egarded himself as a species of
knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is
supported--a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"--were
strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls
which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord
Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he
surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees
having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a
romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park
gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or
contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation
of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his
ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing
at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of
a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent
event, was associated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the
strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field
rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling
passion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical
engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind
of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he
came in contact--even the Derbyshire miners--his friends.

The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle
till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly,
ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed
by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was
ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail
accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have
defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient
castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded
together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator
with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a
certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical
purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there--and this was my
first introduction to Wales--for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year
Lord Bute was the president. The ho