I am going to Rome about the 23rd of this month, and shall, I think, certainly stay there till about Septuagesima; but if I am tempted I shall stop over Easter. When I return I shall go to {79} Bute. Bute will be much stiffer than this: they got pictures of me and made them into cockshys; and I have had at least one threatening letter from there. Besides that there are no Catholics that I know of,[16] and I cannot have a daily Mass. My old friends are all much the same, except Lady Elizabeth, who takes no more notice of me than if I were a dead dog. I have written her letter after letter, without even acknowledgment. The company of my dear friend, Sneyd, is a great pleasure to me. He is my secretary. He is, however, an awful liberal, and is even now reading Charles Kingsley's "Hypatia" with approval. I consider it one of the most impure as well as heretical books I ever saw. I have been reading lately, and with the greatest pleasure, Canon Jenkins's "Age of the Martyrs,"[17] which is really charming, and a worthy product of Oxford, where, however, I hear that the blighting disease of Liberalism has fairly set in. You have, I hear, Mgr. Capel with you, lecturing on something or other; but I know not what success or effect he has had. Ever most sincerely yours, BUTE. [Sidenote: 1869, at Mountstuart] There were reasons why the feeling in the island of Bute about the young peer's change of religion was, as he expressed it, "much stiffer" than it was in Cardiff. The sentiments of resentful surprise which the Presbyterians felt at the lord of the island embracing a faith so alien from their own was fostered and aggravated by the disappointment with {80} which the local Liberals learned that he was politically quite out of sympathy with the Whig principles of his kinsman and former tutor-at-law, the Liberal M.P. for Cardiff and Lord-Lieutenant of Buteshire.[18] One Radical newspaper asserted that Lord Bute had purposely delayed the profession of his new faith until after the general election, so that his influence as a Tory might help the Conservative candidate for the county to win the seat! And the Liberal _Buteman_ thought fit to devote a page, a month after Bute's reception into the Church, to reprinting a _catena_ of the articles commenting on that event which had appeared in the principal newspapers of the country. The feeling with which, in an age more tolerant or more indifferent, one peruses these journalistic effusions, is one of wonder, first at their extraordinary impertinence, and secondly at the cool audacity with which they sit in judgment on the action of one of whose character, personality, and motives they one and all show themselves to be in a state of absolutely abysmal ignorance. The _Times_ summed up a spiteful article by concluding that the "defection of an average curate would have said more for the Roman Catholic religion, and might be expected to lead to more lasting results"; the