Percy Lubbock, who died old and blind at his house, Gli Scafari at Lerici, on August 2, 1965, was the survivor of a remarkable set of friends which included Henry James and Edith Wharton and others less well-remembered today, such as Howard Sturgis, George Calderon, Gaillard Lapsley, and Arthur Christopher Benson, and the novelists Rhoda Broughton and Mary Cholmondeley. Two of these friends he commemorated by editing their letters or diaries, and three others he made the subject of memoirs. His fastidious style (sometimes mannered, and verging on the over-complicated) was an inheritance from the most famous of his friends, Henry James: a “mandarin” style; and to him (rather than to Logan Pearsall Smith, for he outlived him) may properly be given the title of “the last of the mandarins.”
Like Logan Pearsall Smith he had Quaker origins, and his were the most distinguished in England. His mother was Catherine Gurney of Earlham, a niece of Elizabeth Fry and a descendant of Robert Barclay, the apologist of the Quakers, a remote ancestor of the Galton and the Noel-Buxton families. He belonged, therefore, to that Quaker elite which, if there be anywhere an aristocracy of merit and the intellect, most abundantly deserves the name.
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