It is a fine, bold piece of work, virile in its dashing brushmarks and impasto, and in a pleasing low key of colour; altogether very Old Masterish. An inscription beneath states that it “forms part of the freehold of the Hotel belonging to the Baroness Howard de Walden.” It now belongs to the Earl of Ancaster. Let those who will, and have the curiosity to it, trace the why and the wherefore of this devolution of property and titles from a De Eresby, through a Howard de Walden, to an Ancaster. XLIV If there were not so many dishonest people, and so many vulgar people, in the world, the visitors-books of the “Royal Oak” would be a delight to present-day travellers. Those books begin in 1855, and have in their time been filled with a very miscellaneous collection of autographs, criticisms, and sketches. In the old days, before the house was rebuilt, and its new magnificence and crowds of vulgar and artless rich frightened away the majority of artists, thoughtless fellows who had not “arrived” endowed these books with many signed sketches which in after years, when they had achieved reputations, became valuable in a commercial sense. Pencil sketches there were, pen-drawings, and water-colours; and autographs of other men since known to fame were scattered plentifully through those pages. Among and between them were many of the silly, offensive, and downright infamous things that one finds in every visitors-book; for the Howling Cad is a large and plentiful leaven. The productions of the Cad are there still, and later generations of cads and thieves have added their own sillinesses with one hand, while with the other they have cut out the things that really interested. As, according to Tennyson, “the lie that is half a lie is ever the blackest of lies,” so the Cad that has got sufficient culture to appreciate the worth of a thing, and then steals it, must be the caddiest of cads. It is as demonstrable a thing as a theorem in Euclid. The visitors-books of the “Royal Oak” are therefore things of tatters and fragments, but in these remains the spirit of old-time touring may here and there be found. They walked mostly, those tourists, and sketches of them in peg-top trousers—very baggy in the upper part of the leg, tight at the foot, and very braidy at the seams—show how they roamed the country. Often they wore “Jemimas”—the brutes!