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LIFE OF CHARLES HALIDAY. XV
suitable for the different apartments by actual experiment.
He thus raised an unusually elegant and comfortable
mansion. In admiration of its beauty, I sometimes repeated
to him, in jest, as we walked up from the garden to dinner,
the saying of Edward Vaughan of Golden Grove, near
Roscrea, in the county of Tipperary, as if such were his
secret
"
thoughts: Oh Golden Grove, Golden Grove! if I might
"
only keep you, I would give up my chances of Heaven !
Of this new mansion, the library, to use Cicero's expression, small size of
might be considered the soul. But beyond the library he *"* 8tudy>
bad a hole of a study, small enough to please the late Lord
Palmerston. That great and popular minister was found
by Dr. Granville in a little room of Cambridge House,
Piccadilly, up to his knees in manuscript papers, foreign
and domestic (for he said he never had time to read print).
Dr. Granville said to him, he wondered that he would not
choose a larger study.
But Lord Palmerston laughed, and
said he wondered how a man could collect his thoughts in
a larger space. Mr. Haliday's study was a long and narrow
slice as it were, lighted by one window from the east.
There he sat on a low stool at the farthest distance from
the window, and the light to humour his eyes, with a rug
over his knees in cold weather. Immediately about him
were those books of Scandinavian history and antiquities,
purchased for him abroad, at Copenhagen and elsewhere.
In the larger library was the great collection of pamphlet HU library,
and other literature relating to Ireland, which it had been
the labour and pleasure of his life to bring together, before
he became immersed just at the close of it in the study of
the Scandinavian antiquities of Dublin.
In his earlier studies concerning the history of the port
of Dublin, he applied to the Corporation for the use of their
Assembly Rolls and other ancient records and had them.
Hard as these were to decipher, through age and the
mediaeval character of the writing, he yet laboured at them
industriously in the early morning hours, until it was time