Memoirs of Eighty Years
Date: 2018-08-21T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Hake; Thomas Gordon; 1809-1895

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Title: Memoirs of Eighty Years

Author: Thomas Gordon Hake

Release date: August 21, 2018 [eBook #57738]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

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MEMOIRS OF EIGHTY YEARS.

BY
GORDON HAKE,
PHYSICIAN.

“Could we elude the fiat,—all must die,—

Men would become their own posterity.”

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.
1892.

(All rights reserved.)

CONTENTS.

| PAGE
I.
My birth and parentage—My education, beginning eighty-four years ago, still incomplete—Death of my father | 1
II.
Obscure origin of Hakes and Gordons | 3
III.

My sister and my brother—Mischief, a sign of health in children—Friendship, a graft that can only be made while we are growing

6

IV.
My aunt Wallinger—My vivid memory—Our relations in Yorkshire, the Rimington family—My mother’s uncles, the Clarkes | 8
V.

The Clarkes and the Pollocks—William Clarke a governor of St. Paul’s and of Christ’s Church Schools—He gave Sir Frederick Pollock a presentation to the one and me to the other. My first school-days at Hertford, and how after measles and scarlet fever I was sent home in order to die

11

VI.

My rapid recovery and return to mischief after my illness, and the brutal treatment I received from the boys while I was falling sick

15

VII.

From school to Seaford for the holidays, spent by me and my cousin, a Shore, with the Wallingers—The rotten borough, its owners and surroundings—My aunt Shore, a sister of my mother, and the Shore family—Mrs. Wallinger’s despotic kindness to her nephews—Our Denton cousins, the Gwynnes—The Reverend William Gwynne and his lady, also my mother’s sister

17

VIII.
The Gwynne family—Character of Mrs. Gwynne, and of her husband—The training of their offspring | 21
IX.

My monastic life in London—The cloisters, the dormitories, the playground—The influence of their history on the boyish mind—I am ordered to fight

24

X.

Influence of Shakespeare and Virgil over me—“Cozing” after bed-time; story-telling; the reading of forbidden books; the novels of the past; the new novel now worn out—The great epochs, all of a transitory duration, except that of religion

27

XI.

The classical masters—The dress of the clergy—The writing masters—The lower officials—steward, beadles—No teaching except Greek, Latin, writing and arithmetic. Religion not taught, only heard

30

XII.
On bishop, priests, and deacons | 34
XIII.

Henry William Gordon, my uncle, mixes his blood with that of Enderby, whence sprang a giant of middle stature, Chinese Gordon

36

XIV.

My last holiday spent in the mediæval city of Exeter—The dead weight of the clergy relieved by Yates acting Falstaff—Professor Shelden and his mummy—Squire Northmore and his great discovery—Gifford and his Mastership of the Rolls

39

XV.
Lifelong friendships, their physiology—The king’s ward—Games—Handsome boys, and others | 43
XVI.
Boys of some mark—Christ’s unrevisited—Life at Woolwich—Drawing-room manners—Colonel Wylde—Soldiers the best servants | 47
XVII.
Seaford revisited—The Wallinger family—A domestic seaside season of relatives and friends not unknown to fortune | 50
XVIII.

Vaulting ambition, a retrospect—Gravitation of my mother from west to south—She settled at Lewes—My intellect, dieted on its sense of nothingness, takes growth—The process of brain-culture, and its accessories

53

XIX.

Youth—Our first recognition of Nature as something more than ourselves—My modesty always in proportion to my ignorance—My early habit of pumping those who knew more than myself—A country town, a cemetery in which great men are buried alive—Gideon Mantell, prince of geologists—Sir John Shelley and Sir George Shiffner, the last of the pigtail wearers—They represent Lewes in those Tory times

56

XX.

A county town has many mansions, in which the small succeed to the great—Mantell, surgeon-apothecary: his struggles—Lord Egremont’s bounty—He removes to Brighton, sells his museum, vanishes again—The liberality of Government to art, but not to science—Minor celebrities of Lewes

59

XXI.

I become a student of medicine under Thomas Hodson, a great operator—The superior skill of the surgeon, who knows exactly what he is about—Hodson’s strange character—His pre-eminence in county practice—Glynde, Lord Hampden, John Ellman, and south-down mutton

62

XXII.

John Ellman, a sketch—The south-down sheep not extinct—Lord Hampden’s funeral—Southover—The three weird sisters—My studies continued in London at St. George’s—Dr. Thomas Young, the greatest of theorists

65

XXIII.

The order of physicians—Halford, Warren, Chambers—The heavy costs of getting to the front of the profession—The difference between the old and new physicians, how brought about—Dr. James Clark made master of the situation—I become a pupil of Faraday, the eminent lecturer of the day—Family deaths and changes—St. George’s Hospital in the olden time

68

XXIV.

In due course I proceeded to Edinburgh to visit the Scotch Universities—I made the acquaintance, on board the steamer, of a “young fellow”—Dr. Greville, the botanist: his great work on the Cryptogamia—Dr. Robert Knox, whose calling and whose hobby were one—His enthusiasm and geological foresight—Physic is seldom a hobby—Aberdeen and Principal Jack—St. Andrew’s—Glasgow College and its professors

72

XXV.

The Glasgow theatre and Edmund Kean—A tour to the lochs and bens with my brother—Wrote poetry, sent it to Sir Walter Scott on the chance of his being an Edmund Burke—Poetry and its patrons in the past—What a poet is for: nascitur, non fit

75

XXVI.

Breadalbane Castle—Hospitality in the shepherd’s cot—We traverse Loch Long, we become footpads—My brother returns southwards, I remain at Glasgow to pursue my studies—I graduate there—Impressions of Scotch character

79

XXVII.

A retrospect through a long avenue of time to when studies were no longer compulsory—A sixty years’ view—Taking stock of my knowledge—I feel the want of foreign languages—I return to London, and my next important step is to visit Italy—Calais—Paris—Colonel de Courcy—Geneva—The Simplon—Milan

81

XXVIII.

Styles and stylists—Why no author has described a perfect gentleman or a perfect lady—The temporary gentleman—Ladies in high office not to flirt, ugliness essential to their success—Women mistresses of the nervous style of writing—The muscular style best suited to men—The scientific style a good model

85

XXIX.

Nature is the only true stylist; I take my first lesson of her on the summit of the Alps—The English then in Florence—Landor—Trelawny—Colonel Burdett—Bankhead

90

XXX.

William IV. and Queen Adelaide—Sir William Martens—The Marchioness of Waterford—Sir Herbert Taylor—Sir Andrew Buchanan; anecdote of the Court

95

XXXI.
Brighton; a string of anecdotes | 96
XXXII.

The Earl of Elgin my friend—His marbles—He was a great and patient sufferer from tic douleureux—Hahnneman and homœopathy—The earl’s amiable family—Mr. Bruce, the ambassador at Pekin—Lady Elgin and the ladies Charlotte and Augusta Bruce—The earl’s first family—The next Earl of Elgin—My drama, called the “Piromides”

99

XXXIII.
A tirade on friendships—Sir David Scott at Brighton—His interview with George IV.—A passage of snuffs | 101
XXXIV.

The Countess de Montalembert; her versatility—Strange effect on the understanding when those who were in full vigour on our last seeing them, grow feeble and die—The Rev. H. M. Wagner—His labours—Horace Smith—Dr. George Hall—The Smith family—Evening receptions of Lady Carhampton and of the Hon. Mrs. Mostyn, a daughter of Thrale

106

XXXV.

The human race not purposed to be very intellectual—The clergy interpolate Nature with dogma—Count Pepoli, professor of Italian at University College—His opera of “I Puritani,” written for Bellini—He was robbed and exiled by Pius IX., who did not set the Tiber on fire, hard as he tried to astonish feeble minds—Sir Matthew Tierney—Dr. Bankhead and the other king’s physicians at Brighton

111

XXXVI.

The charm of Brighton in the olden time before railways—The “Age” coach—Sir St. Vincent Cotton and the Marquis of Worcester—The Dispensary, the Sussex County Hospital, and its noble patrons—Essay on manners—The dandy—The triumph of the cigar over women—Essay on vanity—Vain to the last—Addison—Vain in death—The least vain of men is the suicide—His anomalous character portrayed—Too systematic to be insane—His courage inscrutable

116

XXXVII.

There is no such thing as merit; it is not boastful in any man to describe his own capabilities correctly—Delinquencies most objected to by delinquents—Those who try to define genius are too clever to succeed—Being a little less clever myself, I give its definition—If I appear too clever at any time, the corrective is close at hand—My early exertions—The enormous increase of good writing in the country—Criticism the profoundest of studies

122

XXXVIII.

Liars, their division into three classes—No man is truly great unless a love of truth places his mind parallel with nature—Its immense use in criticism—A new criticism discoverable in Shakespeare on this basis, illustrated by three parallels—Nature’s mysterious number—Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet—Coleridge’s “Time, Real and Imaginary”—His “Work without Hope”—The three parallels rarely found except in authors of the highest genius

126

XXXIX.

Wordsworth tried and found wanting—The parables of the Lord examined and found absolutely free from metaphor—The poetic mind never fully matures—The Fame Insurance Company’s proceedings—Shakespeare a master of simplicity, and comparatively free from metaphor, which is not strictly sincere—The Prodigal Son and the Ten Virgins, perfect models—Milton’s style magnificent and insincere—The retrospective and prospective imagination of the parables; the introspective only belongs to the poet who substitutes himself for Nature, of whom he knows little

132

XL.

I spend a year in Paris, then take up my residence in London, publishing work there in 1839—I resolve on country life, and settle down at Bury St. Edmunds—The residents there—Its celebrated school, where a bishop of London, a lord chancellor, and a president of the College of Physicians were educated, and were still living—The Marquis of Bristol and Ickworth Building—The singular history and will of the previous earl, Bishop of Derry—An account of Ickworth—The unparalleled career of the earl-bishop—The Hervey family

138

XLI.

Culture in the Suffolk families—Sir Henry Bunbury—His character—The son of H. B., the eminent caricaturist and friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds—Barton Hall: among several of Reynolds’s works there is Venus sacrificing to the Graces, a full length portrait of Lady Sarah Lennox, wife of Sir Charles Bunbury, and the most famous beauty of her day—Her after marriage to the Hon. Colonel Napier, and she becomes the mother of a family of heroes—The Napier family—The second Lady Bunbury, a daughter of Lady Sarah, marries Sir Henry; and Cecilia Napier, her grand-daughter, marries his son, Colonel Bunbury—Sir Henry’s mission to Bonaparte—Sir George Napier—Sir Charles, the hero of Scinde—Sir Charles Fox Bunbury married to Miss Horner, sister of Lady Lyell

147

XLII.

The Duke of Norfolk; his simple life—The Earl of Surrey—Lord Fitzalan, who marries Admiral Lyons’ daughter—The beneficent character of that lady—The family seat of Fornham All Saints sold to a Lord Manners—Hengrave Hall and Sir Thomas Gage—Culford, formerly the seat of the Cornwallis family, then of Mr. Benyon de Beauvoir and his nephew

152

XLIII.

The Wilsons of Stowlangtoft—Their circle—Samuel Rickards, rector of the parish, and the Tractarians, Newman, Manning—Sir John Yarde Buller—Sir Richard Kindersley—The Porchers—Mrs. Henry Wilson, daughter of Lord Charles Fitz-Roy; her admirable character—A dinner at Trinity College, Cambridge—Kindersley, Professor Sedgwick, and Dr. Donaldson—Henry Wilson’s generous character—Anecdote of Sir George Wombwell, former owner of Stowlangtoft—The Thornhills of Riddlesworth—The character of Rickards; his charming wife—The death of friends

155

XLIV.

The Rickardses at home—Miss Rickards paints and glazes new windows for the church—The Rev. Mr. Mozley, a Tractarian and a writer on the Times paper—A Times Commissioner—Lord Thurlow—The Oakes family of Newton Court—Great Saxham Hall and the Mills family—Barrow rectory; the Rev. Arthur Carrighan; his remarkable history—Mrs. Mills; her daughters—George Borrow

160

XLV.

Borrow’s contradictory character—His fine person; Mr. Murray’s portrait of him—As my guest he accompanies me to a dinner at Sir Thomas Cullum’s—The party present—Borrow and Thackeray the lions—Milner Gibson—Borrow accompanies me to a dinner at Mr. Bevan’s, a truly awkward occasion for all parties—Anecdote of Borrow and Miss Agnes Strickland, told me by Mr. J. W. Donne, the Censor

164

XLVI.

Charles Buller, the pet of the House of Commons, secretary to Lord Durham in Canada, and one of a Whig clique, himself a charming person—The parsonage of Rickards on the whole the best literary centre—Hospitality of Riddlesworth Hall—Lord Sandwich there; anecdote of his father-in-law, the Marquis of Anglesey—Colonel Keppel, the late Earl of Albemarle; his charm of manner—One misses the society of one’s own class in high circles, but there are many compensations—The decline of influence in men of rank as well as of position—Mrs. Thornhill, a daughter of Mrs. Waddington, and sister of Moncton Milnes—Our parishes, with their resident squires, like happy republics—The Newtons of Elvedon and Duleep Singh—The Duke of Grafton and Euston Hall—Mr. Angerstein; his family and their princely home in Norfolk

168

XLVII.

The clergy of Bury—The Church the only profession in which practitioners do not get their own living, being already endowed—It will last their time—A parsonic anecdote

176

XLVIII.

The Cookesley family—Dr. Cookesley attacks Dr. Donaldson’s work, “Jashar”—Donaldson, the head-master of Bury school, a man of complicated character, governed by overweening vanity—He wished to be the Christian Voltaire and the Bentley of his day—The true origin of “Jashar” was Knights’s book on “Phallic Worship”

180

XLIX.
Perowne’s attack on Donaldson, as champion of orthodoxy—A clear line drawn between physics and metaphysics | 184
L.

I tire of country life, and visit America, and its principal cities—I return to England; make an excursion to Jersey, then settle down in Grosvenor Street—I am invited to take charge of Lord Ripon’s health and move to Putney Heath—At his death I take a house in Spring Gardens—Later, I settle at Roehampton, for some years, and for some more years in Parson’s Green; finally I move to St. John’s Wood, and there I remain—Such are the gaps to be yet filled in with travels many, and adventures few, of forty more years—Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence at Boston—Their ministerial residence in London—Mr. Lawrence a man of the world, Mrs. Lawrence a lady of the United States—Her estimate of Sir Charles Lyell’s progress towards civilization—Mr. Prescott—I am asked to give a lecture—The medical men of Boston—Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft—A visit to Quebec—A party at the Governor-General’s—Mr. Lawrence—Messrs. Middleton at New York—Terrapine at Philadelphia

188

LI.

The death of Lord Ripon—Spring Gardens—The West London Hospital—I continue my medical services with Lady Ripon—The noble character of that lady—The Disbrowes—The Gordons of Ellon—Mr. Wellesley, afterwards Lord Cowley—Count Pozzo di Borgo—A young Buonaparte—The Duchess of Somerset—Lord Edward and the Earl St. Maur—I prove myself a good diagnostic, when agnostics were in their infancy

196

LII.

My researches on the bones in scrofula—Dr. Baly—The Medico-Chirurgical Society—The Earl and Countess de Grey and Ripon—The present Lord Ripon’s public services—His descent from both Hampden and Cromwell—Other representatives of Cromwell—Mr. Field and Count Palavicini—Dr. Marcet—The Chemical Society—Dr. Faraday—Mr. Davies Gilbert—My paper on “Vital Force”—Contributions to the medical press—My research on the powers of the alphabet—A new cosmogony—On Drapery—My work on “Varicose Capillaries,” published in 1839, and forgotten, resuscitated in 1890 by the Pathological Society

201

LIII.

Lady Ripon’s declining health—I frequently visit her at Putney Heath, and I settle at Roehampton—Her friends and guests—Sir Charles and Lady Douglas—Mrs. Charles Lushington—George Borrow my frequent guest—Dr. Robert Latham—D. G. Rossetti—My visits to Nocton Hall, the country place of Lady Ripon—My poem of “The Lily of the Valley” describes Nocton Wood—How I came to write “Old Souls”—A volume printed for private circulation, called “The World’s Epitaph,” sprang from these poems—How the work fared—The impression it made on Rossetti

204

LIV.

Dr. Latham—He brings Mr. Theodore Watts to see me—I introduce Watts to George Borrow—We stroll over Richmond Park—Latham has a wish to meet Borrow, which I arrange—Latham’s behaviour towards my guest—His assumption—The finale

208

LV.

A dinner at Rossetti’s—Mr. W. B. Scott, Mr. Sidney Colvin, Mr. Joseph Knight, Mr. William Rossetti, Dr. Hüffer, Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip, Mr. Madox Brown and Dr. Appleton—Rossetti’s poetry, his life, the artistic colouring of his mind—The nobility of his nature while in health, his change of character through disease—His poetry and paintings are one; both suffer by separation—The cause of his success as a poet—A critical view of his “Blessed Damozel”

213

LVI.

Opinion of “Sister Helen”—The “lascivious pleasing” of the sonnets—Rossetti’s poetry introspective—His companionable nature, his justice, freedom from jealousy and readiness to serve a friend—Residence in Perthshire with Rossetti in 1872—Stobbs Castle—Crieff—Rossetti at Kelmscott—At Bognor

218

LVII.

Mr. Noble, the sculptor—His recumbent statue of Lord Ripon in Nocton church—My visits to Nocton—The healthiness of Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties in summer—Rossetti’s generous review of “Madeline” in The Academy—He introduces my work to Dr. Westland Marston, who reviews it in The Athenæum—The costs of publication—Mr. Eden—“Madeline” and Theodore Watts

230

LVIII.

The origin of “Madeline”—Theodore Watts—His many endowments—Now a leading critic—His review of my work, “New Symbols,” in the Examiner—Harrison Ainsworth—The novel in general—The origin of “Parables and Tales”—Rossetti, Hüffer, and “The Cripple”—“The Blind Boy,” and Morley’s Fortnightly Review—I go to Bath—Beckford’s cemetery and tomb—Proceed to Germany—The wonders of Stassfurt—The old Saxon church—Dr. Dupré, my son-in-law, at Stassfurt

233

LIX.

My daughter’s marriage—The breakfast and the wedding guests—The likeness of Mr. Dupré, the elder, to the Bonapartes—His relationship to that family by descent—The French family of Dupré; the Buckinghamshire branch—Salt-water in England confined to the coast—Germany soaked in it—The drinking pilgrims—Their bodily sins—Family rambles—My youngest son, Henry, a student at Giessen, joins me in Turin—An autumn in Genoa

241

LX.

The Riviera Levante—Nervi—Its charm of scenery and colour, which commissions me to write “The Painter”—The Palazzo Rosso—The coast of Genoa spoilt by its fortifications—The vineyards and villas—The Villa Paganini—A feast of grapes—A knife-fight—The Via Nuova—The statue of Columbus—We proceed to Spezia—Lerici, Shelley’s last home but one—The Temple of Venus—The marble hills of Carrara—Florence once more—Old friends replaced by new—Madame Mazzini, now the wife of Signor Villari, a senator and Minister of Education—My longings to see Florence again—The Tuscans—Their bright intellects and fine faces—The kindness and attentions of the Italians to strangers

244

LXI.

At Florence after forty years—My pleasant apartments on the Lungarno—I repeat my old walks—I still receive reviews of “Parables and Tales,” always in their favour—My visit to Rossetti at Kelmscott—I describe his home while there in a poem—“Reminiscence”—My next work, “New Symbols”—Rossetti’s remarks on certain stanzas of “The Birth of Venus,” and “Michael Angelo”—William Rossetti reviews “New Symbols” in The Academy, in 1876

248

LXII.

