The destruction of his birthplace was, of course, far from leaving Bute in any sense homeless; for Cardiff Castle as well as Dumfries House, the fine old seat of the Crichtons, were still at his disposition, and to these he added in course of time two other country-places in Scotland, besides leasing for a term of years first the Duke of Devonshire's cedar-shaded villa at Chiswick, and later the beautiful domain of St. John's Lodge, in Regent's Park, which was almost as much a _rus in urbe_ as Holland House itself. Superficially, and in one respect, he may thus be said to have resembled the anonymous duke in Disraeli's most popular novel, who was the owner of so many magnificent seats that he could never feel (it was his one grievance) that he possessed a home. But Bute, who considered it a matter of duty and conscience to spend a certain time at all his places in turn, contrived to find in each of them the _Lar domestico_ (as the Portuguese call it) which makes a house a veritable home. Happy in the society of his wife and growing family (three sons were born to him between 1880 and 1887) and surrounded by the books which he loved, he was well contented to live remote from cities, although quite devoid of any instincts whatever for the sports which alone make country life tolerable to so many Englishmen. A good swimmer and fencer (as we have seen) in his early manhood, he indulged in middle life in no other bodily exercise than that of country walks; and even in these, given a congenial companion, what is called the "object of the walk" was often forgotten in the interest of some conversation on {125} topics strangely remote from the picturesque surroundings of a Scottish country house. One who was often his associate in such rambles, perhaps on the high moorlands above Mountstuart, recalls how they would pause at some notable point of view, and how his companion, gazing with unseeing eye (though in reality far from insensible to the beauties of nature) at the matchless panorama of woods and mountains, sea, and sky spread out before them, would dismiss the prospect, as it were, with a wave of the hand, and continue his discourse on the claim of some mediæval anti-pope to the recognition of Christendom, or the precise relation between the liturgical language employed by the Coptic Church and the tongue of ancient Egypt as spoken by the Pharaohs. [Sidenote: 1877, Bute as a landowner]