172 A Modern Funeral [S6gi 



" 6th July. — Called on Betty Balfour, whom I found in high spirits 

 at the appointment of her husband as Chief Secretary in Ireland. 

 Gerald is a very able fellow and will doubtless do well on his brother's 

 lines, and I had some talk with him about his prospects there. 



"nth July. — Pamela's wedding to Eddy Tennant, and afterwards 

 with Judith to a dance at Sibell Grosvenor's in honour of it. George 

 (Wyndham) was in delightful vein and supped with Judith and me, 

 entertaining us with his Epicurean views of life. ' What we want in 

 modern life,' he said, ' is to have more feasting, song, and flowers, 

 and noise, and to sit long and late with beautiful ladies, ourselves 

 crowned with wreaths.' Certainly his own entertainment, the first he 

 has ever given, was perfection. He has just been returned for Dover 

 unopposed, the first member of the new Parliament. Plis is a happy 

 nature. 



"15th July. — To my Aunt Caroline Chandler's funeral at Witley, 

 driving there and back from Newbuildings, a full forty-five miles 

 through the oak country of the Weald — an almost entirely uninhab- 

 ited district. Witley village, with the exception of some half-dozen 

 new cottages, is unchanged from what I remembered it as a boy or for 

 that matter from what my mother knew it, as her drawings of it 

 show thirty years earlier. Only the church is changed, the inside 

 having undergone the modern rage of decoration. The funeral was 

 a shock to me, as it was conducted with cheerful music and a merry 

 peal of bells, which seemed to be absurd. The old English services 

 are all made ridiculous now with pseudo-catholic ' mummeries.' They 

 have lost their dignity of old days, but it is of a piece with the whole 

 English character, which has changed from top to bottom in my short 

 fifty years of recollection. Here was my poor old aunt, who, when 

 she came to Witley first as a pretty bride in 1845, was wedded soberly 

 and in all decorum, now in 1895 at the age of seventy-two launched 

 into a grave piled up with flowers like a birthday cake, to the merriest 

 strains of the organ, strains to which we might with no impropriety 

 have danced. The only old-fashioned thing in the ceremony was that 

 her son's widow, who inherits the property, fainted and was carried 

 out. 



" 19th July. — Lunched with Lady Galloway. There has been a 

 regular rout of the Liberals at the Elections. Harcourt, John Morley, 

 Lefevre, Arnold Morley among the slain. Much talk of all this. As- 

 quith has won or kept his seat. 



" 13th Aug. — A visit from one Oppenheim, a Jew, who has been 

 travelling in Mesopotamia, and wants to go to Nejd. [This Op- 

 penheim was afterwards an agent of the German Government attached 

 to the German Legation in Cairo, much concerned in his Government's 

 intrigues there.] 



