been walking most of the day with glorious 
 weather in the high places of the hills. . . . From 
 the huts of Goricica already above the forest I 
 traversed the long side of the Veliki Verk close under- 
 neath though separated by a vertical height of five 
 furlongs and I went towards the still higher peak 
 of the Eombon (said to be a name given it in 
 Napoleon's wars) as I ascended it I began to see the 
 plain of Friuli as blue as the boundless sea beyond 
 it from which it was parted by the thin line of white 
 lagoons. To the left was the silvery gulph of Triest 
 and Istrian coast beyond. Higher I saw the Taglia- 
 mento and its mouth, the great swamp east of it, the 
 town of Grado distinct but small as a speck on an 
 island between the lagoons and the sea, and the delta 
 of the Isouzo. As the sun shifted westward over the 
 Adriatic, so the brightness on the waters followed it 
 from the side of Triest over towards Venice. The
 
 ALPINE LETTERS 111 
 
 summit of Bombon was white with new snow, which 
 I was glad to eat. 
 
 SAOILE, 
 
 Sunday, October 17 'ih. 
 
 On Friday the 15th I left Flitsch. The landlady 
 of that place and her son drove with me as far as 
 Cividale on their way to visit her brother somewhere 
 near Cormons. . . . The road was both pretty and 
 hilly down the valley to Caporetto (or Karfreit) and 
 at every steep descent the good woman exclaimed to 
 her son who drove " pocasso " (slowly) saying she 
 drove so seldom she was nervous. She told me not a 
 year passed without four or five violent deaths among 
 the shepherds and woodcutters and haymakers who 
 pass all their lives among the steeps and precipices. 
 If they see a good patch of grass however dangerous 
 of access and difficult to cut when there, they must 
 try and get at it to help out their needy existence. 
 We passed some houses of the village of Ternova 
 built under a rock so loose they must be always in 
 danger of masses falling down and crushing them. 
 And that menacing rock shuts out the sun but they 
 cling to the spot which those before them have 
 inhabited, and have just rebuilt one of the houses in 
 the worst place.
 
 'CHAPTER VI 
 
 HOME LIFE 
 
 ON December 30th, 1880, we were married at 
 St. Anne's, Soho. A few days before that, 
 he had undergone the rite of baptism at the 
 church of Holy well, Oxford, thus by his own act 
 rectifying his parents' omission 1 and making himself 
 formally a member of the Church of England. 
 
 What can I say of the years which followed ? A 
 thousand memories assail me of the peaceful life in 
 his beautiful house at Chelsea, of the quiet evenings 
 by the fire, while outside the wind tore round the 
 bend of the river, when the floor round his chair 
 would be heaped with books ; of the pleasant meet- 
 ings with a few chosen friends, and the pride of 
 seeing him gradually win the appreciation which was 
 his due in the more intelligent society of the day. I 
 had a passion for art and he arranged a beautiful 
 studio for me to work in. He lived among his books. 
 Neither of us had any special liking for London, but 
 it was home, and we both agreed in hating the 
 modern habit of perpetually moving from place to 
 place, so utterly destructive of sane occupation. 
 This habit was not then so universally rampant as it 
 
 1 See letter to Mrs. Pollen, January 18th, 1879, p. 69.
 
 HOME LIFE 118 
 
 is now. Nevertheless, I think we were certainly 
 exceptions among people of our own generation in 
 that often, for six months and more at a time, we 
 never took a railway ticket or slept out of our own 
 house. No doubt if his early education had not 
 deprived him of all opportunities of learning to shoot 
 and hunt an omission for which he always owed 
 some grudge to Lady Byron he would have found 
 more pleasure in country house visiting, but the times 
 when he was persuaded to accept an invitation of this 
 kind could be counted on the fingers of one hand. 
 
 Another reason for leading a quiet life was very 
 straitened means, the result of his having, in his 
 inexperience of building matters, allowed himself 
 to be saddled with far too large a house. 
 
 He was at this time assiduous in attending the 
 House of Lords. On all matters of domestic politics 
 he was content to be a silent listener, enjoying from 
 his seat on the cross-benches the cut and thrust of 
 the recognised gladiators of that time : Lords 
 Salisbury, Derby, Granville, and, most eloquent of 
 all, the Duke of Argyll. The few occasions when he 
 nerved himself to intervene were when Egyptian 
 matters were the subject of debate. The beneficent 
 rule of Sir Evelyn Baring * had then hardly begun, 
 and Wentworth was not alone in detesting the 
 necessity which forced the Government of Mr. 
 Gladstone to crush the unhappy subjects of the 
 
 1 Earl of Cromer. 
 L. t
 
 114 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Khedive when, under Arabi Pasha, they rose against 
 his corrupt tyranny. The efforts made by Wilfrid 
 Blunt and Sir William Gregory to secure for Arabi at 
 least a fair trial and an adequate defence had his 
 warm admiration and sympathy. He heartily re- 
 joiced that they were successful in saving Arabi's 
 life and in averting from England the disgrace of 
 conniving at the commission of a judicial murder. 
 
 Wentworth spoke well, with a good voice and per- 
 fect enunciation, and he was never lengthy. After 
 a hot protest that he made against the sending of an 
 expedition to Suakin under General Graham in 1884, 
 he was congratulated by members of the Opposition 
 and asked to speak again. But as a rule he found 
 himself championing unpopular causes, and encoun- 
 tering the strong prejudice and hostility which had 
 been earned by Wilfrid Blunt, from whom it was 
 naturally supposed that he derived his information 
 about Egyptian matters. He was, in fact, very far 
 from seeing eye to eye in all things with his brother- 
 in-law ; and he deplored the latter's inveterate habit 
 of opposing the representatives of his country 
 abroad on any and every occasion, and of invariably 
 imputing blame to British officials under all circum- 
 stances. It was the bent of Went worth's own mind 
 to appreciate and sympathise with all ancient and 
 simple forms of civilisation. And just as he loved 
 to share, as far as he could, the traditional life of the 
 Alpine herdsmen in their mountain valleys, so he
 
 HOME LIFE 115 
 
 longed to protect the African nomads and their age- 
 long customs from disintegration and corruption. 
 
 In May, 1885, the Earl of Wemyss moved a protest 
 against the evacuation of the Soudan by British 
 troops. Wentworth opposed the motion, and warmly 
 congratulated Lord Granville and the Government 
 on the " moral courage with which they had wiped 
 out a bad debt." He urged them to consider : 
 . . . the enfranchisement of Suakin from all foreign, 
 Egyptian or Turkish misrule, and on that basis to 
 conclude a real and durable peace in the Soudan. . . . 
 Those who expected the Soudanese to take over in 
 a lump all the results of European civilisation 
 cast iron, cotton, capitalists, not to speak of public- 
 houses, police and prisons, for the accommodation 
 of all the adventurers who would not fail to rush 
 into a newly opened-out country, builders of rail- 
 ways, and founders of settled governments by paper 
 resolutions were too much dominated by the idea 
 of a uniform plan for the human species, which they 
 would treat as if all started from the same point, 
 proceeded on one line, and must arrive at an iden- 
 tical goal. They forgot to reckon with the indelible 
 characteristics of different races. The germ of a 
 modern English statesman or peer had been con- 
 tained in the contemporaries of Alfred or William the 
 Norman ; but Arabs could by no possible process of 
 natural selection and survival of the fittest become 
 the ancestors of men resembling their lordships. 
 Every race was confined to its own type and ideal, 
 which it might or might not realise, but from which 
 it could not deviate. There was an equivocation of 
 
 a 2
 
 116 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 meaning in such words as " barbarism " and " civi- 
 lisation," which would mislead if they proceeded to 
 convert philanthropic formulas and commonplaces 
 into action upon mankind in distant parts of the world. 
 It was a serious mistake to regard nomadic life as 
 necessarily barbarous because it was incompatible 
 with that particular kind of refinement which we 
 habitually and exclusively called " civilisation." 
 
 Wentworth was a convinced Home Euler, and was 
 one of the small minority of forty-one who voted for 
 Mr. Gladstone's Bill when it was thrown out by the 
 Peers in 1893. 1 
 
 The yearly expeditions to the mountains always 
 continued, sometimes to Dauphine and the Pyrenees, 
 but more often to the Swiss and Tyrolese Alps. When 
 the summer days came round he was no more to be 
 kept back from the land of his desires than a homing 
 swallow. To the neighbourhood of the great peaks I 
 hardly ever accompanied him. But for many happy 
 weeks and months of almost every year we wandered 
 together among the lesser heights, exploring the little - 
 known passes, and the lovely valleys, far away from 
 the ordinary ways of communication. We lodged in 
 little homely inns, where the foreign tourist is well- 
 nigh unknown, sometimes in peasants' houses, or with 
 a priest, and once in a water-mill, where, when the 
 great wheel was turning, the rush of sound reduced 
 us to communicating by signs. Whether we were in 
 
 1 The numbers were : Contents, 41 ; Non-contents, 419.
 
 HOME LIFE 117 
 
 French or German or Italian-speaking lands, he was 
 always at home, and seemed to understand every 
 local dialect by instinct. All the ways of all moun- 
 tain folk were to him dear and familiar, and wherever 
 we went he was quickly recognised as a friend. 
 Indeed, except that we carried travelling baths, and 
 that his demands for hot water were apt to be at 
 times appalling, he had no needs but what these 
 simple folk could supply. To travel with him was 
 to be made free of a quite new and delicious country, 
 a national life full of old legends and traditions and 
 the love of the wild creatures. He always mocked 
 at the idea that in order to escape from the complica- 
 tions and vulgarities of civilised life so-called it 
 was necessary to sail to distant continents and to 
 consort with the naked savage. 
 
 This life, however, was not serious climbing, for 
 which his passion never did more than slumber. 
 Though he never joined the Alpine Club, his record 
 was at that time known to a good many of its mem- 
 bers. The following short account of his achieve- 
 ments may interest his fellow-climbers. 
 
 His first recorded climb was the ascent of the Rigi 
 at the age of eight. By the age of twenty-five he had 
 ascended most of the well-known Swiss giants, and 
 had altogether made a record of fifty important 
 climbs. He was at Zermatt in 1865 and saw the 
 bodies of Lord Francis Douglas and his companions 
 brought down after the terrible disaster on the
 
 118 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 Matterhorn, a sobering experience, which may 
 account for the postponement of his own attack on 
 that mountain until 1871, when he successfully 
 ascended it. He always considered that the difficulties 
 of this ascent were over-rated, probably as the effect 
 of the well-known tragedy on the popular imagination. 
 
