‘That little something unpossess’d Corrodes and poisons all the rest.’[147]
“I walked with Lord Bute each day. It was like reading ‘Lothair’ in the original, and most interesting at first, but became somewhat monotonous, as he talks incessantly--winding into his subject like a serpent, as Johnson said of Burke--of altars, ritual, liturgical differences; and he often almost loses himself, and certainly quite lost me, in sentences about ‘the Unity of the Kosmos,’ &c.
“He spoke much of Antichrist--the mark 666, the question if it had been Nero, or if Nero was only a type, and the real Antichrist still to come; and of the other theory, that the reason why no ten thousand were sealed of Dan was that Antichrist was to come from that tribe, the dying words of Jacob tending to this belief.
“He talked much of fasting; that he had often fasted for twenty-four hours, and that he preferred fasting as the practice existed ‘before the folly of collations.’ I asked if it did not make him ill. He said ‘no,’ for if the hunger became too great he took a cigar, which allayed it, and that he went out and ‘ate the air’ while taking plenty of exercise; that poor people seldom became thin in Lent, because what they did eat was bread and potatoes. I said I thought it must make him dreadfully ill-tempered to be so hungry, and thus conduce rather to vice than virtue. He said he did not think it made him vicious; but he agreed with me that persons naturally inclined to be ill-tempered had better fast _alone_.
“From what he said it was evident that he would like to give up all his goods to the poor, and that the Island of Bute stands a chance of becoming a vast monastery. He talked much of the Troitska in Russia, where he had been; that the monks there were too lax, and that the really desirable monastic life was that of those who lived in the cells established some miles off by Philaret, which were subterranean, with a stove, and no other furniture. When mass was celebrated in their chapel, these anchorite monks could faintly discern, down a channel hollowed in the rock, the glitter of the candles on the altar, and occasionally, mingled with this, appeared a ray or two of bluish light, and this was daylight. It was the only time they ever saw it.