865-68 SOCIAL LIFE 157 



CHAPTER VI 



1865-68 



Social Life — Letter from Tennyson — Serious Illness — Bones of the 

 Dodo — Plan of Sunday Lectures, 1865 — His Love of Society, 

 and wide Circle of Friends — Death of Whewell, 1866 — Marriage 

 of his only Son, January 1867 — ' Wayside Gatherings ' and their 

 Teachings, 1867 — Lectures at Bradford, 1868. 



On January 28, 1865, Owen writes to his 

 sisters : — 



' We have now a Siberian landscape from 

 the Cottage, very bright and beautiful though. 

 . . . I was tempted by an invitation from a 

 railway millionaire on Wednesday to Chipstead 

 Place, a fine old manor house once owned by a 

 son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, full of wainscoted 

 rooms and a very fine library full of choicest 

 editions — all the zLto plays of Shakespeare, a first 

 edition of the folio, &c. On Thursday drove to 

 Penshurst Place, where I saw all the relics of Sir 

 Philip Sidney : the card table which Queen Eliza- 

 beth had worked for him, the pair of glass chan- 

 deliers which she presented to the ballroom after 

 her "progress" to Penshurst, and a most quaint 



