I think) calls the "_amor ulterioris
ripae_"--survived for many months the new recall of my mind to the
philosophies of prosaic action.

As an illustration of this fact I remember a weekend visit which I paid
that summer to Robert, the second Lord Lytton, at Knebworth. The
occasion was marked by the coappearance of things romantic and practical
in more ways than one. On the day of my arrival one of the first topics
discussed was "Ouida," who at that time was in England, and had been
staying at Knebworth only the week before. "Ouida's" view of life was
nothing if not romantic. Lytton, during the previous spring, had been
spending some weeks in Florence. He was quite alone; and "Ouida," who,
apart from her affectations, was a very remarkable woman, had had no
difficulty in securing his frequent company at her villa, where she fed
him at an incredible price with precociously ripe strawberries. On her
memory of these tender proceedings she had built up a belief that his
nature had been emptied of everything except one great passion for
herself, and she had actually come to Knebworth convinced that a single
word from her would tear him from the bosom of his family and make him
hers alone. The magic word was said. The expected results had, however,
failed to follow--perhaps because the word, or words, had not been very
happily chosen. They had been these: "Why don't you leave this bourgeois
man-and-wife _milieu_ behind you and prove in some Sicilian palace what
life may really mean for people like you and I?"

On the occasion of the same visit another meeting between romance and
reality was this: Knebworth was originally a dignified but plain
structure, built (I should say at a guess) in the time of Charles II;
but, as is well known, the first Lord Lytton (the novelist), inspired by
the taste of his time, and aided by inexhaustible stucco, metamorphosed
it into the semblance of a pinnacled castle or abbey, the old dining
room reappearing in the form of a baronial hall. One evening after
dinner I, my host, and a certain Admiral B---- happened to be in the
hall alone. While the admiral was reading a letter, my host drew me
aside and gave me an amusing description of the rise of the admiral's
family. His grandfather, having accumulated a substantial fortune as a
solicitor, discovered a ruin--a small tower in France--the name of which
was identical with his own. This ruin he bought, and declared that it
was the cradle from which