It has been sometimes said that Bute, during the period immediately preceding his reception into the Catholic Church, was even more drawn towards the "Orthodox" form of belief than he was to the prevailing religion of Western Christendom. The above extracts show that the very reverse was the case. Genuine and earnest worship stirred and impressed him everywhere: thus he writes, after witnessing an elaborate ceremonial (including the dance of the dervishes) in a mosque at Constantinople: "I left the mosque very much wrought up and excited. There are those who are not impressed by this. There are those also who laugh at a service in a language they do not know: there are those who see nothing august or awful even in the Holy Mass." Slovenliness, irreverence, tepidity in religion were what pained and repelled him; and finding those characteristics everywhere in the liturgical services of those whom he called the Photians, he was so far from being attracted towards any idea of joining their communion, that he returned to England, and to Oxford, after this Eastern journey, with the whole bent of his religious aspirations set more and more in the direction of the Catholic and Roman Church. His conversion was, in fact, accomplished before the end of this year, although circumstances, as will be seen, compelled the postponement for a considerable time of the public and formal profession of his faith. [1] The _Scottish Review_, which Lord Bute controlled at this time, and to which he contributed many articles. [2] This was the chapel on the edge of the sea, among the Mountstuart woods, which had been built for the convenience of the people living and working near the house. Lord Bute used it as a domestic chapel until the new chapel at Mountstuart was opened. He was buried there in 1900. [3] Lord Bute's only daughter, Lady Margaret Crichton-Stuart, then in her twelfth year, and under the tutelage of a Greek governess. [4] Adam Hay Gordon married in 1873 the beautiful granddaughter of Sir Robert Dalrymple Horn Elphinstone, and died without issue, as above recorded, in July, 1894. [5] "'Tis said that when upon a rocky shore The salt sea billows break with muffled roar, And, launched in mad career, the thundering wave Leaps booming through the weedy ocean cave; Each tenth is grander than the nine before. And breaks with tenfold thunder on the shore. Alas! it is so on the sounding sea; But so, O England, it is not with thee! Thy decuman is broken on the shore: A peer to him shall lave thee never more!" The text of the whole poem is given in Appendix I.