any entertainment given at a Catholic house the bulk of
the guests--perhaps three-fourths of them--would be Catholics. These
would be people so closely connected with one another by blood or by
lifelong acquaintance as to constitute one large family. Well-born,
well-bred, and distinguished by charming and singularly simple manners,
they were content to be what they were, and the Darwinian competition
for merely fashionable or intellectual brilliance, however prevalent
elsewhere, was, with few exceptions, to them virtually unknown. Yet
whenever anything in the way of formal pomp was necessary, they were
fully equal to the occasion. The well-known dinners given by Mrs.
Washington Hibbert, at which four-and-twenty guests would be seated
round a huge circular table, would fill Hill Street with swaying family
coaches, on whose hammercloths crests and coronets maintained an
eighteenth-century magnitude which the modern world was abandoning,
while on certain ecclesiastical occasions Catholic society could exhibit
a stateliness even more conspicuous.

On one of these latter occasions I was, as well as I can remember, the
only non-Catholic in the company. This was a great luncheon party given
by the then Lord Bute in honor of Cardinal Manning. Lord Bute, who was
in many ways the most learned of the then recent converts to
Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of _Lothair_ in Lord
Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was
disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the
tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart
from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable
likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart
from its peculiar sequel, like a page of _Lothair_ translating itself
into actual life.

The Butes were at that time living at Chiswick House, which they rented
from the Duke of Devonshire. The house is a good example of that
grandiose classicality which we associate with the eighteenth century,
and the saloon in which the guests were assembled provided them with an
appropriate background. They were something like thirty in number, and
comprised some of the greatest of the then great Catholic ladies. Lord
Beaconsfield himself could not have chosen them better. Indeed his Lady
St. Jerome was actually there in person. When I entered there was a good
deal of talking, and yet at the same time there was