204 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER CHAP. 



opinion in the same way, and enlisted their good- 

 will without difficulty. One day he appeared with 

 Mr. John Burns, M.P., in Mr. Pagan, the Sec- 

 retary's office, and, after introductions, said, " I met 

 Mr. Burns going round the building, and thought 

 he wanted a guide ; so I ventured to propose 

 myself; and I am glad to say that he expresses 

 himself very well satisfied with what he has seen." 



Among the visitors whom Flower more par- 

 ticularly enjoyed taking round his Museum was 

 Lord Tennyson, who spent a morning with him 

 alone on July 14, 1892. They were old acquaint- 

 ances, from meeting in Dean Stanley's house at 

 Westminster. On July 23, 1892, Flower went 

 down to stay at Aldworth, meeting the Duke of 

 Argyll, who was also to be a guest there, at 

 Waterloo, whence they travelled down to Surrey 

 together. Flower wrote an account of this visit in 

 his wife's note-book. 



After a very lovely drive of nearly two miles from the station, 

 mostly over wild common land and through deep lanes with 

 woods on each side, we arrived at Aldworth. It is a handsome 

 stone house, in the English style, built about twenty years ago 

 by Lord Tennyson, Mr. James Knowles, now editor of the 

 Nineteenth Century, being the architect. It stands close to the 

 edge of the steep greensand escarpment, which runs nearly 

 due east and west through all this part of the country, and 

 immediately to the south is a steep drop of several hundred 

 feet, and then a level plain, bounded nearly twenty miles off by 

 the range of downs between Worthing and Portsmouth, giving a 

 magnificent view. The ridge, and the whole slope below, is 

 covered by an ' old wood, in a clearing in which the house was 



