“We had a comfortable passage, very smooth sea, none of us were sea sick, but crossing the channel is not pleasant at the best,” Livy wrote her mother the next day from the Brunswick House Hotel on Hanover Square in London. ...
On July 28 they began a long-planned second visit to Condover Hall, Reginald Cholmondeley’s country estate near Shrewsbury, where six years earlier they had stayed for two days. “We remained a week in that house,” Sam recalled, "& learned much. Sometimes there were a dozen guests, sometimes two dozen,” including the painter John Millais. The welcome respite from the bustle of London was, as Paine observes, “one of the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn,” though it left virtually no record. They left on August 2 for Oxford, where the family parted ways for a few days: Rosina Hay returned with the children to London and Sam and Livy were joined by the English actor Edward Wyndham, who escorted them through the town. “Oxford is so beautiful the grounds about the colleges are something marvelous,” Livy wrote her mother. “How I do wish you could see them, the old, old stone buildings with the ivy on them and often with our woodbine on them.” The Clemenses returned to London and their children on August 4.”