Ribblesdale

Last week Death, enemy of elegance, marched up the dark oak stairs of a house in Grosvenor Square, London, and snuffed out the breath of an old gentleman who lay in bed there, his bleak face upturned to the ceiling. Next day The New York Times published his picture: "Lord Ribblesdale, husband of the late John Jacob Aster's first wife, who died yesterday."

In London, where Lord Ribblesdale was known for other things beside his marriage to the onetime spouse of a U. S. financier, another picture appeared the day after his death in various papers. It was a reproduction of John Sargent's famed painting of him in his hunting clothes--a picture conceived by

King Edward one cup-day at Ascot when Ribblesdale as master of the Royal Buckhounds rode up the midway at the head of the King's gentlemen.

"Sargent," said the King to the painter at a Royal Academy banquet, "I want you to do a portrait of Ribblesdale. Wonderful name, wonderful family--600 years on one property up in Yorkshire, wit, great sportsman, two fine sons, great breed."

"The Ancestor" Sargent called the portrait, recognizing in Ribblesdale's magnificent physical presence, his fastidious dress, and in the whole temper of his mind, those qualities which legend has conferred upon the peers of England. Traces of an older generation survived in his speech and in his clothes,-- hard grainy phrases, grandiloquent flights of formal gallantry, puffing stocks, deep collars, square top hats. He was a celebrated boxer! People said that he could knock out any man in the House of Lords. Once he sat next to Charles Parnell in a railway carriage and, for the only time in his life, permitted himself to be engaged in conversation by a man to whom he had never been introduced, thus winning fame as "the first man to interview Parnell." He was 65 when he married Mr. Astor's wife (Ava Willing, Philadelphia). No children were born. One of the two fine sons of his earlier marriage was killed in Somaliland, one in Gallipoli. His title dies with him.