Reflections at Sheffield Place by Virginia Woolf

The great ponds at Sheffield Place at the right season of the year are bordered with red, white and purple reflections, for rhododendrons are massed upon the banks and when the wind passes over the real flowers the water flowers shake and break into each other. But there, in an opening among the trees stands a great fantastic house, and since it was there that John Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, lived, since it was there that Gibbon stayed, another reflection imposes itself upon the water trance. Did the historian himself ever pause here to cast a phrase, and if so what words would he have found for those same floating flowers? Great lord of language as he was, no doubt he filled his mind from the fountain of natural beauty. The exactions of the DECLINE AND FALL meant, of course, the death and dismissal of many words deserving of immortal life. Order and seemliness were drastically imposed. It was a question, he reflected, "whether some flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have not been eradicated with the weeds of prejudice." Still his mind was a whispering gallery of words; the famous "barefooted friars" singing vespers may have been a recollection of Marlowe's "And ducke as low as any bare-foot Fryar," murmuring in the background. Be this as it may, to consider what Gibbon would have said had he seen the rhododendrons reflected in the water is an idle exercise, for in his day, late in the eighteenth century, a girl who looked out of the window of Sheffield Place saw not rhododendrons "but four young swans. now entirely grey" floating upon the water. Moreover, it is unlikely that he ever bestirred himself to walk in the grounds. "Gib," that same girl, Maria Josepha Holroyd, remarked, "is a mortal enemy to any person taking a walk, and he is so frigid that he makes us sit by a good roasting Christmas fire every evening." There he sat in the summer evening talking endlessly, delightfully, in the best of spirits, for no place was more like home to him than Sheffield Place, and he looked upon the Holroyds as his own flesh and blood.

Seen through Maria's eyes Gibbon--she called him sometimes "Gib," sometimes "le grand Gibbon," sometimes "The Historian"--looked different from Gibbon seen by himself. In 1792 she was a girl of twenty-one; he was a man of fifty-five. To him she was "the tall and blooming Maria"; "the soft and stately Maria, " a niece by adoption, whose manners he could correct; whose future he could forecast--"That establishment must be splendid; that life must be happy"; whose style, especially one metaphor about the Rhine escaping its banks, he could approve. But to her he was often an object of ridicule; he was so fat; such a figure of fun "waddling across the room whenever she [Madame da Silva] appeared, and sitting by her and looking at her, till his round eyes run down with water"; rather testy too, an old bachelor, who lived like clockwork and hated to have his plans upset; but at the same time, she had to admit, the most delightful of talkers. That summer night he drew out the two young men who were staying in the house, Fred North and Mr. Douglas, and made them far more entertaining than they would have been without him. "It was impossible to have selected three Beaux who could have been more agreeable, whether their conversation was trifling or serious," whether they talked about Greek and Latin or turtle soup.