I went to Downside in March, for the solemn blessing of the new abbot, my kind and learned friend Dom Cuthbert Butler. The elaborate ceremony took nearly three hours: we were mercifully spared a sermon, but, _en revanche_, the episcopal and abbatial speeches at the subsequent luncheon were long and rather wearisome. At Fort Augustus, {85} whatever the occasion, we never in those days derogated from the good old monastic usage of silence, and public reading, in the refectory. _Summum ibi fiat silentium_, said Saint Benedict: "let no _mussitatio_ [delicious Low Latin word for "whispering"] be heard there, or any voice save that of the reader alone." The custom was one, I think, as congenial to our guests as to their monastic hosts. I was preoccupied at this time with the rapidly-failing health of my oldest Oxford friend, H. D. Grissell of Brasenose, who spent half his year in Rome, and the other half in what seemed a bit of old Rome transported to Oxford. He was the most pertinacious and indefatigable _collector_ I ever knew: coins, books and bindings, brass-rubbings, autographs, book-plates, holy relics, postage-stamps, even birds' eggs--all was fish that came to his far-flung net; and he laboured incessantly to make all his collections, as far as possible, complete. I found the old man at this time, rather pathetically, trying to complete the collection of eggshells which he had begun as a Harrow boy sixty years before. He insisted on exhibiting every drawer of his cabinet, and was greatly pleased with the motto which, I told him, Sir Walter Trevelyan had inscribed on _his_ egg-cabinet: "Hic Argus esto, non Briareus"; or, in plain English, "Look, but don't touch!"[11] Grissell said he would like to affix this classical caution to all his collections of curios; but he did not live to do this, or indeed to do much else of {86} any kind. He left England before Easter for Rome; and there (as perhaps he would have wished) he died very suddenly a few weeks later. By his own desire his body was brought back to England, at great trouble and cost (these _post mortem_ migrations never appealed to me), and was laid near his parents' graves in the pretty country churchyard of Mickleham, in Surrey. There was a large gathering in the pouring rain, Professor Robinson Ellis and I representing his many Oxford friends. As his literary executor, I came into possession of a great number of curious and interesting letters and documents, dealing chiefly with Roman matters and the early days of the Ritual movement at Oxford and elsewhere.