The music of sympathy—Friends at Florence—Professor Schiff—Capponi and a dog that would bay the moon—Madame Schiff and her circle—I prepare “Ecce Homo” here, also “Lucella”—My studies for “Michael Angelo”—My poem of “Pythagoras”—In 1874, still at Florence, I wrote an article on Schiff’s work for The Practitioner—My correspondence—The friends I leave behind

251

LXIII.

I take train for Venice—Every one on first seeing it says he shall stay a long time; no one stays more than a fortnight—The Piazza San Marco; all peace and quiet; no sound of voices, or wheels, or hoofs—One’s coffee turns to nectar as one feeds on the Duomo—The palace of the Doges more majestic than Man—How to imagine what Venice is—The calle and dainty marble bridges—The little canals, where some keep their own gondola as we do our own carriage—One takes a gondola at the Piazzetta—One sweeps by lovely palaces on a Grand Canal—One gets out at the Rialto—This fine old palace is the General Post Office, that is the Fondaco dei Turchi—Then the Palazzi Pesaro, La Ça Doro, Guistiniani, and Foscari—The Arsenal—The Gallery of Art—Churches angular—Churches domed—The Via Garibaldi—The squares of St. Maurizio and St. Stephano—Venice very cold in March—San Marco the most perfect square on earth—The two Othello families—No fear of being run over by cabs—The opera at Venice—The island of Lido—Venice compared to a picture book—Across the Brenner by way of Verona—Munich—Stassfurt again—Excursions to the Harz—The Brocken, the Affenthaler valley—The castle of Falconstein—Proposal for a monument to Goethe—Return to Italy over the Brenner—My travelling companions—Florence, the Perseus and the Loggia dei Lanzi—The inspired evangelists of art—I saw my estimable friends the Villaris again—On my way to Rome

255

LXIV.

A young Jesuit—The lake of Perugia and the hill cities—Urbs recondita, cittá rovinata—The Pantheon, the palace of the Cæsars that was—The skeleton of the Forum—The antiquarian genius—The transfiguration of Rome and the Transfiguration of Raphael—The Laocoon—The Apollo Belvidere, alias Lord Chesterfield’s transfiguration—The Ariadne—The Athlete, at the end of a Via di Scolpitura—The Barbarini Palace and Beatrice Cenci—The Ghetto, the Cenci palace—The Romans proud of Rome—A worn-out pedigree—The Corso, the Piazza Colonna—St. Paul replaces Marcus Aurelius Antoninus—The obelisk in the Piazza di Monti Clitorio—The Palazzo Doria Pamfili—Upstairs to the Capitol—Stopped on one’s way by two lions spurting water—Castor and Pollux; their nags—The Campidoglio—Marcus Aurelius taking his ride into future times—The museum of the modern Capitol

265

LXV.

“What come ye for to see?”—The graves of Keats and Shelley—The church of San Paolo fuori—St. Peter’s rise from the dead—The tomb of the Scipios—The catacombs of the early Christians—The old cloisters of San Paolo—St. Peter’s palace, the Vatican—The Sixtine Chapel in which Michael Angelo re-creates the world

275

LXVI.

Faithful to England for a time—A summer passed at Ballenstedt—The castle of Blankenburg, the billiard-room and chapel—The situation of Ballenstedt: forest, hills, and lakes—Its vicinity to the Affenthaler valley—Reflections on paper—I am my own posterity—My writings since my eightieth year have delivered my message—The human comedy—I insinuate that I am the only English epigrammatist, par excellence—The general incapacity of appreciation—Short poems have often a biographic flavour—Further useless reflections—The almost imperceptible difference between man and man

280

LXVII.
The importance of religion, being a sermon preached to stones—I essay to hope backwards, and fail | 286
LXVIII.

Philographs of eminent medical men known to me in my day—Some of our scientists—The weak side of our great theorists, concerning the sun and conservation of energy

292

Postscript | 299

ERRATA.

Transcriber’s Note: the errata have been corrected.

Page | 45, | line 28, | for “that” read “those.”
” | 49, | line 25, | for “equery” read “equerry.”
” | 79, | line 1, | for “Breadalbine” read “Breadalbane.”
” | 89, | line 2, | for “Tristam” read “Tristram.”
” | 147, | line 10, | for “Lover” read “Lever.”
” | 158, | line 6, | for “vertueuse” read “vertueuses.”
” | 202, | line 18, | for “Marcel” read “Marcet.”

Memoirs of Eighty Years.

I.

Several literary men of eminence have from time to time suggested to me that I ought to write my memoirs, but I have long held the opinion that such works have scarcely a legitimate interest for one’s contemporaries. Now, however, that I have exceeded, by fourteen years, the age of man, I begin to regard the opinion of others, and to look upon myself as a sort of incipient posterity, and am disposed to make the experiment of placing some portion of my life on record.

Most people who attain to birth, parentage, and education, find the latter the most doubtful of the three, even the first being somewhat uncertain. For myself, there is a tradition in my family that I was born by candle-light on the 10th of March, 1809: it was at midnight, and in the town of Leeds.

To keep those in order who believe too much, Nature has issued a series of minds that believe too little, and I am one of these; I could prove to the satisfaction of any free metaphysician that I have never existed at all, and that I am a mere optical illusion, like the rest of my fellow-men.

As to my parentage, I believe in that implicitly. But who else would be so credulous, if it were to his interest to prove the reverse?

As to my education, it has been as scanty as that of the best of us; it would be too great a joke to suppose that eighty years is a sufficient time for the acquisition of any knowledge worth naming. Herschel, for example, discovered the planet Uranus; that educated him, though it had been in the place where he found it for countless millions of years.

The educated are those who appreciate things at their true value; culture does not merely signify knowledge, but its acquisition in the utmost detail.

My father was said to have a musical genius, and rumour handed down that my mother fell in love with him on that account. She was the most emotional woman that I ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I can understand her marrying at the age of thirty-three a youth of nineteen, which she did; but I cannot understand my father at his age marrying her.

I had a sister; she was the firstborn, and a brother who came after me.

My father died at the age of twenty-six; he got his feet wet in the snow, took a chill, and went regularly through all the stages of inflammation.

I was three years and three months old when my father died; I remember him, also his house, both inside and out, and the square where it stood, at Sidmouth. But I have only one vision of these things; it is always the same, that of the father, the house, and the square.

II.

It is as well to know how one’s family dovetails into the community of such a mosaic work as the British, so I will set down what information I have on the subject. I presume that a band of Hakes quitted Prussian Saxony in the olden time for a less sandy soil, and that some of them settled on the old red sandstone of Devon. The name of Hache gave itself to a town in the region of Broadcliss, and received a notice in Doomsday-book. The family no doubt occupied the soil thereabout for centuries, the name being noticeable in the Broadcliss Register in the time of Queen Anne. The name, too, is rife in Saxony; at Stassfurt there is a Hake’s Bridge; besides this there are numerous workmen of the name, engaged in the salt factories, not to mention a general and count who commanded the army against the Danes in the Schleswig-Holstein affair. In England, too, this family name has belonged to all classes, from a viscount in the time of Edward I., an M.P. for Windsor and a poet, in the reign of Henry VIII., down to some, who, being in trade, my mother used to call “the scum of the earth.”

My great-grandfather is reputed to have had land and a mansion called Bluehayes, hard by Broadcliss; and tradition says it got merged into the family of Acland by a successful mortgage on their part. My family lived on the soil for many centuries without being distinguished in any branch of science, literature, or art.

My mother’s family have had a different career: her father was a soldier, and the son of one; they were Gordons of the Huntly stock, and came directly from the Park branch of that house, but how little meaning is there in a name! Truth to tell the only male descendants of the first Gordon are the Aberdeen family. In the reign of one David, King of Scotland, a Norman prince of name forgotten, settled on a territory called Gordon, north of the Tweed. The elder branch failed after three or four generations; an only daughter succeeding to the territory, married a Seton, of Seton, who took the name of Gordon, so that this branch, the most successful one, having become barons, earls, marquisses, and finally dukes, are a younger branch of the Setons; baronets of Touch, still existing, while the Aberdeens, the second branch of Gordon, are the true descendants.

The centuries that have elapsed must have wholly eradicated the blood of Gordon in this family that still bears the name, and had the marquisate from early Scottish kings, whose daughter one of them married: Arabella.

There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people’s relations. What I note down is to show that I belong to all classes. I have a cousin who is a baronet named Key; another who is an earl named Ranfurly; and, as I was told, one of my family was a butcher named Bedford. In fact, while not a true Briton, which I am glad of, I have a full share to my name of the Saxon blood. As regards my mother’s family, they were comparatively obscure in the middle of this century, and are so still, except in the instance of one individual who has a statue in Trafalgar Square, set up by the Conservative Government in perpetual disapproval of the neglect which the hero of Khartoum experienced at the hands of the Gladstone-Granville administration. But for that he would have been, like Cromwell, without a statue. Of him I shall give my opinion in the proper place; and as his name is public property, I shall trace some of the families from which, in common with him, I have derived my origin.

I may say, then, that our grandfather, Captain William Augustus Gordon, was an officer somewhat distinguished in the service. He was at the taking of Moro Castle, Havanna, Louisburg, and Quebec. At the siege of Quebec he was on the staff of General Wolf, and saw him die happy. He retired early from the army, in which he made many powerful friends—married a lady of many high qualities and great personal beauty, named Clarke, whose family belonged to Hexham, in Northumberland, the sister of the Rev. Slaughter Clarke, incumbent of that place, at whose house he first met her while stationed in the town on military duty. He had a family by her of four daughters and three sons, of which my mother was the firstborn.

III.

I had a sister; she came two or three years before me, and died at the age of four or five and twenty, of typhoid fever. She was attended, but in vain, by men of skill—Dr. J. A. Wilson, physician to St. George’s, and Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary.

Then I have a brother, who came last—two years after me—my oldest friend.

We both had good abilities, as time has since shown, but being let to run wild, we had no serious use for them, so we devoted them to mischief. It seems a settled purpose in nature for children to destroy whatever things they can lay their hands on, by way of testing the strength of materials, and to privately annoy all who come within their reach, not out of wickedness, but for fun. I and my brother fully entered into these views, and did all in our power to assist them; the consequence was, we were a good deal disliked. Another failing that we indulged in was a love of the village boys’ society, and this caused us to be looked down on by gentlemen’s sons. The street boys we found the best company, and they were amenable to our orders, which could not be said of the genteel class.

All this is defensible in children who are allowed to follow their own devices, and is a sign of health, for good little boys and girls are never very well. There is no intellectual endowment of such value as a sense of the ridiculous; it argues the existence of imagination, to which it is a supplement and corrective.

Can any one say he has more than one friend who makes him part of himself? I have one—my brother. I used to say once, “If you want friends, you must breed them;” but experience tells us that this method has only an average success. Acquired friends must be engrafted in youth, or before, while growth is going on. Friendships made later are only impressions; they are not an integral part of us; and, though they may flourish, are liable to be overturned. Stately as they may become, like the elm, they have no tap-root.

I said, the other day at dinner, before one of my brother’s sons, but playfully, “I and my brother are fonder of each other than we are of our own children; but we have known each other longer than we have known them.”

A child to be healthy should not be too clever; he should only have receptive power and humour. How grown-up children even differ in this respect!

IV.

Soon after I was seven I went away to school. My mother had inherited a small income in bank-stock, and was able to go where she liked, which she did freely. It was now Exmouth, now Teignmouth, Dawlish, Budleigh Salterton, Tiverton, and other places, but she never found peace of mind in any. She was throughout a long life in search of the Ideal which she never found, and she handed the passion with the same result down to me. She had a married sister, named Wallinger, at Gainsborough; so she took us there. This sister, a year younger than herself, played the great lady throughout as long a life as my mother’s: her husband, Captain Wallinger, was the son of the Wallinger of Hare Hall in Essex, a county family; he had been in the Dragoon Guards, and at a venture might be called the finest and handsomest man of his time.

I remember the house where we lived at Gainsborough, and that of the Wallingers, so well, that I could describe both to the satisfaction of an artist, together with the surroundings, and the roads leading to them, not forgetting a white wooden bridge that spanned the Trent, and which we crossed in due time in a post-chaise into Yorkshire, where we visited relations, the Rimingtons of Hillsborough, near Sheffield, the beautiful grounds of which are now, perhaps, cut up for buildings by a knife-grinding population. A descendant of this family is Rimington Wilson of Bromhead, a famed grouse manor; another is Lord Ranfurly. I remember even sitting on the left side of the carriage, and looking out of the window at the water as we crossed the Trent.

One does not read faces from an early age, but I have a good recollection of certain features; for instance, I can recall our “cousin” Rimington’s powdered head. But after I was seven, I never forgot a face, and often knew schoolfellows again, despite the changes time had worked, whom I had not met for half a century.

It is not the features one recollects, but the demeanour and general expression. One does not, as a rule, observe the features of others. A man who had seen me every day for a year, said, “Well, I always imagined your eyes were blue, but I now observe that they are hazel.”

In his novel of “Coningsby” Disraeli has introduced the character of Sir Joseph Wallinger, the same Christian name as my uncle’s. There being no other family of that name, I have often felt curious to learn what circumstance led him to its selection. He may have been a visitor at Hare Hall in his younger days. I shall have occasion to revert frequently to the Wallingers.

We made a long visit to the Rimingtons; I retain the recollection of it as one of much enjoyment. I remember the housekeeper promising me a penny if I would sit still for an hour, which I did, and lost my money five minutes after while rolling it about the floor; a suggestive episode. I remember Mr. Rimington giving me sixpence, which I no sooner got than I dropped it into a water-tank beyond recovery, as many have done since who have shares in submarine telegraph companies.

This wealthy family, which must still dwell in the memory of many Sheffielders, had only one son, whose three children may still live, with the exception of Lady Ranfurly; the eldest is Rimington of Bromhead Hall, with the suffix of Wilson.

Bromhead Hall manor must have the best grouse shooting in Yorkshire, except that of Studley Royal. My grandmother’s sister, Mrs. Wilson, was our cousin Rimington’s mother, and was a very stately lady. She lived at Upper Tooting, where I once spent my holidays with her when I was at school in London. One day, after a drive with her, she said, “Remember, you have had a ride in your aunt Wilson’s carriage;” and these are the only words of hers that I have borne in memory.

My grandmother, Mrs. Gordon, had two brothers besides the one already named—William and Henry Clarke, of the City of London. William was one of the Mercers’ Company, and is buried in their ground at Mercers’ Hall. He lived at 72, Gracechurch Street, with his brother, who carried on a business in the stationery trade, and made money. His elder brother was rich, leaving over a hundred thousand pounds, but was never in trade. These brothers died unmarried, and their wealth reached the next generation, the elder attaining the age of ninety-five.

V.

That uncle of mine, William Clarke, whom I never saw but in the back room on the first floor of 72, Gracechurch Street, had a proud temper. His father went into business in King Street, Guildhall, and was cut by the father before him for so doing, which father was a general, and paymaster to Queen Anne’s forces, with a residence in Kew Palace. My mother’s immediate uncle was introduced into his father’s business, that of a whalebone merchant, but quitted it suddenly on being asked by a customer to abate a price; his reply being, “Do you think it was stolen?” He played a part in life which still influences posterity, and will do so more and more, if only through one act of his life, that of giving a presentation to the first Sir Frederick Pollock for St. Paul’s School. Proud as he was, he had a good heart, though a churl; he was careful even to meanness; he was charitable towards those who needed it most, preferring the poor to such of his own kith and kin as were not well off. Indeed he left thousands to charitable institutions, and very little to any of his relations except one, the only nephew who preserved his name, though his intentions were ultimately frustrated by the death of his heir, and that, at a period of his life when he was no longer competent to design a will. But he did a great thing in sending the young Pollock to St. Paul’s School, whence the boy proceeded to Cambridge, and became one of the hundred senior wranglers of his own century. The genius of the Pollock family was ripe for breaking out; the brother of the future Chief Baron, Sir George Pollock, became a distinguished general, and, I think, died a field-marshal, a rank borne for a long time by the Duke of Wellington alone, who could tolerate no rival. Sir Frederick Pollock was facile princeps in his profession, and from him have sprung lawyers of mark for three generations, not the least promising of these, as report goes, the present or third baronet, son of a good, great, and noble-minded sire, lately lost to the world; and it must not be forgotten that the name is great in medicine, that profession which is more enlightening than all the others put together, involving, as it does, an adequate knowledge of every science. It is not to be forgotten, either, that one of the most cultivated men of the day, a true poet and the possessor of a unique literary talent in fantastic caricature, is to be found in Walter Herries Pollock, a younger brother of the present baronet.

Either William Clarke or his brother Henry, who were both governors of Christ’s Hospital, supplied me with my early education by nominating me to that remarkable school. They might have put me also to St. Paul’s, though I might not, certainly, have done them the credit they must have enjoyed from giving a presentation to the young Pollock. What the elder did for my mother was always with a high hand; if he sent her money it was with covert insult, nevertheless circumstances compelled her to be grateful and to say as much in return, and she certainly had the best of it in so doing. I must acquit all who act in like manner of wanting spirit, in accepting needful favours done with an ill grace. None of us feel resentful towards Nature for giving us our carrots, our turnips, our potatoes, covered with dirt!

I was given in charge of a clergyman from Exeter to London, the Rev. Mr. Back, who took his own son to the school at the same time. I remember absolutely nothing of my journey, over 173 miles, except that on the road the coach met a drove of cows, and that I said to myself, “This will be something to tell my mother.” This occurrence has stuck to my memory ineradicably, like a daub of paint. But I remember the date without ever having refreshed it: the 20th of June, 1816.

In those days the journey occupied twenty-four hours; as I started in the morning I must have reached town in the morning, and being destined for Hertford, where the younger boys of my tender age were sent, I must have been conveyed there the same day, but I recollect nothing that happened till in bed at No. 1 ward, under Nurse Merenith.

But the almost regal school and oblong gravelled ground, with buildings in front and on each side, faced with trees, and enclosed in lofty iron railings, I see still; as I saw on being turned loose the next day.

When at home in the enjoyment of freedom, I was riotous; when at school, in the hands of strangers, I was meek. I feared my writing and cyphering master, Mr. Whittle. The usher, who took a dislike to me, never missed an opportunity of striking me a blow. Less I feared my classical master, Dr. Franklin, a tall man of noble deportment, with a florid complexion, and a face that never relaxed during school hours, but was full of play the moment school was over. I recollect well my astonishment at seeing the boys following him in crowds as he marched to his house in his doctor’s gown, while they tugged at his robes, seized on his hands, and made free with him as if he were their father; he enjoying these liberties not less than the boys themselves.

I was at once put into Greek and Latin grammar, with delectuses; and then into Æsop. But while on those amusing fables I sickened of measles; from this I had scarcely convalesced when I was down with scarlet fever. This burnt itself out of my blood, but left me prostrate, and, as I learned, I was sent home to my mother to die; all of which seemed to me very natural.

VI.

Let me here remark, as a physician, that, had not my constitution been faultless, the scarlet fever would have seized on my kidneys or my heart, and have maimed me for life, allowing me, perhaps, twenty years in which to complete my survey of the world. But I passed unscathed through the ordeal, a sort of inoculation that renders one death-proof so long as it is not worth while to die. How did I get home through that long journey? In doing so I anticipated a two days’ instalment of my now near-approaching oblivion.

My recovery was rapid, and, now that I had a brother as my familiar, I was ready to set him a bad example, and to perpetrate whatever mischief our united talents could invent. Our most obvious opportunity was, after we had watched our neighbour at Heavitree sweeping his gravel walks, to throw rubbish on them over the fence, that he might have the labour in which he delighted, over again. We would then retire unseen, and, as we thought, into the security of non-detection, too young to know the value of circumstantial evidence. But the nonsense of children is little worth repeating, except to babes, and I cannot emulate those wonderful geniuses who can even turn metaphysics into fairy tales. I cannot resist giving an account of the finest ride I ever had in my life.

