Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

“ The feeling with which, in an age more tolerant or more indifferent, one peruses these journalistic effusions, is one of wonder, first at their extraordinary impertinence, and secondly at the cool audacity with which they sit in judgment on the action of one of whose character, personality, and motives they one and all show themselves to be in a state of absolutely abysmal ignorance. The Times summed up a spiteful article by concluding that the "defection of an average curate would have said more for the Roman Catholic religion, and might be expected to lead to more lasting results" ”

“ They went off straight to Rome, in Christian fashion, to ask the Pope's blessing on their betrothal; and I just missed them there, for I had the happiness this spring of another brief visit to Italy, at the invitation of a Neapolitan friend. I spent two or three delightful weeks at the Bertolini Palace, high above dear dirty Naples, with an entrancing view over the sunlit bay, and Vesuvius (quite quiescent) in the background. I found the city not much changed in thirty years, and, as always, much more attractive than its queer and half-savage population. ”

“ To Bute, with his almost passionate veneration for the ancient university, which for centuries had been the chief home of religion and learning in Scotland, it was intolerable to think of St. Andrews being deposed from its pride of place and sinking into a decaying village, a mere resort of sea-bathers and golfers. ”

“ A visit to Arundel a little later was signalized by great festivities in honour of the birth of the Duke's little daughter. The four thousand guests who, as the fancy took them, danced in the tilting-yard (converted into a great open-air ballroom) , listened to martial music from military bands, roamed through the beautiful state-rooms, or gazed admiringly at the myriad fairy lamps which glowed many-coloured on castle walls, battlements, and towers, were literally of every class. ”

“ Surrounded from babyhood by a circle of adoring females, in whose eyes the fatherless infant was the most precious and priceless thing on earth, he had grown up to boyhood penetrated, no doubt almost unconsciously, with an exaggerated and overweening sense of his own importance in the scale of creation, to which the wholesome influence of Galloway House provided the best possible corrective. Distinguished, high-principled, exemplary in every relation of life, Lord and Lady Galloway held up to their children, by precept and example, a constant ideal of duty, unselfishness and simplicity of life ”

“ My own life was of course, after my entering on the office and duties of prior, much more confined than heretofore to the precincts of our Scottish abbey. This was no additional burden to me; for my life, whether at Fort Augustus or Oxford or in Brazil, had always been a life in community; and I had always been happy and at home in the society of my brethren in the monastery. ”

“ Unostentatious as were his innumerable charities, it is right that these things (which include his benefactions in South Wales alone) should be recorded. Bute's name was known in his lifetime, and has been handed down to posterity, as that of a munificent patron of scholarship and learning, of science and architecture and art. He richly deserves this tribute; but it is not to be forgotten that he was also a wise, discriminating, [3] and most generous benefactor of a score of institutions designed only for the relief of the distressed, the needy, and the suffering. ”

“ On this crowning day we were more than three hundred in the vast refectory for dinner, at the end of which a choir of monks chanted with thrilling effect the mediæval Laudes, or Acclamations of Hincmar, in honour of our illustrious guests. Among these magnates was my old friend of early days in Brazil, Bishop Gerard van Caloen, whom I had not seen for sixteen years. [18] He had grown a long grey beard, and his eyes looked out through his spectacles as sad and inscrutable as ever. ”

“ A few days after the last sad rites, Bute's widow, with her daughter and three sons, left England for the Holy Land, in order to carry out his long-cherished desire that his heart should be interred in the sacred soil of Olivet. It was reverently laid in the tiny garden of the Franciscans, outside the humble chapel known as Dominus Flevit—"The Lord wept"—the traditional spot, half-way up the holy mountain, where the Saviour shed tears over the approaching fate of the beloved city. An oleander tree alone marks the place of sepulture ”

“ I was unable to attend the next lecture—a most interesting illustrated history of the old Fort—being called south to attend the funeral of the Bishop of Galloway, an old and faithful friend of our house, with whom I had been intimate for close on forty years. The funeral procession, with crucifix and choir, vested clergy and mitred prelates, passing through the streets of Dumfries thronged with silent mourners, was one of the most remarkable spectacles I ever witnessed in Scotland. Bishop Turner had long been on terms of close friendship with the Bute family ”

“ Bute spent nearly the whole winter and spring of 1870-1871 at his beautiful Scottish home, to which he was deeply attached. As he came to know his neighbours better—and he took much pains to cultivate friendly relations with them all—the stiffness, which was, perhaps, as much the result of his own shyness and reserve as of their lack of sympathy with his religious opinions, to a great extent wore off, and his simplicity, courtesy, good sense, and kindness of heart won for him little by little the high place in their regard which he ever afterwards maintained. ”

