LONDON GOSSIP.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 191, 24 November 1876, Page 8

LONDON GOSSIP.

[From the Lady Correspondent of the * Evening Telegraph.'] London, September 11. The poor Earl of Beaconsfield has at last been baited, badgered, and bullied out of his silence and solitude at Hughenden Manor. Forced to speak at last, he has endeavored to explain the meaning of words about which a quibble had been raised by the ' Times.' This he has done to the satisfaction of all etymologists, but scarcely to that of the feverish portion of the public already in hot pusuit of the barbarous Turk and resolved to chase him from all his strongholds of Europe. By cool observers, however, it is not supposed that the horror manifested against the Turks for their as yet unproved horrors committed against the Bulgarians gtotally devoid of prejudice and self-interest. Mr. Spurgeon himself, who so devoutely prays aloud to God to drive the Turks from Europe, and to send them defeat and shame in revenge for the atrocities committed by them during the wai*, and who attributes to " Romish enmity towards the Eastern Church" the dignity and moderation evinced by the Catholic clergy of England in their treatment of the subject and their objection to calling down from the pulpit the vengeance of H>aven against any portion of the human race, deeming such violence unchristian and unseemly, is now reproached in his turn -with having once uttered a hope that " every capital in Europe would ere long be in possession of a Baptist chapel, and that the great desire of his soul would be fulfilled could he but live to see a Baptist chapel founded on the spot where stands the great mosque ofjSt. Sophia at Constantinople." The Earl of Beaconsfield is therefore subjected to the persecution carried on to his very hearthstone at Hughenden on account of the silence which is regarded as that of indifference in the cause, and has to pause in his musings on the pomps and vanities of this wicked world to defend himself from the attacks he cannot but despise. It is to Hughendea that for many years he was wont to retire to write the Oriental portions of his romances, for it is there that his collection of Eastern souvenirs has always been kept undisturbed. It was to Hughenden Manor he hurried straight without a moment's pause on landing from the steamboat which bore him back to England after his Eastern tour. Among the reminiscences of his life it is still the souvenir of those days that the Eirl of Beaconsfield loves best to recall. Seated outside the hall door of the Manor House upon the green sward, with the sheep feeding beneath the very windows of the mansion, he would recount the wonders of his journey to the family group gathered round him. The elder Disraeli would listen with doubt, which always provoked a merry war between father and son and the mother and aunt, the latter a remarkable woman, who always, to the day of her death, persisted in declaring that her Ben would become the first man in England, for that even falsehood from him was of far more value than truth from other people. Sometimes the group of listeners would be embellished by the presence of Miss Pardo, who had taken the little cottage at Bradenham, close by, in order to be near the spiritmoving influence of the brilliant heir of Hughenden, and who, fired by his bright descriptions of his travels in the East, went and did likewise — her two volumes of the City of the Sultan being the result of the inspiration. Many people still remember the terror produced one day among the harvestmen in the fields round Hughenden on beholding " young Disraeli " rushing through the corn in full Turkish costume, brandishing a glittering scimitar high above his head, and cutting fiercely at the wheat ears as he went, uttering all the while the most furious oaths in the Turkish vocabulary — until he arrived at Miss Pardoe's door with a whole group of barking dogs at his heels, and the women and children of the village flying in every direction. The object of this mad frolic beneath the burning sun was to convince the ladies of Bradenham Cottag-o of the thoroughly Oriental aspect of young Mr. Dkraeli in Oriental costume.