protected by law in the Bill of 1880, which subsequently
passed into an Act, especially as he was put to no little
personal inconvenience by attending the House of Lords
at that particular time. With him the protection then
first accorded to Owls, a fact overlooked by many recent
writers or speakers on the subject, was no question of
sentiment only. He knew, and no one better, how
beneficial Owls are to the farmer and the game-
preserver—though the latter will hardly ever admit it.
The course of life hitherto led had been only interrupted
occasionally by the malady to which he was
subject, but it was rudely broken in the autumn of 1882,
by the death, after a short illness, of his eldest son, who
had but recently attained his majority. This loss was
greatly taken to heart, and was followed within little
more than a year by a still heavier blow in the death of
Lady Lilford—a loss more felt now that he himself was
becoming a permanent invalid, some three or four acute
attacks of his insidious disease having begun to cripple
his hands and feet. In all this time and under all these
afflictions neither his kindliness nor his cheerfulness
forsook him. Both his letters and his conversation,
tinged as they were with grief, evinced his natural wit
and humour, brought perhaps into greater prominence
than before by their contrast with words, occasionally
let drop, that shewed how deeply his feelings had been
stirred. Yet there was no forced pleasantry, for a
man more free from affectation can scarcely have lived.
The real consolation was found when some time after
he married a dear and intimate friend of his deceased
wife, Clementina, daughter of the late Mr. Baillie-
Hamilton, whose intense devotion to her husband for
the rest of his life can be only reverently recorded and
not recounted.
In his own county was organized a Natural History
Society, of which he was not only the President, but the
mainstay, and to its ‘Journal’ he began, in 1880, to
contribute a series of papers on the Birds of Northamptonshire,
which were finally republished, with many
additions, in two volumes under that title only a short
time before his death. The generosity with which he
supported almost every scheme that made for the progress
of Zoology might have been called lavish had it
not been tempered by discretion. Enough to say that
on a good case being made out his pecuniary help was
always forthcoming, and never stinted in amount. But
often he did not wait for a case to be brought to his
notice, and of himself would find opportunity and the
man for it. A notable instance of this subsequently
happened in regard to the zoology of Cyprus, which he
commissioned Dr. Henry Guillemard to investigate, with
results well known to readers of ‘ The Ibis.’
As before said, Lord Lilpord’s interest in all that
concerned Spain never relaxed, and next to his own
country his sympathies lay with that whose language he
loved to study and speak. He hailed with pleasure the
appearance in 1887 of the ‘ Aves de Espana’ by Don
José Arevalo, published in the Memoirs of the Royal
VOL. B b