The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly, ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there--and this was my first introduction to Wales--for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address, most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with balls, concerts, or entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard. These were all arranged on a dais, and sang national melodies; and when the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the soul is in its strings." Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting personage--Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since. Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcestershire, and to a fourth--this was in Yorkshire--for the celebration of the New Year.