much
to mitigate the unwelcome tenor of the other.

Many interesting people I used to meet at the house of Mr. Froude the
historian. Among these were two relatives of Mr. Froude's second
wife--namely, Henry Cowper, one of the most charming conversationalists
of his time, Lady Florence Herbert, and, through her, her well-known
husband, Auberon. Auberon Herbert was a most singular character. He
represented a movement of thought which has since then taken other
directions, and would probably now be associated with some form or other
of socialism. In one sense he was certainly no socialist. On the
contrary, he was an ardent champion of individual freedom, as opposed to
the tyranny of the state. He even contended that all taxation should be
voluntary, and actually started a journal, mainly written by himself, in
support of this agreeable doctrine. He was, however, yet more
pertinacious as an advocate of what is now called "the simple life." His
wife shared, though she slightly perhaps tempered, his opinions; and
when they first set up house together they insisted that all their
household--the domestics included--should dine at the same table. After
a week's experience, however, of this regime, the domestics all gave
warning, and the establishment was reconstructed on a more conventional
footing. This counter-revolution had been accomplished before I knew
him, and my intimate acquaintance with him began at a great shooting
party given at Highclere Castle by Lord Carnarvon, his brother. Neither
I nor he were shooters, and while battues were in progress, and guns
were sounding daily at no very great distance, he walked me about the
park, declaring that modern castles which stood for nothing but the
slaughter of half-tame birds were examples of a civilization completely
gone astray. In order that I might see what, shorn of its earlier
eccentricities, was his personal ideal of a reasonably ordered life, he
asked me to stay with him for a week at his own home, Ashley Arnewood,
in Hampshire, on the borders of New Forest. In due time I went. His
dwelling among the woodlands was of very simple construction. It was a
small farmhouse bisected by a flagged passage giving access to four
rooms. On the right as one entered was a kitchen, on the left was an
apartment which he dignified by the name of a museum, its sole contents
being fragments of ancient British pottery which had been dug up in the
neighborhood and were here carefully arran