It was at Heavitree, where, near the churchyard and parsonage, there was a large meadow, which I and my brother often crossed on our rambles. One day we encountered a large sow there. I coaxed my way up to it, and leapt on to its back, when it started off at a tremendous gallop, needing neither whip nor spur. My seat kept safe, and I was carried round the meadow at a fabulous pace, no doubt amid gruntings the most terrific. This ride seemed to realize in me a state of existence surpassing all common pleasure; it was a taste of glory.

My leave of funereal absence, which was so soon converted into a holiday, was prolonged without difficulty on the certificate of Mr. Harris, a leading surgeon of Exeter, who was good nature itself; but he must have seen that I was malingering. I must have remained at home nearly a year. By this time I was intelligent enough to understand my mother and her history, and my brother was not behind me in that respect. She instilled into our minds a contempt for the Hake family, some of whom were in trade; but this was most unjust, for their moral tone was high, and they were a credit to the middle class. Their position in life had changed since the generation previous; but family pride had remained to them, and that is sometimes the parent of honour—if not its father, its mother at least. On the other hand, she was never tired of her own family distinction; her father and two of her brothers, the third being still a boy, had in her eyes the attributes of nobility. But all this was in the warmth of her own imagination and love; for no one else thought so. They were respectable and respected—that was all. Those who are really great are not aware of it, for it never occupies their thoughts.

The time came for me to be returned to my owners, the masters of the school—a change that gave me neither pleasure nor pain. I cannot recall the time when I did not feel myself the subject of destiny against which I had no instinct of resistance. So amenable was I to the mastery of circumstances, that all things happened as a matter of course, and I knew no protest. When my illnesses began, I was the subject of diarrhœal disorder, and I was brutally treated. I was put into a room with a tub of cold water to cleanse my miserable self, when the boys, hearing of my wretched plight, broke in upon me with a broom, and did the work of scrubbing me. My feeling was that I must bear it; my consolation was that it would not last. Soon afterwards I was taken to the sick ward and treated with humanity.

VII.

My governor, as was called the one who gave a boy his presentation, made an attempt to have me kept in London, but I was still thought too young, and I reached Hertford again, where I remained for perhaps another year; but after the August holidays, I was established in the Newgate Street school.

The Wallingers had settled at Seaford, in a house on the Crouch, to which a good garden was attached, and in this my uncle plied the spade and grew vegetables. It was a gentlemanly residence, standing high and overlooking the sea.

At Seaford I spent my first holidays, and made a large acquaintance there. It was the property of the Earl of Chichester and Mr. Ellis, and it returned two members to the House of Commons at the dictation of its owners. Mr. Canning once had the honour of representing, I cannot say the borough, but the gentlemen to whom it belonged. During his proprietorship Mr. Ellis was created Lord Seaford; he afterwards succeeded to the family title of Howard de Walden.

A row of houses led from the beach up to the Crouch on the left side; opposite to this was an open field. One of these houses Mr. Ellis kept as his occasional residence. It was entirely in the French style, had a long walled garden, and was very picturesque. The man cook of this gentleman sometimes visited Seaford, and took up his abode in the family house, bringing with him his hounds and horses.

A cousin of mine, Henry Shore, who was also in the school, passed the August holidays at Seaford with our relations. His mother was the youngest of the four Miss Gordons. She married into a very considerable family, the Shores of Maresbrook Park, near Sheffield, an elder branch, of which the younger was Shore of Tapton, who took the name, afterwards, of Nightingale. He had two daughters, Florence and Penelope. The first of these, as is well known, remained single; the second married Sir Harry Verney.

It may be of interest to mention that these ladies took their names from the country of their birth, the one being born at Florence, the other at Athens.

This was my first opportunity of learning my aunt’s character, which was a very singular one. It was necessary to her that she should be the first person in her circle, wherever that lay. At Seaford she found no difficulty. It was then an obscure town with a few good families in it, among them the clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Carnegie and his wife; Mr. Verral, the surgeon, a man of great talent and skill, with his wife and children; and Captain Evans, the agent of the borough owners, whose business it was to see that the taxes were paid up, or to pay them himself, ready for an election, and never to press for rent. Then there were gentlemen farmers in the neighbourhood, a peculiar class—men of capital and education, devoted chiefly to the breeding of sheep. Every one has heard of Southdown mutton; in those days it was in plenty. Ellman of Glynde and Lord Chichester were great among its producers, and it was never killed till it was six years old. No venison equalled it in flavour, and, regrettable to say, it is now unknown in the market; if it still exists in perfection, it may be at Stanmer Park and at Glynde.

The greatest of our aunt’s accomplishments was keeping house—of all else she was ignorant in the extreme; but, by the aid of a small dictionary, she kept the spelling of her letters pretty correct, and by tact she concealed her ignorance of all human knowledge. She expected to be looked up to by her neighbours, and she required this homage of her relations, one and all. I and my cousin had to meet a heavy tax to retain her favour. She would spoil our morning by sending us on errands to her tradesmen, not in one round, but to one at a time, with a written order, which held us on the trudge up to the time of luncheon. She made us her pensionnaires, and she had the firm belief that she honoured and delighted us in thus keeping us employed. Her remaining sister, Mrs. Gwynne, lived at Denton, a village on the Newhaven side of the downs, three miles off. The Rev. William Gwynne, the husband of this lady, was the rector of the parish.

Mrs. Wallinger was very fond of this sister, who was a cautious and sentimental flatterer, and witty beyond all common measure. She was never at a loss for anecdotes of the most amusing kind. Her husband was a stout, showy man, a good talker and a lover of wine, which did not suffice him without a long double nightcap of brandy, gin, or rum. He and Captain Wallinger adapted themselves admirably to each other, and the two families met at each other’s table often.

There was a houseful of children at Denton Rectory, ending in five sons and two daughters, brought up without a view to education, both boys and girls. Notwithstanding this, one of the five sons became an Australian judge, and another entered the Church, though at first an M.D. Mr. Gwynne had a passion for shooting; he cared more for his dogs than for his own cubs. He was, however, a kind man, with a manner that made him appear interested in every one he met with.

VIII.

As I have got so near to the remarkable family of Gwynnes, I must say a few more words about them.

Mr. Gwynne was one of six brothers and two sisters. One brother was a very artful lawyer of imposing demeanour, and was highly respected by all who did not know him.

Another brother, whose position in life—the head of the Legacy Office—was so good that all men spoke well of him, married a not good-looking Jewess. A third brother was also in the law, but the time came when he forewent his licence, perhaps owing to some irregularities in his practice; but he was the most true-hearted of the lot, and had one of the sweetest of daughters. He had a practice still, but it was attended with certain disabilities. Two brothers remained; both attained rank in the East India Company’s service. They were, like the rest, very fine men, and, being soldiers, they were of unimpeachable honour.

Then there were two sisters, who, as is always the case in slack families, were a credit to society. These two ladies were both well settled in life.

My uncle was the most unfortunate of the family; too much for the day was the good thereof, so he allowed his affairs to drift in whatever direction they liked, and that was towards bankruptcy, of course.

He was indulgent towards his family, though perhaps a little ironical towards his wife, who would repeat all that passed concerning him with the greatest glee. After a quarrel, in which he said ill-natured things, she would say, “If that is your opinion of me, Gwynne, why did you marry me?” “My dear Henrietta,” he would reply, “it was for your present beauty and your future expectations.” And she would tell this story with fits of laughter.

These, my uncle and aunt, were frequent guests at Glynde, the residence of a Lord and Lady Hampden, who took much pleasure in Mrs. Gwynne’s society on account of her great wit.

One evening, after dinner, Lady Hampden spoke warmly in favour of one of the farmers, dwelling on his truthfulness and honesty.

“My dear Lady Hampden,” said Mrs. Gwynne, “you do not know that man; I can assure you that, with the exception of my dear husband, he is the greatest liar in the county.”

My uncle, Captain Wallinger, would sometimes drive me over to Denton, and we generally reached the parsonage in time to see a general rush of the boys from the house and premises. They were so dirty, so ill-clad and unkempt, they did not dare to face their uncle. Mr. Gwynne was seldom at home; his time was fully employed in keeping appointments with dog-fanciers, horse-dealers, gunsmiths, and the like. He allowed the parish to take care of itself, or to be cared for by the farmers or his wife; and as he preached extempore, he had no sermons to prepare. He was very fluent, which he accounted for by saying that he looked at the congregation as he would do on a field of cabbage-stalks. I have no doubt that, when preaching to others, he was sincere, and that he preached to himself at the same time. But he was not one of those self-martyrs who annoy themselves through life with religious dogmas. Still, he was not a mere agnostic in canonicals, but true to his belief, though he did not avail himself personally of this advantage.

There was not a tree in the village, except a willow that wept over a mud pond on the roadside by the church, as some sanctified parties do over the worthless dead; yet Denton could be compared to nothing but the backwoods of a colony, so rugged an aspect did the Gwynne boys give to the place. They were the talk of the neighbourhood for miles around. They could, nevertheless, satirize and very cleverly mock those who looked down on their doings. One or two of them, once on a visit at the Wallingers’, followed their aunt, by invitation, up to the drawing-room. She knew them of old, and while they ascended the stairs she turned round suddenly, when she met the sight she expected—one was making hideous faces at her, the other was squaring his fists at her back.

“Dear me! You seem amused,” was her only reproof; but she secretly enjoyed it, for everything was grateful to her that stamped others as her inferiors.

IX.

I was now to enter on a new life. My home was to be a monastic one, which three hundred years before had been the residence of mitred abbots. A king had expelled these from their Gothic dominion; another and a better king had given it to his children, among whom in these latter days were Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. And now I was to be there, to tread in their steps, to pace the same ancient cloisters, to catch the same earnest mood in pacing them.

The place was more like a university than a school. Four classical masters to teach us the languages of Athens and Rome; two writing-masters, who themselves wrote like copper-plate, and made us do likewise, besides teaching us figures.

Then we had playgrounds by the acre. One looking on Little Britain through lofty palisades, on which same ground were the residences of the masters and of certain dignitaries, among them that of the treasurer, always a City magnate, and to us inscrutably great. The counting-house was in the grounds, as well as the head and junior master’s houses, together with the office and house of the steward. With all these buildings, the playground was not crowded; and apart, in the large open space on the north side, stood the grammar school.

Now that the institution is to be removed, the character of the boys will change, and all its traditions end. The cloisters and garden within their quadrangle, with the monkish dormitories and other old places, have hitherto shaped the minds of the boys, and this influence will cease, and the feeling will vanish that the school owed its foundation to a king. It was in this feeling that the pride of the boys lay; it indulged them in the belief that they were superior to all other boys. They thought of their royal founder almost as if they were descended from him, and honoured their very dress from its similarity to that which the youthful sovereign himself wore.

In my time the cloisters were Gothic, as originally built; half a century ago they were reconstructed into Saxon or some other contemptible pattern, which has perpetuated the architect’s ignorance, insensibility, and bad taste up to the present. But it signifies little; all will be swept away and covered with shops, where the name of Homer will nevermore be heard. But Parliament, in sympathy with open spaces, may grant the necessary million. Not they!

But nothing was intended to last for ever, if we except—what?

The genius of the place affected me very soon, I felt myself growing into monkhood. I preferred the sombre cloister to the playground, and for that reason I often had to be alone there, not in steady thought, but under involuntary emotions which ran through me like an underground current. Then, the suggestiveness of some of the inscriptions on the walls, thus, “Here lies a benefactor, let no one move his bones.” This I used to regard as a very pathetic appeal, as if the bones were very comfortable where they were yet in constant dread of being disturbed. Had nothing been said they might have been safer from the antiquarian.

But I should mention that the first ordeal I was put through was to fight. Every boy knew whom he could fight; this was required of him for the benefit of his public. A boy named Yardley was selected to test my pugnacious powers. We were of a height, both tall, and of about the same age. We were taken into a private yard. Of fighting I knew nothing; but I had a quick eye and was quick of limb. More than this I had dramatic imagination, and to this it was that I owed my victory. I pictured to myself a tiger springing at his prey, and with this example I leapt at my antagonist from some distance, and my fists covered his face and eyes almost before he knew that I was upon him. He had not a moment’s chance, he floundered each time that I was upon him.

This encounter was never forgotten by the boys, and I was never asked to fight again.

X.

Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright, that the soliloquy and the dagger-scene were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office” were not prominent grievances in Hamlet’s career.

When I was about eleven years old I became owner of Rowe’s “Shakespeare,” which has in it a wonderful little life of the bard. He quotes the marvellous passage beginning with—

“She never told her love,”

and, as far as memory serves me, it was to declare that poetry of such exquisite beauty was not to be found in any other writer, ancient or modern. I have since often thought that nothing in the context fairly led up to an idea of such magnitude, and that the passage was one of Shakespeare’s interpolations. Be this as it may, it had an elevating effect on me which has lasted me for life; it gave me a sense of perfect excellence. It may appear ridiculous to say that it not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but that it depressed me, in turn, with the feeling that I could never equal it, however long I might live!

No other writer at that time affected me similarly, except Virgil, when I came to that passage which depicts the breaking of the waves on the prow of the vessel and the receding of the cities and lands (terræque urbesque recedunt). After we reached our beds at night the boys were wont to “coze” in literary cliques round some favourite tale-teller, who would relate marvellous stories of knights and ladies, with much about genii, fairies, and witches. Though I never heard anything to that effect, I have always thought that Coleridge must have lent himself to such delights for the pleasure of others, and that “Christabel” was unconsciously an outcome of these romantic entertainments.

Many of the boys were great readers of forbidden story, and smuggled books into the school, the penalty of which, on being found out, was a flogging. The books in question were romances of enchanted castles; of beautiful young women, the prisoners of tyrants; of subterraneous passages and solitary cells. I would give much to possess a circulating library of that day. Such a one I found at Seaford, and devoured whenever my holidays came round. The novel, as reintroduced by Plumer Ward, and imitated greedily by Bulwer and Disraeli, was then unknown.

“Tremaine,” like all new conceptions which are accordant with the average mentality of great Britons, became epidemic, and floated over the reading world as a new sensation. It was succeeded by “De Vere,” while Walter Scott was winding up the business of romance. The success of these works started a fresh “novel” epoch, now, too, worn out, only lingering till such successors as Walter Besant and Louis Stevenson are ready to sweep them from view. This is so true that it is almost a disgrace to write a novel.

It must not, however, be forgotten that Dickens fired a bomb into library shelves, and that Thackeray gave us his own character in novelistic shape.

All great things appear in epochs, which hitherto have had a limited duration. Witness the rise and fall of sculpture in Greece, of epic and drama there; of painting in Italy, beginning with Titian and Raphael as late as the sixteenth century; of music in Germany and Italy, now on the point of extinction. Poetry, too, has had its day from Shakespeare to Coleridge, and is now dead. The present is the epoch of invention, and that will die out.

Music has never been of the highest quality in a free country. The northern nations, England, America, the great Colonies, produce no musical genius; Italy and Germany have ceased to do so since they came into the enjoyment of freedom.

Science itself, now rampant, is but of an epoch. But, amid all this, religion is enduring.

Some will say, We now have the Press; that will maintain and resuscitate all that is good or beautiful! Not so; it is but of an epoch, and is already blasé. It does not lead; it only “follows the leader,” as in a game played by a child.

Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all.

These dry bones cannot live, O son of man!

XI.

The masters of the school in my time were a certain set of reverends named Rice, Lynam, and the Trollopes. I was more or less under all, none of whom were in sympathy with boys. Rice was called “cuddy,” a word in our vocabulary signifying “severe.” He beat the boys with a fury worthy of a bastard son of the Eumenides.

To see that man of the fist, rod, and cane spending his force on a little boy, now leaving the autograph of his four fingers, in red and white, on the infant’s cheek, sending him reeling half-way up the room, while the robes he wore were flung fluttering into the air, was a sight worthy of the demons, and would have made for them a matinée.

Lynam was a quiet man. He heard the boys their lessons, but never explained them. Under him I had the Greek and Latin grammars so well by heart, that, give me a week to look them over, I could repeat them now! We had to say them, year after year, but there was no teaching. When he got rid of a class he was at once at his own work, and that probably was “The Lives of the Roman Emperors,” published after his decease.

Trollope was of the neuter gender. He must have been paralyzed at some period of his life, for his articulation was jumbled; he rolled one word into another before it took sound, and he dragged a leg after him as a Scotchman would a haddock. But his father, the doctor, carried the divinity, in which he had graduated, about his person. His shovel hat, his robes, all bespoke that heavenly dandy, a dignitary of the Church Catholic and Apostolic. He looked worthy the order of the black silk pinafore.

In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop’s footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop.

The school was truly classical and nothing else, except for the teaching of “spongy” Reynolds and “hacky” Clark—the writing and arithmetic masters—the affix of this first being due to a nose which was amorphous and appeared to belong to the class Porifera, or sponges, while that of the second was due to a guttural crackling sound of the man’s voice.

To do Reynolds justice, he was not impatient, and he was painstaking with his pupils. To facilitate his arithmetical instruction he wrote two lines of verse which were naïve—they ran thus:—

“Profit and loss accounts are plain;

We debit loss and credit gain.”

But his supreme merit was that of substituting geographical for moral texts in our copy-books. One I remember, for small text, was, “Batavia in Java, capital of the Dutch settlements.”

Reynolds was somebody. He married his daughter to Thomas Hood, and his son was, I believe, the Reynolds of Sunday newspaper fame.

With this exception the school was purely classical; nothing whatever was taught but Greek and Latin. History, geography, English, and its grammar, were unheard of. We had to teach ourselves to read and spell, and none will dispute that the prayers before scanty meat were beautifully given by the Grecians, those head boys who proceeded to the University. Grammar we learnt only from the Greek and Latin, but it was sufficient; composition we derived from the same source, whence, perhaps, our habit of inversion, so offensive nowadays to poetic dribblers, who doat on Wordsworthy prose.

The steward of the school, who was ruler, a sort of president of the growing-up republic, named Higgins, was an oldish man, grey-pated, with a youthful slim figure, fair skin, and a straight disciplinarian mouth. He presided at meal-time, seated at a desk on the large daïs at the upper end of the hall, like a modern Pontius Pilate. There he was, to receive criminals led to judgment by the monitors, and to flog them without mercy. He was greatly feared and, of course, greatly hated. He reminded one of a snake in his movements, which were rapid and flexible. No complaint was made to him of the boys, by beadles or monitors, but what was believed by him; he required no proof.

It was a sort of Russian system; every official, every monitor, was a spy, and the steward was the willing knout, a creature emotional as a reptile, servile as a dog, and as a cat cruel.

Nevertheless, there was one extenuating circumstance—he had a pretty daughter, with whom a friend and school-fellow of mine was in love.

I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. Religious machinery was everywhere visible. There was a grand organ in the gallery at one end of the dining-hall, over the doorway; there was an organist, Mr. Glen, to accompany the hymn or psalm during the daily services before meat, consisting of a bit of Bible and a thanksgiving, the Grecians being pro-chaplains. There was a form of prayer read by any boy in the wards who was handy at bed-time, and a chapter selected at his option; but no teaching of the Scriptures or of the Church dogmas, if we may except the services at Christ Church on Sundays. There may have been such an appointment as chaplain to Christ’s Hospital; if so it was strictly honorary, and kept a profound secret.

