27 OCTOBER 1917, Page 17

LORD REDESDALE'S FURTHER MEMORIES.•

Loins REDESDALE'S last book contains the meditations of a culti- vated man who found in literature an occupation for his leisured age. In his Mentori

pure water trickles into a stone basin All those things; have

their meaning, and here, as you sit in the broad verandah of the rest-home, represent two scenes ill the life of the Buddha ; firstly, the preaching of the first sermon in the Mrighadeva, the deer forest near Benares, where the stags and hinds come to listen to the Holy One, and, secondly, the Veluvana, or Bamboo grove, which King Bimbisara presented to the Buddha and which became the first Vihara, monastery or meeting-place, of the new sect's adherents and monks."

This leads Lord Redesdalo to sketell the life of Buddha and to institute a comparison between him and St. Francis, and to wander away into speculations about the Aryans. Next comes a vivid little chapter about the sad days of the Continuum, and then we are brought back to trees and their legends and the garden again. " All men love trees," he wrote, with a too sublime forgetfulness of the many men, especially on Local Authorities and in the building trade, who do not. Amid his interesting notes on the trees that he at least loved with all his heart, Lord Redesdale tells a emious story of a haunted gems or wild cherry-tree in the grounds of an old Scottish castle. Calling there one day with " Hang Theology " Rogers, he found the house-party with " long and rather pale faces." That morning a ntunber of them, looking out of tho windows, as well as olio visitor wino Was driving up to the castle, had seen a woman's figure come out of the genun-tree, glide along, and vanish. A local legend &elated that the tree was haunted by the spirit of a femme mistress of the castle. It is not often that a ghost is said to have been seen in daylight and by a numberof witnesses, but Lord Redesdalo declares that be has repeated the story as told him while the witnesses were " under the spell."

Passing beyond the gardens once more, the author institutes an interesting compel-ism between. Queen Victoria and the Empress Maria Theresa, as women and as rulers, though he forgot the Empress's connivance at the partition of Poland—a crime and, from the Austrian standpoint, a bltouler which Queens Victoria would, we think, have instinctively avoided. Ho goes on to describe the formation of tine Wallace Collection, for which he was a trustee, and to recall Sir Richard Wallace, whom he knew personally, and the fourth Lord Hertford, of whom he had heard much. He disposes of the controversy about Sir Richard's origin by quoting an authoritative letter from Lord Ember. Colonel Gurwood, Wellington's private secretary, wino was Lord Esher's grandfather, was a fellow-officer of the fourth Lord Hertford, then Lord Yarmouth, in the 10th Hussars, and became his intimate friend. The Colonel died before Lord Esher was born, but from his widow Lord Esher heard the true story of Sir Richard Wallace. He seas, as moat people suspected, not the half-brother but the natural 13011 of Lord Hertford by Agnes Jackson, an Irish girl whom Colonel Guru-owl knew. He was left as an infant wills a concierge in Paris. Colonel Gurwood traced the child and persuaded Lord Hertford's mother to adopt him. That good-natured lady, George Selwyn's " Mir- Hie," did so, " much against the inclination of her son." But when Richard Wallace grew up, he became his father's secretary and inseparable companion, and inherited all the wealth that Lord Hertford could divert from his legal heirs. Again the author leads us back to the ganlen, by way of Wagner and Nietzsche, and dis- cusses the nature of lichens and the part, beneficent or evil, that funguses play in the life of trees. Of Shakespeare's mulberry-tree, in the garden at New Place, Stratford, which a furious parson, Gastrell byname, hewed down in 1758 in order to stop visitors from corning to gaze on it, Lord Rcsiesdale stile us that a cutting was taken by Capell, the commentator, to his place at Troston in Suffolk. There Capell's tree still stood in 1896, when scions from it were sent to Kew and to Buokingham Palace, so that Mr. thentrell's evil deed did not put an end to this form of tree-worship.

The amiably discursive bookends with a long and interesting el spier on tine Russia that Lord Redesdalo knew in his youth. The author repeats his contention that our refusal to help Denmark in 1861, when Palmerston was overborne by the Queen and Lord Russell, was a fundamental mistake. Lord Rodesdale believed that Russia was ready and willing to support Denmark if wo had agreed to do so, and that in face of an Anglo-Russian combination Bismarck would have been afraid to move against his defenceless little neigh- bour. Our policy in regent to Schleswig-Holstein was admittedly confused and vacillating, but it is by 110 7110alls clear that our anneal fumes in league pith Russia could at that limo have saved the Duchies from Prussia and Austria. Nowadays we can all perceive clearly that Prussia's despoiling of Denmark Was the first atop in her career of crime, but we can scarcely Winne the British statesmen of half-a-century ago for failing to foresee the evolution of Prussian policy when many of our own living statesmen up to the very eve of war declined to credit her wills the malevolent designs which many of her people had proudly avowed. for years past.