Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen
Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the
dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne
divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the
Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of
Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him
all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his
Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of
memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made
friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's
Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful
vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of
him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither
he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in
December, 1891.

It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been
Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be
Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection.
The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian
world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and
the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me
by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord
Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle.
Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took,
by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who
was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding
behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he
made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue
ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her