248 Newstead Abbey [1909 



of mixed verse and prose being refused publication. He was entirely 

 right, for the volume, except some of the sonnets, was worthless. That 

 must have been in 1867, Robert Lytton having recommended me to 

 send it to Chapman who was then his publisher. It was a fortunate 

 refusal. 



" 29th May. — Newbuildings. It has been a week of glorious 

 weather, the last of a long drought, but now there have been two days 

 of rain. Our only trouble is that the caterpillar has fallen on the oaks, 

 and half the leaves are devoured. This is always the result of frosts 

 at the time the leaves are first unfolding, for the young grub needs a 

 certain cooking of its food, and the frost does this for it, burning the 

 young leaves. It is the same with the apple blight, which is also upon 

 us. Both apple and oak, however, have a natural regrowth of leaves 

 in July and August, which renews their vigour, giving them a second 

 Spring. 



"30th May (Whit Sunday). — At Newbuildings. Meynell is here. 

 He has just been for Joan of Arc's canonization to Rome. He saw 

 Monsignor Stonor there, and asked whether he had been to the cere- 

 mony. 'No,' said Stonor, 'why should I go? She was a French- 

 woman.' The subject of modernism, he said, is now never mentioned 

 at the Vatican. ' The Pope is a worthy, good man, but his pronounce- 

 ments are all dictated to him by the Cardinals, and he is allowed no 

 initiative.' I showed him a passage in my diary in 1892 relating to 

 Manning's Modernist sympathies in the last years of his life, and he 

 told me that what I had put down was quite correct, and about his 

 death. Vaughan had been his creature, but latterly the Cardinal had 

 grown to dislike him. 



"2nd June. — I am at Newstead Abbey, brought here by Beauclerk, 

 who is a country neighbour and friends with Lady Chermside and her 

 sister, who own it. He tells me that his father was once offered New- 

 stead Abbey and a part of the estate for £6,000; then, in i860, old Webb 

 bought it of Wildman, to whom Byron had sold it. Webb had had two 

 sons, but the elder, a charming young man, had committed suicide while 

 an undergraduate at Cambridge, and the younger had emigrated to 

 Australia at the age of twenty-four. So he left Newstead to his 

 daughters, the eldest, Geraldine, having married Sir Herbert Chermside, 

 a retired General, the same Chermside who was in Egypt and Governor 

 at one time of Suakim. The sisters lived together there, the younger, 

 Ethel, who is unmarried, sharing the ownership of the property in a 

 sort of way, one managing everything indoors, the other everything out 

 of doors. They are both pleasant and conversible, and proud of their 

 family possessions, as they may well be, and of its connection with the 

 poet. They have made me very comfortable in rooms overlooking the 

 garden. 