 For many years in middle life, when financial 
 burdens had grown on him, he could but seldom afford 
 the high fees demanded by the best guides. This 
 meant the ruling out for the time of all really high 
 ascents. He took this with much philosophy, for, as 
 every climber knows, there is plenty of adventure to 
 be had at the lower altitudes, and, in fact, often more 
 scope for the skill and resource of the climber himself 
 than when he is under the tutorship of really first- 
 rate guides. There was much compensation, too, in 
 avoiding the monster hotels which beleaguer the 
 more famous peaks, and the horrid intimacies of 
 nights spent in the more frequented club huts. As 
 time went on he gravitated more and more to the 
 south side of the Alps, and especially to the region 
 known as the Dolomites, a name against which he 
 always protested, for he said that there were dolo- 
 mites everywhere in the Alps. Rock-climbing rather 
 than snow-work had always been his passion ; and of 
 all his climbs those that I think he recalled with most 
 enthusiasm were of the great bare peaks and crags 
 that surround San Martino di Castrozza and Cortina. 
 
 But he had always been haunted by the thought
 
 HOME LIFE 119 
 
 of certain monsters of Savoy and Dauphine, the 
 Aiguille Verte, the Grepon, the Meije, and others 
 standing about them, which he must needs over- 
 come before he died. The Aiguille Verte he climbed 
 in 1891, when we were staying with our friends, Lord 
 and Lady Monks well, in the delightful Chalet des 
 Rochers, above St. Gervais. The Meije he achieved 
 in 1895, and the Aiguille du Grepon in 1897, when he 
 was fifty-eight years old ! He had been very eloquent 
 in early life as to the unfitness of any man aged over 
 fifty for serious climbing. But now that he had 
 himself passed that respectable age, no reminder of 
 his former wisdom had the smallest effect upon him. 
 I give some extracts from his letters : 
 
 ZERMATT, 
 
 July 7ih, 1895. 
 
 On Thursday, the 4th, I went up another fairly 
 benign " monster," the Nordend of Monte Rosa, hav- 
 ing slept at a " club hut " at the Untere Plattje. 
 I started at two in the morning with two guides, 
 reached the sharp ridge of the summit in seven and 
 a half hours in an intensely cold wind, but had a 
 beautiful view from the lakes of Lombardy to the 
 Maritime Alps, and was down at Zermatt at 6.30 in 
 the evening. . . . 
 
 LE FBESNAY, 
 
 July 20^, 1895. 
 
 On Thursday evening at a quarter past nine I 
 and my guides left La Berarde, and after twelve hours' 
 ascent, including five hours' severe rock climbing, we
 
 120 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 reached the summit of the Grande Meije at a quarter 
 past nine on Friday (yesterday) morning. Another 
 party of French alpinists and their guides followed 
 close upon us, and there were assembled there on 
 that Friday morning thirteen souls, all of whom, in 
 spite of the omen, are still living. To complete my 
 pilgrimage on this Mecca of climbers, I decided to 
 descend on the other side, and we accordingly 
 descended by rocks of considerable difficulty to the 
 so-called Breche Zsigmondy, named after a young 
 Austrian climber, who first ascended the Great Meije 
 from that side, and a few days after perished in an 
 attempt on another (the north-west) side of the 
 Meije. From the Breche Zsigmondy we ascended 
 the Meije Centrale (only about sixty feet lower than 
 the Grande Meije), but with very great difficulty in 
 one place close to the Breche Zsigmondy, and some 
 anxiety a narrow slanting cleft up a precipitous 
 wall above overhanging, so that there was little room. 
 We got through this place safely after long and hard 
 work and reached the summit of the Meije Centrale 
 about two all of the way rather difficult ; thence a 
 short but very hard descent on to the glacier above 
 La Grave, where we arrived at a quarter past eight 
 in the evening. On the whole I have never had so 
 difficult a climb, and two or three places were of 
 exceptional difficulty, to me at least. . . . 
 
 Here are some flowers taken high up on the 
 southern precipices. . . . 
 
 GENEVA, 
 
 Tuesday, July 23rd, 1895. 
 
 I send you some photographs of the Meije, three 
 from the south on which side I went up and one
 
 HOME LIFE 121 
 
 from the west, on the side from the Chateleret. I 
 have put some red dots roughly showing the passage 
 we followed from the glacier up the rocks successively 
 to the Grand Couloir, the Mur, the Pas du Chat, the 
 Glacier Carre, the Cheval Eouge, a knife edge of red 
 rock across which one sits with both feet in the air ; 
 the Tete du Capucin, the summit of the Grande 
 Meije (G. M.), the Breche Zsigmondy (Z.), the " Grat- 
 wanderung," thence to the Meije Centrale (M. C.). 
 After the descent of the wall of this last to the last 
 dot, we went down the snow wall of the north side 
 to the glaciers of La Grave. . . . 
 
 ZEBMATT, 
 Sunday, August llth, 1895. 
 
 Yesterday I had a nice little climb up the Gabel- 
 horn, which is highly and not unjustly honoured 
 among the monsters of this place. About three 
 hours of interesting rock work from the bergschrund 
 to the sharp Grecian -nosed summit. Not as precipi- 
 tous and lovely as the ascent of the Meije, but better 
 than the Koth-horn, and at least as good as the 
 Matterhorn. ... I am sorry to say it is raining 
 again this evening. ... If it will only be fine the 
 next two days, I wish before leaving to visit the most 
 venerable of all the Zermatt sanctuaries of monster 
 worship the Dent Blanche. I have had such bad 
 luck with weather, etc., that, including the Gabel- 
 horn, I have this summer only been up seven peaks of 
 more than 13,000 feet high, and I should easily have 
 doubled that number if Old Harry had not spoilt so 
 much of the time. . . . 
 
 Yours . . . 
 
 CHICKEN-ABOUT-TO-BEINTEGBATE-THB-COOP.
 
 122 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 He ascended the Dent Blanche six days later. 
 
 AROLLA, 
 Saturday, July Wih, 1897. 
 
 There are a few English and one or two German 
 tourists here, but I have had no conversation with 
 any of them. Gentinetta, however, compared notes 
 with some climbing men without guides (now gone) 
 and found them rather disappointed that we crossed 
 the Aiguilles Eouges in only sixteen hours, they 
 having taken twenty-three, and thinking we should 
 either fail altogether or be benighted. 
 
 HOTEL DU MONT BLANC, CHAMONIX, 
 
 Monday, August %nd, 1897. 
 
 * 
 
 I had, as I wrote you by postcard yesterday, a 
 most charming day with heavenly weather on the 
 glorious Grepon, which I love more than ever after 
 capturing and not being captured by it. We started, 
 my three guides and myself, at 1 a.m. on Saturday, 
 July 31st, up and traversing turf slants and immense 
 boulders till dawn, then up a glacier and under 
 formidable icebergs and snow-strewn rocks for two 
 hours more. After breakfast on champagne and 
 pdt de foie gras, up more glaciers and icebergs and 
 a rock and snow couloir between the Aiguille des 
 Charmoz and the Aiguille du Grepon, to a very 
 severe ice and rock couloir, up which we had a hard 
 struggle to the foot of the celebrated Mummery 
 chimney, perhaps 60 feet high I think rather less. 
 Joseph Aristide Simond swarmed up with great 
 fatigue, stopping in, I think, two places with good
 
 HOME LIFE 128 
 
 foothold to gasp for breath ; then the younger and 
 lighter of the other guides climbed up slightly 
 help(ed) by the rope round him, of which Joseph had 
 the end. Then the ice axes and provisions were 
 drawn up ; then I went up with considerable hauling, 
 and lastly Gentinetta, also largely assisted by the 
 other two guides tugging at the top. After that we 
 had many hard places on the way along the knife, or 
 rather saw, edge of the ridge of rocks, to the summit. 
 A promontory 60 feet high between two precipices 
 to be let down by rope backwards, the last man 
 descending by the reserve rope doubled round a head 
 of rock, the rope then drawn on round its support. 
 Just before the very summit a narrow cave, quite 
 underground, to slip, or rather struggle, through, a 
 veritable crack for earwigs. From the summit a 
 lovely view ; on one side the North Pole, on the other 
 green Savoy in July. After enjoying all this and a 
 bottle of champagne, fortunately not broken by the 
 terrible cliffs, down more cliffs with a mixture of 
 reserve ropes and slipping back astride down abrupt 
 edges in the wall-like cliffs. I think about four in the 
 afternoon we emerged from the difficult rocks and 
 descended a glacier till we reached the line of ascent 
 of the morning, for we crossed the peak descending 
 exactly on the opposite end, and we reached Montan- 
 vert by lantern light a little before ten after twenty- 
 one hours, which were among the most interesting 
 I have ever known. I am so much in love with the 
 whole thing that I long to make the same passage two 
 or three times more and examine the wonders and 
 beauties of those striking red and grey rocks more 
 exhaustively.
 
 124 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 I believe all this will interest you little, but if I 
 could have photographed the whole view from the 
 summit, even you would have considered some of it 
 beautiful. I saw all the green mountains near 
 Taninges. 1 
 
 I have a propitiatory offer of some red agate bowls 
 to make, which I bought at Montanvert, found (the 
 raw material) in the Mont Blanc chain. . . . 
 
 ZEEMATT, 
 
 Sunday, August 15th, 1897. 
 > 
 
 It is all very well to wander about sometimes in 
 fairly easy places, and I enjoy that kind of thing very 
 much without guides ; but when I do have guides, I 
 only care for the very best rock climbs that can be 
 found ; and I never met with any to be compared to 
 the Grepon for every kind of beauty of rock, and 
 unsurpassable human interest, being near the limit 
 of what one conceives to be attainable. As Joseph 
 Aristide said, " C'est tout juste." But it is just 
 possible without danger, the ropes being sound and 
 the climbers too, and I hope and expect that I shall 
 go over it again once or twice, so as to impress all the 
 details thoroughly in my mind. 
 
 The allusions are to a mock dispute which we two 
 perennially carried on as to the charms of the 
 mountain world. He pretended to think that the 
 anxieties of the poor " clucking hen " at home were 
 based on complete ignorance and incapacity to admire 
 the greater Alps. I had to retaliate by calling them 
 
 1 AJvillage in Savoy ; we had lived there for some weeks the 
 year before.
 
 BALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 1896
 
 HOME LIFE 125 
 
 freaks and monstrosities of Nature, far too much 
 glorified by their adorers, and also by pointing out 
 that only lunatics thought it necessary to go to the 
 tops of them in order to enjoy them ! 
 
 Eighteen hundred and ninety -eight found him 
 again in South Tirol, climbing the Fiinfiger Spitze 
 by the Schmidtkamin, the Pala di S. Martino, 
 Gran Odla, Sass Maor, Kleine Zinne, Winkler- 
 thurm, Delagothurm, Cima della Madonna, etc. In 
 July, 1899, he wrote : 
 
 PERRA, 
 
 Friday, July %Sfh, 1899. 
 
