Lady Victoria Campbell

6 CHILDHOOD AND HOME
in which to sleep, and from which to rush in an un-
ending round of social engagements. It was the
centre where the Duke lived surrounded by his
family, and where he carried on all his work, literary
and public, and the spreading trees and wide verandah
gave shade and air to his colleagues and friends, who
sought the society of himself and the Duchess.
From those social gatherings the children were never
excluded. They were brought up in the best of all
schools, with a hearing ear to the conversation of the
men and women who were filling the stage of life,
and working in their day and generation.
One of the Duke's greatest pleasures in becoming a
resident of Campden Hill was to find himself a
neighbour of Lord Macaulay. He lived at Holly
Lodge, and the elder members of the family recall
his student walk to and fro in his verandah, and his
frequent arrivals to sit under the horse-chestnut tree
on the lawn at Argyll Lodge.
One of the sisters had been out purchasing a birth-
day present for a brother, and came rushing down
the green slope to announce that the chosen volume
was the then new " Macaulay 's Lays." Seeing him
seated in the circle, the narrator came to an abrupt
pause. " That is right, my dear," was his quick
comment, " never praise an author to his face."
Macaulay was not to be a neighbour for long, and in
a few short years the chilling tidings crept across the
sunny lawns that the great historian, whose fore-
bears had been ministers in the Argyll country,
had been found dead in his library.