280 Alfred Austin's Idea of Heaven 1^97 



to manage. On the contrary, he told me, he had done it without more 

 effort than just to fix his mind determinedly and reverently on Her 

 Majesty, waiting till the inspiration came, ' and (after a pause) it 

 came.' He showed me a letter from the Queen's private secretary, 

 thanking him for the verses, and saying that Her Majesty thought 

 them very pretty, but when he went to present them at Windsor, she did 

 not ask him to recite them. A letter from Lord Salisbury was in 

 the same sense; however, Austin is so loyal that he even apologized 

 for depreciating Victorian architecture. In the afternoon we all sat 

 talking on the lawn, Lady Paget and Lady Windsor being of the 

 party, and it was suggested that each of us should give his idea of 

 Heaven. Mine was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running 

 water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be 

 woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, 

 ' Are you there? ' and for her to answer, ' Yes, are you? ' and so turn 

 round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years. 

 Austin's idea was to sit also in a garden, and while he sat to receive 

 constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea, 

 and a British victory by land. He talked to us a good deal about Irv- 

 ing, and told us that Irving had begun life as a boy of all work in 

 the family of a solicitor in Cornwall, where his father and mother 

 were butler and cook. The solicitor put the boy into his law office as 

 a junior clerk, but dismissed him because he paid no attention to busi- 

 ness, only to play-acting in office hours. 



" 6th July. — A letter from Joseph Potocki telling the ugly news of 

 the burning of the Countess Branicka's stud and stables ; one hundred 

 and thirty horses perished, including two colts they bought from us 

 last year. It is said to be the vengeance of an English groom dismissed 

 for theft. Her daughter Sophie is engaged to marry Prince Strozzi. 



" 12th July. — My new room at Newbuildings which I call the ' Jubi- 

 lee Room ' is finished, and looks already part of the old house. It was 

 built without plan, elevation, or sketch of any kind, Thorpe and I 

 working it out together as we went on." [The Jubilee Room was 

 more than a room, being a separate building with two stories. Thorpe, 

 a plain stone and bricklayer born and bred in the parish, a painstaking, 

 conscientious man working slowly, but with a complete knowledge of 

 his trade and its older traditions. The panelling inside was done by 

 my estate carpenter, Dench.] 



" i$th July. — The South African committee has published a report, 

 certainly the most scandalous ever jobbed. It absolves Chamberlain 

 in these words : ' Neither the Secretary of State for the Colonies nor 

 any of the officials of the Colonial office received any information 

 which made or should have made them or any of them aware of the plot 

 during its development.' It may be noticed that this pronouncement 



