man, in addition to those of Mitford. He resigned his office, sold his house in Chelsea, and took possession of Batsford Park, his cousin's estate in Gloucestershire. The house was not to his liking; he pulled it down and built another of lordlier proportions, and he began to lay out the celebrated tropical garden. From 1892 to 1895 he was member of parliament for the Stratford-on-Avon division of Warwickshire. During these years literature was much neglected, but in 1896 Mitford published The Bamboo Garden, a charming and fantastic work which he called an ‘apologia pro Bambusis meis at Batsford’. In 1898 he visited the East again, exploring Ceylon. In 1902 he was raised to the peerage, as Baron Redesdale, of Redesdale in Northumberland; he became a constant attendant at the House of Lords, taking little part in the debates, but speaking sometimes effectively on subjects connected with the Far East. He began to suffer from a deafness, which was very painful to a man of such gay and gregarious habits. This threw him more and more upon the resources of his mind and pen, and he became an industrious writer. In 1906 he accompanied Prince Arthur of Connaught on the latter's visit to the Emperor of Japan, and published on his return The Garter Mission to Japan (1906), the best pages of which deal with the disconcerting changes which had taken place since he saw that country last. He further elaborated the same theme in A Tale of Old and New Japan (1906).
In the last decade of his life Lord Redesdale occupied himself by writing his autobiography, which appeared as Memories in 1915. He was also busy with translations, addresses, and pamphlets to such an extent that he seemed, after the age of sixty-five, to have turned from an amateur into a professional man of letters. In the first year of the War he had the misfortune to lose his eldest son, Clement, who fell in France after brilliantly distinguishing himself. Lord Redesdale, now almost stone-deaf, found companionship and consolation in literature; he began a book which was to be called Veluvana', and he threw himself ardently into the study of Dante. Having reached his eightieth year in full mental activity, he died at Batsford 17 August 1916. What he had written of 'Veluvana', and some other fragments, were edited by the present writer in 1917. He had five sons and four daughters and was succeeded as second baron by his second son, David Bertram Ogilvy (born 1878).
Lord Redesdale was an extremely lucky man, and deserved his good fortune. Few persons of our time have been accomplished in so many directions. He did many things, and most of them well; none of them, perhaps, superlatively well, since he lacked one gift, concentration. If he had devoted himself entirely to the diplomacy of his early years, to the arboriculture of his middle life, or to the literature of his old age, he might have made a more substantial impression on posterity. But, in spite of all his intelligence and his ardour, he remained an amateur—a very brilliant amateur indeed, but not a professional expert in anything. He reached his highest level as a writer, for his style was elegant, firm, and individual, though occasionally a little slip-shod. After the age of sixty-five, carefully and earnestly as a man may write without previous training, he lacks the craftsman's hand. As a human being, Lord Redesdale was a sort of Prince Charming; with his fine features, sparkling eyes, erect and elastic figure, and, in the last years, his burnished silver curls, he was a universal favourite, a gallant figure of a gentleman, solidly English in reality, but polished and sharpened by travel and foreign society. To see him stroll down Pall Mall, exquisitely dressed, his hat a little on one side, with a smile and a nod for every one, was to watch the survival of a type never frequent and now extinct. His autobiography, which will long be read and always be referred to, will preserve the memory of a man who was vivid and spirited beyond most of his fellows, and whose eighty years were brimful of vivacious experience.
Edinburgh Review, April 1913; Lord Redesdale, Memories, 1915 (portrait); personal knowledge. ]
MONYPENNY, WILLIAM FLAVELLE(1866–1912), journalist, and biographer of Disraeli, came of an Ulster Protestant family of Scottish extraction, which until 1898 spelt the surname ‘Monypeny’. The second son of William Monypeny, a small landowner, of Ballyworkan, co. Armagh, and of Mary Anne Flavelle, his wife, he was born at Dungannon, co. Tyrone, 7 August 1866. Educated at the Royal School, Dungannon, and at Dublin University, where he graduated with high distinction in mathematics, he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford; but temporary ill-health compelled him, after a short residence, to leave Oxford for London, and he became a regular contributor to the Spectator. In 1893 he joined the
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