On the fly-leaf of a copy of his lordship’s wild poem “Eccelino da Romano,” I have written:
“I have preserved this wild book out of regard for the memory of its author. Poor Lord Dillon! His eccentricities bordered on insanity, but he was kind to me, in my youth, and in a foreign land, where, as yet, I had all my friends to make.”
I first knew him at Florence, when that fair city, rather full of English, was ringing with stories of his eccentricities, and with the fame of his daughter’s beauty. He was frank, fearless, very capricious; but, as I believed, a generous, warm-hearted man. The worst of his eccentricities was a total disbelief in Christianity, or in any revealed religion—a sort of jumbling mad-reasoning materialism. And with him materialism was a very different and a much more withering and repulsive thing than it was with poor Shelley.
There was an epigram in circulation in the English part of society in Florence; I know not who wrote it, nor am I quite sure that I retain the lines correctly, but they were something like these:
“Dillon, go home! Consult thy
daughter’s looks, Peruse them well, and burn thy atheist books. Read in those angel eyes and heavenly face That there’s a God—then supplicate His grace.” |
Florence was almost raving about the beautiful Miss Dillon. Travelling much abroad, out of the way of English newspapers,
and never being much
| CHAP. XIII] | LADY STANLEY | 127 |
But, being violently a philo-Turk, the young diplomatist was no friend to me or to my books about Turkey. Perhaps here I ought to have used the past tense, as before he had been a month at Constantinople he agreed that all I had said about that pandemonium was strictly true, and as he has now been living more than three years in the Levant, he must have greatly modified his philo-Turkism. I should always have towards him a warm corner of the heart on account of his maternal grandfather and the heavenly face of his mother, whom I have never seen since her Florentine days; or, if I have seen her, I have done so without recognizing her. How often does this happen! One passes in the streets, or in some crowded place of resort, a person in whom one was so deeply interested some thirty or forty years ago; one may stand side by side with such a person, in a state of the most perfect indifference, not knowing her or him—as the case may be—and not having the least consciousness of the presence of such a person. Then, in England, if one had, what could one say or do? After such a deluge of years, at least two or three reintroductions would be requisite.
Her ladyship’s mother appeared
to be a quiet, amiable, domestic woman; but I was told that she had, mixed with good common
sense, a fair share of wit. One of the many subjects with which Lord Dillon, who would not take the Scriptural version, delighted
| 128 | VISCOUNT DILLON | [CHAP. XIII |
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