I was charmed to receive your letter of the 16th, _with most interesting details_. I pass it on to-day to Sir James Fergusson, who merits that attention. I am thankful you are safe out of cold, dreary, _dangerous_ Iceland, though in after times it will be amusing to talk of your travels in such a curious unvisited country. You are a dear good Boy for writing so often, and I thank you _very very_ much; only it vexed me to be forced to remain so long silent. On your birthday we drank your health "with a sentiment," and the servants had a bottle of wine for the festive occasion, and Mungo [Bute's dog] was decorated with a new ribbon.... Mr. Henry Stuart has been extremely civil in sending me boxes of game and fruit from Mountstuart. There were great doings on the 12th at Rothesay, from which I gather _you_ are now considered Somebody, instead of being Nobody (which I always felt you were wrong in ever permitting). If Sir J. F. had been Guardian long ago, such a state of things would not have existed. Bute was called away from Oxford, soon after his return for the October term, to attend the funeral at Cheltenham of his last surviving aunt, Lady Selina Henry. His mother had had three sisters, but he had never been intimate with any of them, although he appreciated their personal piety more, perhaps, than they did his. "When I return," he wrote from Cheltenham to his Oxford {54} friend, "I shall be able, perhaps, to add to your knowledge of the ultra-Protestant school, as I have already added to my own. It is wonderful how holy some people are in spite of everything." Bute always recalled with pleasure the extreme piety of some of his Protestant forbears, notably that of his great-great-grandmother, Selina ninth Countess of Huntingdon,[9] after whom Lady Selina Henry was named. He gave an old engraved portrait of this esteemed ancestress, who was as homely-looking as she was pious, to an intimate friend, with these words written under it by himself: "Fallax est gratia et vana pulchritudo: mulier timens Dominum ipsa laudabitur."[10] Not only tolerant of, but conspicuously fair-minded towards, the religious views of others, Bute gave evidence of this, as well as of his deep interest in theological questions, in a letter written early in 1868 on the subject of the _Filioque_ clause in the Creed, which divides East from West. Himself persuaded of the truth of the doctrine on this, as on all other points, held in the Latin Church, he could not pass unchallenged defective or disingenuous arguments even on the right side. It is really breaking a fly on the wheel to attack the argument of the writer in the _Rock_. What he says is this: If the Spirit proceeds from the Father only, and not from the Father and the Son, then the Father, by this attribute of emitting {55} the Spirit, which the Son has not, is of a nature so different from that of the Son that they cannot be of one substance.