The old Duchess of Cleveland (mother of Lord Rosebery), a lady dowered with no mean intellectual gifts, lived to a very great age, being well over ninety at her death. She was possessed of a considerable sense of humour, and used to tell several entertaining stories of the many visitors who were always coming over from Hastings to see Battle Abbey. When the Duke of Cleveland first took possession, he naturally acceded to the request of the Hastings Corporation that the Abbey ruins should be open to the public once every week, and on the first public day eight hundred people arrived, swarmed all over the place, and were only prevented from entering the Duchess’s own boudoir by the determined attitude which she assumed, advancing against the intruders with the fury of her eye rendered doubly formidable by the huge pair of spectacles which she habitually wore. The notes she used to receive from visitors were sometimes very curious; one individual, for instance, wrote saying that he considered he had a right to go over the Abbey at all times, as one of his ancestors had fought at Hastings, and he himself had been christened “Norman”! Another, a lady, wanted to know if anything very pretty had been found at the spot where Harold fell, as in Rome she had seen such lovely ornaments found in the tombs there. This rather reminds me of another lady whom I once heard saying that her favourite study was the history of the Moors in Mexico, and the relics they had left behind there. People used to be very fond of boasting to the Duke and Duchess of their Norman descent, amongst others Mrs. Grote, who, when at Battle in 1867 with her aunt and the celebrated historian, declared that she was a lineal descendant of Harold’s younger brother, “Earl Leofwine,”—a name which in the course of time had been transformed into Lewin. At one time, over the fireplace in the Abbots’ Hall was a stuffed black horse, which used to be pointed out to visitors as the identical animal which had carried William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings. In reality the horse in question had never carried any one more celebrated than Sir Godfrey Webster, and then only at a review. The arrangements at Battle Abbey in the time of the Duke and Duchess did not err in the direction of excess of comfort. The Duke was inclined to economy, and the Duchess, an extremely clever woman, was so much immersed in various intellectual interests, mostly of an archæological kind, that she did not trouble to give much attention to household management. Matters were allowed to take their own course more or less, with the result that on one occasion the French Ambassador, on his way from the station to the Abbey, was delayed by the breaking of the carriage pole, which collapsed owing to extreme and untended old age. It was, certainly, no place for sybarites, who generally agreed with the quotation from the Litany which a witty and luxurious member of the Foreign Office once wrote in the visitors’ book—