Literature still deplores the loss of his lordship’s fine library, his splendid collection of law books and autograph letters, but most of all his private notes and papers, which it is said had been accumulating for fifty years. [Illustration: _The Spaniards._] All his contemporaries bear witness to the calmness and dignity with which he bore this irreparable loss,[214] nor (for all that is said of his love of money) would he accept of any pecuniary compensation for it. His hard, inflexible animosity to his noble opponent, Lord Chatham, whose death ‘he witnessed without compassion, whose funeral he refused to attend, and when the House moved for a pension to be granted to the widow and her children had kept silence, voting neither one way nor the other,’[215] was the great moral blot on Lord Mansfield’s character. But on this occasion of keen mental pain and bitter personal disappointment—far beyond his great monetary loss—he exhibited no vindictiveness against the perpetrators of it, and himself directed the acquittal of Lord George Gordon. One wonders if he came face to face in the hour of his calamity with the memory of his own past want of mercy, and recognised in fire and the devastation of his best-prized treasures the form of a protean Nemesis. Not long after this event Mrs. Boscawen, writing to her friend Mrs. Delany, tells her that she has called at Ken Wood; that Lord Mansfield appears to bear his trial with great equanimity, but that Lady Mansfield is looking very ill. It was a happy thing for the Chief Justice that, like his neighbour and friend Erskine (notwithstanding all their occasional professional antagonism), he too found pleasure in simple things, especially in the improvement of his grounds; and though not so ardent and practical an arborist as Lord Erskine, several of the trees in the demesne are of his plantings—especially the cedars of Lebanon, which make so interesting an appearance in the grounds opposite the house. There are three of them, planted at the angles of an equilateral triangle, and, unlike most cedars of Lebanon, they grow from 50 to 60 feet high without branches. The trunk of the largest measures in girth, just above the ground, 24 feet.[216] Another source of relief from mental corrosion was his fondness for the society of young persons, and it is pleasant to learn from a letter in the correspondence of Mrs. Delany that twelve months after the Gordon Riots he had recovered, if, indeed, he had ever lost, his accustomed serenity. This lady, then in her eighty-first year, was visiting Mrs. Boscawen (widow of the Admiral) at Glanville, Colney Hatch, and she writes to her niece under the date of July 23, 1781: