e fact that for the first sixty years of his
life the writer had cultivated the art but casually and sporadically. He
retained, in spite of all the labour which he expended, a certain
stiffness, an air of the amateur, of which he himself was always acutely
conscious.

This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal made to
general attention by the 1915 _Memories_, a book so full of geniality
and variety, so independent in its judgments and so winning in its
ingenuousness, that its wider popularity could be the object of no
surprise. But, to those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must
always appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from what we
may call the subjective point of view. It tells us of his adventures and
his friendships, of the strange lands he visited and of the unexpected
confidences he received, but it does not reveal very distinctly the
character of the writer. There is far more of his intellectual
constitution, of his personal tastes and mental habits, in the volume of
essays of 1912, called _A Tragedy in Stone_, but even here much is left
unsaid and even unsuggested.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale was the redundant
vitality of his character. His nature swarmed with life, like a drop of
pond-water under a microscope. There cannot be found room in any one
nature for all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree was
concentration. But very few men who have lived in our complicated age
have done well in so many directions as he, or, aiming widely, have
failed in so few. He shrank from no labour and hesitated before no
difficulty, but pushed on with an extraordinary energy along many
various lines of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired
and most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are scarcely to
be discerned, except below the surface, in his _Memories_. Next to his
books, what he regarded with most satisfaction was his wonderful garden
at Batsford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in the
autobiography. He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and when
he was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to me that he
was going to write an _Apologia pro Horto meo_, as long before he had
composed one _pro Banibusis meis_. A book which should combine with the
freest fancies of his intellect a picture of the exotic groves of
Batsford was what was required to round off Lord Redesdale's literary
adventur