found Lord and Lady Salisbury in the library, lined with Burleigh books and MSS. Mr. Richmond the artist was with them. He has the most charming voice, which, quite independently of his conversation, would make him agreeable. He talked of the enormous prices obtained for statues and pictures at the present time, while Michelangelo only got £90 and a block of marble for the great David at Florence, and Titian the same for his Assumption at Venice. He spoke of the amount of chicanery which existed amongst artists even then—how the monks, and the nuns too, would supply them with good ultra-marine for their frescoes, and how they would sell the ultra-marine and use smalt. He described how Gainsborough never could sell anything but portraits: people came to him for those, but would not buy his other pictures, and his house was full of them when he died. Gainsborough gave two pictures to the carrier who brought his other pictures from Clifton to London: the carrier would take no fare, so he painted his waggon and horses and another picture and gave them to him: these two pictures have been sold lately for £18,000.
“Besides the Lord Chancellor Selborne with his two pleasant unaffected daughters, Miss Alderson was here the first day, and Sir Henry and Lady Maine. With the last I rambled in search of adventures in the evening, and we walked in the long gallery, which is splendid, with a gilt ceiling, only it is incongruous to see the old panelled wall brilliantly lighted with gas.
“Lord Salisbury is delightful, so perfectly easy and unaffected: it would be well if little great men would take pattern by him. Lady Salisbury is equally unassuming, sound sense ever dropping from her lips as unconsciously as Lady Margaret Beaumont’s bon-mots.”
“Dec. 14.—Lady Salisbury showed us the house. In the drawing-room, over the chimney-piece, is a huge statue of James I. of bronze. It is not fixed, but supported by its own weight. A ball was once given in that room. In the midst of the dancing some one observed that the bronze statue was slowly nodding its head, and gave the alarm. The stampede was frightful. All the guests fled down the long gallery.
“In the same room is a glorious portrait of Lord Salisbury’s grandmother by Reynolds. It was this Lady Salisbury who was burnt to death in her old age. She came in from riding, and used to make her maid change her habit and dress her for dinner at once, as less fatiguing. Then she rested for two or three hours with lighted candles near her, and read or nodded in her chair. One evening, from the opposite wing of the house, the late Lord Salisbury saw the windows of the rooms near hers blazing with light, and gave the alarm, but before anybody could reach his mother’s rooms they were entirely burnt—so entirely, that it would have been impossible to identify her ashes for burial but for a ruby which the present Lady Salisbury wears in a ring. A little heap of diamonds was found in one place, but that proved nothing, as all her jewels were burned with her, but the ruby her maid identified as having put on her finger when she dressed her, and the ashes of that particular spot were all gathered up and buried in a small urn. Her two favourite dogs were burnt with her, and they are probably buried with her.[32] It was this Lady Salisbury who was inadvertently thrown down by a couple waltzing violently down the long gallery, when Lord Lytton, who was present, irreverently exclaimed:
‘At Hatfield House Conservatives
Become quite harum-scarum,
For Radical could do no more
Than overturn Old Sarum.’[33]
“In ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill Sykes is described as having seen the fire at Hatfield as he was escaping from London.
“In the dining-room there is a portrait by Wilkie of the Duke of Wellington, painted when he was here after the battle of Waterloo. There is also at Hatfield a beautiful picture of Mary Queen of Scots at fifteen.[34] This, however, is not the authentic portrait. There is another, a replica of that at Hardwicke, taken in a widow’s dress shortly before her execution, which is one of the three portraits certainly painted from life. It was sent by the Queen to the Duke of Norfolk and intercepted by Lord Burleigh. One of the other two portraits belonged to Louis Philippe. As Sir Henry Bulwer was waiting for an audience of the king, another gentleman was in the room with him. The portrait of Queen Mary hung on the wall. The stranger looked at it, walked backwards and forwards to it, and examined it again and again. At last he walked up to Sir Henry Bulwer and said, ‘Can you tell me, sir, whom that portrait represents?’—‘Yes, I can,’ said Sir Henry; ‘but will you tell me why you ask?’—‘Because it is the lowest type of criminal face which is known to us.’ The stranger was Fouché the famous detective.
“In Lady Salisbury’s own room is a picture of Miss Pine, Lord Salisbury’s other grandmother, by Sir Joshua; also the Earl and Countess of Westmoreland and their child, by Vandyke; also a curious picture of a lady.
“ ‘She looks dull but good,’ said Miss Palmer.
“ ‘She looks clever but bad,’ said I.
“ ‘She was desperately wicked,’ said Lady Salisbury, ‘and therefore it is quite unnecessary to say that she was very religious. She endowed almshouses—‘Lady Anne’s Almshouses,’—they still exist, and she sent her son to Westminster with especial orders that he should be severely flogged, when he was seventeen, and so soured his temper for life and sent him to the bad entirely; and none but ‘a thoroughly highly-principled woman’ could do such a villainous action as that. The son lived afterwards at Quixwold, and led the most abominably wicked life there, and died a death as horrible as his life. He sold everything he could lay hands on, jewels and everything, all the old family plate except one very ugly old flat candlestick and six old sconces, which were painted over mahogany colour, and so were not known to be silver. His is the phantom coach which arrives and drives up the staircase and then disappears. Lord Salisbury heard it the other night when he was in his dressing-room, and dressed again, thinking it was visitors, and went down, but it was no one.’
“There is a picture of Elizabeth by Zucchero in the famous dress, all eyes and ears, to typify her omniscience, and with the serpent of wisdom on her arm: she loved allegorical dress. Her hat is here—an open-work straw hat—and in the recess of the gallery her cradle, with A. R. for Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth hated Hatfield. She was here in her childhood and all through Mary’s reign, and she constantly wrote from hence complaints to her father, to Mary, and to the Ministers, and they told her she must bear it; but she hated it, and after she became queen she never saw Hatfield again. The relics of her remain because James I. was in such a hurry to exchange Hatfield for Theobalds, on account of the hunting there, that he did not stop to take anything away.
“In the afternoon we had games, charades—Pilgrim, Pirate, Scullion, and stories.”
“Dec. 15.—Breakfast at a number of little round tables. I was at one with Miss Palmer, the Attorney-General, and his daughter Miss Coleridge. The Attorney-General told a story of a Mr. Kerslake, who was 6 feet 8 inches in height. A little boy in the Strand, looking up at him, said, ‘I say, Maister, if you was to fall down, you’d be halfway t’ome.’
“My cough prevented my going out, but we had Sunday-afternoon service in the chapel, with beautiful singing. In the evening Lady Salisbury asked me to tell stories to all the party, and it was sufficiently alarming when I saw the Lord Chancellor in the first row, with the Attorney-General on one side of him and Lord Cairns on the other. In repeating a story, however, I always think of a bit of advice Mr. Jowett gave me long ago—‘Try to say everything as well as you can say it.’ The Attorney-General afterwards told us—
“There is at Clifton a Mr. Harrison, who is the second medical authority there, a man of undoubted probity and reputation. He told me this.
