whom lie had long been attached, and returning to
England shortly after, their wedding was celebrated in
the following June.
The next twelve months were passed quietly, if not
at home at least not in foreign travel; but in little
more than a year his hereditary enemy, the gout—
which had shewn itself even while he was a schoolboy
at Harrow—laid hold upon him, and confining him to
the house for a time incapacitated him from the enjoyment
of field-sports. Meanwhile the aviary at Lilford
continued to grow, and at the end of October, 1860, he
was able-to write to me :—
“ I have taken to hawking, not yet with any striking
result except allowing a fine Goshawk to escape.
The Zoologist will probably present its readers with—
‘ On ------ the keeper of ------ ------ Esq. of ------
Northamptonshire, shot a fine specimen of that rare
bird the Golden Eagle. Its tail is long, its eyes are
yellow. Mr. ------ the well-known taxidermist o f--------
pronounces it to be an adult male, etc. etc. etc!—and
this will be my female Goshawk.”
Again at intervals he suffered from the same disease,
which was destined to mar the remainder of his life:
and a very severe attack supervening in the autumn of
1861, soon after the death of his father, when he succeeded
to the family honours and estates, temporarily
disabled him from walking. Yet he was able to attend
the General Meeting of the British Ornithologists’
Union in London on the 11th of December, as well as
that of 1862, which was held at Cambridge on the 7th
of October, during the Annual Meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science. The
few survivors of those who were present can hardly
forget the spirit with which he entered into the proceedings
of the ‘ Thorough ’ dinner at the Red Lion
Hotel in this town, under the presidency of Professor
Huxley, with Professor Kingsley as Vice-Chairman. It
would be out of place here to enter into details; but
the dinner was to celebrate the victory won, after a
hard-fought struggle, by the adherents of the principle
of Evolution over their opponents, who had manfully
disputed what now proved to be an untenable
position.
At the meeting of the British Ornithologists Union
held in London on the 20th of May, 1864, Lord
Lilford not only proposed that a New Series of
‘ The Ibis ’ should be begun in the following year, but
undertook, on its being continued in its existing form,
to defray the cost of a plate in each number—a promise
that was more than literally fulfilled for the rest of his
life; and to that journal for 1865 he contributed an
excellent sketch of the ornithology of Spain, as observed
by himself in two visits, the first (as before mentioned)
in 1856, and the second in the early spring in 1864,
which confirmed the favourable impression he had
already formed as to the country and all that belonged
to it. To Englishmen Spanish Ornithology was a field
almost untrodden, and its fertility came to many as a
surprise; yet on the former of these visits only a few