An Impromptu Sonnet.

    Ticked of at the Leasowes, Aug. 24, 1857, as per order.

    “And so you claim a verse of me, good friend,
      As from the inspiration of the place;
    Well then,—­from pastoral trash may taste defend
      Your pleasant Leasowes, and the human race! 
    The Gentle Shepherd’s day has had an end,
      Nor even could melodious Shenstone here
        (False and inflated, we must all allow),
      Excite one glowing thought or pensive tear
        Unless indeed of wrath or pity now: 
      Yet dearly can I love these tumbling hills
        With roughly wooded winding glens between,
      Set with clear trout pools link’d by gurgling rills
        And all so natural and calm and green,
    That served to enervate your Poetaster
    But only strengthen now their Iron Master.”

I will also record a hospitable sojourn in old days at Northwood Park, the splendid abode of Isle-of-Wight Ward (grandfather to my school and college friend Ward of the Aristotle class and Oxonian persecution), where I once spent a week in my father’s time:  and similarly a visit at Lord Spencer’s perfect villa near Ryde:  and at other pleasant homes, made to me frequently welcome, the chief being Wotton, the classic mansion of one of my oldest friends.

Also long ago,—­see a former page,—­I purposely dismissed with only a word our lengthened visits in my father’s day at Inveraray Castle with the old Duke of Argyll, and Holkar Hall with Lord George Cavendish, as private domesticities,—­whilst a casual other few as at Ardgowan, Rozelle, Herriard, Losely, and the like, gratefully on my memory, shall be thus briefly recorded here:  Ardgowan is the magnificent abode of my friend Sir Michael Shaw-Stewart, after whose grandmother as my sponsor I am named Farquhar; Rozelle, the hospitable mansion of Captain Hamilton, where I sojourned many days, meeting the elite of Ayr, and among them the aged niece of Burns in the poet’s own country; Herriard House, my old school-friend Frank Ellis’s heritage under his name of Jervoise, and Losely—­“of the manuscripts,” where I have often visited my late excellent friend James More Molyneux.

Of course, like everybody else who may be lifted a trifle above the crowd, I have experienced, almost annually, the splendid hospitalities of the Mansion House and most of the City Companies:  may they long continue, and not be spunged away by Radical meanness! all classes are united and gratified thereby, for the poorest get the luxurious leavings, and the feasts are paid for by benefactors long departed from the scenes of their successful merchandise.  All that seeming prodigality and luxury have good uses.  But I will mention (of course without the hint of a name or place) one only instance of excessive splendour, quite needless and to my mind vulgar.  A great magnate (not a royalty, I need hardly say) invited