 
 
 My climbs have now culminated in the " traver- 
 sata " of the Rosengarten, and a second ascent of the 
 Delagothurm, close to which I passed on the way 
 down from the Rosengarten, and as the weather was 
 superb, it would have (been) throwing away one's 
 chances to neglect visiting again that most wonderful 
 pillar, so I gave up a much less interesting ascent for 
 a repetition of the second best climb in what I know 
 of the Alps. It was yesterday morning that I 
 reached again the narrow resting place between 
 unfathomable abysses, whence one sees the green 
 world of summer in all its loveliness, but from which 
 one has the sensation of being cut off for ever by a 
 drop on every side, which one's eyes can hardly bear 
 to contemplate. I and my two guides passed more 
 than an hour on the summit, basking in the sun with 
 not a breath of wind, gazing on distant towns and 
 villages, amidst green mountains and green plateaus
 
 126 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 and sombre forests, and making up one's mind to face 
 the walls up which we had crawled that is still with 
 one's face in the rock, crawling down backwards. 
 Now after two ascents and descents I know every 
 inch of the rock, but it hardly seems less difficult with 
 intimate acquaintance. Almost every bit of the 
 precipice is difficult, and in two places fissures 
 the difficulty is extreme and could not be surpassed 
 without reaching the impossible. . . . 
 
 The second guide, Zagonel, had never been there 
 before, and being a good climber, was delighted, but 
 astonished at the difficulty, which he had supposed 
 must be greatly exaggerated. 
 
 Even these were not his last climbs. In 1902, when 
 he was aged sixty-three, he wrote a warm recom- 
 mendation for his favourite guide Michele Bettega, of 
 Primiero, describing various feats that they had done 
 together the year before, including a fourth ascent 
 of the Delagothurm. He wound up with : 
 
 In all these excursions Bettega had the able co- 
 operation of Bortolo Zagonel, and, as is known to all 
 mountaineers, the best guides have the best oppor- 
 tunity for their most brilliant work when associated 
 with each other. Bettega is now rich in experience 
 and still in the prime of life. I have never known 
 him employ more skill, strength and judgment than 
 during the above-mentioned excursions. His eye for 
 selecting the line of attack is perfectly marvellous, 
 but is equalled by the resolution and resource with 
 which he deals with the details as they arise. I have 
 never known him completely baffled in any of the
 
 HOME LIFE 127 
 
 things we have undertaken together, and he has 
 rarely had even to modify the original plan. I have 
 only to add that I look forward to further expedi- 
 tions in his company. 
 
 I have copied this because I want to add my own 
 warm thanks to these two excellent fellows, his 
 constant companions during those last years, who 
 gave him many hours of happiness, and to whom, 
 when his own strength and activity were beginning 
 to fail, he must have many a time owed the safety of 
 his life. 
 
 Where are they now ? Their country of the 
 Southern Tirol has been the bone of contention 
 between Austria and Italy, and the tornado of war 
 has swept over their homes. The younger man, 
 Zagonel, will certainly have been pressed into the 
 Austrian Army ; Bettega may possibly have been 
 beyond military age. Where their hearts will have 
 been whether with Austria and her old Emperor, 
 loved and venerated by all Tirol, to whom they were 
 loyal enough when I knew them, or with Italy, whose 
 language they spoke I cannot tell.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 
 
 THE year 1880, towards the close of which 
 we were married, should, according to Lady 
 Byron's will, have seen the thorough exami- 
 nation of her papers by the three trustees and the 
 formulating of some decision regarding them, but 
 nothing was done. Miss Mary Carpenter and Miss 
 Frances Carr were now dead, and Mr. Bathurst was 
 not the man to cope single-handed with a difficult 
 situation. On the occasion of our marriage Went- 
 worth and his father were reconciled, and remained 
 for some years on cordial terms. But nothing could 
 be got from Lord Lovelace about the missing papers. 
 Always unapproachable, he had become doubly so 
 from age and extreme deafness, and he was always 
 particularly hard of hearing on subjects that he dis- 
 liked. The danger that, if provoked, he might put 
 the papers out of his son's reach in the future could 
 not be ignored. There was nothing for it but 
 patience. And so matters drifted on until Decem- 
 ber, 1893, when, at the age of eighty -nine, the old 
 man passed away. 
 
 Within a few weeks of his death the long-desired 
 treasure of important papers was handed over by his
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 129 
 
 widow and personal heirs to his son and successor, 
 who soon found that they contained all that he had 
 anticipated. Mr. Bathurst having also died, and 
 the whole trust being now at an end, the whole of 
 Lady Byron's legacy of papers were at last united 
 and in the hands of her grandson. Amidst all the 
 manifold preoccupations which now fell upon Went- 
 worth in his new condition, he gave all his spare time 
 to supervising the making of careful typewritten 
 copies of a large portion of these papers, 1 with no 
 more definite intention at that time than to secure 
 that several duplicates of certain evidence, in the 
 clearest and most comprehensible form, should be 
 preserved in different places. But events were pre- 
 paring which were eventually to force him to action 
 regarding this evidence. 
 
 On May 12th, 1896, Lovelace (as we must now call 
 him) received a letter from Mr. John Murray, fourth 
 in the dynasty of the well-known publishers, asking 
 him to be " editor in chief " of the new edition of 
 Byron's poems and letters, etc., with the assistance 
 of a " subordinate editor to do the rough work," and 
 after a few hours of hesitation he wrote accepting the 
 proposal in terms as courteous and friendly as those in 
 which it had been made. For this mistake I must take 
 my full share of blame. It seemed to us both then, and 
 still seems, that to decline the power of controlling what 
 
 1 This accurate and conscientious work was carried out for 
 him by Miss Marion Wedderspoon, then of 9, Gracechurch Street ; 
 see ante, pp. 42, 43.
 
 130 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 would probably be the definitive version of Byron's 
 life-story was to lose a great opportunity, and one 
 which in the future he might bitterly regret. I think 
 he had some prescience of the difficulty of exercising 
 control, but he could not refuse to make the attempt. 
 His idea then was that by rigidly excluding all inti- 
 mate correspondence with or about Mrs. Leigh sub- 
 sequent to a certain date, he could avoid confirming 
 either Mrs. Beecher Stowe's revelations on the one 
 hand or the calumnies against Lady Byron on the 
 other. The events that followed will be told best 
 in a narrative that he sent later to Lady Dorchester. 1 
 
 3rd February, 1899. 
 
 * 
 
 I am afraid I blundered badly in the beginning in 
 not bringing him (Murray) to particulars, and point- 
 ing out all the difficulties that I could myself then 
 think of, when he first informed me, nearly three 
 years ago, that he positively meant to bring out a 
 definitive collection of the poetical and prose writings 
 and asked me to undertake the " editorship." I 
 replied that I was willing to do what I could for him, 
 but could not pledge myself as to how much that 
 might be, and declined any settlement of payment 
 for materials, or work I might do, till I could see my 
 way distinctly as to doing anything that would have 
 pecuniary value. I accepted being editor in a vague 
 way, rather ad referendum, for future arrangement 
 when it became a more practical question, for I did 
 not understand that Murray was in haste about any- 
 
 i See Chapter II., p. 42.
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 181 
 
 thing except the poetry, a new and trustworthy text of 
 which appeared to me at that time to be the principal 
 object in his mind. He had then, I think, for some 
 time been working at it through Mr. Coleridge and 
 others. I was at that time just going abroad as 
 usual to spend my summer in the Alps, without 
 having at all taken in that Murray had any strong 
 desire to beat Henley out of the field, and hasten on 
 his preparations for such a purpose. I did not think 
 either of the matter, as I ought to have done, from a 
 publisher's point of view, and press to an issue who 
 was to be the ultimate judge of the nature of the 
 undertaking. I think I ought to have seen that it 
 could only be the man who found the money, and 
 that all connection of a responsible kind between me 
 and another man's business enterprise could not 
 possibly work, for I could not, on what was to me a 
 family matter, enter into questions of 5. d., even if 
 I were supposed to understand them. If I had 
 pressed him I have no doubt I should have found 
 Mr. Murray perfectly frank, and that, with all his 
 desire for the perfectly free use of all the materials 
 I might possess, and every one else might possess, 
 and entirely according to his own views rather than 
 those of Lord Byron's family and friends, he would 
 never have affected much inclination to offer me the 
 powers of a real editor, though while I was abroad I 
 soon found myself being advertised much more 
 quickly than I had foreseen, for I thought the execu- 
 tion of the plan was still remote. Still, when I re- 
 turned to England, there was no talk at all about the 
 prose, but I was shown a lot of proofs for the first 
 
 volume of poetry, which still appeared to be the 
 
 & 2
 
 182 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 only practical question, and no difficulties occurred 
 to me as connected with this part of the subject. I 
 spent many hours, and even days, labouring through 
 the proofs of the " Hours of Idleness," making a 
 certain number of notes and suggestions, of which 
 I hardly know whether a single one was ever 
 attended to. 
 
 About this time Henley's volume of early letters 1 
 came out, and I remember that it was you who first 
 spoke to me about them, and pointed out several 
 that you thought it a great pity should ever have 
 been printed. I consequently looked through, and 
 for the first time indeed read, all Lord Byron's early 
 letters, and very quickly arrived at the conclusion 
 that hardly any of the letters before 1812, published 
 by Dallas, Moore, and the Hodgson family, ought 
 ever to have been published, or ought to be included 
 in any collection that received contributions of 
 hitherto unpublished letters from Lord Byron's 
 family. I had many discussions with Murray about 
 this, and informed him of the impossibility of any 
 sanction from me to the republication of the letters 
 to Miss Pigott, Mrs. Byron, and Hodgson. At the 
 same time I told him that if I were editor I could 
 add to a collection, either in whole or in part, a cer- 
 tain number of letters, chiefly to Mrs. Leigh, and I 
 showed him copies of these letters, which, however, 
 included a good deal as to which I had by no means 
 made up my mind, or had already determined on 
 no account to publish. It seems that, either inadver- 
 tently or confidentially, for I cannot remember, I 
 
 1 Works of Lord Byron. Edited by W. E. Henley, Vol. I. 
 London: Heinemann (1897).
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 183 
 
 left with him the book of copies, and that Mr. 
 Murray himself or his brother thought leave had 
 been given to copy and use them, and they actually 
 put them into print, and to my great surprise and 
 alarm I saw them in the proofs that continued 
 to be sent to me, after I had long definitively 
 renounced all idea of taking any part in the work. 
 I had only shown them to Murray at the time, 
 when I either left them in his hands or forgot to 
 bring them away, as materials from which I might 
 myself be inclined to make some selections if I were 
 to act as editor, but I never dreamt of putting them 
 into any one else's hands, and it was a most painful 
 surprise when I discovered the use that it had been 
 contemplated to make of them. I entirely acquit 
 everyone of intentional breach of confidence. Murray's 
 explanation of it, two or three months ago, when I 
 complained of this grave mistake, was that he had 
 imagined they were all copies of some letters which, 
 as you may remember, had once belonged to his 
 father, who had bought them from some of the 
 Leighs, and who finally very generously gave them 
 to my sister and me, -and Murray thought that I 
 had meant to give permission for their free use. 
 This was not quite the case, even as to the copies 
 from that particular lot of letters, because I knew 
 that old Mr. Murray had considered the most extreme 
 care ought to be exercised before deciding whether, 
 and how much, to publish out of that bundle. But 
 my packet of copies was principally composed of 
 letters that did not come from old Mr. Murray, but 
 from my own family collection. 
 I must, however, go back to the end of 1896 or
 
