We lunched with the Speaker, and had the pleasure of the company of Archdeacon Farrar.  In the afternoon we went to a tea at a very grand house, where, as my companion says in her diary, “it took full six men in red satin knee-breeches to let us in.”  Another grand personage asked us to dine with her at her country place, but we were too full of engagements.  In the evening we went to a large reception at Mr. Gosse’s.  It was pleasant to meet artists and scholars,—­the kind of company to which we are much used in our aesthetic city.  I found our host as agreeable at home as he was when in Boston, where he became a favorite, both as a lecturer and as a visitor.

Another day we visited Stafford House, where Lord Ronald Gower, himself an artist, did the honors of the house, showing us the pictures and sculptures, his own included, in a very obliging and agreeable way.  I have often taken note of the resemblances of living persons to the portraits and statues of their remote ancestors.  In showing us the portrait of one of his own far-back progenitors, Lord Ronald placed a photograph of himself in the corner of the frame.  The likeness was so close that the photograph might seem to have been copied from the painting, the dress only being changed.  The Duke of Sutherland, who had just come back from America, complained that the dinners and lunches had used him up.  I was fast learning how to sympathize with him.

Then to Grosvenor House to see the pictures.  I best remember Gainsborough’s beautiful Blue Boy, commonly so called, from the color of his dress, and Sir Joshua’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which everybody knows in engravings.  We lunched in clerical company that day, at the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol’s, with the Archbishop of York, the Reverend Mr. Haweis, and others as guests.  I told A——­ that she was not sufficiently impressed with her position at the side of an archbishop; she was not crumbling bread in her nervous excitement.  The company did not seem to remember Sydney Smith’s remark to the young lady next him at a dinner-party:  “My dear, I see you are nervous, by your crumbling your bread as you do. I always crumble bread when I sit by a bishop, and when I sit by an archbishop I crumble bread with both hands.”  That evening I had the pleasure of dining with the distinguished Mr. Bryce, whose acquaintance I made in our own country, through my son, who has introduced me to many agreeable persons of his own generation, with whose companionship I am glad to mend the broken and merely fragmentary circle of old friendships.

The 3d of June was a memorable day for us, for on the evening of that day we were to hold our reception.  If Dean Bradley had proposed our meeting our guests in the Jerusalem Chamber, I should hardly have been more astonished.  But these kind friends meant what they said, and put the offer in such a shape that it was impossible to resist it.  So we sent out our cards to a few hundreds of persons,—­those