al society. When first I made Mrs.
Grote's acquaintance, the persons one most frequently met at her
house in Eccleston Street were Roebuck, Leader, Byron's quondam
associate Trelawney, and Sir William Molesworth; both the first and
last mentioned gentlemen were then of an infinitely deeper shade of
radicalism in their politics than they subsequently became. The
other principal element of Mrs. Grote's society, at this time,
consisted of musical composers and performers, who found in her a
cordial and hospitable friend and hostess, and an amateur of unusual
knowledge and discrimination, as well as much taste and feeling for
their beautiful art. Her love of music, and courteous reception of
all foreign artists, caused her to be generally sought by eminent
professors coming to England; and Liszt, Madame Viardot, Dessauer,
Thalberg, Mademoiselle Lind, and Mendelssohn were among the
celebrated musicians one frequently met at her house. With the two
latter she was very intimate, and it was in her drawing-room that my
sister gave her first public concert in London. Mendelssohn used
often to visit her at a small country-place she had in the
neighborhood of Burnham Beeches.

It was a very small and modest residence, situated on the verge of
the magnificent tract of woodland scenery known by that name; a
dependence, I believe, of the Dropmore estate, which it adjoined. It
was an unenclosed space of considerable extent, of wild, heathy
moorland; short turfy strips of common; dingles full of foxglove,
harebell, and gnarled old stunted hawthorn bushes; and knolls,
covered with waving crests of powerful feathery fern. It was
intersected with gravelly paths and roads, whose warm color
contrasted and harmonized with the woodland hues of everything about
them; and roofed in by dark green vaults of the most magnificent
beech foliage I have ever seen anywhere. The trees were of great age
and enormous size; and from some accidental influence affecting
their growth, the huge trunks were many of them contorted so as to
resemble absolutely the twisted Saxon pillars of some old cathedral.
In many of them the powerful branches (as large themselves as trunks
of common trees) spread out from the main tree, at a height of about
six feet from the ground, into a sort of capacious leafy chamber,
where eight or