 184 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 beginning of 1897. Murray was very unwilling to 
 let me off from being editor, of which I pointed out 
 the growing difficulties in consequence of my objec- 
 tions to the Pigott letters, etc., which he was not 
 prepared to give up. For some, time he considered it 
 to be hardly a practical question, and that the first 
 volume of poetry was the only thing to think of, and 
 he did not know when he should be ready to take up 
 the prose. But, as time went on, he appeared to 
 make up his mind more and more strongly in opposi- 
 tion to me, a good deal on the ground of the neces- 
 sity of fighting Henley with his own weapons, and of 
 destroying Henley and Heinemann by such an 
 exhaustive and complete work as they could not 
 hope to compete against. This fresh prospect of 
 enmity with Mr. Henley, for whom personally I 
 never felt any ill-will, finally decided me, and, after 
 many hints which Murray had evaded all notice of, 
 I insisted on withdrawing altogether. I, however, 
 did not withdraw the free gift of the entire use at his 
 pleasure of all my poetical MSS., published and un- 
 published, and of various other scraps which I did 
 not think need be regarded as private family papers, 
 and I never for a moment should have consented to 
 accept any remuneration on this account, though it 
 is due to Mr. Murray to say that he more than once 
 referred to his willingness to pay for whatever he 
 received from me. You will, I think, perfectly 
 understand that, as things then stood, no considera- 
 tion of money could possibly be allowed to form any 
 part of the things on which I had to decide in the 
 least objectionable way. Owing to Murray's deter- 
 mination to follow his own course, and the absence
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 185 
 
 of clear understanding between me and him at the 
 beginning, it was impossible that the result should 
 be absolutely satisfactory to any one. 
 
 I have referred to old Mr. Murray's gift to my 
 sister and me. With the MSS. of Lord Byron's 
 letters to his sister, there were a number of copies of 
 them, in the handwriting of the present Mr. Murray. 1 
 These copies did not quite include the whole, though 
 they contained much which, in my opinion, ought 
 never to be published. Nevertheless, when I thought 
 from various indications that Murray, having com- 
 mitted himself to an important publication of fresh 
 materials, found himself insufficiently possessed of 
 enough materials to prevent his work from being a 
 disastrous failure, I decided to return him his own 
 copies of these letters, to use entirely at his own dis- 
 cretion, if he thought fit, it being understood that I 
 in no way sanctioned or approved of their being so 
 used, though I did not think it right to withhold from 
 him the power of making even an injudicious selec- 
 tion from them. What he has done has been, I 
 rather think, to make no selection at all, but to print 
 everything, and I have not the least doubt of his 
 conscientious conviction that in this he is a much 
 better friend to my grandfather's memory than I am 
 or than you are, as I observe that in every single 
 instance when any question is raised about a letter 
 he invariably thinks that particular document is of 
 vital importance to Lord Byron's memory, and that 
 it is an act of justice to print it/ . . . 
 
 I pass on to some printed proofs of Murray's third 
 volume of prose, which I received in the late autumn. 
 
 1 I.e., John Murray IV.
 
 186 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 I was much startled to find in it a number of letters 
 from Lord Byron to Mrs. Leigh, which I knew were not 
 among the copies in Mr. Murray's own handwriting, 
 returned by me as before mentioned. I consequently 
 called upon Mr. Murray besides writing, and then 
 learned from him in answer to my enquiries, first, as 
 I have said already, that by a mistake the whole of 
 my book of copies, which had inadvertently remained 
 for a very long time in Albemarle Street (till I 
 accidentally missed it and wrote to enquire about it), 
 had been copied by mistake, and found its way into 
 print. But I also learnt for the first time that, within 
 the last year or two, Mr. Murray had discovered in 
 his safe an important packet of letters from Lord 
 Byron to Mrs. Leigh, the existence of which had been 
 unknown for many years, and I think his father was 
 supposed to have bought them from Mrs. Leigh at a 
 different time from the purchase of that packet 
 which he had afterwards given to my sister and me, 
 and Mr. Murray showed me that in one or two instances 
 the letters of this packet were duplicates of letters in 
 my own family papers, and included in the book of 
 copies printed by mistake. I then told him that I 
 did not think he ought to publish any of the letters 
 which were duplicates of my own private papers, but 
 that any others, which existed nowhere else, I did not 
 think myself called upon to interfere with, though I 
 should have done so if they had been in any hands 
 but his own, but I was quite willing to leave the entire 
 responsibility to him, about papers of the contents 
 of which I was ignorant. ... I must not fail to 
 declare that I do not do Mr. Murray the injustice of 
 attributing any pecuniary objects to him. It is a
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 187 
 
 question of amour propre, for I do not believe that 
 any additions would now add much to the success 
 of his book. He has turned out to possess so much 
 more material than he was himself aware of, and still 
 more than any one else can have anticipated, that I 
 look on the success of his book as assured, so far as 
 such a book can succeed at all. I am convinced that 
 so far as I have thwarted him, it has been for his own 
 good, or at any rate of no detriment to him, but 
 naturally enough in the heat of his labours, and what 
 he regards as a contest with various enemies, among 
 whom at the moment he is almost tempted to classify 
 me, he does not see all this as clearly as I do. 
 
 It will be seen that at this time Lovelace was still 
 able to do justice to Mr. Murray's position and to 
 remember the generous action of John Murray the 
 third, but he was harassed by the knowledge that 
 fresh trouble must arise when certain portions of 
 Byron's correspondence came to be dealt with, and 
 foresaw his own difficulties with regard to it. At 
 this time he was fond of quoting Bourget's Monsieur 
 Legrimaudet " enchaine commeje suis par les liens de 
 la gratitude, 1 ' but he laughed with a wry face. 
 
 In July, 1899, appeared the third volume of the 
 " Letters and Journals," and in The Times' review 
 of it special prominence was given to two statements 
 by the editor, Mr. Eowland Prothero : 1 
 
 (1) The fifteen letters, or extracts from letters, 
 
 1 Now Lord Ernie.
 
 188 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 from Byron to Miss Milbanke ... are printed for the 
 first time from copies made by the Earl of Lovelace, 
 and 
 
 (2) No evidence exists to prove the precise nature 
 of the charges on which Lady Byron separated from 
 her husband. 
 
 Both these statements were profoundly irritating 
 to Lovelace. He saw in the first (perhaps unjustly) 
 a fresh effort to draw him into part responsibility 
 for Mr. Murray's publication; and the second he 
 qualified as an " amazing statement." He pressed for 
 some " dementi " to be published in the next forth- 
 coming volume, and for some months an acrimonious 
 correspondence was carried on between him and Mr. 
 Murray (mainly through his friend and legal adviser, 
 Mr. Francis Smith) with the object of finding some 
 form of words that should satisfy both parties. It 
 proved Ineffective, and Lovelace now in his exaspera- 
 tion threatened to restrain Mr. Murray from publish- 
 ing any letters from Byron to Augusta whatsoever. 
 He had been stimulated to this resolution by receiv- 
 ing an alarming set of proofs in which some very 
 significant letters were printed in extenso. It will 
 have been seen from his memorandum to Lady 
 Dorchester that the question of the ownership of 
 these letters bristled with difficulties. Some be- 
 longed to Lovelace's family papers, some he and his 
 sister owed to the generosity of the late Mr. Murray, 
 some belonged to the present Mr. Murray. But as
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 189 
 
 regards publication, all were then subject to the 
 authority of the successors to Lord Broughton's 1 
 executors. Lady Dorchester had paramount in- 
 fluence with these gentlemen and Lovelace trusted 
 to her to obtain, if necessary, legal coercion of Mr. 
 Murray. It was inevitable that the latter should 
 also appeal to her, with whom he had long been in 
 friendly relations. He pointed out that the proofs 
 had been sent to Lovelace in extenso so as to leave 
 the question of excisions entirely to his judgment. 
 Lady Dorchester seized upon this as a basis of com- 
 promise, and since, in spite of his anger, Lovelace was 
 very sensitive to the suggestion that he was acting 
 unfairly, she had little difficulty in inducing him to 
 desist. As to what portions of the letters might be 
 safely published, let him leave it to her. In any case, 
 nothing would induce her to sanction the printing of 
 certain significant passages. Lovelace would have 
 been for suppressing some letters altogether, but not 
 for publishing them with omissions which would have 
 the effect of turning guilty documents into apparently 
 innocent ones ; yet this was what was eventually done. 
 Lady Dorchester took all responsibility for the ex- 
 cisions, with single-minded devotion to the one object 
 which she thought to be her duty, the protection of 
 Byron's memory. The question of truth and justice 
 did not trouble her. She believed that her father 
 (Byron's friend Hobhouse) would never have permitted 
 
 1 John Cam Hobhouse.
 
 140 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 anything which confirmed the story of Byron's guilt to 
 see the light, and she must do as he would have done. 
 
 Others approved her action so far as they under- 
 stood it. A granddaughter of Mrs. Leigh's who was 
 consulted naturally accepted it gratefully. Love- 
 lace's own ambassador to Mr. Murray, Mr. Francis 
 Smith, wrote of " Lady Dorchester's broad and 
 sensible view of the situation." And thus Lovelace 
 found himself pressed into acquiescence in the very 
 thing he had desired so ardently to prevent a new 
 obscuration of evidence. He dared not quarrel with 
 Lady Dorchester. Not only could she control all 
 questions of publication, but she herself had inherited 
 from her father Byron's intimate letters to Lady 
 Melbourne, still unpublished, the existence of which 
 in other hands than his own was a constant source of 
 anxiety to Lovelace. 1 Lady Dorchester was old and 
 in feeble health. She had promised that all the Byron 
 papers and memorials in her possession should go to 
 Lovelace at her death. Alas ! she survived him more 
 than seven years, and those papers that were in her 
 hands have now for ever passed away from Byron's 
 descendants. 
 
 As Lovelace afterwards made public his irritation 
 against Mr. Murray, I am glad to be able to quote here 
 from a letter written by him at this time to Miss 
 Geraldine Leigh : 2 
 
 1 See pp. 42, 43. 
 
 * Granddaughter of Augusta.
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 141 
 
 March ISffi, 1900. 
 
