London loved him. Much water, as the saying goes, had flowed under the bridges since April, 1831, when the mob broke the windows of Apsley House, while the body of the Duchess, just dead, was lying there waiting burial. The iron shutters were the only signs left of the fleeting unpopularity of the Reform days. The life that was in the Duke, his activity, his unwearying interest and the share which he took in affairs and events great and small, from the quelling of the Chartist insurrection, only five years before his death, to the opening of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851 and the cutting of the Koh-i-Nur, stirred the imagination and roused the admiration of all men, rich and poor. People used to tell how, when he and Lord John Russell were discussing the steps to be taken for the safety of London in 1848, and Lord John suggested one measure after another, the invariable answer from the grim old soldier was, “Done already.” Nothing had escaped that wonderful eye. And so he became, as it were, a superman, and when he died men looked around them and there was none found to fill the gap. As the great funeral car passed opposite the window where I was, one of the wreaths of cypress and bay leaves fell off. So soon as the last soldier closing the procession had disappeared, a poor old woman dashed forward and picked up the wreath. I ran down and tried to buy it of her, but she would not part with her precious relic. At last I persuaded her to sell me one cypress cone for a shilling. The cone was full of seed which I sent down to Exbury in Hampshire, at that time belonging to my father; and there are now, in the wood near the house, a number of quite important cypress trees, the beautiful sixty-year-old children of that wreath. After the funeral, “The death of the Duke of Wellington” was set as the subject for a copy of Alcaics for fifth-form boys at Eton. It was an unfortunate subject, for it was sure to lead to some regrettable absurdity: that did not fail: one boy began his copy of verses with the two lines: Ut dixit olim magnus Horatius, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Apart from the bathos of the drivel, it was so inappropriate, seeing that the glorious old warrior fell asleep at Walmer full of years (eighty-three) and honour, on the fourteenth of September, 1852. His body was brought to London, and lay in state at Chelsea for a week before the funeral. CHAPTER V WALES AND OXFORD