By the way, there was some religious improvement to be derived personally through the committing of a misdemeanour, the punishment for which was the getting a chapter in the Bible by heart. I profited by this myself in a curious manner, for, being a very sensitive boy, I made a bad reader, so, when called upon to perform the evening service, I always read the chapter which I knew by heart, and that so impressively and faultlessly, that I came off with much éclat.

I can still repeat that chapter, but no other.

XII.

Perhaps ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting my pronunciation of Jōb, which I called Jŏb. If we were reading something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the occasion must have been so rare.

What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious. A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.

The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic, inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely he is the missing link!

I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.

XIII.

My mother’s youngest brother was an officer of artillery, and, as adjutant, was always stationed at Woolwich. He had married the daughter of a Mr. Samuel Enderby, an oil-merchant, and a man of great wealth, living on Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, when first I knew his family, and afterwards moving to a mansion on Blackheath.

When a day’s holiday occurred, I and my cousin walked down to my uncle’s house, taking that of the Enderbys on our way. We were paid our travelling expenses both ways, though we never rode, but kept the money in our pockets, together with the heavy tips that we got at both houses.

My uncle did not attain the rank of captain, even, till middle age. Promotion in the artillery, going by rotation, was slow, and so long remained, owing to the Duke of Wellington’s narrow ideas, and brevet at last had to be substituted for real rank.

My uncle, however, died a lieutenant-general, with a good-service pension, followed by the command of a brigade.

My son, Alfred Egmont Hake, has given a true and pleasing account of my uncle, Henry William Gordon, and his family relations, derived from information supplied by me for his “Story of Chinese Gordon,” who was one of my uncle’s younger sons.

I had a strong love for this uncle, and he reciprocated the feeling; nay, more, he always overlooked my faults, which were not a few in the eyes of those relatives who were incompetent to judge me, and expected me to play the commonplace game in life for which, unfortunately, I was wholly unqualified.

Charles Gordon’s education was military only. His rapidity of perception and combination, so conspicuous in his command of an army, were left otherwise barren; he was, therefore, unable to grasp the great truths that surround our actual being, sacrificing their beauty and enjoyment to a meaningless superstition. He had even humour of the most delicate kind, without which no man of genius is ever born, for it is the crowning faculty of man’s intellect.

As possessing a judgment myself which reaches no conclusion before passing through an unprejudiced analysis of all things great and small concerning it, I have never been able to conceive a soldier’s duties accordant with a Christian’s, or to realize such an idea as that of a man leading one army of paid assassins against another, with a love of Christ, or of his Maker, or of mankind in his heart. The fact that men offer their own lives only shows how earnest they are in the profession of shedding blood. Those of the Mahometan class might infuse religion into slaughter; but not one of the disciples or evangelists could have done it, except one.

“Rich must a hero be in superstition

Who deems ’twas God who gave him his commission.”

Throughout his childhood and youth, Charles Gordon associated with soldiers. His family were of the military class; he imbibed the love of their profession. He had an acute mind, with faculties which, if trained, would have served for a philosopher; but he had not the originality that leads a man to educate himself, and to cast all falsehood out of his nature. A slight knowledge of physiology would have sufficed to root out most of his theological ideas; but that slight knowledge, even, he did not possess; and what he most wished might be, he believed. His name is great, but his reputation will rest finally on his military genius and his many virtues.

But to return to my subject. A day’s holiday at Woolwich was a pleasant pastime. It sometimes included a visit to Greenwich Hospital, sometimes a review, and more than once a sight of Richardson’s Theatre at Greenwich Fair-time, when all that is tragical in the world was enacted with all the rant that tradition had handed down from stage to stage.

XIV.

I passed my last remaining holidays with my mother at Exeter, the old dean and chapter town of the west. Exeter continues in my mind to be a mediæval city, its inhabitants a people of the middle ages. To enjoy the height of respectability it was necessary to have a visiting connection with the bishop of the diocese, and this secured the unenviable acquaintance of the dean, the Mr. Dean, the divinest of doctors, and the whole chapter, which, judging from its antecedents, owed its importance to and was in itself a mere Chapter of Accidents. To think how men, ignorant of all things save privilege and dogma, can testimonialize their fellow-citizens by means of a nodding smile! To be admitted into the close to eat mutton and red-currant jelly with the canons of the cathedral was a fortune of social rank, sufficiently ample to confer honour on the dozens who knew them. How strange is all this to minds of any magnitude! A string of minor infallibles, each the owner of dearly beloved brethren whom he condescends to despise, ruling over the pauper intellects and imaginations of a city!

Yet all these idolaters are great economists; instead of earning their own respectability, they seek to get it dirt-cheap by having it conferred upon them.

I found my mother in better circumstances; her younger uncle had died, and as he could not take his hoard away with him, he left it to be divided among his near relations, but the only one, the Rev. Robert Clarke, who bore his name, came best off; and he deserved it, not only for his own sake, but because he was already better off than most of those who profited under the will! This cousin was the kindest, the most clerically gentlemanlike of the cloth he favoured. The name of Clarke is on record at Hexham as that of liberal Church patrons.

But mediæval cities and people of the middle ages, still playing out the ancestral game, have their theatres. To that of Exeter I went to see Yates perform the part of Falstaff. I was deeply bitten by the fun, and the next day performed much of the character myself before my mother, and kept her in a continual roar of laughter.

The eminent surgeon, Mr. Shelden, was, in times preceding, a practitioner in the place; as such he was a friend of the Gordons. He left a relict, whom my mother often took me to see—a charming lady, who knew how to make herself delightful to a child. Mr. Shelden was Professor of Anatomy at the College of Surgeons in London. In the museum of the college there is a mummy which he made, and which he called “Madame Mahogany.” It excited much curiosity at one time. On visiting the museum, I readily found it on the left of the entrance door. There is a portrait of this eminent man in the Devon and Exeter Hospital, painted by the artist from memory after Shelden’s death, and it was said to be an excellent likeness by those who remembered him.

It may interest some to know that my grandfather resided for many years at Bowhill House in St. Thomas’s. The place was purchased over his head, and made the county lunatic asylum, which purpose I believe it serves to this day.

With this place were associated some of my mother’s happiest as well as most miserable recollections. The names of those who were known to her family are still rife in the old red sandstone country, and have been distinguished in the new generation. I must mention that of Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, who was a generous-minded reformer in days when to be a radical was worse than to lead a life of blasphemy. He was the first scientific man who succeeded in condensing a gas. The one he operated on was chlorine; his results were published in Nicholson’s Journal in the year 1809. So little interest attached to great discoveries in those days that his researches were forgotten, and Faraday long afterwards succeeded in the same work. He had never heard the name of Northmore, and published his own results as the first obtained in that direction. This I learned from Mr. Northmore himself, when I was grown up. That philosopher did not even claim his discovery when the scientific world was ringing with Faraday’s praise.

Among other friends of her youth my mother long remembered with affection her school-fellow, Ann Gifford, the daughter of a grocer in Exeter. The name was afterwards known through the brother becoming master of the rolls and obtaining a peerage as counsel for great George our king, during the prosecution of the queen.

In those days counsel were at their boldest, when Denman, who had to examine the Duke of York, could say to him in open court, “Stand forth, thou slanderer!”

I have heard say that one of the most amusing transfigurations ever produced, without a miracle, was that of Mr. Wareman Gifford, from a grocer behind the counter to the brother of a lord.

XV.

At school was laid the foundation of two lifelong friendships; one with Henry Edmondes, who afterwards was a barrister, and became deputy clerk of the peace for Middlesex during Sergeant Adams’s chairmanship—another with Hugh Worthington Statham, who proceeded to medicine, finally occupying the mastership of the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. Edmondes was of short stature, with an intellect the better of which I have never known. He had all the humour of Charles Dickens, and, had he lived, might have proved a closer rival than Thackeray to that inimitable writer. He had advantages that Dickens never acquired; he was a scholar, well read in English, French, and Italian, as well as in classics, and was free from that silly sentimentalism which at times placed Dickens below par.

Statham, like myself, is still alive: never losing sight of the literæ humaniores, he threw his excellent abilities into the healing art, and touched the first place in his branch of the profession. Next to my brother, he is my oldest friend. Our first meeting must have been seventy years ago.[1]

I have not yet alluded to the King’s Ward, a sort of aristocratic section of the school, in which the boys were trained for the navy. Candidates were received into it at their own option. They formed a society apart, not associating with the other boys; consequently their deeds were traditional, relating to how in times past they had been in revolt, defying their masters, escaping from the school, and, after being retaken, how they were locked up in the prison cell and tamed on bread and water.

Their studies were under a mathematical master, apart from the other boys. They were distinguished by a metal badge with some emblem upon it, which was worn by them on the left shoulder.

They were always considered a very “gallous” set, which, in the school vocabulary, signified “daring.”

I preferred my solitary walks in the cloisters to joining in the games, and this secluded habit sometimes raised a faction against me, and I had only the choice left me of yielding or of being mobbed. There was a game in which some hundreds held on to each other by the tails of their coats, while the leader determined the direction they should take by going himself the way which pleased him. I was always a candidate for the leadership, and my plan was to drag the long chain of boys through segments of circles to left and back to right; the effect of this was, by a swift and sudden turn, to throw half the boys off their legs to the ground, the hinder ones coming in for the fall as the impetus given by the foremost reached them.

It appears remarkable, at first thought, that with so many hundreds one should learn the name of every boy; but it is nothing compared with what is achieved by study. Some forty years ago I had a conversation with Professor Henslow, of Cambridge, on the subject of getting names by heart. At that time there were sixty thousand plants classified. He said that a botanist would by degrees fix all these names on his memory without any effort.

A memorable group among us was that of three brothers named Leighton, a family of such beauty as can only be rarely seen. Two of them were Grecians. The eldest, James Leighton, was tall, with dark hair and complexion, and of a graceful figure. He proceeded to the university early in my time, so I saw little of him, but that little has lasted my memory for seventy years. David Leighton came next; he was of a fair complexion, with large grey eyes, with nose and lips exquisitely curved, and a countenance expressive of talent and good nature.

The Grecians might reach their twentieth year at the school, and, as men, had the advantage of their dress being made of fine cloth; it was otherwise the same as that of the boys, except that they had broad red girdles, stamped like those of the monitors. In such dress the Grecians had a truly noble appearance; one might think of them as high officials at the court of Edward the Sixth.

The youngest of the group was Frederick Leighton, my junior, and my particular friend. He had dark and refined features, with curling hair.

I met David Leighton again at Baden Baden in 1832, among the fashionable crowds from all nations. He was chaplain to the English residents of the place. I have heard nothing more of this fine family from that time to this.

I asked him what he had done at Cambridge. His answer was, that he had disgusted his whole family.

Another contemporary, one who made some figure in professional life, was Lawson Cape. As a boy he was the greediest of readers. His father brought him historical works week after week, and he devoured their contents as fast as they reached him. He was short, fair-haired, freckled, quick at reading, quick at learning, quick at looking about him. It was difficult to follow his movements, so excited were they on all occasions. I met him again at Florence, during the carnival. I saw him abroad once more at Baden Baden, after which he settled in London as an accoucheur, when I came across him for the last time.

He was related to Sir Charles Locock, and through his influence acquired an obstetric practice in town.

[1] He died at the beginning of 1892, after entering his eighty-fourth year. He was two months my senior. I have later on made a distinction between early friends and later ones, dwelling on the fact that what happens to us before we have attained our full growth is nourished as a part of us, and so becomes ingrained in our natures.

XVI.

Dr. Basham, physician to the Westminster Hospital, was another of us. I lost sight of him between the years 1824 and 1860, when I met him in the laboratory, and knew him again at a glance.

Sir Henry Cole, whom I had not seen for five and thirty years, another boy, came across me at one of Lady Ripon’s receptions; I recognized him too, though he was disguised in the broad red ribbon and star of the Bath.

These two men reached notoriety, each in his calling, Basham as a physician, Cole as an official in the office of Records. But they and their like were of the vanishing class, their names are disappearing; they filled only a little space in their own generation, which they accompany to oblivion.

My school days are a memory that I have never refreshed by visiting those ancient halls and cloisters; once only since I left them have I passed through from Newgate Street to Little Britain. I found all there was doubly dead. It was dead in its own past, and dead in mine. I saw a moral blank in which love was absent, absent as it had ever been between the pupil and his masters. During my holidays at Seaford, I experienced thirty days at a time of love and kindness; the recollection of this drew me to it again. I was seldom at Brighton without going over there with my brother and his wife, or with his children and mine, to look once more at the house on the Crouch, and to walk over that beautiful south down that ascends from the beach and the sea to Cuckmere.

When we no longer knew one living creature there, we still found pleasure in asking the oldest inhabitants if they remembered Captain and Mrs. Wallinger.

When I quitted school and gave up the mediæval costume, I was put into fine clothes, and spent a fortnight at Woolwich, taken about from sight to sight by my uncle, dining often at the artillery mess, taking a spare bed at the quarters of Colonel Wylde, and waited on by his man, when I learned, and have since often found, that a soldier makes the best valet in the world. Whatever familiarity you may show him, he never becomes familiar with you; he is always respectful. No one knew this better than my famed cousin, Charles Gordon. He, when at home, would talk to the soldier-footman of certain members of his mother’s family, who were expected as guests, and, calling them good-naturedly by opprobrious names, would ask if they were in the house; but the servant, however hard driven by the persistency of his young master, would to the last pretend not to understand to whom he made allusion.

I did not like that visit to Woolwich: my uncle was very severe, though only at the moment, on the faults of young people, though a kinder heart could not well be. The evenings were formal; we sat round a table, every one in some manner occupied. Unused to fine furniture I kicked the leg of the table. The uncle showed anger on his expressive face, while he asked, “Can’t you reconnoitre?” I was given an elegant copy of “Gil Bias” to read; unused to such editions, unused to reading in the presence of fine people, I damped my finger at my lips. “Give me the book,” shouted the good uncle; “I’ll show you how to turn over the leaves!” In this he performed the feat as any other gentleman would do, and handed the book back.

This and similar incidents so troubled me that I contemplated taking flight; but my patience under trial prevailed, and I bided the time for a visit to Seaford, which soon came about.

This was in 1824, when Charles Gordon was not yet a denizen of our world.

Colonel Wylde, my host at the barracks when the family house on the common was full, played a part which relieved him from the humdrum of military life. He spoke Spanish fluently, and, at a time when such a man was much wanted by the Government, he was employed on a mission to Spain; and afterwards, when Prince Albert became one of our royal family, he was appointed as his equerry, and became a great favourite at court. He was my uncle’s closest friend; but on the command of a brigade falling vacant, Wylde, then general, was given the appointment, though one below my uncle in seniority, on whom by custom it should have devolved, and this one incident cooled the warm friendship of a long life.

Owing to his urbanity, his knowledge of life, and his pleasant face, Wylde became a great favourite with the royal family, the queen, the princes and princesses, all of whom loaded him with presents. Prince Albert pressed on him a baronetcy, which, from a mistake in the bestowal of his early affections, he could not accept. It was an arbitrary act of the Duke of Cambridge to break through the rules of the service and give him a brigade which was due to another, to a friend; perhaps he should have refused, but doubtless the pressure on all sides was heavy, not to mention that Wylde had a family which would have been large if divided between two.

What made this brigade business more aggravating was, that the duke had contracted an intimacy with my uncle and his family, and was really his friend.

XVII.

Leaving Woolwich, I went on a long visit to my relations, the Wallingers, with whom I had passed so many happy holidays while at school.

Seaford occupies a line on the southern coast most charming to the eye, but its beauty has been its ruin. A picturesque expanse of back water extends from its magnificent cliff to Newhaven, and the time came when its decaying vegetation generated typhoid fever, which destroyed the reputation of the place, while it decimated the inhabitants.

Another calamity followed: a high spring tide, not so many years ago, washed away the houses in front of the sea, and overflowed the streets. Repairs have been made, new structures raised, private houses, hotels, and a convalescent hospital; but it is no longer the Seaford it was of old, in its rotten-borough days.

I was once more there with my kind aunt, and an uncle whose brow smiled while it frowned. There were two branches of Wallinger; my uncle was a cadet of the elder branch, then represented by the Rev. John Wallinger, the disinherited heir of Hare Hall, who went from the law to the Church for the love of Calvin.

The younger branch was represented more to one’s taste by the Rev. William Wallinger and his brother Arnold, a sergeant-at-law. John was too busily engaged on Calvin’s affairs to visit Seaford at this time, but William was in a manner settled there with his pupil, the young Lord Pelham. Other members of the family came there to make up a seaside season; among them the wife and daughters of William Roberts, who was Teller of the Exchequer, an office held by his father before him, both renowned epicures, who held to the axiom that a good cook was three hundred and sixty-five blessings a year. Mrs. Roberts was a sister of the Rev. John, and brought with her a string of seven daughters, all less beautiful than their mother. Then the family of Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary, added to the list of visitors, he being an old friend of all.

Mrs. Nussey was a very lovely woman. She was the daughter of Mr. Walker, her husband’s predecessor at court; in fact, the Walkers and Nusseys, in turn or together, had been apothecaries to the royal family time out of mind, and it was said that the late Mr. Walker was the only man who knew how to reach the vein in George the Fourth’s fat arm.

Nussey, whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and that the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable.

Nussey was a man deservedly esteemed; he had that gracious manner which comes often from enjoying the confidence of the great.

I must say a few words more about William Wallinger. Any attempt to describe his countenance would be made utterly in vain; it is in this that the artist may assert his superiority to the writer. No one ever saw him without surprise to find himself in company with so much grace and manly beauty. He was too gentlemanly for a king, too quietly self-possessed for a noble, too impressive in manner for any other human being but himself. He inherited a good fortune; he might have had the pick of the country in preferment had he so chosen, but he refused profitable livings, among others that of Stanmer, a village in Lord Chichester’s park, preferring modest pulpits and independence. He was much thought of by the people at Hastings for a period. There Lord Chichester had a chapel built for him; but he often changed his residence and varied his duties. He was attached to Tunbridge Wells, where his sister, Mrs. Jederé Fisher, resided at her seat called Great Culverden. She was the widow of Mr. Jederé Fisher, of Ealing Park, Middlesex, a charming residence, sold later on to Sir William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, now cut up into streets and villas.

Her son is a well-known Kentish magnate.

XVIII.

As a rudiment of that vaulting ambition and its consequences which grew up in me by degrees, and has, I lament to say, remained with me, though now grown prudent and steady, the better aims of which I have striven to fulfil, I may mention here, in taking leave of my boyhood, that there was a bath at Islington called Peerless Pool, to which in summer the boys of the school were sent to bathe. It was a large mass of water, oblong in shape, with a wide promenade. There we would spend a whole afternoon, sent there by the authorities when the half-holiday was at hand. There, to excite the wonder and applause of the other boys, I punished myself by taking the longest run to the water’s edge that was obtainable within the enclosure, and leaping somersault fashion into the air to a great height, and reaching the water in a seated posture. In doing this I entailed on myself a punishment equal to being flogged. Being somewhat sheepish at the age of fifteen, I did not stand very high in the estimation of my uncle, General Gordon, while staying with him at Woolwich, when one day he took me down to the Thames to bathe. There was a platform, probably for the soldiers to jump from into the water; this afforded me a long run, and I resolved on performing my feat. My uncle was perfectly amazed at it, and often alluded to it with surprise in later years.

After this display of my pluck, he was much in favour of my going into the army.

By this time my mother was gravitating southwards with my sister and brother, that she might be near her sisters; she accordingly took a house at Lewes, where there was a good grammar school suitable for my brother.

The process of intellectual growth in all probability differs in individuals; what it was in me I am able to state. It is my opinion that with the same organism as I now have, with which I can grasp and master any subject, not much matter what it is, I should have made but a poor show of intellect but for certain elements of a moral nature. The first of these is a sense of one’s own nothingness without knowledge; the second is a desire for even more knowledge than most persons possess.