 The present Mr. John Murray is quite ready to 
 relinquish any further publication of Lord Byron's 
 letters to Mrs. Leigh and submits the question abso- 
 lutely to the discretion of Lord Byron's executors 
 Nothing can be fairer or more honourable than the 
 course he is prepared to take. He would not 
 surrender the letters for payment of what they cost 
 and indeed declines any pecuniary transaction. (I 
 had suggested that that might be a fair and proper 
 way out of the difficulty, if it should turn out to be 
 practicable.) 
 
 But he will do nothing that is distasteful to you. 
 The letters have been submitted to Lord Byron's 
 executors and willingness expressed to abandon all 
 publication of them, but after looking through them 
 with great care, Lord Byron's executors have decided 
 that it will suffice to strike out what is objectionable, 
 and that there is a considerable portion of I think a 
 dozen or fifteen letters which is absolutely innocuous, 
 so that the publication of that part ought to be 
 allowed if only in recognition of the very handsome 
 and obliging manner in which Mr. Murray has met 
 your wishes. Lord Byron's executors think, and it 
 seems to me with good reason, that Mr. Murray is 
 acting so fairly and considerately towards you that 
 some acknowledgment is due ; and what is now pro- 
 posed can do you no harm. . . . 
 
 Regrettable as these contentions were, with their 
 result in a breakdown of a long friendship, they had 
 the advantage of finally ending an impossible situa-
 
 142 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 tion. Lovelace had had an illuminating experience of 
 the difficulties of joint control in such an enterprise 
 as Mr. Murray's, but he had also realised something 
 to him much more vital ; namely, that he could not 
 carry out his project of being absolutely non- 
 committal as regards the revelations of Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe. The suppression of evidence which this 
 involved for him was of too serious a character. 
 Mr. Murray and his coadjutors could pursue this 
 course quite legitimately. In fact for them it was 
 inevitable. They were uncertain as to the truth, 
 and they were not bound to hold a criminal 
 investigation. 
 
 But Lovelace knew. And it had now come home 
 to him that to endorse such a policy with his name 
 would have been in fact to give negative evidence 
 against Lady Byron. The acceptance of the editor- 
 ship had been a great mistake and it was well that 
 it had come to an end. 
 
 After this he refused to look at any more proofs. 
 He left unopened the handsome volumes with which 
 Mr. Murray continued to present him at intervals as 
 they were published, and after a time he returned 
 them to the giver. I do not think he ever knew 
 exactly in what form the most troublesome letters 
 finally saw the light. 
 
 It must have been in the course of the winter of 
 1899 1900 that a scene took place which remains 
 vividly in my mind. My husband was walking up
 
 THE BYRON PAPERS 148 
 
 and down the room trying to ease the fever of his 
 soul by talking out the everlasting dilemma, how to 
 hide the faults of one ancestor without doing black 
 injustice to another, how to suppress truth without 
 adding to a mountain of lies. I was listening for the 
 hundredth time with indescribable weariness, and in 
 secret revolt at the sacrifice of his life, at the constant 
 waste of his talents and energy in the effort to solve 
 an insoluble problem and at the hateful atmosphere 
 of the miserable story which he was compelled to have 
 constantly in his thoughts. He wound up his com- 
 plaints with " Oh ! if I could have peace ! " 
 
 And I, thinking aloud rather than intending to 
 suggest any definite action, exclaimed : 
 
 " There never will be peace till the truth has once 
 for all been acknowledged ! " 
 
 He wheeled round in his walk and faced me : 
 
 " Ah ! you think so, do you ? " 
 
 And I realised that my words had confirmed the 
 thought that was already formed in his mind.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "ASTARTE" 
 
 FROM this time forward the only question 
 between us was how and in what form the 
 truth had best be brought out ? Lovelace 
 had for many years occupied himself at intervals 
 with collecting and annotating the evidence, and in 
 the years before he received from his father's heirs 
 the last important collection of papers he had, for 
 lack of private material, sought over the whole field 
 of literature for sidelights upon Byron, the impression 
 made by him on his contemporaries, and the whole 
 framework of the society in which he lived. It was 
 natural that when he came, in his turn, to write about 
 Byron, he should desire to include some of these 
 notes in his book. And if the effect has been to 
 overweight it somewhat with quotations and other 
 extraneous matter, I think no reader of " Astarte " 
 will deny that much that he collected is of extra- 
 ordinary interest. Unfortunately, in the acrimony 
 engendered by his recent contentions with Messrs. 
 Murray, and in his irritation at what he felt to be 
 their complacent possession of his ancestors' affairs, 
 he enjoyed pulling out of their obscurity certain 
 literary quarrels in which the founder of the firm
 
 " ASTARTE " 145 
 
 was belaboured with extreme vigour, and with entire 
 lack of personal respect, by Hazlitt and others. 
 
 These methods of controversy no doubt only 
 amused the generation for which they were written, 
 but they disgust the present one ; and only a man 
 steeped as Lovelace was in the literature of a hundred 
 years ago, and living much apart from contemporaries, 
 could have failed to see the impolicy of quoting from 
 them now. He had, however, inherited from Lord 
 Byron himself a keen taste for vigorous and incisive 
 language, and as he found himself going over the old 
 ground the old indignation against the injustices of 
 Moore's " Life of Byron " and of the Quarterly 
 Review, and the unfairness of putting on Lady Byron 
 responsibility for the ill-considered destruction of 
 the Memoirs, flamed out again and he was not to 
 be restrained. The effect has been, as might have 
 been foreseen, entirely unfortunate, creating hos- 
 tility and prejudice against the whole scheme and 
 motive of the book in many quarters where impar- 
 tiality and cool judgment might otherwise have been 
 looked for. 
 
 Recollections of the extreme avidity with which 
 the public had formerly seized upon every detail of 
 Mrs. Stowe's revelations, and of the controversy that 
 she provoked, made Lovelace dread for his book a 
 similar " succes de scandale." He desired only to 
 put the truth beyond question, and in order to avoid 
 as far as possible newspaper notoriety, and above 
 
 L. 10
 
 146 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 all the possibility of making money out of the story 
 of his ancestors, he decided to print the book pri- 
 vately and to circulate it as a gift among friends and 
 prominent persons in the literary world. He was 
 advised, however, that, in order to protect the copy- 
 right, the form of publication must be gone through. 
 This was therefore done both in England and 
 America, the number of copies " published " being 
 restricted to 200. The book first saw the light in 
 December, 1905, and was named " Astarte," in allu- 
 sion to Byron's tragedy of " Manfred." The follow- 
 ing was inserted as a slip in the beginning of each 
 volume : 
 
 December, 1905. 
 
 " Astarte " is formally published, and a few copies 
 have been sold, but the greater number of a strictly 
 limited impression are not intended for the market ; 
 the principal object being to place these records in 
 the hands of those who for special reasons ought to 
 have the means of acquainting themselves with 
 the true position of Lord and Lady Byron and 
 their descendants, so long and fundamentally mis- 
 understood. 
 
 With this view, under instructions from the 
 author, Messrs. Charles Whittingham & Co. of the 
 Chiswick Press have the honour to present this 
 volume. . . . 
 
 During the few months that he survived the publi- 
 cation he gave away a good many copies and sold a 
 few to approved applicants, mainly owners of famous
 
 " ASTARTE " 147 
 
 libraries, among the latter being Chatsworth and 
 Windsor Castle. 1 
 
 The kindly appreciations written by the recipients 
 of presentation copies cannot be taken very seriously. 
 I will, however, venture to quote from some of 
 the interesting letters that he received at this 
 time : 
 
 From Lady Ritchie (Anne Thackeray). 
 
 ... I realise by myself what a sorrowful in- 
 heritance was yours in this tragic secret, and that 
 you felt it an almost inexorable duty to record it. 
 
 No one will ever misjudge Lady Byron again. 
 Death has come with its oblivion and all is over. . . . 
 
 From the Hon. John Fortescue, author of " The 
 
 History of the British Army." 
 ... It is an immense relief to turn from the 
 masses of journalism, falsely called literature, full 
 of vulgar pseudo-sentiment and corrupt gossip, 
 which have been thrown up around the name of 
 Byron, to the solid structure which you have built 
 out of your very wide and extensive reading. Yours 
 should be, and, I hope, will be the last word upon the 
 subject. . . . 
 
 From the late Mr. Vernon Lushington, son of 
 Dr. Lushington, D.C.L., M.P. 
 
 . . . The Book with its unanswerable documents 
 must silence the libellers for ever, and establish the 
 honour, truthfulness and extraordinarily self-sacri- 
 
 1 Since his death I have sold in like manner a certain number of 
 copies, and given away several, retaining a very few in my own hands. 
 For these I have for some years refused all applications. M. C. L. 
 
 10-2
 
 148 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 ficing action of your Grandmother, so cruelly wronged 
 and so wantonly traduced. It must also rivet an 
 odious charge on Lord Byron, one that will emphasise 
 but not alter our opinion of his lawless character. 
 The first of these results, considered by itself, is a 
 matter for rejoicing, as a tardy act of justice and 
 redress : the second would be (in my opinion) much 
 to be regretted on general grounds, but that the 
 charge is so closely bound up with the false charges 
 against Lady Byron which were and are so public. I 
 thus fully recognise that it was impossible for you 
 to do the first of these two things justice to Lady 
 Byron without doing the second also, fixing the 
 particular crime upon Lord Byron, at least without 
 confirming anew and in a most pointed way the sus- 
 picions to which his conduct and his words had led 
 long ago. As chief representative of your Grand- 
 mother and custodian of the documents, it was for 
 you to decide upon your course. You had to choose. 
 You chose deliberately and with clear conviction, 
 and I do not think anyone is entitled to Uame your 
 choice, although he may differ from it. On this point 
 as on others my feeling and my judgment go along 
 with Leslie Stephen. . . . 
 
 The distinguished figure of your Grandmother is 
 one that I can never forget. On her visits to us at 
 Ockham * she was always received with the greatest 
 honour and cordiality by my Father and my Aunt 
 Frances Carr. The younger members of the family 
 gave her their utmost respect, but I don't think any 
 of us attained intimacy. My mature estimate of 
 her character approaches I think your judgment, but 
 
 1 Ockham had been let for many years to Dr. Lushington.
 
 " ASTARTE " 149 
 
 my knowledge is superficial only. To me as to you 
 it seems that Lady Byron went too much by rule, 
 and this sometimes spoiled her practical judgment in 
 extraordinary or complex circumstances. Continu- 
 ing friendship with Augusta was indeed quixotic. 
 My Father, I notice, tried to dissuade her. I wish he 
 had been inexorable. But of course the decision 
 was with Lady Byron herself. . . . 
 
 From Lady Gregory. 
 
 ... I don't think the true and painful story could 
 have been told with greater reverence and I feel that 
 Byron's own life story is in some curious way made 
 better by all the truth being told it shows him in the 
 grip of a tragedy, no more able to escape from it than 
 the hero of a dramatic imagination from his full 
 three acts. He escaped in the one way he could by 
 early death. Lady Byron's splendid silence is worth 
 putting before the world and is a gift to it. . . . 
 
