Page 31 Advertisements Column 1

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 22, 27 February 1891, Page 31

In striking contrast with the fierce passions concentrated during th 3 last two days within Committee Raom No. 15 in the House of Commons has been the presence in the corridor outside of a patient grey figure. Throughout the whole of the protracted sittings of the Irish party this figure has sat on the oaken benches opposite the door of the Committee Room, for hour after hour, barely moving. This strangely pathetic grey figure ia not unknown in other parts of the great building where Parliament is housed. It is Mrs, Macdonald patiently waiting for her blind husband. The clergy of Holland are at present promoting a movement for the erection of a suitable monument to Thomas n Kempis at Agentenberg. near Zwoll. Ie was in the Augustiman Convent at Agenteaberg, of which his brother was prior, that this illustrious servant of God took his vows as a religious in 1406 ; here he entered into priest's orders in 1413, and here he appears to have spent his whole life in seclusion. The project of raisiog a monument to him in this 6pot is worthy of praise, but, after all, his greatest and most lasting monument must ever be " The Imitation of Christ." This celebrated book has had, next to the Scripture itself, the largest number of readers of which sacred literatuie, ancient or modern, can furnish an example. No book, after the Holy Scripture has been so often reprinted ; none translated into so many languages. In French alone sixty distinct versions are enumerated . There are more landlords in England of the type represented by the late Lord Tollemacne than Fome people imagine ; but his death at the ripe age of eighty five will not be lees sincerely regretted. Owner of a great estate — of two estates, indeed, one of 7,000 acres in Suffolk, and the other of 26,000 acrea in Cheshire — he was the most capable agrilcultunst in the country ; while for the last fifty years he has devoted himself to a long, arduous, and successful endeavour to do justice both to the land and the people. "Tne only real and la-uing pleasure," he used to say, " derived from the possession of a landed estate is t<> witness the improvement in tbe social condition of those residing on it." Ttie reformers who are so anxious to improve great landlords off the face of the earth will find it a htcle difficult to provide a substitute for Lord Tollemacne and others like him. His ideas on the subject of small allotments, of course, were only part of a much more comprehensive theory aa to the duty of a landowner. While he would have liked every cottage tenant to have three acres and a cow, he considered 200 acres the proper size for a farm ; and in order to break up his estate in this way, he built over fifty farm-houses At a cost of. £118,000.