GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



practically used, and portions of the apparatus are, I believe, still 

 to be seen at South Kensington. 



Ronalds offered the invention to the Admiralty of the day, 

 but my Lords rejected it on the ground that as the war with France 

 was just concluded, they had no use for it curious reading in our 

 eyes at the present time. 



How long Ronalds resided at Hammersmith I do not know ; but 

 he died in 1873, at the advanced age of eighty-five. After him 

 came Dr. George Macdonald. The son of a Scottish farmer, he was 

 the direct descendant of one of the families who suffered in the 

 famous massacre of Glencoe a fact which may have helped to 

 colour his mind with romance, and to tinge it with religious fervour. 

 Anyway, he was a successful portrayer of Scottish peasant life in 

 fiction, and a pioneer in a charming by-way of literature, since 

 traversed by other men with even greater results. Through the 

 medium of his popular novels, and sincere verses (marked as they 

 were by strong religious feeling), he made a powerful appeal to a 

 large section of the serious reading public. He also wrote delight- 

 fully for children, and was for a time editor of Good Words /or the 

 Young ; and he published a fascinating " faerie romance " called 

 " Phantastes." 



He had many children, and during his residence at the river-side 

 dwelling at Hammersmith, the garden must have been lively with 

 their glad voices, so that the name by which he called the house, 

 ' The Retreat," was rather a misnomer. William Morris changed 

 it to " Kelmscott House " thus linking it with his beloved country 

 home on the Upper Thames, thirty miles from Oxford. The latter 

 place he himself describes in 1871 in a letter to his friend Faulkner, 

 as " a heaven on earth, an old stone Elizabethan house like Water 

 Eaton, and such a garden ! close down to the river, a boat-house 

 and all things handy." His biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, tells 

 us that during twenty-five years he found in the beautiful old house, 

 a peace and joy that no other place gave him, and his attachment 

 to it deepened as years went on, became indeed passionate, because 

 ' with him the love of things had all the romance and passion 

 that is generally associated with the love of persons only." It 

 became to him as he himself said, in one of his letters, " the type 

 of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, 

 simple people, not over-burdened with the intricacies of life ; and, 



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