 I am sure you feel rewarded for your labour, which 
 must have been very great, for you have left nothing 
 to be said or surmised as far as is possible. . . . 
 None can tell all the struggles of the soul but we 
 may be sure that " where all is known, all will be 
 forgiven." . . . 
 
 From Mrs. Earle, 1 author oj " Pot-pourri 
 
 from a Surrey Garden." 
 
 ... I think you have done it quite admirably and 
 with the greatest dignity, making the truth to shine 
 as it always should, in spite of the awful sadness of 
 the tale. Will you think it very strange that it makes 
 me like and even understand Byron better than I 
 
 1 Granddaughter of Mrs. Villiers. (See p. 22.)
 
 150 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 ever did before. In spite of everything it makes him 
 more human, and one can understand, as he had little 
 or no moral sense, that his rage against Lady Byron 
 was not so senseless as it has always seemed ; as 
 though she did behave so well, she yet robbed him 
 directly and indirectly of his prey and crossed his 
 wishes most successfully. It is indeed a human 
 document of the greatest interest, as must always be 
 where the inner hearts of men and women are re- 
 vealed. . . . What I do not even now understand is 
 what motive made him marry at all. Was it that he 
 hoped it would be a blind, which would enable him 
 to cheat the world and continue the intimacy, or was 
 it money alone ? The utter sacrifice of a young girl 
 seems the greatest crime of all. It is very interesting 
 to see how, before she knew the truth, her Mother 
 viewed her daughter's character and its severity, 
 which was the only accusation the world could bring 
 against her. . . . 
 
 From Henry James. 
 
 . . . Let me tell you at once that I am greatly 
 touched by your friendly remembrance of my possible 
 feeling for the whole matter, and of your own good 
 act, perhaps, of a few years ago the to me ever 
 memorable evening when, at Wentworth House, you 
 allowed me to look at some of the documents you 
 have made use of in " Astarte." Ineffaceably has re- 
 mained with me the poignant, the in fact very 
 romantic interest of that occasion. And now you 
 have done the thing which I then felt a dim fore- 
 shadowing that you would do but the determination 
 of which must have cost you, as you show indeed, 
 infinite consideration, and you have done it all after
 
 " ASTARTE " 151 
 
 a manner of your own, and in a form, and with a 
 weight and an authority, a general overwhelming 
 massiveness, before which, at first, one catches a 
 little one's breath. I caught mine when I recognised 
 your purpose and the extent of it, but as I went on I 
 saw your act, I can honestly say, as a high and grave 
 inevitability absolutely complete in itself, and justi- 
 fied by the very terms in which you perform it. It 
 is an incantation out of which strange tragic ghosts 
 arise, and other grimacing shapes, and thick troubling 
 fumes of a past that seems to serve for them as a 
 dark underworld ; but such an effect was the essence 
 of your case, and could only come, of itself, from the 
 moment you began to speak, as you have done, from 
 the only real knowledge of what you are talking 
 about (in connection with the matter) that our 
 chattering time has seen. This knowledge, in its 
 kind, strikes me as your warrant, and still more as 
 your necessity (for the act) ; and great is the pleasure 
 of seeing a thing so immitigably done. For if you 
 evoke the Ghosts you send them also, with as firm a 
 hand, back to their shades, and I think there is not 
 one of them (least of all the dreadful one of Hay ward, 
 whom I distressfully remember) who will ever rise 
 again for an hour. Great is the virtue of History 
 when it has waited so long, and so consciously to be 
 written, and to be enabled to proceed to its clearing 
 of the air. Between the covers of the book shapes 
 itself the last word about Byron absolutely the last 
 word, strange, portentous and polysyllabic, but 
 admitting now of none other whatever after it. It 
 seems to me equally true that your justice to Lady 
 Byron has the same final and conclusive character,
 
 152 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 allowing of no rectification in any sense, and I can't 
 sufficiently congratulate you on not having yielded 
 to any insidious but considerable temptation to dress 
 her in any graces, in any shape of colour whatever, 
 not absolutely her own. To have spoken for her so 
 sincerely and with such effect, and yet with such an 
 absence of special pleading I mean with so perfectly 
 leaving her as she was can't have been an easy 
 thing, and remains, I think, a distinguished one. 
 Clear she was, and you have kept her clear ; and amid 
 the all too heavy fumes one puts out one's hand to her 
 in absolute confidence. I think her spirit, somewhere 
 in the universe, must be putting out its hand to you ! 
 As for some other questions by which I mean the 
 form and scheme of the book on the side of illustra- 
 tion and reference and citation there would be 
 much to say, to my sense, if it were not one o'clock 
 a.m. and I hadn't already written you as long a 
 letter as you will care to read. On the one hand the 
 miscellany is extraordinarily rich and entertaining 
 and I can but admire and envy you the magnificence 
 of your Fund, on which you so royally draw I mean 
 your fund of reading and historic saturation. Like- 
 wise it's interesting to encounter so many vivid and 
 dauntless personal opinions, and so competent a 
 defence of them. I nevertheless think I should have 
 ventured to contend with you on the literary con- 
 nection, into which, in some places, you expand, 
 and am not sure, in short, that I wouldn't rather 
 have argued for your bundle of precious relics 
 wrapped in a plain white napkin instead of in your 
 cloth of gold. But these are things to talk of of 
 which I think with the greatest pleasure. . . .
 
 " ASTARTE " 158 
 
 From William De Morgan. 
 
 ... I have received the long expected book. I 
 should esteem myself privileged in possessing it if it 
 were only from the fact that it is absolutely unique 
 of its kind. For if analogous circumstances have 
 ever existed, which I doubt, the chances are, I take 
 it, very large that any such book as made up the 
 analogy was a mere pidce justificative the attempt 
 to re-instate, irrespective of facts, of an advocate. 
 My recollection of my own reading at Ockham, of 
 your book before it went to press, is one of scrupu- 
 lous fairness I am of course writing now merely to 
 thank and acknowledge this is hardly a letter but 
 the slightest inlook I have had time for has carried 
 my impression still further in the same direction. 
 
 Your description of Lady Byron simply brings her 
 back to me as I recollect her. And I imagine that 
 if my mother were now living, she would say nearly 
 the same only that her early memories of your 
 grandmother would of course occasion hesitation on 
 points reservation outright perhaps. But of one 
 thing I feel quite certain : she would have rejoiced 
 at the removal for the future of the possibility of the 
 sort of imputations and fault-findings that made the 
 tone of so much conversation about Lady Byron. 
 I know how things said grated on her while of 
 course refutation was what she was not authorised 
 to give, and nine times out of ten, what her hearer 
 would have had no title to receive. 
 
 However I mustn't run on ! A Publisher is calling 
 for proofs, corrected. That is funny isn't it ? 
 What have I to do with proofs ? l 
 
 1 These were the proofs of " Joseph Vance."
 
 154 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 From Sydney Cockerell (Director of the Fitzwilliam 
 Museum, Cambridge). 
 
 ... I saw Swinburne and Watts -Dunton last 
 night. They told me at first that " Astarte " had 
 not arrived, but it was discovered among other 
 unopened parcels. . . . However, they are both most 
 eager to read it, and Swinburne said that you would 
 hear from him in a day or two. Watts-Dunton, who 
 is exceedingly learned in all matters connected with 
 poets and poetry, said that he had always believed 
 Mrs. Stowe's statement, and that he regarded the 
 publication of an authoritative summary of the facts 
 as the most important literary event that had 
 occurred for years. He added a piece of informa- 
 tion that will interest you, namely that the writer 
 of the Saturday Eeview articles was Mrs. Lynn Linton, 
 " the most brilliant journalist of her time." 
 
 From Algernon Swinburne. 
 
 ... I am very much obliged by your gift of a 
 most interesting and curious book. It is perhaps a 
 matter for condolence that the intrusive imperti- 
 nence of scribbling strangers should have compelled 
 you to undertake such a task : it is certainly a 
 matter for congratulation that it should have been 
 so finally and so admirably discharged. 
 
 The following is taken from a letter to a mutual 
 friend, written a year later : 
 
 From M. Paul Bourget to Mrs. Ady (Julia 
 
 Cartwright). 
 
 . . . Le livre m'a extremement interesse et je le 
 considere comme le document definitif sur le pro- 
 bleme de la rupture entre Lord Byron et sa femme.
 
 " ASTARTE " 155 
 
 II ne me semble pas qu'il depasse la mesure de ce 
 qu'il est permis de publier sur un grand ecrivain plus 
 de trois quarts de siecle apres sa mort. Faut-il que 
 je vous avoue que cette passion criminelle, mais 
 vraie, de Byron, donne pour moi a sa figure morale un 
 pathetique que je ne trouvais pas a ses fanfaronnades 
 et affectations. J'aime mieux un egare, quelque 
 coupable qu'il soit, qu'un comedien. . . . 
 
 At this time the notices in the Press were few and 
 unimportant, but six months later, on the death of 
 the author, many of the obituary notices took the 
 form of a more or less complete review of his book. 
 Among much that was trivial and evidently written 
 from hearsay only, there were two or three that 
 showed real study of the subject and an effort at 
 fair judgment. But the general verdict was, on the 
 whole, unfavourable. Even those who recognised 
 the interest and ability of the work declared that it 
 should not have been written. And there was a 
 curious inability to understand its motive. ' Why 
 Lord Lovelace should have set his hand to such a 
 task none can explain," said a writer in the Tribune. 
 The following remarks in Freeman's Journal are 
 typical of many other comments. " His freak 
 and a very disagreeable one it was was the publica- 
 tion for private circulation of * Astarte,' a fragment 
 of biography devoted to proving the terrible accusa- 
 tion made by Harriet Beecher Stowe against Byron. 
 ... To vindicate the reputation of his grandmother
 
 156 
 
 at the expense of that of his grandfather was also 
 Lord Lovelace's object. . . ." Why " also " ? The 
 vindication of Lady Byron he being her one male 
 representative was the only object of the book, and 
 if this duty could have been discharged without con- 
 firming the revelations of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, how 
 immense would the relief have been ! 
 
 A more just criticism was to the effect that the 
 book had been too long delayed. If it was to have 
 been written at all, it should have been done when 
 the scandal was in every one's mouth. It is largely 
 in order to explain the obstacles which stood in the 
 way of dealing with the matter at the proper time, 
 that this memoir of Lovelace has been written. It 
 was pleaded that " the Byron mystery " was now 
 shelved and universally forgotten, and that it was 
 a wanton thing to drag it to light again. But Byron 
 is not shelved. And whenever he is talked about or 
 written about, the old figment, that his unhappy wife 
 was to blame for the failure of his domestic life and 
 for his flight into exile, would reappear, and again it 
 would have been said that to the supposed odiousness 
 of her conduct as a wife she had added a crime yet 
 more odious, that of bringing a false accusation 
 against her husband. These lies, however seldom 
 they might now be repeated, had to be destroyed. 
 
