Your Father Uses French
A Great Deal With His Colleagues, Who, Many Of Them, Speak English
With Great Difficulty, And Some Not At All.
.
. . Lady Charlotte
Lindsay came one day this week to engage us to dine with her on
Wednesday, but yesterday she came to say that she wanted Lord
Brougham to meet us, and he could not come till Friday. Fortunately
we had no dinner engagement on that day, and we are to meet also the
Miss Berrys; Horace Walpole's Miss Berrys, who with Lady Charlotte
herself, are the last remnants of the old school here.
LETTER: To I.P.D.
February 21st
My dear Uncle: . . . I wrote [J.D.] a week or two before I heard of
his death, but was unable to tell him anything of Lord North, as I
had not met Lady Charlotte Lindsay. I have seen her twice this week
at Baron Parke's and at Lord Campbell's, and told her how much I had
wished to do so before, and on what account. She says her father
heard reading with great pleasure, and that one of her sisters could
read the classics: Latin and, I think, Greek, which he enjoyed to
the last. She says that he never complained of losing his sight,
but that her mother has told her that it worried him in his old age
that he remained Minister during our troubles at a period when he
wished, himself, to resign. He sometimes talked of it in the
solitude of sleepless nights, her mother has told her.
On Tuesday morning we were invited by Dr. Buckland, the Dean of
Westminster, to go to his house, and from thence to the Abbey, to
witness the funeral of the Duke of Northumberland. The Dean, who
has control of everything in the Abbey, issued tickets to several
hundred persons to go and witness the funeral, but only Lord
Northampton's family, the Bunsens (the Prussian Minister), and
ourselves, went to his house, and into the Dean's little gallery.
After the ceremony there were a crowd of visitors at the Dean's, and
I met many old acquaintances, and made many new ones, among whom
were Lady Chantrey, a nice person. After the crowd cleared off, we
sat down to a long table at lunch, always an important meal here,
and afterward the Dean took me on his arm and showed me everything
within the Abbey precincts. He took us first to the Percy Chapel to
see the vault of the Percys. . . . From thence the Dean took us to
the Jerusalem chamber where Henry IV died, then all over the
Westminster school. We first went to the hall where the young men
were eating their dinner. . . . We then went to the school-room,
where every inch of the wall and benches is covered with names, some
of them most illustrious, as Dryden's. There were two bunches of
rods, which the Dean assured me were not mere symbols of power, but
were daily used, as, indeed, the broken twigs scattered upon the
floor plainly showed.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 22 of 60
Words from 10921 to 11428
of 30995
