During the earlier portion of his Parliamentary career he lived in Mrs. Potter’s town house in Queen’s Gate, until he moved to Bramham Gardens, South Kensington, which continued to be his London house until a short time before his death.
Although he always regarded his thirty years at Owens as his chief work, the thirty years of his London life were hardly less busy than the time he spent in Manchester. The occupation might not be so continuous, but it was certainly more multifarious. Ten years of Parliamentary and active political life had brought with them new activities and fresh demands upon his time and energy, and except for occasional periods of enforced idleness due to attacks of gout—the only constitutional weakness from which he suffered, and which, as he used ruefully to observe, he had done nothing to deserve—he was always busy. He had a serious attack of pneumonia in the winter of 1902, which left him enfeebled for a time, but eventually, after a summer in Mürren and Burgenstock and a winter in Algiers and Sicily, he seemed to have completely shaken off its ill effects. Otherwise his sound and vigorous constitution kept him free from even passing ailments, and his fourscore years were passed with few interruptions to his activity from illness.
Shortly after Roscoe took up his residence in London he sought for some _pied-à-terre_ in the country for the sake of rest and change of scene, and relief from the physical and mental strain of continuous life in town. In 1892 he was able to obtain a delightful place on Lord Lovelace’s property in Surrey, some two dozen miles from London. It was beautifully situated on the North Downs, between Guildford and Dorking, amidst some of the loveliest scenery in the South of England. He and Lady Roscoe altered it to suit their requirements: he to build a spacious study and to provide room for his many books, and she to house her own collection which was even more numerous, and to accommodate the many works of art with which she had surrounded herself. Roscoe has given a charming word-picture in his autobiography of this ideal retreat, to which as the years increased they became more and more attached. Here they had
An elegant sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books, Ease and alternate labour.