All this is emotional, but it supplies an impulse to intellectual motor power, which, when traced out, proves to be of a very simple kind, consisting of impressions derived from without being reiterated within, and inspected over and over again. Take several brains of the same capacity: one man has not the impulse of ambition or desire. Say to him—

“All the world’s a stage.” His ear takes the words to his brain, and they are lodged there; he can repeat them from memory of sound. Say to another—

“All the world’s a stage.” He will be impressed, first by words, on receiving them, and will repeat them mentally, and in doing so will see that he is reiterating a pre-existing mental impression; one which at some time he had derived through the eye; he will see a stage with men and women on it—the players. He will see these making “their exits and their entrances,” and by reiterated observation of old impressions, which run parallel, he will observe men and women actively employed in the world. By a like process of observing old impressions mentally, he will not only witness the phenomena of human life, but will undergo the appropriate emotion even before the phenomena are realized, the emotion leading up to the idea.

Now all this requires previous knowledge, without which no extended train of thought can be effectively carried out; whence it is that those who are ambitious and have a desire for knowledge, will acquire it at every expense, both of time and labour, and will so become accustomed to keeping their native intellect in play.

XIX.

I had taken leave of boyhood and entered on the period of youth—a time when neither children nor men were found to be suitable companions. The three epochs in our lives are pretty equally divided: that of childhood, owing to the feebler action of the forces, appears to pass away very slowly, and ending at our fifteenth or sixteenth year seems interminable; longer than the time it takes to advance from forty to seventy years of age, and quite as long as to go onwards from fifteen to forty years.

Of course there is an earlier and a later youth, and it is to the first that the preceding remark chiefly applies, the period when ignorance is not strange.

At this early time we do not recognize nature otherwise than as being ourselves, or in any way apart from us; it is later that the line of demarkation draws itself between the inner and outer world; and it is then that time seems to move.

I suppose it was owing to a species of honesty, but I found, very tryingly, at this time, that my self-assurance and my knowledge were in strict proportion; I was not, in fact, presumptuous; but of great modesty.

I must put to my credit a habit of not allowing a moment of ignorance to pass by without rectifying it by questioning either books or persons, and I often learnt more from others than from books. To this day I never come across a man possessed of special experience without questioning him as if I were engaged in a research. Not long ago, a gentleman who had been twenty years in the Fiji Islands, said of me that I had extracted more information from him respecting the people and country in an hour’s conversation, than had been elicited from him by all his friends put together, during the year he had spent in London as commissioner from the islands during the Colonial Exhibition.

I trace the increase of this habit upon me to the practice of minute diagnosis which belongs to the physician. By its means, at all events, I accumulated corners of knowledge, which few appeared to possess besides myself.

In a country town there is often a man or two of eminent attainments who is buried alive. It was so at Lewes, a feeble, antiquated presentiment of civilization in itself; but it contained Gideon Mantell, the great geologist, who, searching Tilgate Forest, became the discoverer of the Iguanodon, which is now visible in the South Kensington Museum.

In those days all county towns were alike in essentials, and Lewes was not a bad typical example. With a small population it returned two members to Parliament, both baronets, both wearing pigtails, both having parks within a drive. There was Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, and Sir George Shiffner of Combe Place. Great men were greater in those days than they are now, or will ever be again. Sir John looked a great man. Sir George looked only an important one.

Sir John was tall, slim, upright, with the look of a diagnostic, in whose presence a horse resolved itself into its elements. The whip in his hand told the man. When either of these worthies appeared in the quiet streets—and quiet they were, except on market days—the shop-keepers were seen standing at their doors as if they were their own customers. The apparition of Sir John or Sir George was like that of Hermes, when, formerly, the god visited Athens.

Like everything else that is worn out, Lewes was discontented with its lot. Not many miles south was Seaford, a rotten borough, and, in the distance, Old Sarum, and this was more than the less prosperous inhabitants of Lewes could endure. They must have reform, and it came.

Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.

After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.

What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves?

XX.

Like most other county towns Lewes had many mansions. These in olden times were the winter residences of nobles and squires, and, at their death, of their relicts, for the women always survived the men. It was considered in those days that the taste of port wine struck the highest note on the palatal gamut, and that gout, though painful, was a distinction. The best lives seldom exceeded sixty-nine. The vesical and gall compartments at that age, generally, had completed their mineralogical collection, and death was not pleasant.

Many of these mansions had the charms of not having been decorated or repaired for a hundred years, whence they looked much the same as when inhabited by the dowagers of bygone generations. So sensible were some of the later occupants of this, that they preserved them in their pristine state, and sat in them in old armchairs till they imagined themselves to be ancestors; and in an instance or two donned the pigtail to complete the illusion. So honourable was this emblem, that no tradesman, however mean his calling, could wear it without being spoken of as the old gentleman, and he doubtless felt himself to be such, though he might be serving a customer with a jar of spermaceti oil.

As aforesaid, Gideon Mantell was an inhabitant of Lewes, struggling for fame by his researches within the chalk strata, and for a livelihood by his practice as a surgeon and apothecary, in which he had a fair amount of success, no doubt due to his great abilities, but in the estimation of many to the flash of his surroundings. His gig and groom were models as they waited at his door. His coat of arms embraced your vision as it shone in the fan-light and whispered of greatness within. He was tall, graciously graceful, and flexible, a naturalist, realizing his own lordship of the creation.

Mantell had a brother in his business, a man, short and deformed, of a quiet, obliging manner. His name was Joshua. He had a son who also made himself heard in later times from the wilds of New Zealand, as a successful scientific explorer.

Some years later the good Earl of Egremont, lord of Petworth Castle, great in his generosity, presented Mantell with a large sum of money to start him in a spacious mansion at Brighton, where he might set up his fine museum, and pursue his profession in a wider field. Removing to this from Lewes he still pursued his science, but the sort of ground he needed was preoccupied, and, disposing of his collection to the trustees of the British Museum, he migrated finally to a suburb of London, I think it was to Clapham.

Had Government allowed such a man as Mantell a thousand a year for the purposes of science, he would have brought the geology of his day to perfection! How creditably they might have amended the sacrifice by withholding the £70,000 from the British Gallery for the purchase of a sham Raphael, and a preposterous Rembrandt, which the pencils of those artists never touched—an invalid housemaid on a throne as Virgin, and a Charles the King on a cart-horse! Raphael painted only beauty, Rembrandt only grace. But the English are the meanest judges of art in Europe. An Italian picture-dealer would have set them right in a few minutes.

What have the trustees done with those fabulous Correggios, which once made such a figure and were shelved to the entrance passage, when the National Gallery was still in Mr. Angerstein’s mansion in Pall Mall?

“Per arte e l’inganno,
Si vive mezzo l’anno;
Per inganno e l’arte
Si vive l’altro parte.”

There were other worthies in this town of Lewes: Mr. Horsfield, author of the “History and Antiquities of Lewes;” Mr. Lower, a stationer, who wrote on Sussex worthies; and the master of the Grammar School, Dr. Proctor, whose voice crackled emphasis and accent. He was one of the rolling stones that gather no moss; Lewes failed him and he took a mansion towards Kemp town; he was tempted from his school there to Jersey, and became Principal of its College, but this did not fit him for any length of time. My brother, who was his pupil, met him now and then in after days in the streets of London; he was then always on his way to see the bishop.

XXI.

All this time I was a student of medical science under a truly eminent man, Thomas Hodson, the highest authority in his profession within the bounds of Sussex. His career and station gave him every claim to be classed with the worthies of his age. He was the friend and fellow-student of Astley Cooper, and the other aristocrats of surgical art. All acknowledged him as their equals, though his skill and abilities were in a measure hidden from the admiration of the world. He was numbered among the leading lithotomists, having extracted the stone by means of the greatest operation in surgery, somewhere about a hundred times, with unvarying success.

It was in reflecting on the skill of such men that I always regarded surgery as a science far above all that physic can attain to.

Thomas Hodson is a name not to be forgotten. He loved his art passionately, and he would discourse on it with all the fervour it deserved. It is an art; but look at its foundation! The human frame is a transparency to the surgeon’s eyes. He is never in the dark, but sees his way clearly, with a perfect knowledge of what has to be done from first to last. It is otherwise with physic: the physician can fulfil certain indications, with certain remedies; these very few in number. For the rest, how these operate, what work they perform in modifying function he can never fully foresee. Nor will science ever reach such a pitch as to enable him to trace the changes which occur in the system, under the influence of a single dose.

He can swim, but he is mostly out of his depth, and that too often in troubled waters.

On the other hand, physicians generally used to receive a better education than surgeons; such of them as respect their position, make themselves acquainted with every branch of knowledge, whether in literature, science, or art; in social life all doubtful questions, when all others are at a loss, are referred to them; and it is fully expected of them that they will have a ready reply.

Hodson was one of the most amiable men I ever knew, and his manners were sweet and elegant to such a degree as to make it deserving of mention that on being thwarted he became the most passionate of men. The world, then, seemed hardly large enough to hold him. Such a trifle as the loss of a letter, or of a book, would set him off. Smiling, pale with anger, he would exclaim, “Will you look about for me?” Then, rapping on the table with his bent forefinger, forcibly enough to crack the mahogany, he would shout, “I have looked high, I have looked low; I have looked uphill, I have looked downhill, and I have looked on level ground. Help me for my sake; if you won’t do so for my sake, help me for God’s sake; and if you won’t help me for God’s sake, do so for Jesus Christ’s sake; for they say he was a good ⸺!”

Hodson was a man of middle stature, fair, although old; bald, with a finely shaped head, and silvery hair; with classic features, and a most intelligent expression. His manner was courteous and, in its particular fashion, graceful. It is no wonder that such a man, gifted as he was, should have been the delight of the neighbouring gentry, and of the greater men of the town. When summoned to Glynde or Firle, the residences of Lords Hampden and Gage, he was always a desired guest at the table of those nobles; and no more genial and amusing one was anywhere to be found.

Glynde, the inheritance of the late Speaker, Lord Hampden by creation, sad to say at this hour dead, a descendant of the great patriot, is the most charming house, perhaps, of any in the south. A large Elizabethan mansion, a pleasant park, downs covered with the choicest breed of sheep in the known world, was even made more celebrated by the tenant farmer John Ellman, than by the lords of the soil.

In those times there was such a thing as south-down mutton!

John Ellman, of Glynde, was a man known to the whole agricultural world. To those who never saw him, he was known by his full-length portrait, as was Coke of Norfolk, and other celebrities of his day, to be seen in the window of a corner shop, between St. James’s Street and Pall Mall, kept by a gentleman who had the aspect of George the Fourth, and was supposed to be a son of the monarch; giving one a good idea of what the king would have been, had he been born a commoner.

XXII.

Ellman, of Glynde, was a knee-breeches man, with top-boots, tall, coated for horseback, and with a characteristic farmer’s hat, not scanty of brim. As such I remember him; but when alone, or even speaking to another, there seemed something wanting to him, and this was a—Cattle Show.

I recollect his daughter—an extremely pretty girl, sixty-five years ago. I used to wonder how such a delicacy could come of so purely masculine a breed of men.

The south-down sheep is no doubt fully kept on at Glynde; the late Earl of Chichester, too, is said to have kept up the breed, but it is to be feared that it is less profitable than the fat, or wool-growing sorts, which yield the worst mutton to the market, and the best wool; matured for the butcher within a year.

“Sic transit gloria brebis.”

Mr. Hodson took me with him to the funeral of the then last Lord Hampden, who only enjoyed his estate for twelve months. I entered the vault; the crimson velvet and gilt nails were as fresh on the coffin of the previous lord as on the one now placed by its side. All the other red velvet coffins had gone brown.

A gentleman, it was Mr. Cumberland, of the mint, who was related to Lord Hampden, and used to stay with him at the old family seat in Buckinghamshire, told me that there was always a table in the family pew on Sunday morning, with wine glasses on it, and a bottle of port wine, with which the friends regaled themselves during the weary service at church, which, as a duty, they attended, so setting a good example to the village folk.

It is a useless fashion to bury the dead in red velvet, as a finish off to the oak, and the leaden coffins. However, all this cost is met out of the pockets of the dead, who can no longer manage their own affairs, and have all the appearance of bearing it with patient submission, whatever their last wish might be!

Lewes stands on a spur of the downs, the river Ouse runs at its base. Between this and the ascent, School Hill, a turning to the left leads to an adjoining village, Southover, deserving of mention, as once the seat of a monastery of historic interest. There, too, is what was Mr. Newton’s residence, the Priory, a fine old Gothic structure, that is to say, if it still is there.

In the parish of St. Anns, there are the remains of a castle, worthy the attention only of antiquarians, and thence the road leads on to Brighton, a journey of eight miles; but all this is sixty-five or sixty-six years ago.

My uncle and aunt, Captain and Mrs. Wallinger, at this time left Seaford and settled at Southover, where Mrs. Gwynne, having become a widow, settled likewise. So there were three weird sisters who had never lived in the same place since their marriage, once more grouped together.

I had acquired some anatomical knowledge, Mr. Hodson having recently purchased a new skeleton, a very gentlemanly one, which gave one the idea of its having been in very good society. I had induced it to yield me a very substantial knowledge of its bones.

I had also fully mastered the “Pharmacopœia Collegii Regalis Medicorum Londinensis,” not only the last but some preceding issues of the work. I knew all the drugs, and the tinctures, and the spirits; so I was in some measure prepared to study disease, and learn the uses of medicines. This was in 1827, when I entered myself at St. George’s Hospital, and took a room at 191, Sloane Street, over a hair-dresser’s shop. The name of my landlord was Bloxup; of my landlady, Jones; from which it may be inferred that it was Bloxup and Co., Limited.

I have noticed that happy couples who marry themselves to each other often lead a more decent life than those who take the pledge. I never lodged with a better conducted couple than the Bloxup-Joneses. Mrs. Jones had all the ready ways of handling fronts for lady-customers, while Mr. Bloxup attended to the hair-crop in a room behind.

Dr. Thomas Young, the illustrious inventor of the Undulatory Theory of Light, was then a physician at St. George’s. I used to go round the wards with him. He was thought to be very undecided in his opinions of a case; the fact is, medicine is so uncertain a science, it was not good enough for such an intellect as his to work on. Pupils learnt very little by going round with the physicians; they heard nothing from them, and it was regarded as a somewhat daring venture to put a question. The best plan was to go round with the house-physician early in the day; he would explain to the pupils the nature of the cases and what was being done for their cure. A friend of mine told me that he asked Dr. Warren, while going the round of the wards, what was the name of a skin-disease for which he was prescribing; and that the doctor looked at him blandly, and replied, “I am sure I don’t know, do you?”

XXIII.

In those palmy days the physicians formed a very aristocratic class as constituting the gentlemanly branch of the profession. Halford, Warren, Chambers, and their compeers, were dictators. When out of town they left a list of names in the order in which another should be sent for in their absence when any patient summoned them, not knowing they were away. They began practice with a house and a carriage, prepared to spend ten thousand pounds, and wait; having nothing to do, except to dance attendance at the hospital from year to year, until their turn came round for election. They never wrote a book, that would have been to give their knowledge away, whereas, what they wanted was, to be paid. The public at that time was fully of opinion that a man who wrote had nothing else to do. Their turn came as soon as could be expected. Among these tide-waiters some were left fortunes and retired, while some were worn out and gave up the contest.

These men were often fellows of their college, always from Oxford or Cambridge; a degree from either qualified them to become fellows of the college of physicians, while all others were only licentiates.

The revolution came, and all this was overthrown. The young and active physicians reported cases, and advertised their abilities by writing books. To crown all, the queen succeeded to the throne, and Dr. James Clark, her physician, only a licentiate of the college, had all the royal appointments of the profession placed in his hands! With this, nepotism was at an end. It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country.

There was no medical school at St. George’s; the anatomical students went to Great Windmill Street, where Mr. Cæsar Hawkins lectured and taught. The chemical students went to the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, where Faraday and Brand were professors. The lectures there were delivered at eight in the morning; beautiful and perfect they were; the attendance was very thin. I am proud to remember that I imbibed my first ideas of chemistry at such a fountain head. Faraday was most charming, most unpretending; his experiments never failed, nor did those of his colleague, who was a model lecturer; gentlemanly, perfect of expression, exact of execution.

While attending the prescribed courses, I went often to hear the eminent lecturers of the various schools. Sir Astley Cooper was the popular man, but neither he, with his noble figure, nor Green, with his oratory, approached Abernethy, who was by nature a perfect master of the comic.

There was an unassumed drollery and archness in his way of looking up with his head bent down, in the absence of a smile, nay in the solemnity of his face, while he narrated cases in all the humour of circumstance and situation. It was his own unstudied manner, and great would the actor have been who could have imitated it.

Mr. Abernethy found his match in a friend of mine, Sir David Scott, then a young baronet just beginning to enjoy his position in life. Visiting the great surgeon, he was received with the usual contempt that was bestowed on patients by him, who remarked, “I suppose you are an idle man about town, perhaps an officer in the Guards?” He asked a few questions, prescribed and told the patient, as usual, to read his book. Sir David rose and depositing the fee, crumpled up the prescription and flung it in the air.

“Why do you do that?” asked Abernethy.

“Because,” answered Scott, “you have not gone into my case.”

On this Abernethy called him back, investigated his complaint carefully, and gave him a fresh prescription, saying, “Excuse me, but I cannot tell you with what nonsense I have to bear from the fools who come here for my advice!”

I heard this from Sir David, one of my earliest friends, whom I shall have occasion to speak of at large.

It was now that my uncle, Captain Wallinger, died, and the four sisters were all widows. Close upon this the great event in their family happened; the death of the uncle, William Clarke, who left considerable wealth which was divided among his nephews and nieces, of which my mother was one.

William Clarke reached the age of 95; he was well known in the city, but he had no calling except that of belonging to the Mercers’ Company in whose grounds in Cheapside he rests.

My mother, with my brother and sister, came to town and we settled in a house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Place, at which time Belgrave Square was in the course of being built. Grosvenor Place was at that period a picturesque row of brick-built houses, which have since been replaced by others of a more stately kind. No. 1 was Tattersall’s, approached by an archway at the side of the front door, the house being occupied by Mr. Lane, who had been house-surgeon at St. George’s, next door. The hospital itself was of old brick, but occupied its present large area with one entrance in Grosvenor Place and another at Hyde Park Corner.

The Iron Duke’s house opposite, which was the said corner, was of as dingy a brick as the hospital. His good taste encased it in stone on his own account, and employed the architect, Mr. Burton, to erect the fine entrance to the park adjoining on account of the Government.

XXIV.

I was in London more or less until I reached my 21st year (1830); by that time the hospital and its teachers had gone stale, when the idea occurred to me to visit the Scotch Universities. I took my way to Edinburgh by steamer, and very pleasant the voyage was. There were pretty young ladies on board, who soon became as friendly as if they had been relations. But not to be forgotten was a gentleman who had wit and vivacity; I remember his name quite well. He told me that he was crossing to get out of the way of his creditors for a little time, and to visit his kinsfolk. He looked to me about 45 years old, when he told me, as a sort of joke, that he was a classical tutor in London and had been spending too much money, adding, with self-apologetic glee, “You see what it is to be a young fellow!” I did not know at the moment that he had been spending five pounds of mine, nevertheless such proved to be the case before we parted, for that was the trifle he—“by-the-bye”—wanted of me for a few days, his days very much resembling the six notable ones during which the world was created. He took me to Ambrose’s Hotel, a very comfortable one, the scene of Wilson’s drunken Noctes Ambrosianæ, and we had a double-bedded room. I was in bed first and it was left to him to extinguish the light, which he did by blowing it out. It was a candle of tallow, and, to my disgust, the stench of it soon filled the room. I protested vehemently against his proceeding, when his reply was, “You don’t know now what you may get to like in time!”

