282 The Herberts at Wilton [1897 



the victim of some base trick in order that the other might reign alone." 

 In August I made a driving tour through the West of England and 

 South Wales. The day before starting I received a letter from Edward 

 Malet breaking the silence of fifteen years. It was very cordial and 

 expressed regret for our troubled relations in the past. I have an- 

 swered it in a way which I hope may bring about a renewal of our 

 friendship. The occasion of his letter was the discovery among his 

 mother's papers of a number of MS. poems he thought were mine. 

 In reality they were Lothian's as I can see by the handwriting, and 

 also by internal evidence — poems of dates between 1861 and 1864, 

 the time Schomberg and I were most together and most with Lady 

 Malet. I need not give a full account of this journey. We passed 

 through Petworth and Rogate, where I found Hugh Wyndham, just 

 retired from diplomatic work after his forty years' career. Then by 

 Bishop's Waltham to Salisbury and Stockton, stopping for a couple of 

 hours at Wilton on my way. This time I found Sidney, now Lord 

 Pembroke, at home with his family of boys at cricket, much as 

 I found the former generation thirty years ago. " Wilton is the para- 

 dise of England with its three rivers, eternally beautiful and un- 

 changed while its owners change and perish. One passes by and finds 

 Herberts living there, happily idling their lives away, as one finds 

 swallows year after year nesting in a village, and one imagines them 

 to be the same Herberts, as one imagines the others to be the same 

 swallows. At Warminster next day I stopped to bait and dined at 

 the ordinary at the Anchor Inn, it being market day among the farmers 

 with whom I talked agriculture and the price of mutton. But when 

 they found I was not there to buy lambs they lost interest in me. 

 I found to my surprise that of the ten farmers dining with me five 

 drank water only, the rest cider. Our meat was roast ducks carved 

 by a chairman at the head of the table, and at one moment I was half 

 afraid they were going to make speeches." I spent my Sunday, 8th 

 August, at Mells, where I found a company of " Souls," then on to 

 Bristol where I put up for the night at an odd place of entertainment 

 called " The Bath," kept by a Dr. Shaw and his wife, a pretty woman, 

 who had been long in India, and who was the attraction evidently of 

 the guests, mostly retired Anglo-Indians, patients as well as guests, 

 as indicated by the menu cards, which were marked with medicines as 

 well as wines. Bristol is the refuge of such broken-down officials, 

 who live at its cheap lodging-houses. The next day, crossing the Severn 

 Channel by the tunnel to Cardiff and St. Fagan's, where I spent the 

 inside of a week delightfully with the Windsors in their romantic 

 castle, which is such a perfect thing, an old Carolan house set in 

 the enceinte of an older castle wall, spoilt by nothing modern, the 

 object of my pilgrimage, and back, still driving through the romantic 