 I believe that the five years during which he wrote 
 his book were the happiest of Lovelace's life. At 
 last the doubts and hesitations that had tormented
 
 " ASTARTE " 157 
 
 him for thirty years and more had been cast aside ; 
 and as he pondered over the records of his family 
 tragedy, the conviction became daily clearer to him 
 that he had chosen the only true and honest course. 
 He did not hurry himself. After so much delay, a 
 few more months or years seemed to be of small 
 account, and he was naturally deliberate. The 
 occupations of a landowner are manifold, and some 
 of them delightfully absorbing. He could only 
 write in the intervals of other work, and his manu- 
 script was often put aside for long periods. He was 
 also enjoying a new form of society. Young people 
 were growing up in his family and that of his wife. 
 He loved to throw his house open to them, and for 
 their pleasure and advantage allowed every sort of 
 innovation and interruption to his usually quiet life. 
 Those who had always thought of him as rather 
 unsocial were amused to see " Uncle Ealph " the 
 delighted centre of youthful frivolities. Older 
 friends were also made welcome. When I think of 
 those who paced the garden at Ockham with him on 
 those happy summer afternoons, I see the well- 
 beloved figures of W. H. Lecky, Henry James, 
 William de Morgan, Lord Courtney, and of many 
 others who are happily still with us. Part of the 
 year was always spent at Ashley Combe, in Somerset, 
 among the great woods which his father had planted 
 between moor and sea. There he loved to work in 
 his shirt sleeves with shovel and pick, as his father
 
 158 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 had been wont to do, cutting rock-paths down the 
 sides of the combes. There was once a delightful 
 fortnight when he was the host of his two Alpine 
 guides, Michele Bettaga and Bortolo Zagonel, from 
 Primiero (in that land for which Italy and Austria 
 have been fighting). Miss Gertrude Bell, whose 
 exploits as a climber are well known, came to help 
 us to entertain these good fellows, and the whole 
 party amused themselves with making " ascents " of 
 the rocks which fringe that portion of the Bristol 
 Channel. 
 
 It was in the late autumn of 1905 that he first saw 
 his book in print, and I remember well the sigh of 
 content with which he said that now he hoped never 
 again to talk or think of the subject of it. He kept 
 this vow so well that he never brought himself to face 
 the irksome task of putting in order the mass of 
 papers from which he had worked. A year later I 
 found myself dealing with a maze of confusion, to 
 which he alone had had the clue. 
 
 These letters reflect the preoccupations of that 
 time : 
 
 To the Hon. Mrs. Norman Grosvenor. 
 
 OCKHAM, 
 
 December 80&, 1905. 
 MY DEAR CAROLINE, 
 
 Your extremely kind letter is a fresh expression 
 of that steady friendship and sympathy, now lasting 
 many years and for which I always have been and 
 shall remain grateful. Your interest in the subject
 
 " ASTARTE " 159 
 
 for personal and family reasons is what I care for 
 most, but I am also glad you should wish to know the 
 truth lor its own sake, and especially Lady Byron's 
 " claims to admiration and respect, and the limita- 
 tions which may have made her an incompatible 
 associate for a man of Byron's fiery and rebellious 
 temperament." I am quoting from a delightful 
 letter I have received from Mr. Sidney Cockerell. He 
 continues : " I feel great pity for her but scarcely 
 less for the other two nay perhaps even more, as 
 they certainly suffered most. Lady Byron had at 
 any rate the support of a clean conscience, whereas 
 the Erinyes must always have been goading her 
 husband and Mrs. Leigh and making life intolerable 
 for them. One sees the subject stripped of all 
 trivialities, like a Greek drama and thus detached, 
 one cannot pass judgment. One can only grieve that 
 Fate was so unkind." 
 
 Of course I shall feel highly honoured if Lady 
 Ridley should make up her mind to purchase the 
 book ; and I will write accordingly to the Qhiswick 
 Press that, if they hear from her, they are to supply 
 her with a copy. ... I feel as if the whole country 
 would be pervaded by the Furies when the civil war 
 of the elections breaks out. Mr. Cockerell, in the 
 letter I quoted, mildly reproves me for shewing the 
 cloven hoof of undemocratic ideas in some of my 
 pages, and perhaps I ought to have effaced my own 
 little prejudices, but it is not only or indeed mainly 
 the political levellers I dislike. The invasions of 
 machinery, manufactures, trade, the levelling of 
 antiquities and beauty the disappearance of the old 
 world of nature and art is what I really hate, and there
 
 160 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 I think "socialists" of W. Morris' and S. C. 
 Cockerell's type are quite of my mind. I no more 
 love the revolutionary changes made by capitalists 
 than they do. 
 
 But the hour of post approaches and warns me not 
 to start a sermon at you but to wish you a happy new 
 year and send my love to your children and yourself. 
 
 To the same. 
 
 OCKHAM, 
 
 May 18ft, 1906. 
 
 I do not know how to thank you enough for intro- 
 ducing me to the rich store of poetry and history that 
 is compressed into " Le Jardin d'fipicure." The title 
 itself strongly attracts lovers of Lucretius. Anatole 
 France's own name would, as you may have under- 
 stood, not in itself have been much inducement ; but 
 on the other hand a book that you have thought over 
 cannot be indifferent to me, and on turning over the 
 pages I find dedications to Lucien Muhlfeld, E. Bod 
 and Th. Wyzewa whose writings I have read with 
 very great admiration. So far I have only traversed 
 the first thirty and the last fifteen pages. I have 
 some reserves to make on the sections about gambling 
 and also I think the author rather haunted by 
 peculiar sentiments as to la terrible merveille 
 woman. I spent some time finding out his texts. 
 Only the first one is from Ecclesiastes, and he has 
 arranged it considerably. In the Vulgate version I 
 find (vii. 27) : " And I have found more bitter than 
 death the woman, who is a fowling snare (laques 
 venatorum), whose heart is a fishing net, her hands 
 are bonds."
 
 " ASTARTE " 161 
 
 I do not know whence he quotes : " Ne vous 
 appuyez pas sur un roseau qu'agite le vent, etc. ; " 
 but " toute chair est comme 1'herbe et sa gloire passe 
 comme la fleur des champs " is Isaiah xl. 6, though 
 it does not seem intended to apply specially to 
 woman. It is in Ecclesiasticus (of the Apocrypha), 
 xxv., that he gets : " All wickedness (or roguish- 
 ness) is but little to the wickedness of a woman. 
 ... Of the woman came the beginning of sinne, 
 and through her we all die." So he garbles and 
 mixes not a little. 
 
 Saturday. I read some more last night. There 
 is a beautiful section about the last splendid meta- 
 morphosis of the butterflies who end their existence 
 in an hour of love and youth (p. 51). On death 
 generally and indeed life too he does not seem 
 so strong as his friend Edouard Rod, a page of whose 
 which I particularly admire, I will now quote : 
 
 Les Chretiens disent que notre vie importe peu, 
 que 1'autre compte seule, que la terre est une anti- 
 chambre ou il ne faut rien casser en posant sa canne 
 et son pardessus avant d'entrer au salon. Moi, je 
 ne suis pas de cette ecole. Je crois au contraire que 
 notre vie importe beaucoup, parce que je ne suis pas 
 sur qu'il y en ait une autre. La religion, tres bonne 
 chose, mais bien incertaine, cher monsieur ! Moi, 
 je n'y pense jamais, sauf le dimanche, quand je vais 
 au temple, a cause de 1'exemple. Dans ce que je 
 vous dis, je me place a un point de vue exclusive- 
 ment terrestre utilitaire. Et je vous declare que 
 ma niece, qui est impregnee jusqu'aux moelles de 
 1'esprit de sacrifice, a eu beaucoup plus de satisfac- 
 tion que moi, qui en suis depourvu. Dans des pro- 
 
 L, 11
 
 162 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 portions enormes, monsieur ! Je me suis ereinte 
 pour amasser une fortune : elle a eu toutes sortes 
 de joies infiniment meilleures, dont aucune ne lui 
 a laisse la moindre amertume. Voila le premier 
 point. . . . 
 
 Le second point, c'est le travail utile, simple et 
 productif est incomparablement superieur au travail 
 complique, savant et lucratif . . . . Je veux dire que 
 le meilleur travail est celui qui exige la plus grande 
 fatigue et qui, au lieu de favoriser 1'echange, comme 
 le commerce ou Tindustrie, augmente simplement la 
 reserve des produits de premiere n6cessite. 
 
 Je n'ai pas besoin de dire que 1'enonce categorique 
 de principes aussi differents que ceux qui ont assure, 
 depuis ses origines, les progres de notre civilisation, 
 fit surgir dans mon esprit une foule d'objections. 
 Si je parle ainsi, continua M. Nicollet d'un ton moins 
 assure, c'est que je sens bien que je suis le moins 
 heureux des habitants de la Villa Charlotte. D'ou 
 je conclus que mon frere et ma niece ont mieux com- 
 pris la vie que moi." 
 
 If it would not weary you too much, I should like 
 to give you " Mademoiselle Annette " from which 
 this long extract comes. 
 
 To return to the philosophy of the garden from 
 which Anatole France starts he appears unable or 
 unwilling either to stay there or find his way back 
 to it. He ends by half envying, half rebuking, the 
 creature of his imagination, who retires (with a 
 beautiful but unthinking Aspasia) into a vacuum of 
 oblivion and indolence. There is something un- 
 decided and inconclusive about all the agitations 
 of Anatole France, and even about his style. As to
 
 " ASTARTE " 163 
 
 this last my impressions are somewhat slow in form- 
 ing, and I have yet to discover the striking merits of 
 which one hears so much. Here and there I like 
 something and want also to put a few queries. . . . 
 
 To Miss Gertrude Bell. 
 
 OCKHAM, 
 
 July 29 >fh, 1906. 
 
 Will you accept a copy of William De Morgan's 
 book which I have been reading with the utmost 
 delight ? I am assuming your permission and send- 
 ing it with this at the same time I mean. 
 
 You will find both laughter and melancholy as in 
 life, so combined as to give one the feeling of a living 
 piece out of the world's life idealised by a poet, 
 who is also a master of irony and humour gentle 
 without illusions. 
 
 In every one's existence there pass by notable 
 specimens of goodness, beauty, vice and crime but 
 how impossible one feels it to describe them to the 
 life to penetrate and reproduce their thoughts and 
 words to convert repulsive monsters into good 
 pictures or plays but when this is well done what a 
 pleasure it is to read all that one fancies one has or 
 ought to have observed. And how bitter it is to 
 have beheld some human ape and tiger on the prowl 
 and to have been ignorant and powerless to stop 
 their wicked work from thriving and making misery. 
 And yet I can conceive a sort of satisfaction in 
 giving literary form to the terrible drama in which 
 we are perpetually involved though we so little 
 understand it till too late. 
 