“ In an age when faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, when love is regarded but as a spasm of the nervous system, and life itself as but the refrain of a music-hall song, I believe that it is still the function of art to give us light rather than darkness. ”

“ One who well remembers the first arrival at May Place of the young Scottish peer, then aged thirteen and a half, has described him as a slight tall lad, reserved and gentle in manner, and particularly courteous to every one. The shyness and also the reverence for sacred things which always distinguished him as a man were equally noticeable in him as a boy; and it is remembered that when he revisited the school three or four years later, during the Harrow holidays, and was asked where he would like to drive to, he chose to go and inspect an interesting old church in the neighbourhood. ”

“ I write down these closing memories in our monastery under the Southern Cross, in the great South American city where my brethren in Saint Benedict, active and devoted men, but far too few for the ever-growing work that lies ready to their hands, are leading the same life of prayer and liturgy, untiring, pastoral labour, and the education of the young in religion and letters, which has been the mission of our Order all through the Christian centuries. ”

“ It was far too small to hold the wedding guests, who perforce remained on the lawn outside. I walked with our host, later in the day, in the splendidly timbered park, and the great picturesque untidy Irish garden; and he held forth on the hardship of having to live uncomfortably in Ireland after the luxury of Colonial governorships. "Ireland! a rotten old country, only fit, as some one said, to dig up and use as a top-dressing for England!" ”

“ Andrews and Oxford
"I have sometimes dreamt," wrote Bute in one of the most picturesque passages of his Rectorial Address, "of the primeval headland, still lifting skyward its crown of ancient towers, but with that crown encircled by an aureola of affiliated colleges—a commonwealth of seats of learning, an Oxford of the North." ”

“ We motored out after them, and lunched on one of the highest points of the island; drinking in, as we ate our Irish stew, an entrancing prospect of the blue Firth, the long sinuous Ayrshire coast, and the lofty serrated peaks of Arran. From Bute I went on to Dunskey, a place full to me always—even under its new, altered, and improved conditions—of a hundred happy memories. There was an al fresco entertainment—tea, music, and dancing on the lawn—given by my niece to the tenants and their families one afternoon ”

“ There is nothing for it but to go on one's way, trying to do one's duty—and literature. I have also a considerable taste for art and archæology, and happily the means to indulge them. When I return from Ober Ammergau, whither I go next month, to see the Passion Play, I shall do a little yachting in home waters, and then return here for the autumn and winter. There is plenty to do here, of course; and building, archæology, and writing will perhaps help me to forget my troubles. After Christmas this place will be unbearable, and I think I shall go to Bute. ”

“ I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing and coaching, were the salt of life. ”

“ Up to his thirteenth year the fatherless boy was under the constant and unremitting care of a devoted mother, whose memory he cherished with veneration to the end of his life. Sophia Lady Bute was a woman of warm heart and deep personal piety, tinged, however, with an uncompromising Protestantism commoner in that day than in ours. One of her fondest hopes or dreams was the conversion to her own faith of the numerous Irish Catholics whom the development of the port of Cardiff, and the rapid growth of the mining industry, had attracted to South Wales ”

“ The rapid drop down the serra—it was my first trip on the wonderfully-engineered "English Railway," which enjoys the profitable monopoly of carrying passengers and coffee (especially coffee) to the busy port of Santos—was enjoyable and picturesque, with glimpses, between the frequent tunnels, into deep wooded valleys, the dark uniform green of the matto {186} interspersed with the lovely azure and white blossoms of the graceful Quaresma, or Lent tree (Tibouchina gracilis) , one of the glories of the Brazilian forest. ”

“ Genuine erudition—a virile independence of thought and judgment—an engaging personal diffidence and a complete absence of anything like obtrusion of the writer's own opinions, combined with a gift of expression and a command of language which often soars to real, if sober, eloquence—these qualities may all be found in the essays which he wrote during the years which were the most intellectually productive of his life ”

“ I was at Arundel for a few days after New Year, and found the Duke very busy with improvements, inspecting new gardening operations, and so on; "and after all," he said, "some one will be coming by-and-by who may not like it!" From Arundel I dawdled along the south coast to Canterbury, and paid a delightful visit to my old friends Canon and Mrs. Moore at their charming residence (incorporating the ancient monastic guest-house) in the close. I spent hours exploring the glorious cathedral—the most interesting (me judice) if not the most beautiful in England. ”