Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

“ 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. ”

“ 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" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ One of the chief ornaments of the judicial bench, who knew Bute well, once observed of him that if his vocation had been to the law, he might have reasonably looked to attain the highest honours of that profession:
Industry, learning, patience, impartiality, capacity for work, a remarkable power of grasping facts and weighing evidence, clearness of expression, and a single-minded desire for truth—if these, combined with a noble presence and a lofty integrity {225} of character, are qualifications for judicial office, Bute possessed them all, and in a high degree. ”

“ Her august and venerable ritual, the ordered splendour of her ceremonial, the deep significance of her liturgy and worship, {41} could not fail to attract one who had learned to see in them far more than the mere outward pomp and beauty which are but symbols of their inward meaning. The love and tenderness and compassion with which she is ever ready to minister to the least of her children would touch the heart of one who beneath a somewhat cold exterior had himself a very tender feeling for the stricken and the sorrowful. ”

“ DEAR LORD BUTE,
I must try and write a few lines, asking you to pardon all defects.
The real Palm Branch was most welcome, with its special blessing: it is behind me as I write, and many happy thoughts and messages does it bring. God bless you for your most kind thought. I intend to forward it in due time to Gerald Rendall (late head of Harrow, then Fellow of Trin. Coll., Cambridge, now Principal of University College, Liverpool) , as my share in furnishing his new home: he was married this vacation. The students, male and female, will be glad to see what a real Palm Branch is like. ”

“ I have done two good things (besides some foolish ones) since my twenty-first birthday; the first on December 8, 1868, when I was reconciled to the Catholic Church; the second on April 16, 1872, when the same Church blessed my happy marriage. It is a satisfaction to feel that twice in one's life, at any rate, one has done what one is certain never to repent of nor to regret. Do you not agree with me?
Bute's marriage brought him into intimate relations, and indeed some degree of kinship, with some of the ancient Catholic families of England, of whom he had up to that time known very little. ”

“ The projected visit to Oxford—Bute's first since his change of religion five years previously—duly came off, and he thus refers to it:
To "do" Oxford in a day is suggestive of the American tourists who "do" Rome in three; but my wife saw the most noteworthy things under the skilled guidance of old Parker, whom I fear we unduly fatigued. You may imagine the feelings and memories that came over me as I led my young wife through Christ Church. It is difficult to estimate exactly what I owe to Oxford, but the debt is a heavy one.... ”

“ The long and short is that the Protestants—i.e. the Lord Chancellor and his Court; my Guardians; my friends and relations; and Mansel, Liddon, and Co. have extorted from me a promise not to become a Catholic till I am of age. They are {47} jubilant with the jubilation of devils over a lost soul; but I am hopeless and weary to a degree.
There remains nothing to say now, except that I am utterly wrecked. I have not dared to pray since. I have heard Mass twice, but I looked on with an indifference greater than if I had been at a play. I feel no moral principle either. It is simply all up. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ If there is any characteristic which stands out in that life more saliently than another, it is surely the strong and compelling sense of duty—a sense, it is to be noticed, acquired rather than congenital, for Bute was by nature and constitution, as an acute observer early remarked, [2] inclined to indolence—which runs all through it like a silver thread. ”

“ Capel. Post, p. 75. See also p. 111.
[3] "It has ever been a hobby of mine, though perhaps it is a truism, not a hobby, that the true life of a man is in his letters.... Not only for the interest of a biography, but for the arriving at the insides of things, the publication of letters is the true method. Biographers varnish, they conjecture feelings, they assign motives, they interpret Lord Burleigh's nods; but contemporary letters are facts." (Newman to his sister, Mrs. John Mozley, May 18, 1863.) ”

“ Later on, after the presentation of his only daughter, his charming house in Regent's Park (which, as well as its spacious gardens, he did much to improve and adorn) became the centre of much agreeable hospitality of a more general kind. Bute himself was pleased to think that the entertainments given there in the beautiful ball-room—lit from garlands of Venetian glass, and opening on to the illuminated grounds—were popular and appreciated by society. "I really think," he wrote, "that people enjoy making up parties to come to us on these occasions. ”

“ The latest addition made by Bute to his large landed possessions in Scotland was one which on several accounts was the source of much interest to him during the last years of his life. Just as the chief attraction of Falkland, which he purchased in 1887, had been the fact that it included the ancient royal palace and its hereditary Keepership, so the principal inducement to him to acquire, as he did in 1897 from the Earl of Fife, the Morayshire estate of Pluscarden, was that he thereby came into possession also of one of the most beautiful and interesting ecclesiastical relics in Scotland. ”

“ The transparent honesty which was part of his character was manifested in such restorations as he undertook at Cardiff, Rothesay, and St. Andrews, where at the cost of some æsthetic sacrifice, and often at much added expense (for the materials had sometimes to be brought from afar) , he carried out the work in a stone different in colour from the ancient building, so that there should be no possible future confusion between the old and the new. Altogether it must be said that to Bute's other titles of honour is to be added that of a noble patron of a noble art. ”

“ His practical interest in agriculture was evinced by the fact that the arable land on his Buteshire property was trebled during his tenure of it; and foreseeing with remarkable prescience the great future in store for the port and docks of Cardiff, he spared neither labour nor means in their development. He was Lord-Lieutenant both of Glamorgan and of Bute, and discharged with tact and success the office of Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland in 1842, on the eve of the ecclesiastical crisis which ended in the secession of more than 400 ministers of the Establishment. ”

