Memories (volume 2 of 2)

We returned to Yedo and the next few weeks were spent in the usual humdrum way, transacting routine business, cursing the heat and the mosquitoes, until towards the end of July,...

On the 30th of November at daylight, Satow and I, in our usual characters as diplomatic stormy petrels, sailed for Ōsaka to make all preparations for the opening of that city an...

Ito was now appointed Governor of Hiōgo and Kōbé. It is curious that so comparatively small an office should have been spoken of as an excessive rise for a man who was destined...

On the 18th Yamashina no Miya, first cousin once removed of the Mikado, who had arrived at Hiōgo the previous day to invite the Foreign Ministers to an audience of the Emperor a...

So I was left on my lonely job, which lasted from the last days of March till the beginning of August. I was the only European in the great city (for the Consulate, under Mr. Ru...

The period upon which we were now entering was of singular interest and historical importance. It was the connecting link between the old Japan and the new, a transition-time in...

There was a great stir in Japan in the summer of 1869, when it was known that the Duke of Edinburgh was coming in the _Galatea_. The Japanese Government were wildly excited, for...

On the occasion of the Imperial journey to Yedo last year, his Majesty took upon himself the direction of the machinery of the State. Up to that time the precepts of the Emperor...

When I reached France it seemed as if at every corner I was to meet old friends—all of them in difficulties—the result of an epidemic of plunging on the Turf—very catching. At M...

The generation of the Villiers family to which Lord Clarendon belonged were people singularly gifted with charm and ability. I did not know the Bishop, nor did I know Mr. Edward...

These digressions are, I suppose, inartistic, but the death of Lord Clarendon led me to speak of his successor, and so I have wandered on—carried by memories that will not be de...

It was on a lovely morning in the early spring of 1871 that I stood on a spur of the Antilebanon, the famous “Dome of Victory,” and looked down upon the plains of Damascus. I mu...

Is it possible that I, a child of the nineteenth century, grown old in the twentieth, ever paid a visit to Ulysses in the Island of Ithaca? Sometimes it seems to me that I did o...

The _Russia_ (Captain Cook), the crack ship of the Cunard line which carried me to America in the month of March, 1873, would not find much grace in the eyes of the rich men who...

I had long wished to see the capital of the Mormons. Their story was so utterly unlike the nineteenth century, that in spite of much that was vulgar and contemptible it seemed t...

One fine day at the end of April I was walking down the “sacred street” of St. James, as usual thinking of I know not what trifles, utterly absorbed in them, when I felt a tap u...

Lord Beaconsfield was always singularly kind to me. One evening, soon after I went into the Foreign Office, I sat next to Mrs. Disraeli at a dinner at the house of Lord Comberme...

Lord Henry Lennox was First Commissioner of Works when I was appointed Secretary. He was not at all in a frame of mind to be in love with the business of the department. In fact...

I was now a free man, and after a trip of a month in France I sold my London house, took possession of Batsford and made up my mind to become a country squire. I was made a magi...

In 1896 I brought out a little book, “The Bamboo Garden,” which was very well received, though naturally it appealed only to a very limited public. Besides a few indulgent frien...

In the year 1898, business took me once more to Ceylon. One of my sons had gone out there to start in life as a tea-planter, and I must needs go to see how he was faring and wha...

On the 4th of April, 1900, England was startled and shocked by the news that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been shot at. They were on their way to Denmark, and their trai...

The year 1905 will always be memorable in the annals of the Royal Yacht Squadron, that greatest of all clubs, of which King Edward was, and King George now is, the Admiral. In t...

In 1912 I received an invitation from Herr Siegfried Wagner to be present at the _General-Probe_ (dress rehearsal) of the Bayreuth Festival. My daughter Iris, my usual travellin...

Since my memory of what took place at St. Petersburg in 1864 was made ready for the printer, the storm which some of us foresaw as the inevitable consequence, sooner or later, o...