ected by marriage. He was the
friend and often the guest of Queen Victoria, and in his twenty-eighth
year he is even found as a guest at the festive board of George IV.
'Such a round of laughing and pleasure I never enjoyed: if there be a
hospitable gentleman on earth it is His Majesty.' And at all times he
was ready to mix freely and on terms of social equality with all who
shared his sympathies, dukes and dustmen, Cabinet ministers and
costermongers.

In the holiday season he delighted to travel. In his journals he sets
down the impressions which he felt among the pictures and churches of
Italy, and in the mountains of Germany and Switzerland; he loves to
record the friendliness of the greetings which he met among the
peasantry of various lands. When he talked to them no one could fail to
see that he was genuinely interested in them, that he wanted to know
their joys and their sorrows, and to enrich his own knowledge by
anything that the humblest could tell him. Still more did he delight in
Scotland, where he had many friends. He was of the generation
immediately under the spell of the 'Wizard of the North', and the whole
country was seen through a veil of romantic and historical association.
There he went nearly every year, to Edinburgh, to Roslin, to Inveraray,
to the Trossachs, and to a hundred other places--and if his heart was
stirred with the glories of the past, his eye was quick to 'catch the
manners living as they rise'. As he commented caustically at Rome on
'the church lighted up and decorated like a ball-room--the bishop with a
stout train of canons, listening to the music precisely like an opera',
so at Newbattle he criticizes the coldness of the kirk, 'all is silent
save the minister, who discharges the whole ceremony and labours under
the weight of his own tautologies'. His bringing up had been in the
Anglican church; he was devoted to her liturgy, her congregational
worship, her moderation and simplicity combined with reverence and
warmth. Although these travels were but interludes in his busy life,
they show that it was not for want of other tastes and interests of his
own that his life was dedicated to laborious service. He was very human
himself, and there were few aspects of humanity which did not attract
him.

With his father relations were very difficult. As his interest in social
questions grew, his attention was naturally turned on the poor nearest
to his own doors, the agricultural labourers