I acquired the friendly acquaintance, at Edinburgh, of Dr. Greville, the eminent author of a work on the Cryptogamia; he was married to an Eden, the sister of Mrs. Northmore of Cleve, whose husband I have already spoken of, a noble old Devonshire squire.

Dr. Robert Knox was in his glory in those days, the greatest anatomist of the time, whose splendid intellect, in opposition to Lyell and the rest, foresaw that we had only to abide scientific progress to discover that man belonged to an early period of time.

I am sorry that I never saw Dr. Knox; he was an enthusiast in his devotion to anatomical science; it was his calling and his hobby in one. A dentist once remarked to me that every man should have a hobby besides his profession, and smilingly admitted that his was “making money.” I have observed that surgery has engaged many enthusiasts in its pursuit—anatomy and pathology may be added; but I do not remember a physician of whom this could be so flatteringly said, unless it were Sydenham, a true devotée. But formerly the practice of medicine was in the dark: not altogether so now, since the introduction of physical and chemical diagnosis, the work of Laenec and Bright. It is no want of enthusiasm in character itself; it is not so very long since all the science of the country was carried out and sustained by physicians.

At Aberdeen I enriched myself with the acquaintance of Principal Jack, who showed me many attentions—not the least of which was that of introducing me to his charming wife and daughter. Our acquaintance did not then cease, but continued for some years.

I visited St. Andrews. What distressed me there, was to see a large college building without windows or roof, announcing itself to be a ruin. It is true the university is very old, but a seat of learning ought to last for ever, and not be allowed to become a mere memorial of some intellectual famine.

I then went to Glasgow, where Dr. Hooker was the professor of botany in the university, and where Dr. Badham—a scholarly gentleman—was the professor of physic, an appointment which, as I understood, was in the gift of the London College of Physicians. Except Dr. Thompson, who had the chair of chemistry, the other professors were of no account.

The college, a double quadrangle, stood in the middle of the town, where it was established by an edict of the Pope in one of the middle ages. It was a quaint old building, a credit to the learning of the city: the present building being more a credit to its wealth. The ancient structure, I presume, was pulled down and the site disposed of.

XXV.

The manager of the Glasgow theatre was one Alexander, a long-legged, long-armed Scotchman of great mobility. He pleased the public, so I suppose he had a fairly good troupe of actors. However that may be, he had Edmund Kean with him for two nights, once as Richard III., once as Macbeth. I was deeply impressed by the acting of this great tragedian, though I believe he was on his last legs. It was said that he was dosed with brandy every time he went on the stage, and that on quitting it he sank exhausted into another’s arms; yet, once on the boards, he was firm of step and voice. Knowing his condition, the pathos of the scene was the more touching, though no one could have judged that he was a sick, much less a dying man. His voice now clear, soft, touching; then stentorian and explosive in its rattle, according to the necessity of the situation.

With what an eye he gazed! And his demeanour! He could bring more tragic feeling out of stillness, and the silence of deep thought, than was to be found in the play he performed in. It was as if the persons he represented had escaped the grave and thrown themselves once more into the struggle.

At an advanced period of the summer, my brother came to Glasgow, and very wisely proposed that we should make a tour; and this we did principally on foot. We visited some of the lochs and bens, climbed Grampian hills, and worked our way to Breadalbane Castle, returning by Loch Long. This I mention merely to note an incident connected with it which was, that by the action of the fresh air, the exercise, and the scenery on mind and body, I imagined my emotions had a poetic cast, and accordingly I composed verses. These my brother, who was as little experienced in human affairs as myself, though he was deep in the study of law, proposed my sending to Sir Walter Scott, the all-powerful author, soliciting his perusal, with the hope of being taken heed of as a poet. What led to this folly on our part was, the facility with which Crabbe rose to fame and fortune by a similar act of impertinence. All know that he sent some verses to the generous Burke, which were very fresh, asking for the patronage of that great statesman, to whom he was utterly unknown. Burke, wonderful to relate, took him under his notice, and finally procured him a living in the gift of the Duke of Rutland. This was very noble of Burke, but it did a great deal of harm by leading innocent young authors, like myself, to suppose that the nobility and other powerful men were still the patrons of literary men, especially of the useless poets. If one looks back, one perceives that the majority of our poetic authors owed their success to patrons who made their works a fashion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, had noble or royal patrons; Milton there was no one to patronize, whence the market value of “Paradise Lost” rose only to ten pounds. Dryden belonged to the upper class, so he had a patron in himself; Pope was made a fashion through patronization: Bolingbroke alone would have sufficed to lift him up into fame.

In modern times poetry became noble itself. There was Byron, a peer; Shelley was a sprig of baronetcy, and a rebel in Church and State, which was a great assistance; while Keats, being a vulgarian, was left out in the cold to die for want of flattery and flannel.

Coleridge never met with a patron; he who surpassed every poet but one in genius; so he famished, exclaiming, “Work without hope, draws nectar in a sieve!”

And Wordsworth, with his narrow intellect and wide emotions,—he had patrons; the cloth took him up, and the public followed suit, an act they could only have performed for a third-rate poet, the first and second-rate being much above their comprehension.

The course of such human events will not have the slightest influence on men endowed with true poetic genius. They know the wording of their commission; they know its signature, written as it is in invisible ink; they know its seal, on which the six days of creative work is engraved, with Some One resting on the seventh.

The upshot of all this is, a poet is born to celebrate Nature, who is everlasting. He informs himself that nations fulfil only a given series of events, and that all concerning them, except their history and literature, is lost. He makes himself acquainted with the bulky circumstance that Greece and Rome were once as lively and self-confident as ourselves, as frivolous and as fashionable, but that in the midst of their greatness and their rubbish there were predestined poets; that Homer was one and Horace another, and that the legacy of their work is the only legacy they could leave us. He tells himself that he is appointed to do certain work that shall hereafter celebrate the existence of his own beloved and glorious land, the country, the beloved country of his birth and death!

XXVI.

We found ourselves in the park at Breadalbane, where there was no living being in sight. The handsome castle stood silent and solitary, as if it had been erected for its own accommodation. It was a large, elegant, white structure, but had an architectural expression not sufficiently imposing to contend with the bold scenery around. There was the river, making a rush for Loch Long; there were the mountains;—these were masters of the situation and of the castle, which seemed more like a looker-on.

This was my impression then; it might not be so now.

We had passed the night in the cottage of a shepherd which we entered, and we asked the gudewife to give us food and lodging; this she did, adding to them a hearty welcome, uncertificated as we were. She gave us of what she had—a good mess of porridge and milk, with oat cakes as a second course, for porridge makes one hungry, as we found the next morning and the next day. We slept in beds built into recesses. On the morrow, after our breakfast, we asked the hostess what we were in her debt; but she scouted the idea of any payment, so we adopted the alternative of guessing our hotel-bill, and paying it by placing a few shillings on the table.

We proceeded for some hours along Loch Long, and by noon found hunger growing upon us to a ravenous degree. There were no habitations, much less shops, on the way, till at length we saw a villa. A maid-servant stood at the door with her broom. I approached her, saying we were very hungry, and asked her to sell us a loaf. She received my petition with contempt, entered the villa and unsympathetically added the slam of the door to her refusal. To be treated as the tramps which we were, was a new sensation.

That evening we ceased to be footpads, and reached home.

At the end of summer, which was near, my brother returned southwards, while I remained through the winter session to obtain more chemistry and to complete my study of natural philosophy and physics. In the spring, having completed my twenty-second year and passed the last six ones in the study of the sciences, I thought it a good opportunity to graduate on the spot, which I did accordingly, and was highly complimented on my anatomical examination by that delightful gentleman, Dr. Badham. I had answers to all his questions on the tip of my tongue. I may mention that I had acquired anatomy at the then University of London, under Granville Sharpe Pattison, at the first opening of that great institution.

The Scotch character is of a very mixed kind, perhaps too well known to need comment. It is thrifty and extravagant, dissipated and religious, sober and drunken, generous and mean in more striking contrast than that of the English people, because it runs into greater extremes, the opposite qualities being often united in the same individual. I met with an instance in which even a decent respect for death was wanting. A physician told me he had just left a dying patient who said to him, while breathing gutturally, “I say, doctor, isn’t this the death-rattle?” The doctor answered, “No, my dear sir, it is not that quite yet.” To which the rejoinder was, “Well, if it isn’t, it is damned like it!”

A Scotchman whom I met before long at Florence—he had been one of George the Fourth’s physicians—told me, not with a view to his credit, that he was whistling as he entered a notorious den in Edinburgh on one Sunday morning, when the landlady, to use a mild term, accosted him with the words: “Dr. B⸺, I won’t have any whustling in my house on the sabbath day!”

I have twice been in Scotland since; a country one never tires of unless one is a native.

XXVII.

While my eighty-fourth year has commenced I look back over more than sixty years to the time when studies had ceased to be obligatory. I then took a survey of my stock of knowledge: it was small, but it embraced the rudiments of all that was necessary to progress. A classical education gave me access to the ancients, but I wanted French, which was the key to modern science. This determined me to pass some time on the Continent, and to get acquainted with other literatures than our own, as well as with other manners and customs.

I returned to London by stage; it was in the cold of the spring season. Two things only left a permanent impression on my mind of that journey. One is that I travelled with Mr. Orby Hunter, and that we were the only two inside passengers on the route. He was a neighbour of my mother; she, after a long visit to her beloved and hated Exeter had grown sick of it and of every one there, and had gone back to town, taking up her residence with my sister and brother in a small house, No. 49, Grosvenor Place.

Mr. Orby Hunter, a great politician of the day, was a gentleman of high caste, which made all he said the more impressive. He was greatly disturbed at the course events were taking. It was the eve of a general election, and a reform bill was hanging in the balance of parties.

From Mr. Orby Hunter I learnt much of the state of feeling in the country, the resolute fight against Peel, Wellington, and the Tories, conducted by Grey and John Russell.

I did not remain long in town, but soon made my way to Italy, remaining the best part of a year at Florence, visiting Paris, Geneva, Milan, and other cities on my way there and back. I shall not give an account of my journey, but only my experiences of it, such as having learned what coffee was for the first time in my life, and what fricandeau de veau lardé meant, at Calais. As to the latter, I have not tasted the equal of it since. In those days there was not a railroad on the Continent, and one travelled by diligence, vetturino, or post.

My sensations were new as I trod on the pavement of Paris for the first time. I felt myself somewhat great, and I entered a glover’s shop and bought an elegant pair of gloves to add to my delusion.

I stayed at Meurice’s hotel in the Rue Rivoli. There I got acquainted with Colonel de Courcy, to whom I had a letter of introduction in my portmanteau for Florence, not knowing it then, but there are persons who can make friends with each other without the assistance of a third party. Colonel de Courcy was one of the few extremely charming men that one meets with in the course of a long life, by which I mean gay, amusing, good-natured, gentlemanlike, free from reserve; men who after a few minutes you seem to have known always and would wish to go on knowing to the end.

The late Earl of Albemarle was such a man; I refer to him later in these pages.

Colonel de Courcy was the brother of Lord Kinsale, whose patent of nobility was over seven hundred years old, the most ancient in the Dublin College of Arms. George IV., on hearing about it, greatly desired to see the treasured document, but so precious was it that the heralds would only entrust it to certain commissioners, who were not allowed to part with it for an hour.

The colonel was on his way to England, but lingered at Paris for his pleasure, the invitation to which also detained me, in the company of my new acquaintance.

Leaving Paris in a dreadful diligence by way of Dijon and the golden grapes, I traversed the Jura range and entered Geneva. I stayed there too, for of course I had to set myself up in a musical box that played the “Parisienne” and the “Marseillaise,” as well as in a watch and chain, besides looking at Mont Blanc and sailing on the lake to see where the Rhone rushed in, and to visit Lausanne in memory of Gibbon. Nor did I fail to see the prison of Chillon in compliment to the poet Byron.

My jeweller at Geneva was a very earnest mechanic. He had studied the art of watchmaking in London and in Paris, he had made a chronometer to compete for some great prize and had failed, entirely to his own satisfaction, assuring himself that his work was of the best, but that it was impossible to make allowance for the wear and tear of the sun!

The journey from Geneva to the Simplon I found very romantic. The valley, in which lies Martigny, was marked by driftways that looked like roads excavated from solid snow, cut out from the heights to the level, and which, never traversed by travellers, appeared to lead to lands unknown.

At Martigny there had been a deluge, by which every house was dislocated with the exception of the church. The flood was caused by the bursting of a mountain lake; the clever priests, foreseeing what would one day happen, so constructed the church, with a prow towards the threatening lake, as to enable it to resist a torrent.

I passed over the Simplon; I saw the Borromean Islands on the other side, and, proceeding to Milan, paid their old owner, the great cardinal, a visit in the cathedral. He was lying, as so many have beheld him, in his comfortable coffin.

Milan even then was a most elegant city, and most tastefully paved. I was so fortunate as to have a letter from Sir James Clark to Dr. Ciceri, who showed me everything, and there is no guide like a native one; but I say now that all I care for in the Lombard capital is the fresco of Leonardo da Vinci.

XXVIII.

When a man begins to write and finds he can hardly spell his name, he looks at Bolingbroke for style, or at Goldsmith, and gets help from both; but woe to him if he falls in love with such rickety writers as were De Quincy, or Carlyle! Both had bandy pens. As a man gets older, if he has anything to say, he is contented with being himself, and covering his thoughts with words that exactly fit them, as the skin fits a race-horse. An affected style betrays an affected character, with its self-respect in abeyance. He finds that some long words contain his idea ready made, but he does better to shun them, and express it in his own way, and this I have done in writing these my memoirs.

Whatever my style was before visiting Italy, I cannot now say; probably the word did not then apply. I think that a man who is an agreeable companion should write as he would talk to himself; by such means only can he be what is called a stylist.

Macaulay wrote as he would have preached, had he been a parson; but, as a layman, he used stilts for a pulpit.

Thackeray spent a good deal of his time on stilts. He wrote, too, as he talked; but, then, he was a very disagreeable companion to those who did not want to boast that they knew him. In his society people had to do two things when one would have been quite enough; they had to smile titteringly as well as to listen.

Perhaps the reason why no author has hitherto described a perfect gentleman is, that it would require his being one himself; and some people think that no perfect gentleman ever lived except—not irreverently speaking—the Christian founder. Richardson’s Sir Charles was a muff, Bulwer’s Pelham a prig, Thackeray’s Major a fop, Dickens’s Mr. Dean an unfinished portrait.

Was the true gentleman ever meant to be? The only one accredited with that character—the only Lord—was not unacquainted with the use of irony, even with invective itself which served his end, and that with far greater effect than remonstrance.

I conceive the gentleman, like genius itself, to be fragmentary. How men differ in their conception of the character!

A lady whom I knew at one time very intimately, conceiving that her husband was on his death-bed, asked him to have his sons before him, and to give them some good advice before he died. The husband readily consented. “My sons,” he said, “your dear mother wishes me to say a few words that may be of benefit to you when I am gone, and I am most anxious to acquiesce in her desire. If there is anything that I can advise to your advantage, it would be this: never to repel the advances of women; it is not gentlemanly.”

But a perfect lady—has such a thing ever been? Who has described it?

No one; it is indescribable!

But even the temporary gentleman has a great charm; it is based on a model which may last for an hour, even a day; and then crumble. Amiability goes a long way in constructing this model; it is so conciliating, and sometimes so gentle, that it seems to purr. Henry VIII. no doubt handed Woburn Abbey over to Lord John’s ancestor in a most gentlemanly style; yet, what a wild beast he was; his mouth was always daubed with human blood.

It was amiable of Lord John to bring in the first Reform Bill, because one of its effects will ultimately be to make Henry-Eighths of the people, who will re-confiscate all the Woburns in the land, and all the Convent Gardens.

I was on intimate terms with a man who was private secretary to Lord John, and who obtained a baronetcy of him. That appreciative individual told me that no one knew, really, what a kind, amiable, and gentlemanly man the Lord John Russell was. No one knew it! Did he imply that he was himself no one?

But, happily for us, we have still George IV. left us as a study.

Is it true that the women are to have the franchise—will it come true? Is it true that they are to have cushions in the Houses of Commons and of Lords, because they are fitted for the highest offices of State;—will it come true? If so, it is to be hoped that the perfect lady will be evolved; one who even, for purposes of policy, will not exercise her charms; such a one might be trusted, because, in negotiating with a foreign plenipotentiary she would not use her eyes.

Until that happy evolution is achieved, one might certainly appoint ugly women; they would be obliged to rely on their intellectual gifts alone.

A woman’s style of speaking in private is often very pleasant; less so in public, unless she is a Siddons.

Everything will happen in turn, and awkward things will even come about. The Press might have to hint that Lady Mary, our minister for foreign affairs, has been much talked about of late, as giving too frequent interviews to the Home Secretary, Mr. Tristram Shandy; that it is even insinuated, at present only in private circles, that the husband of the right honourable lady contemplates taking law proceedings. This would prove a heavy blow to petticoat government: it would inevitably lead to the breaking up of the administration.

Thus demeanour has its peculiar style, as well as writing.

Women are often great stylists; they have the merit of writing as they would talk. Every one knows when a book is written by a woman; she is so good at drapery, still more at male beauty.

There are two styles of writing derived from anatomy—the nervous, and muscular. Trelawny, about whom I would say something, for his book has come out afresh, had both of these in one—he made them dramatic and pictorial.

Women are the best mistresses of the nervous style; they supply its instances at first hand, from flirting to hysterics; while men, like Borrow and Trelawney, are masters of the muscular style.

I could give a valuable hint to writers who would be effective, exact, and pleasing; let them master the methods followed in the scientific style, as in an article on “Light,” by Herschel in the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana.”

XXIX.

Before I went to Italy I could not write; after I had crossed the Simplon I could: the wonders I saw wholly revolutionized my soul. There was height above height of snow that disregarded the sun; or, if it yielded to its insinuations, it was only to drip into bayonets of ice. There were cataracts that had so far to fall, that the eyes reached the bottom of the gulph first, and seemed only overtaken by the waters with which they started.

I had nothing more to do with Bolingbroke or with Goldsmith, in style; I had seen Nature play the great idea and express herself. I learned that she was the true stylist, and that she was not inimitable.

I lingered at Florence and made acquaintance with many there—native, English, and foreign. Among these were Trelawny and Landor, whose names still continue remarkable. Of the last I saw little; he was preparing to drive himself to England in his gig. He had greatly offended the Government of Tuscany by the freedom of his speech, and he became intolerable. This resulted in his being served with an order to quit the country. When matters came to so serious a pass, he was taken by surprise. He called on the Grand Duke to remonstrate; he told that amiable prince that it was an honour to the country to have such a man as himself residing in it; on which subject the Grand Duke agreed with him, and the edict of expulsion was withdrawn.

He, too, was one of the artificial stylists.

People went little abroad in those days for want of travelling accommodation, and the English generally in Florence, were not of a kind to make a favourable impression; many of them were ill-disciplined in principle, and had become dregs who reached the bottom, though there were many who were quite as respectable at home as a thousand miles off, and were absent on business only, economy, or pleasure. Colonel Burdett, a friendly and agreeable man, heir to the prince of Radicals, Sir Francis, was a traveller on his way to Rome, and invited me to accompany him; but I desired to be stationary for a time, that I might acquire the lingua Toscana, which I was learning under the Abbé Caselli.

Landor was not a nice man; he was violent in his conversation: he thought it worth saying that his ancestors were statesmen when Lord Mulgrave’s were working in a ditch, forgetting that his descendants in the course of things might be working in a ditch while Lord Mulgrave’s were statesmen.