 In a good book one may recognise all sorts of old 
 acquaintances and thoughts and pages even of
 
 164 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 tragedy and searching exposure may be consolatory 
 if written in a serene spirit. . . . 
 
 The late summer of 1906 was hot and oppressive. 
 For some reason we did not seek coolness under the 
 pines at Ashley Combe, but lingered on at Ockham. 
 One sultry morning in August, the head-woodman 
 came to report damage done by mischievous boys 
 in Lovelace's favourite plantation. Very wrathful, 
 he sallied forth in the hot sun to the scene of destruc- 
 tion, and came back much heated and tired. That 
 afternoon we had a visit from Mr. Francis Galton, 
 most charming of talkers, kindest and most acces- 
 sible of celebrated men. There was long and 
 delightful conversation between him and Lovelace 
 on the terrace. Mr. Galton amused himself as usual 
 in our aviary, being especially charmed with the 
 love-drama between Pierrot, the green Amazon 
 parrot, and Eosy Talbot, the pink cockatoo, a 
 recent gift from my sister in Australia. The last 
 word that my husband addressed to me was some 
 joke about Pierrot and his ardent courtship. An 
 hour later he was found on that same terrace, lying 
 on his face in the twilight. He had passed away 
 without fear or pain.
 
 APPENDIX 
 BYRON'S DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER 
 
 ADA AUGUSTA BYRON, born in December, 1815, 
 was married at nineteen to William, eighth Lord 
 King, afterwards created Earl of Lovelace, 1 and 
 died in November, 1852. She was a pretty and attractive 
 woman of exceptional talent, but of somewhat eccentric 
 character. I have little to add to the summary of her 
 life (cut off, like her father's, in early middle age), and the 
 description of her achievements as a mathematician, 
 given by Miss E. C. Mayne, in her " Life of Byron." a 
 Her teacher, Professor Augustus De Morgan, said of her 
 that, if she had been a man, she could have been Senior 
 Wrangler. 
 
 In the passage, however, which Miss Mayne quotes 
 from Mrs. Beecher Stowe's description of her, there occurs 
 a sentence from which I must strongly dissent, namely : 
 " She married a man of fashion, ran a brilliant course as 
 a gay woman of fashion, etc., etc." Lord and Lady 
 Lovelace no doubt lived in the best societj^ of their day, 
 but neither can ever have been " of fashion." They 
 spent the greater part of their time in the country, he 
 absorbed in his duties as a landowner, she in literary and 
 scientific pursuits. 
 
 The correspondence in my hands shows that Lady 
 Lovelace took but little interest in ordinary society. 
 Among her few intimates was Babbage, inventor of the 
 calculating machine ; and it was an unfortunate con- 
 sequence of the studies that they made together that she 
 
 i See Chapter I., pp. 7, 8. 
 
 * Vol. II., pp. 8486 (Methuen, 1912).
 
 166 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 conceived the idea of an " infallible system " of betting 
 on horse-races. Lady Byron blamed Lord Lovelace for 
 having at first encouraged his wife's taste for racing, and 
 for having introduced her to undesirable acquaintances in 
 the racing world. From his letters, however, it appears 
 to me that he was never more than passively acquiescent 
 in her adventures. 
 
 Of course there soon came a dreadful day when the 
 calculations completely broke down, and the unhappy 
 woman found that she had lost a sum so large that she 
 dared not speak of it to her husband. Much trouble and 
 sorrow came of all this, as to which I cannot say more. 
 But it is right to state that Lady Lovelace's losses were 
 paid by her mother, Lady Byron, and did not fall upon 
 Lord Lovelace's fortune. 
 
 I am glad that Miss Mayne gibbets as " plainly 
 apocryphal " the absurd tale that Byron's daughter was 
 unacquainted with her father's poems until her visit to 
 Newstead at the age of thirty-five ! It is entirely untrue. 
 
 When she died, from an internal disease, after nearly 
 two years of terrible suffering, her son Ralph was thirteen 
 years old ; but for the last few months of her life he had 
 not been allowed to see her. 
 
 Her daughter, Anne Isabella King (known then as 
 " Annabella"), was at this time fifteen years old. She 
 apparently much resembled her mother, though she had 
 darker colouring and rather less regular beauty of features. 
 Both were women of middle height, beautifully formed 
 and proportioned, and with great dignity of carriage. To 
 the last hour of her long life the daughter retained the 
 charm of her delicate and expressive face, with the 
 beautiful dark eyes full of intelligence and loving-kindness. 
 And she shared with her brother the attraction of a sweet 
 and gentle voice in speaking. It will be remembered that 
 this characteristic is recorded of their famous grandfather. 
 
 Her own daughter writes of her : 
 
 She learnt drawing from Ruskin. Her gift for sketching
 
 APPENDIX 167 
 
 was unequalled, especially as regards horses, and the 
 rapidity of her pen-and-ink drawings could never have 
 been guessed from their minute perfection. An architec- 
 tural drawing done by her at the age of twelve was hung 
 in the Royal Academy. The beautiful house at Crabbet 
 was mainly designed by her. That her artistic and literary 
 gifts are not better known to the world at large is due to 
 her retiring nature and love of self-effacement ; she 
 always preferred to enjoy the triumphs of her friends. 
 She was a first-class chess player, mathematician and 
 linguist, being a most distinguished Arabic scholar. She 
 had much knowledge of music, and had been a friend of 
 Joachim. 
 
 She was a little over thirty when she married Wilfrid 
 Scawen Blunt, of Crabbet Park, Sussex (who survives 
 her), then in the diplomatic service and not yet known as 
 a poet, and took at once a distinguished place in the best 
 literary and general society of her day, both British and 
 foreign. But she found her real vocation in the adven- 
 turous journeys that she undertook with her husband in 
 the seventies and eighties of the last century. She rode 
 the only woman in the cavalcade through the wildest 
 portions of the Arabian and Mesopotamian deserts, 
 penetrating to jealously-guarded fastnesses and often in 
 no slight peril. She loved the sun and the wind, and the 
 hills and the freedom of outdoor life ; and her perfect 
 horsemanship, her fearlessness and the habits of extreme 
 abstemiousness which she inherited from her father, Lord 
 Lovelace, made her singularly well fitted to encounter the 
 many" difficulties of such travels. 
 
 Again I quote from the same source : 
 
 She had been a remarkable long-distance runner until 
 she dislocated her knee on one of her desert journeys. 
 Medical help not being at hand, she continued to ride for 
 weeks with her swollen and useless leg supported by the 
 foot in a rope tied to her waist. She crossed the Tigris, 
 Euphrates and Kherkha rivers either on a goatskin raft 
 or clinging to a swimming horse. Knowing the formidable
 
 168 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 nature of these rivers, she foretold the military difficulties 
 in those regions. 
 
 To the end of her life the romance and delight of these 
 wild journeys were never far from her memory. 
 
 Her principal adventures are related in the two books 
 published under her name, 1 but she was always inclined 
 to disclaim the authorship of them. The fact was that 
 her diaries were rather freely edited for publication by 
 the practised hand of Wilfrid Blunt. But her clear and 
 accurate narrative formed the whole substance of the 
 books, and without her knowledge of Arabic, and the 
 sympathy and understanding with which she conversed 
 with the tribesmen wherever she went, they could not 
 have been written at all. 
 
 With her active aid her husband set up the stud of 
 Arabian horses which still exists at Crabbet ; and for 
 years it was her daily occupation to care for the welfare 
 of these beautiful creatures. She was constantly in the 
 saddle, exercising and training them, and breaking-in the 
 young ones, which she did with extreme gentleness and 
 boundless skill and patience : 
 
 At the age of seventy-seven she could still vault on a 
 horse unassisted, and while in the prime of her strength 
 habitually rode a buck- jumper, which afterwards " put 
 down " the crack Australian rough-rider of the day. 
 Perhaps this was her proudest achievement. 
 
 The Blunts had acquired a property near Cairo, called 
 " Sheikh Obeyd's Garden," where they spent a part of 
 every year, and where a portion of the stud was kept. 
 In her old age, when Crabbet had been relinquished to its 
 present owner, 2 she lingered longer and longer every year 
 in this Egyptian home. She was in England when the 
 
 1 " Bedouins of the Euphrates," by Lady Anne Blunt (Murray, 
 1878), and " A Pilgrimage to Mejd," by Lady Anne Blunt (Murray, 
 1880). 
 
 8 Her daughter Judith, Baroness Wentworth.
 
 APPENDIX 169 
 
 War broke out, and she yielded to the entreaties of her 
 family so far as to spend the winter of 1914 here. But in 
 the autumn of 1915 she went to Egypt, intending to wind 
 up her affairs and return in the spring, and she never 
 came back. The danger to navigation in the Mediter- 
 ranean had become too great ; and those who loved her 
 here, and out of whose reach she was, could but resign 
 themselves to the inevitable. Her last two years were 
 spent in completing her " History of the Arab Horse," 
 the fruit of many years of study (which it is to be hoped 
 will see the light some day), and in many acts of kindness 
 and care for the British soldiers who now surrounded her 
 in Egypt. 
 
 In June, 1917, the death of her niece, Ada Mary, 
 Baroness Wentworth, 1 who had in childhood been the 
 object of her loving care, came to her as a shock. She 
 felt it to be " unnatural " and very repugnant that she 
 must now inherit at her age and from a younger genera- 
 tion the ancient barony of her mother's family. In spite 
 of this change at the last, no one, I think, will ever 
 remember her except as " Lady Anne Blunt." 
 
 The heat of two Egyptian summers (though she liked 
 it) had undermined her strength. Her eightieth birthday, 
 in September, 1917, found her very feeble, and two 
 months later, after about a week's illness, she died. Kind 
 friends and devoted servants ministered to her at the last. 
 She lies at Gebel el Ahmar, Abbasieh, under the Eastern 
 sun that she had loved so well. 
 
 Much more might be written of her. Many sorrows 
 were hers, especially the deaths of three children in infancy. 
 But no disaster, no wrongdoing of others, ever wrung 
 from her a word of bitterness or complaint. No one was 
 ever so lovingly unselfish as she was : 
 
 To her stoical endurance of pain and hardship, her 
 asceticism and self-sacrifice, she joined a light-hearted 
 gaiety, a delightful humour and lavish generosity and 
 
 1 See Chapter III., p. 40. 
 L. 12
 
 170 RALPH EARL OF LOVELACE 
 
 loyalty of nature, together with fathomless sympathy for 
 the sufferings and weaknesses of others. To the end of 
 her life she had the heart of a child, the brain of a scholar 
 and the soul of a saint. 
 
 Her memory will not soon fade. 
 
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