the same time I may say that
I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at
Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by
sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money
need pass between us.

In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to
him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton.
When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had
begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental
column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to
the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and
intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work
farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present
day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the
credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to
the petitioners was, so he told me, this:

GENTLEMEN.

It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to
nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own
ingratitude.

Strathfieldsaye may have been in old days the scene of many political
incidents. The latest was one at which I myself was present. The heroine
of it was Miss Meresia Nevill, Lady Dorothy's daughter, who afterward
achieved renown as a luminary of the Primrose League. She was then in
her novitiate only, and the duke one morning whispered to her that he
would give her a lesson in oratory. I was asked to be present at it,
but otherwise it was to be strictly secret. Accordingly after breakfast
she, I, and the duke met by appointment in the library. The doors were
locked, and Miss Nevill, who had brought some memoranda with her
scribbled on a half-sheet of letter paper, was told by the duke to take
her stand on the hearth rug and give him a specimen of her powers by
declaiming what she proposed to say, he himself being seated on a sofa
watching her. "Now," he said, "begin." Bashfully consulting her notes,
and speaking with apologetic rapidity, Miss Nevill began to murmur, "My
lords, ladies and gentlemen." "No!" ejaculated the duke; "my dear young
lady, no! Mouth it out like this: "My lords--ladies--_and_--gentlemen."
Don't say it as if you were saying your prayers." In this humorous but
most admirable advice there was no great verbal brilliance; but his
tendency to verbal brilliance showed, on