Then there was Dr. Bankhead, who was the newsman of the fashionable past in all instances where slander mostly fitted in. There was a divorced, re-married countess who, as the wife of a rich parson, was a leader, but whose story he ripped open for the delight of all comers, at the same time the nearer he might venture to England himself the worse he would have fared.

The relief in acquiring such companions is that one never expects to meet them again.

I am probably the only one living who was acquainted with Trelawny in his younger days. It was during my first residence in Florence in the years 1831-32. He was of a strong, noble build, of quiet, gentlemanly demeanour, and of a manner of conversation free from all display. He was much courted by the English residents. His adventures, his marriage with the maid whose father’s life, the Greek chief Ulysses, he had defended and saved, his connection with Byron, his cremation and burial of Shelley, were in every mouth, and he is undoubtedly one of the celebrities of our time. His likeness was taken by Kirkup, an English artist who lived and died at Florence, and who was the discoverer of Dante’s portrait, now universally known.

I knew Kirkup well. He was a pleasant companion in those early days, over sixty years ago; he afterwards became entangled in the superstitions of spiritualism, all through lack of that physiological training which should be given to all, and but few enjoy. These shocking errors of the mind, to which not even the cattle are liable, appear to gratify their slaves for a time; but they have no ultimate value, only encouraging the clear-sighted to look down on their fellow-creatures.

It is only due to the memory of Trelawny as a hero to record here that the English women, married or single, old or young, were crazed as Juliets about him, at the same time that they were gushing over with stories of his cruelty to his lovely wife, whose hair, trailing on the floor of Ulysses’ cave, he was said to have stripped off to the roots in a moment of anger.

There was a good anatomical school at Florence, of which I did not fail to profit.

On this my first visit to Florence I got to know many new things—the meaning of the fine arts, the beauties of Michael Angelo, Cellini, and Bruneleschi; the mysteries of Dante, Boccacio, Petrarch, Alfieri, Ariosto, Tasso; so I returned richer than I went. But of all the persons I remember, Madame Catalani is foremost in my memory; she is never to be forgotten. And till I returned to the city again, I lived within sight of the Palazzo Vicchio, the Duomo, and the Campanile.

Lord and Lady Holland occupied the British Ministry at Florence. Among other English families resident there were Lord Burghersh; Lord Mulgrave, a great musician; Sir Henry Floyd, Lady Peel’s brother; Dr. Bankhead; Kirkup, the artist; the Perrys, the Losacks, and several others with and without handles to their names; Mr. Hare among them, still guessing at Truth. Among natives was the incomparable Catalani. The English, or most of them there, were awaiting events, making pleasant homes, until future prospects came closer and within reach.

At Sir Henry and Lady Floyd’s I met with Colonel Burdett, the brother of our best lady, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, whose estimable acquaintance I made more than half a century later.

The Marquis Spinelli was very fond of the English and a great favourite with them, acting as a medium between our countrymen and his own.

What an experience and toning a young man gets from a residence of this sort, in a favourite foreign city, at an age when his sap is rising, and has yet to burst out and congeal into full leafage!

I am not going to describe Florence; my love of it will come out better when I visit it again.

All was new to me then! Imagine only what it is for such sweet little cities as Piacenza, Parma, and Modena to be new; imagine Milan to be seen for the first time, after architectureless Brighton!

I remained at Florence, a voluntary seeker after knowledge, a great part of 1831 and 1832. I then went into Switzerland by way of Milan, Como, Lugano, Bellinzona, Zug, Zurich, Schaffhausen; made acquaintance with Strasburg, Stutgard, and several other German cities, not omitting the Rhenish and other German towns, ultimately reaching Brussels and home.

Before long I was at Brighton again on a visit to the widow Wallinger, my faithful and generous aunt.

XXX.

I once was spoken to by a king; I had great anticipations. When I saw him, I found, to my astonishment, that he was only a man. I had to go on a knee and show my affection for him, which I did not feel, by kissing his hand, which was large and flabby. This gentleman was named William; there had only been three of that name before him.

The next day I saw a queen; her name was Adelaide. This lady bowed to me, smiled at me.

This introduction did not lead to any intimacy, as may be supposed, but it entitled me to the acquaintance of our ambassadors abroad, and to the entrée at foreign courts.

On the evening of the Drawing-Room, my friend Mr. Nussey took me to dine with Sir William Martens, at St. James’s Palace. He belonged to the Court, and on the subject of royalty was emotional.

The conversation turned on the ladies at the Drawing-Room. I spoke of a daughter of Lord Stewart de Rothsay as the one great object of admiration. He went into raptures over the name, and congratulated me on having seen the most beautiful woman of the day.

This lady married the Marquis of Waterford, and is the mother of our naval hero, Lord Charles Beresford.

An old friend of mine, Madame Gandillot, whom I knew at the late Lady Ripon’s, was brought up by Sir Herbert, the Privy Purse, and Lady Taylor. I heard from her many amusing anecdotes of the king and queen, one of which I may relate. Sir Andrew Buchanan had just returned to England, and was at Brighton, where the Court was staying. It was suggested by Queen Adelaide to dress Sir Andrew as a Turk, and to inform the king that the Turkish ambassador, whom he expected, but did not then know, desired an audience of him. This, by the assistance of the Taylors, was fully carried out, and Sir Andrew, fully disguised, was introduced by Sir Herbert; the queen, Lady Taylor, and my friend being the only persons present.

The king received the supposed ambassador graciously, but looked puzzled; he received his message in due form, but still had a puzzled look, as if, as was surmised, the face of the envoy was not new to him. So the interview passed off, to the great amusement of the queen, followed by no remark from the king either then or after.

XXXI.

Again at Brighton. I may here say, the delight of myself and brother to this day is the recollection of Mrs. Wallinger, our aunt, long gone, and of the eccentricity of her mental powers, increasing as time went on.

I have spoken of her often in an earlier page, but her sayings were really droll enough to be put on record. I often make the new generation laugh by repeating them.

When she had done anything that gave her a triumph, she would say to one of us, “Did I not, my dear, show my great good sense? Am I not always right?” Of course we assented with a smile of mental reservation.

As she grew old and less capable, and ceased to feed her friends, she dropped into a more melancholy mood, and, looking upwards with her fine large eyes, and a sigh, would say, “What a world it is, isn’t it, my dear? Here we are, my dear, all alone, one with another.”

She did everything in her power for her relations with kindness of heart and ample means, but it only made her feel that she was everybody’s victim, so all her good deeds made her sorrowful.

She reached to a very advanced age, when her decay of memory showed itself in a curious manner; she would forget, in part, the very subject she was dwelling upon. Thus, when the sad story of Sir Thomas Troubridge was made public, that he lost both arms and legs in the Crimea; that the lady he was engaged to marry before the war did not shrink from her pledge on his return, she was greatly impressed by the circumstance, and would say, “If it had been me, my dear, I could not have married him. I know it would have been very dishonourable of me, but I should have said, ‘Sir, I can’t!’ Only think, my dear, how dreadful it would have been, he in so helpless a condition, not able even to wash his own hands!”

Some in this mental state will in speaking forget even their last word, when it has served as a clue to the one that comes next. Thus, such a person repeating Lord Lytton’s earlier names, Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer Lytton, would never stop, because after Lytton he is necessitated to say Bulwer, after Bulwer, Lytton, after Lytton, Bulwer again, and so on for ever.

When the memory begins to fade, the ghost of a word sought still haunts the mind, and by dwelling on it for some time, the substance will return to the shadow, and the word again lives. The memory must be far gone to encounter total obliteration—threads to every subject long remain; but the difficulty, then the impossibility of finding and taking up the thread at last follows. The lady of whom I have spoken, the kindly aunt, was brought up at Exeter. I once asked her if she remembered Northern-hay. Her reply was, she had never heard the name. I spoke of other places, beginning with St. Bartholomew’s. We lived there, she said, after we left Bowhill House, and we used to walk up Fore Street to St. Sidwell’s, and then across Northern-hay Hill.

I have mentioned how in her better days this generous, kind-hearted lady felt herself the victim of her family, spontaneous as was her interest in all that concerned them. My mother, while we were at Brighton, had a fall on the stairs, which produced a severe dislocation of the hip-joint. I hastened to Mrs. Wallinger’s house to acquaint her with the distressful news. She evidently took in all at a glance, with the weeks of kindness she would be compelled to bestow on the sufferer, and her first remark, accompanied with a sigh and upturned, pathetic eyes, was, “Is it not very hard on me, my dear? To think of my family!”

I must not omit a very frequent saying of this lady. Her house was a model of cleanliness, and to that virtue she would allude with pride. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she would say; “for what else is there, my dear?”

I cannot resist noting another favourite exclamation of hers, always uttered when any event, serious and unexpected, transpired. On such occasions, she would look piously upwards, and say, “Does it not show how true everything is, my dear?” just as if the whole of the holy Scriptures had suddenly flashed across her mind.

XXXII.

In my earlier days I was intimately acquainted with the Earl of Elgin, whose name is co-immortal with the marbles of ancient Greece. It shows what an amiable man he was to have taken so much notice as he did of a young man so insignificant as myself, and to have introduced me on equal terms to his wife and family.

How fortunate is London to contain the Elgin Marbles and the Raphael Cartoons, which, exclusive of the Venus of Milo, and the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, are of greater worth than all the other sculptures and paintings in Europe.

I knew Lord Elgin in London and Paris; it was when his great diplomatic career was ended. He was a patient sufferer from facial neuralgia, and was under the treatment of Hahnneman. He was unable to speak, for the motion of his lips left a new paroxysm of pain. So he wrote what he would have said, and on one occasion he placed the words on paper that violent as his suffering was it was due no longer to the disease, but to the medicine that was administered. A remedy in homœopathic hands is thought to occupy the disease, and by slightly exaggerating it to effect its cure.

Lord Elgin would have liked to see me one of Hahnneman’s party; he introduced me to the physician. I saw some of the practice, but always left in exactly the same state of mind as I went.

I sometimes joined the family party at dinner in Paris, so I knew Lady Elgin and her two daughters who were then single. I think the eldest was called Lady Charlotte, the youngest was Lady Augusta, who became the wife of Dean Stanley.

The manner and ways of this family were of the simplest; there was not the slightest show of rank in anything they did or said.

Afterwards, in London, the earl brought his son, Mr. Frederick Bruce, to see me, and this visit afforded me a pleasant recollection; for Mr. Bruce, Sir Frederick afterwards, became a distinguished public servant, and, when ambassador in China, took a keen interest in Charles Gordon, and assisted him in every manner in his power. He was tall of stature, and a much finer looking man than his eminent eldest brother.

Lady Matilda Bruce, afterwards Maxwell, through her marriage, was the eldest daughter of Lord Elgin by his first wife, and was the heiress of her mother’s large fortune. I did not meet her, but she showed me kindness through a common friend, and when I visited Canada she gave me a cordial introduction to her brother who was Governor-General of that colony at the time.

There was a drama published by me in 1839, called the “Piromides,” which many members of this noble family took a pleasure in reading. It was my first serious work, and was inscribed to the Earl of Elgin, the late ambassador at the court of the Sultan.

XXXIII.

As our latter end comes about, we reason on and take stock of our friendships, chiefly those of our youth. Our statistics, accumulating with time, enable us to grasp the subject in its fulness.

People are apt to call their acquaintances their friends because it sounds more important, but this is a mistake; if I am known to have been on intimate terms with a man for twenty or thirty years and I speak of him as an old acquaintance, I have at least the satisfaction of telling the truth.

A community of interests may last a lifetime, and it may be as strong as that of the banks, which would argue efficiency. Such is the friendship of circumstance, but should the conditions change it would vanish.

It seems to be a moral law of our species that new friends, however gratefully they accept one’s services, so long as they are needed, have a disposition to drop off when they can no longer profit by them. Such friendships are like a fever which runs its course; a fever sometimes affecting a whole family, and then not leaving a symptom behind.

Nevertheless, a good acquaintance is a very pleasant thing, even though its benefits on both sides may balance and explain each other.

There are some who practice friendship quite naturally, others who are only skilled in it as a game. It would prove amusing to make a good classification of one’s friends, as is done of the animal kingdom, by dividing them into warm-blooded, (hæmatotherma) and cold-blooded friends (hæmatocrya). We are all too fond of forming friendships. I have often observed that nothing is more fatiguing than what is generally called a night’s rest, unless it be the dream and its final result, that we have made friends! Dreams are as laborious and realistic as realities; the nervous powers are put through walks and conversings with strangers, as well as acquaintances, some dead long ago. One has introductions, dialogues as with the living; but what is so amusing and ludicrous, many dream that they have made new friends, to find it was in their sleep!

Regarding friendship, how often it is only theoretic; intimacy without intercourse; instead of active only passive sympathy, the philosophical equivalent of cement, such as isinglass or glue! When friends have a common interest, how they stick to each other! There is still another kind of friendship of an agueish type, which one might call intermittent. It has some foundation in a community of nature, but is unable to sustain itself continuously, showing itself in fits. It is the most aggravating of all social alliances, and would be better extinct.

At Brighton I enjoyed the inestimable friendship of Sir David Scott, a leading magistrate there, of very high social rank—in fact, the most important personage of the place at a time when it needed men of influence to direct it towards its present unrivalled position.

As a young man, Sir David Scott succeeded to the baronetcy of Sir James Sibbald, of Sillwood Park, and he bore the addition of K.H.G., an order that was extinguished with the severance of Hanover from our ruling sovereigns, on the accession of Victoria. This order, the use of which has been very much replaced by that of the Bath, was conferred on Sir David by George the Fourth, whose life he probably saved by having a madman arrested at Brighton, who was provided with pistols to shoot the king. Sir David, a true gentleman without being a courtier, and therefore at home in all that related to good breeding, once gave me an amusing account of his interview with the “first gentleman in Europe,” telling with much gusto an anecdote of the king’s studied elegance even in taking a pinch of snuff. “I perceive, Sir David,” he said, “that you take snuff; allow me to offer you a pinch from my box.” This Sir David took, shaking his thumb and finger over the box, as one ordinarily does, not to waste any of the precious powder on withdrawing the hand.

This was the king’s opportunity of showing himself more advanced in gentility than his subject. He said, “Now, Sir David, permit me to try a pinch from your box.” The baronet drew forth his box and presented it to the king, who, having secured his pinch, withdrew his thumb and finger with careful rapidity, evidently lest any particles that had been touched should fall back into the box, and so render the remainder unfit for use.

Sir David gave me an amusing account of how the official who received him at court and introduced him to the king’s presence became the great man that he was. It was Sir William Knighton, who had accompanied the Marquis of Wellesley as his physician to Spain. It was said that Dr. Knighton would never draw his salary, which he evidently did not wish to be paid in money. So at the conclusion of his service the marquis sent him to the king with important documents, which exactly suited him for the exercise of his effrontery and self-assurance. The gentleman-in-waiting, having an appreciative and loyal mind, said, “You will be very much surprised when you come to see the king.” Dr. Knighton replied, “He will be very much surprised when he comes to see me!”

So it turned out. The king was very much struck with the physician’s manner and aptitude for affairs, and before long made him his “Privy Purse.”

At a time when the now proud town of Brighton was only half built, Sir David purchased the estate of an Oriental Company on the west cliff, facing the sea. A building that was already erected on it before the project failed, he converted into a mansion, which he called Sillwood House: this he occupied himself, with his family. On the ground in front were built two elegant streets, called Sillwood and Oriental Places. Later, on a portion of the ground, he erected for himself a villa with an entrance on the Western Road, and laid out a charming garden and shrubbery there, where he lived for many years, making his home the resort of a fashionable and cultured circle. He was often spoken of as the “King of Brighton,” and he certainly exercised great influence there as a Conservative leader. At the same time, he supported every charity in the place, and materially assisted the Rev. H. M. Wagner, the then all-powerful vicar, in planting the town with churches.

Sir David Scott had a pension given him by the Government for saving the king’s life; this the Liberal Parliament, on coming into power, withdrew—sorry, perhaps, that such a life had been saved.

XXXIV.

A very remarkable character who used to visit Brighton was the Countess de Montalembert, mother of the nobleman of that name who made himself known in France. She was the daughter and heiress of Mr. Forbes, whose “Oriental Memoirs” were much esteemed in his time. This lady had friends among all sorts of people. While chuckling over scandalous and not decent letters from Lady Aldeburgh, she would be receiving the visits of such uncontaminated beings as Lady Mary Pelham, and conferring with her on religion. In her invitations to me she would one day say, “I want you this evening to come and meet the religious set:” this would be such men as the Robert Andersons. Another time it would be the worldly set that she was to receive and I was to meet; and this was certainly the most pleasant set of the two.

She had great naïveté, and was full of fun, trenching often on those sources of humour which are forbidden to delicate minds. Her literary occupation at the time when I saw most of her (in 1837) was in writing a “Life of King David”—a work that she completed with great self-gratulation, and which, at her death, her executors burned without estimating its worth, the quicker to dispose of her numerous papers.

Her husband was a baron at Louis Philippe’s court, and received the higher title from that temporary king. His wife, being a Protestant, was not admissible at court—a difficulty which she readily overcame by crossing over the way to the Catholic faith; and this she quitted when it was no longer for her interest to remain in it.

She had two sons. She cared only for the elder one. He lived in Paris, and at her death inherited her fortune. She died of a quinsy at her house in Curzon Street, about a year after the time when I saw most of her.

She was sprinkled and crossed, at baptism, by the name of Rose, which name may have suited her well in her bloomy days, for late in life she had a pleasing face, full of lively expression, with a fine portly figure. She was fond of sketching herself seated on a music-stool, which she called a Rose sitting on a Thorn.

In the death of friends whom one sees from first to last, witnessing their gradual rise and fall simultaneously with our own, there is nothing striking; but how different the effect on our minds when we lose sight of them in their prime, and reflect that their sturdy figures, seeming to be still unobnoxious to change, lie prostrate in their graves! We recall them, and see them still in full activity; they appear to have only gone away! So was it with the kindest of men, my best of friends, Sir David Scott, whose name and goodness deserve a better monument. So it was with Mr. Wagner, whose quick limbs and upright pleasant face appear to be moving through the streets of Brighton at this hour! I see him now rapidly turning the corner of Castle Square into the Old Steyne! Then comes back into view the rapid step of Horace Smith, another celebrity of the place, with a pun almost out of his mouth before we were within hearing of each other! They all seem still alive!

Wagner walked through the streets as if they were his own, reviewing the people as he passed as a general would an army, now stopping, speaking, laughing, now pushing on again. He had been tutor in the Duke of Wellington’s family. The wonder is that, with his firmness of purpose and successful handling of men, he did not reach a bishopric up to that of Canterbury itself. He might have led even the House of Lords by the nose. But Brighton was to him an episcopal see. He enjoyed the patronage of nearly all the livings there, with the monopoly of marriages, births, and deaths; building church after church himself out of his own large resources and the pockets of willing or unwilling friends.

There was an abomination of doctors at Brighton in those days, potent firms, chiefly on the Steyne; but the class is soon forgotten, since they leave nothing behind them but their patients and their shops.

Among apothecaries, Newnham was prince. One saw him walking across the Steyne, then red-bricked for foot-passengers only, he wagging his head with a look of triumph, and in gaiter attire; his face nearly six feet above his shoes, with an expression on it of the miracles that may be achieved by salted senna alone, not to mention the openings artificially made in veins with the mere thumb and finger. But Newnham was a friendly, knowing character. I think often of the advice he tendered me as a young physician, “Never dine with a patient. Such has been my rule through life; for if you do, sooner or later you are sure to let out the fool!”

