I should have been prepared for the misadventure, for I was suffering at the time under an evil direction of [Symbol: Mercury], who was just then in [Symbol: Mars] with [Symbol: Uranus], so that I was almost bound to anticipate some untoward happening.[12] {177} On his return from Teneriffe, Bute spent several months at Cardiff, where, as already mentioned, he entertained the Royal Association at their meeting there, and read his paper on the ancient language of the islanders. He attended the corporation-meetings regularly between April and November, and was able to note in his diary in the latter month that his year of municipal office had been a success. He was particularly gratified by a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, himself the mayor-elect for Sheffield, asking his advice on various points connected with the office--"advice," added the Duke, "which your most successful tenure of the mayoralty of Cardiff renders you so admirably qualified to give." Bute showed this letter to a friend, remarking in his quiet way: "The local press has spoken very kindly of my conduct as mayor, but I value this letter more than any number of newspaper articles." Bute went up from Cardiff in May to attend the Royal Academy dinner, as he did on several subsequent occasions. It was of a later one of these entertainments that he noted: "The Academy was bad, and the dinner the dullest I have been at, only redeemed by Rosebery's very witty speech, which was, however, obviously the result of long toil. The Lord Chancellor's [Halsbury] seemed much more spontaneous." Bute does not seem to have spoken at any of these functions, as he did occasionally at the dinners of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. {178} Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff records in his diary the impression made on Sir Alexander Grant, at one of these dinners, by Bute's oration. I met Sir A. Grant, who was full of the speech which Lord Bute delivered the other night at the Scottish Academy dinner, in which he said that "Athens and Assisi had spoilt him for everything else."[13] [1] Froude makes the same remark ("Oceana," Chap. XIV.) about the Chinamen on board the steamer by which he travelled from Australia to New Zealand. "I suppose," he adds, "that to Chinamen the separate personalities are as easily recognised as ours. To me they seemed only what Schopenhauer says that all individual existences are--'accidental illustrations of a single idea under the conditions of space and time.'"