“ Bute always undertook and pursued such researches with the acutest zest and interest. "I think," a friend wrote of him with kindly humour, "some of the happiest hours of his life were spent standing by, wrapped in his long cloak and smoking innumerable cigarettes, while a band of workmen, directed by one of his many architects, dug out the foundations of a mediæval lady-chapel, or broke through a nineteenth-century wall in search of a thirteenth-century doorway." ”

“ Yet to a section of people here he is more than Pope, a little God, whose every word they accept as an oracle from heaven. Poor good people! It is hard to understand such idolatry: it is, I think, a peculiar product of Oxford, and of one school here.
Bute is in admirable dispositions, and during the month of May has been leading the life of a true Christian. ”

“ The future bishop, with all his attainments, had not the reputation of a very successful teacher in class, nor of a good disciplinarian; but as a house-master he had many admirable qualities, and was greatly beloved by his pupils. For him also Bute preserved a warm and lifelong sentiment of regard and gratitude; and to him, as to John Smith, he was accustomed to send every Easter a blessed palm from his private chapel, which Dr. Westcott preserved carefully in his own chapel at Auckland Castle. ”

“ Of our party, I think I may say that Lady Loudoun, Miss Eden, and the doctor are the worse for their visit to Jerusalem. They had the misfortune to make acquaintance with people, calling themselves religious, whose delight seems to be to deny the authenticity of every single sacred site. The result has been, as might have been expected, a semi-disbelief in everything.
I think, on the other hand, the pilgrimage has been very advantageous to Bute. It has helped him to gather up his thoughts and prepare for action and the work of his life. He has kindly appointed me his chaplain. ”

“ The young peer had from his childhood, as is shown by his early correspondence with Lady Elizabeth Moore, been aware that he would be entitled at the age of fourteen to exercise certain powers of nomination in respect to the management of his Scottish estates. Most of the members of the Lords' tribunal which had adjudicated on his position in May, 1861, had evinced a curious ignorance of the nature, if not of the very existence, of these prospective rights, and even when informed of them had been inclined to question the expediency of their being acted upon. ”

“ The restoration and partial rebuilding of Cardiff Castle was the earliest work of the kind undertaken by Bute. The lofty tower conspicuous on the southwest of the castle enclosure, the restoration of the great southern curtain wall, with its covered way, and the erection of the noble staircase were among the most important of his building operations at Cardiff, which included also the discovery and partial restoration of the old Roman walls and gateway, the re-excavation of the moat, and the clearing and re-marking the sites of the mediæval friaries of the Dominicans and Franciscans. ”

“ Deeply and intelligently interested as he was in the future development of Cardiff, which he was to do so much to promote, Bute's conviction was that a really healthy public opinion in the district {85} could not be created or maintained if only one school of politicians was to have the chance of making its voice heard. This was the main reason which determined him, with full foreknowledge of the heavy financial burden it would entail on him, of starting and supporting a Conservative daily paper in the heart of Liberal Wales. The local Liberals were, of course, disappointed and indignant ”

“ The "Fête-Dieu" in the streets of an English country town will be rather an experience.
We have been down at the sea for the last month. We have no London address, neither of us caring for the place, where no one left me an house and where I have not the least intention of buying one.
Having at this time, as mentioned above, no London residence, Lord and Lady Bute spent their year chiefly between Cardiff and Mountstuart, with occasional visits to Dumfries House, for which Bute had always a particular affection. ”

“ Not only tolerant of, but conspicuously fair-minded towards, the religious views of others, Bute gave evidence of this, as well as of his deep interest in theological questions, in a letter written early in 1868 on the subject of the Filioque clause in the Creed, which divides East from West. Himself persuaded of the truth of the doctrine on this, as on all other points, held in the Latin Church, he could not pass unchallenged defective or disingenuous arguments even on the right side.
It is really breaking a fly on the wheel to attack the argument of the writer in the Rock. ”

“ It is certain that the contemplation of his cousin's wasted life not only distressed him deeply, but tended to confirm in him an almost exaggerated {29} antipathy to the extravagant craze for racing, gambling and betting, which was the form of "sport" most prevalent among the young men of family and fashion who were his contemporaries at Oxford. Bute's entire want of sympathy with such pursuits and such ideals thus inevitably cut him off from anything like intimate intercourse with the predominant members of the undergraduate society of his college. ”

“ Pictures are exposed to receive an exaggerated homage, unknown and undreamt of in the West. But it is absolutely true to say that the Perpetual Presence (to which no reverence at all is offered, by genuflection or otherwise) receives less respect than one ordinarily pays to any place of worship whatever, even a meeting-house or synagogue." Later, recording a visit to the Greek cathedral at Pera, he describes the service there as "the most disagreeable function I ever attended: the church crammed with people in a state of restlessness and irreverence characteristic of Photian schismatics ”

“ A young man of strong religious instincts, good parts, and studious habits, had, after much reading, grave consideration (and, it might be added, earnest prayer, but that was outside the public ken) , come to the conclusion that the religion of the greater part of Christendom was right and that of the British minority wrong. And what made matters worse was that he had in his constitution so large a share of native Scottish tenacity, that there seemed no possibility of inducing him to change his mind. ”