I quite appreciate your desire that I should send you something of my recollections of the late Marquis of Bute, for whom I had the honour of doing some important work. Lord Bute's architects certainly had considerable opportunity of meeting him and getting to know him as he appeared in their department, for one of the outstanding facts of his life was that he was never out of the mortar-tub. It was one of his brothers-in-law, the late Lord Herries, I think, who used to tell him that he would go down to posterity as the Brick-and-Mortar Lord. But no one who had the privilege of knowing him ever associated his works with any of the ideas of quantity, monotony, and mere utilitarianism, which the mention of the humblest of building materials might conjure up in the minds of people who had not that privilege. Quantity of production, and expenditure of time and money had no prescribed relations to each other when time or money was required to procure the most appropriate material, or time was required to determine the precise design. I remember saying to him once, when something had been delayed till I thought it must be tiresome to him, "Why not let it be finished, and off your mind?" His reply was, "But why should I hurry over what is my chief pleasure? I have comparatively little interest in a thing after it is finished." That saying supplied the key to much that, without it, might be misconstrued in the annals of his architectural undertakings. What he did not consider of importance was allowed to go through at once. What he thought of importance he made a matter for his personal thought, and no detail was so small as to be secure of passing unobserved, or so apparently insignificant {242} that an indefinite delay might not be suffered till he had determined whether it was to be converted into a feature, or at least the vehicle of an allusion to some idea which interested him. The fact is that Lord Bute possessed great imagination, learning, and taste, and an inexhaustible patience and power of calm deliberation before coming to any conclusion which he deemed to be of any importance; and it so came about that he seldom, if ever, changed his mind and ordered anything to be altered after it had once been done. I have heard a tale which was supposed to exemplify the nicety of his taste and the grand scale on which he gratified it. The story may have been meant for a parable only, but it narrated circumstantially how that his architect had imported a shipload of marble columns from Italy, and put them up in a certain palace which he was building for the Marquis, but that when his lordship came to see them, behold, they were not of the exact tint which he wanted, so incontinently they were thrown out, and another shipload was brought, which turned out, of course, to be perfection, of which the pillars themselves, as they stand there to-day, are the lively proof.