Lord Redesdale never married. He and his sister kept house together at Batsford until her death in 1866. She was a woman of great ability, full of sympathy with all her brother’s pursuits: her loss was a cruel blow to him, and during the twenty years which followed between her death and his, he never put off mourning. I was in the Far East when she died, and after all these years I could repeat by heart much of the touching letter which he wrote to me as being the one man to whom he could open out the grief that was in his soul. Batsford stands on a lovely spur of the Cotswold Hills, crowned with a glory of oaks and elms, beeches, ashes and chestnuts, a most fascinating spot, and here it was that, under the genial influence of the kind old lord, whose portrait by Lawrence is the very embodiment of goodwill towards men, the happiest days of my father’s childhood were spent. The three little cousins were devoted to one another. It was a beautiful friendship which strengthened as they grew up, and only ended with their lives. No two men could have been greater contrasts than my father and the late Lord Redesdale: perhaps their affection was all the stronger for that; it had begun in childhood and lasted into extreme old age; they were always happy together, and when they were parted it was rarely that a day passed without their writing to one another. They went to the same schools, Iver first, then Eton, but not in the same house. At Oxford Lord Redesdale was at New College, my father at Magdalen. My father did not stay long at college. He soon left the University to take up an attachéship at the Legation at Florence, where Lord Burghersh[15] was minister, in whom he had the luck to find a most sympathetic chief, devoted to art, and especially to music, which with my father was a passion. The musical society of Florence at that time was brilliant, and the young attaché was speedily welcomed into its intimacy. Of those days he had many stories, none, I think, more curious than this. One evening after the opera there was a supper party at the house of the Grisis, the parents of the famous prima donna. Giudetta, the elder daughter, had been singing and the unhappy tenor had been hissed off the stage with all the viciousness of which an Italian audience has the secret. My father was sitting next to Giulia Grisi, then a little girl of twelve—it was in 1827—and he happened to say to her: “Ebben Giulia, I suppose some day you will be singing in grand opera?” “I sing in opera,” answered the beautiful child, “and run the risk of being hissed like that wretched man to-night!” In two years’ time, 1829, she made a precocious début at Bologna, and was not exactly hissed! Seldom can there have been a more triumphant career than hers from the day when, as a mere chit of fourteen, she dazzled the world with her beauty and that lovely velvety voice.