I must not omit the name, in these brief memorials, of my cultured friend, George Hall, a physician and still more than that, a gentleman. As travelling Redcliffe Fellow, he spent ten years in visiting Greek and Italian and Turkish cities, and the chief courts of Europe. He was too refined for a Brighton physician; few of his patients were to his taste. When summoned to those who suited him best, he passed hours with them instead of sharing his time fairly among all. He had some noble blood in him, according to rumour; but it was of a sinister strain. This held possession of him secretly, and influenced his life; but he found consolation in marrying Lady Hood, a peeress of very considerable fortune, and in retiring from the vulgarity of physic.

The pun sacrifices the sense and purport to the playful analogy. In the practice of this Horace Smith expended the conversational portions of his life. I told him, at one of Mrs. Smith’s evening receptions, that a man known to us had injured a limb while travelling in Norway. His reply was, “I suppose a bear came and Gnaw’wayed his arm.” His daughter, Miss Smith then, and I believe so for life, was a quick and clever match for her father in drawing him out. She had an open, good-tempered face, with the eyes well apart, to which her nose, following suit, owed a flatness. Most auditors must have observed that all whom Nature has favoured with a lying-down nose were let fall by their nurse when babies in arms. Thackeray was one of these. One would have thought they would have fallen on their backs; but no, they all fall on their noses.

The only authority for punning that I know of is Aristotle; he recommends it to a pleader. Horace Smith’s puns are yet remembered; the one on elder-flower water was his best.

The evening receptions at Brighton were pleasant pastimes, especially those of Lady Carhampton and the Hon. Mrs. Mostyn, daughter of Mr. Thrale, of Johnsonian memory. This lady, in Sillwood or Oriental Place, near the Horace Smiths, had a suite of receiving-rooms winding all round the mansion, hung with pictures. In one room was a couch enclosed by a silken canopy within a recess, above which was gilded in large letters, “Mon Repos.”

XXXV.

Any one who has enjoyed the help of an acute mind in life must have concluded that the human creature was not designed to be very intellectual. It has great faculties, but these can do little more than provide munificently for its wants. It solves with facility all the problems of luxury and amusement, but can for the most part no further go. Nevertheless, there are a few of an intellectual caste, living apart from the vulgar and ostentatious; these force their thoughts on unwilling recipients, and in what they produce give intimations of a higher race than that of man being still possible, though scarcely to be expected to spring from the few, since the grovellers have so immense a majority.

The clergy of Brighton were adapted more to the wants of the congregations than to those of religion. One likes the clergy. They have a good education up to the age of one or two and twenty, and their profession is gentlemanly. If they renewed their knowledge of science from time to time, they would not interpolate nature with dogma, the effect of which is more damaging than they can conceive. To the eye clarified by impartial thought, it is like a pimple on the face of a pretty girl; but it will run its little course.

While at Brighton I first knew Count Pepoli, the head of an illustrious Bolognese family. He was the author of some pleasant works, and wrote the opera of “I Puritani” for his friend Bellini, the composer who furnished the music. He was banished from his country, and had his estates put under forfeiture by Pius IX., whose utmost science could do no better than proclaim the dogma of an immaculate conception, and announce himself infallible, as occupying upon earth the rotten throne of an Almighty. Yet this gentleman, by the aid of his superstitious adherents, was able to expel the best families from Bologna, for not wishing to retain him in his place of civil chief—put into that place by those supernatural chemists, the cardinals, who, by mumbling cabalistic words over a drink of wine, could turn it into blood, and, by showing the whites of their eyes, could metamorphose a mouthful of dry bread into the flesh of Christ. They mean well, they administer to existing wants; but the drinking and the eating of these would be cannibalism of the worst description, and this they have not the imagination to perceive.

Pepoli reached England a poor man, though the owner of many palaces and lands. He supported himself by becoming, almost at once, Professor of the Italian Language, Literature, and Antiquities at the University of London, in Gower Street; and he retained this post for some twenty years. When the pope was shown the shortest cut out of Rome, Pepoli rushed back to Bologna, and got hold of his magnificent palaces once more, and recovered his lordly position.

Some twenty years after this, when I last visited Italy, on my way to Rome I stopped at Bologna, and inquired of my landlord, Pellagrini, the way to the Palazzo Pepoli, which I accordingly sought and found. It was a massive, ancient structure, and on inquiring of the janitor if the count was at home, was informed that his kinswoman, the Countess Maria Pepoli, lived there; and I was directed to his residence, which was a large building occupying one side of an open Place, and which seemed only to need a sentinel to complete its pretensions to being a royal palace.

Unfortunately for me, the count was at his country seat.

This nobleman, while in London, married a Scotch lady. My old friend, Mr. Plattnaur, kept up a constant correspondence with the count, informing him of all that happened to his English friends. Plattnaur was very intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The lady once asked when he would join them at dinner. He replied, “If you please, to-morrow.” “Yes,” she answered, “do come to-morrow: it will be the first day of the chicken.”

I have not spoken of Sir Matthew Tierney, a physician of Irish extraction, a good-looking plausible man, always equal to the occasion, whatever might fall in his way. He had the look of a baronet when once you knew he was one—a title that he won easily, by a stroke of worldly wisdom. When George No. 4 was a Brighton man, reposing under that Chinese umbrella, the Pavilion, he was surrounded by physicians, one of whom, Dr. Bankhead, I was intimately acquainted with in Italy during 1831 and 1832. Bankhead was a powerful-looking Scotchman, with a large red face and hair to match, living abroad for reasons, and practising among the English residents at Florence, by whom he was much liked and courted, and as little respected as many of them were respected by themselves. But all liked his anecdotes of life high and low, more especially so did the men after dinner, when the ladies had left the table.

He told me that he used to meet the king’s physicians every morning before visiting the royal patient, and that he and the others invariably passed away an hour in inventing scandalous stories about the aristocracy, calculated to give amusement and pleasure to their patient. He had been Lord Londonderry’s physician; with him he had lived in town and country, and so had become acquainted with the noblest in the land, and with all their foibles.

Bankhead knew the history of Tierney’s rise to the summit, which had a very humble beginning. The king, always self-indulgent, was of course always ill. At that time his favourite groom, who was suffering under circumstances similar to those of his master, and could get no attention from the medical men of the palace, consulted Tierney. That astute physician saw his chance, and giving the groom as much care as he would have bestowed on royalty itself, effected a cure, which, commending itself to the king, led to Tierney being summoned, and to his advice being followed with marked advantage.

Sir Matthew kept up a handsome house at Brighton, on the Grand Parade, where he resided in the season, living in London during the fashionable months. He was a favourite, and a man of very pleasant manners.

As to manners, they make the man more than doth the tailor, though he be a Stultz or a Poole. Sir Matthew had the manner of a man of mark, which consisted in his looking as if he had an answer ready to any question before it was asked. When he came into the committee-room of the hospital, it was as if he had entered to do all the business of the meeting, and to put everything right, taking it as granted that confusion was in the ascendant.

It was so with Sir David Scott. His quiet, pleasant face was a signal for all to look at him, and to feel that what he had to say would be more refreshing than anything they could utter themselves.

Horace Smith’s face was of that free, smileless expression, which clearly asked, “Do you want to laugh? for, if so, I’ll make you do so without further notice.”

As to Wagner’s face, it was one not easily defined. The expression was pleasing without being quite agreeable. It bore the candid threat of entering on some business transaction, useful in itself, but declining in interest the nearer it approached the amount of subscriptions still necessary to carry out as it deserved his beneficent scheme. Wagner in one thing only was unscrupulous and devoid of mercy—it was in ordering money out of one pocket into another for the general good, as if parting with it was the chief object in life, and to assist another in doing so was benevolence itself, such as few were capable of feeling towards a fellow-man.

How successful he was in taking every one into partnership with him in such matters!

XXXVI.

In those days Brighton was full of charm, more so than now by a long measure. There was no three-shilling railway; you went to and from London with blood horses, driven by those nimble whips, Sir St. Vincent Cotton one-half of the way, and by the Marquis of Worcester the other half, within five hours. A crowd saw your splendid equipage start, whether from Piccadilly or Castle Square. It was called “The Age,” and was a wonder of the age.

Brighton then had a season; November was the choicest month. The weather then was delicious, and the upper stratum of society, by a mild upheaval, was moved bodily from the metropolis to the sea, without even a dress being crumpled or a lace torn.

There were good angels in those days, as there are now; and if one was not privileged, as I was not, to see them under cover in such a conservatory as the mansion of the Duchess of St. Albans, one could meet them in full bloom out of doors on the esplanade.

That beneficent duchess and her worthy successor, Miss Burdett-Coutts, were constant visitors at Brighton during the autumn.

I had many inducements to be at Brighton. I was acquainted with all the medical profession there; Dr. Price and the skilful Mr. Taylor, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Furner, were my particular friends, and I knew the principal residents of the place.

I undertook the work of the dispensary, to which I was physician for five years, and I joined the Committee of the Sussex County Hospital, which was the pet establishment of such men as Lords Egremont and Chichester and Munster, of the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Lawrence Peel, all of whom would spend a pleasant gossiping hour in the committee-room from time to time; none of whom forgot the wants of the institution.

While I was chairman of the committee it fell to me to read out a letter from Mr. Lawrence Peel, announcing his gift of, I think, two thousand pounds, as a mark of gratitude for Lady Jane Peel’s recovery from illness.

When I see a portrait of Lord Hartington, the massive countenance brings the Duke of Devonshire back into my mind. I need no portraiture, but the name to bring the Earl of Munster back to memory. These great men were as much at home with us all as they were with each other, enjoying the chat and the laugh without mannerism or hauteur.

It is through manners that all our intercourse is carried on, and one would suppose that they strictly represented the person. It is not so to any great extent; fashion influences them, and they become modified by imitation, so that they cease to be anything very different from current coin; like it, having the different qualities of silvery, coppery, or golden; the same person expressing himself in all three to different sorts of men—a guinea’s worth to the physician, a shilling’s worth to the beggar.

In my early days the tumid young men, rigged out in newest apparel, would go up and down Bond Street at a snail’s pace, doing no better than advertising their tailors. Like handsomely bound volumes, the contents inane, they were just as contemptible as the “sandwichers” who now take their place, bound in boards. None of these tumefied gentlemen ever walked in a hurry, confessedly because they would not have it supposed that they had anything to do. But they had; they smoked cigars in the open air, holding them in two fingers out of five, the other three spread out like a fan, the hand encased in lavender-tinted gloves guiltless of a crease. They smoked weeds which were lighter in weight than the silver they cost; they smoked them in Bond Street, they smoked them in the park; but as any lady of their acquaintance approached, they ostentatiously flung them into the road before raising the host—that is to say, the hat—a couple of inches nearer heaven.

I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian. By degree the young officer, the young squire, and the delicate-minded parvenu was seduced into the allurements of tobacco.

The introduction of the cigar into society was a great trial to the womenkind. At first a smoker was no gentleman, and he only became one when no gentleman did otherwise than smoke. The Sybarites at the commencement of their new epoch smoked only out of doors or in a room set apart for the purpose; this was still a reason for the separation of the sexes, but at length some beauties of independent spirit assured the youth of their set that they liked the perfume of a cigar, and from that time the revolution set in.

The puppyism of that day was mere fashion, the exercise of the imitative faculty which the monkey is supposed to still retain. But fashion is not a very durable religion.

The novelists, clever creatures, have shown a fondness for making such inanities as I have depicted very heroic on occasions, and as coming out in quite a new character; but they have not said why. The truth is that the vanity which begets a dressy snob will ferment itself up into the leader of a forlorn hope, and be thankful for the chance of a Victoria Cross instead of the praises of the giggling sex, whose blessedness threatens to keep them single.

Some men are vain to the last; Addison was when he invited a nobleman to come and see how a Christian could die; Dr. Donne was before parting with his last breath but one or two—he was laid out by himself. Women, too, are supposed to be not free from vanity, not only up to the last, but a little after, desiring to be called “beautiful corpses;” and to this end they have directed their maids to rouge their cheeks when they are no more.

These are the true lovers of art.

As we are on the topic, one may say the least vain are those who die by their own hand, especially with the aid of a pistol. These instruments do the work of suicide with a very ill grace; the effect is that however much the relatives may have wished for a photograph to be taken after death, even that consolation is forbidden them.

It takes two or three generations for the world to forget it when a great man kills himself.

“Life is a handsome present—no man earns it;

Ungracious therefore is he who returns it.”

I could never regard a suicide otherwise than as a very remarkable person, with inscrutable traits of character; in truth, as a singular anomaly. Napoleon, the most noticeable, perhaps, of men, because the worst among conspicuous ones, could not reach the courage to kill himself; bravery seems inadequate to such a purpose. Butcher as he was, there was not a sprinkling of self-destruction in him; his life was more to him than the empire of the world which he had lost, though that life was one of cancer.

I knew a man, a captain in the navy, retired, a C.B., with a private income of £1200 a year, with no expenses but those of a lodging, no wife or family, who drowned himself because he was going blind, and this being so he could no longer superintend his affairs, and felt himself liable to be cheated, which was more than he could endure—and it certainly is a trial! This man was old and infirm, cool, unimpassioned, not wanting in even spirits, and fond of a joke. He had the full use of his faculties, and had frequent conversations with a weak-minded medical man, in the club-room over which he lodged, on the nature of various poisons without his purpose being suspected. It ended in his creeping into a water-cistern under the boards of an adjoining room.

Most of us grow tired of living, but we prefer the fatigue to nothing, though we may suffer pain that is all but insupportable.

A man who takes his own life may be mad in some respects, but not in committing the act, for he always does it in the right way. If he fired at his own bust instead of at himself, if he swallowed the bottle instead of the laudanum within it, if he cut his dog’s throat instead of his own, with a view to self-destruction, it would be madness itself. But he performs the act rationally and perpetrates it in a strictly methodical way.

There must be two kinds of courage, one of which is common to most men, and one which few possess and none comprehend.

I am told that when a certain reporter attends a meeting on behalf of a journal and finds out, from the speaker’s address, that the purpose for which the assembly is convened is worthless, he retires; and on taking up his note-book, looks at the person speaking and says, “Go home and cut your throat,”—words that might have well been addressed to the Bond Street swells.

XXXVII.

A steam-engine may be called the greatest of inventions, and could the best one as yet constructed have sufficient consciousness to register its excellencies and defects, according to its own knowledge and experience, it could not be accused of boastfulness or self-depreciation. Again, if a dog could be endowed, in addition to its faculties, with the power of expression, and could define in exact terms its sense of smell and so announce it more keen than that of all other animals, it could not be accused of vanity.

The steam-engine in its revelation might reflect credit on its designer and on the man who constructed it, and these might reflect credit on their maker, but not on themselves; they had no hand in the acquisition of their faculties. So with the dog, it would simply make its statement, and in so doing communicate a phenomenon that the science of man would otherwise be slow to reach.

As it is with the dog, so it should be with men in giving expression to their natural gifts. A Shakespeare, knowing and avowing himself to be a vehicle constructed of phosphorized brain and ozonized blood, through which the higher revelations of nature are poured out on the senses of men, might describe the glorious machinery as it worked within him; might declare himself to be the most highly perfected of human beings, and that without vanity or boast, but not without a benefit to others, affording them details concerning himself absolutely unattainable by ordinary means; for no one has yet fathomed him as he did himself, and his knowledge died with him.

If Lord Bacon had taken the trouble to explain to us all about the wheels that moved his apparent delinquencies, it would have afforded a scientific lesson, and have ranked with his other essays. He would have lost nothing by it; minds of the size of his suffer nothing from opinion, and can be as indifferent to it as a cat, or a dog, or a horse, or a cow is to what we call decency. The degree of energy people display in vociferating against the anomalies of morals is the best measure one can have of their own failings. If I were to hear a man rail vehemently against a swindle, I should at once conclude that the machinery of cheating within him was in good working order, unless it had been his lot to be the party swindled.

There is no genius without humour, at least no literary genius, for that differentiating faculty is the basis of all self-criticism. Men have been challenged to define genius, and they have tried to do it without being asked. The fact is that clever people can do nothing unless it is a little difficult; they cannot see what lies directly under their noses, and one of the truths so situated is that perfect genius has never existed. Such genius as a man can possess is fragmentary, never whole. He may have literary genius, and that is enough for one. He may have scientific genius, like Goethe, Oken, Lamark, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Darwin, Helmholtz, Davy, Faraday, Hunter, Cuvier, Laenec; but many of these were poor creatures in other branches than their own. He may have genius in mathematical philosophy, like Newton; but that great man had an intellectual weakness. Real genius of the perfect kind would be more than one man could carry; the ideal whole is broken up and distributed in fragments, some immense, like that falling to Leonardo da Vinci’s share, some small and constituting mere talent.

I have somewhere a list of men of genius who were originators, beginning with Homer as the father of Poetry, and coming down to Goethe who began the transcendental philosophy of to-day in his “Metamorphoses of Plants;” and I could never get beyond sixty or seventy names.

Any one giving an estimate of his own capabilities, whether favourable or unfavourable, or both, without illustrating what he states by his own work, and by the opinions of competent critics, is an egotist. If hereafter I should enter on the subject of my mental capabilities, it will be on the principle not of self-consciousness, but of mechanical candour. Having never ceased my work up to the age of eighty-four, I may have within me an ample experience of my mental operations; but any account of these the reader has the advantage of testing with what he finds his own superior judgment.

I produced very little in my early days, though a passion for literary success then governed me, alternating with a passion for scientific. A career in the direction of either was impeded in middle life by professional practice, which had its fascinations. But the young have not really much that is worth saying to the middle-aged or old. I had been nourished on the Greek and Roman classics; under the special influence of Herodotus I composed an Egyptian drama of the time of Cambyses, and it cost me much labour and greatly improved me in the art of composing; but not having read it for more than half a century I am quite unable now to judge of it. The flight I know to have been high, but whether through clear atmosphere or fog I cannot say. Sir Sibbald Scott, son of my friend Sir David, told me that he had seen the authorship of “The Piromides” inquired for in Notes and Queries at two different times. It was received by the press as a work of solemn purpose throughout.

I may mention that Lord Elgin, to whom I inscribed this play, thought it betrayed poetic taste, and he expressed his opinion in warmer terms than I cite.

It is surprising to witness how many good writers of their own language there are in this country: in reading the papers this is extensively seen; the leading articles appear equal, all marked by idiomatic clearness of expression. Then, in literary criticism, it is noticeable how much deeper the writers penetrate into the arcana, perceiving what is rendered, and what is left wanting, in a poetic composition, and that with a psychological acuteness much more general than was met with a generation or two ago. This is the more valuable, since criticism is the profoundest of studies; it demands an adequate knowledge of every science and art, as well as a competent observation of nature.

In speaking of my own intellectual mechanism, this I say once more is none of my own, but an instrument placed temporarily among visible things, to reveal what it may to the less knowing.

XXXVIII.

It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work will be a very remarkable one, almost unique. But, being a close observer, I have noticed that those who always tell the truth obtain immense credit, no matter how much they say that militates against themselves. The pleasure of speaking the truth at all times is immense. Lying is a very peculiar art: some use it merely as a convenience, and often have not the ability to forge a lie without including in it the contradiction. One takes pity on this class, endowed only with a pauper intellect and a pauper conscience.

Exaggerative liars are of a common class; it is somewhat difficult to reach their motive, because they neither serve themselves nor others. What they chiefly exaggerate is incomes; it must be due to a sanguine temperament.

The decidedly despicable liars are those who lie about themselves; but these have not the shrewdness to see their way safely. A man told me that he had been dining with a distinguished party at a certain club. He had not the knowledge necessary to give his lie substance; he was not aware that the rules of the club he named did not admit of a member entertaining any stranger there.

These are the three sorts of everyday liars; it is astonishing how completely every one knows them as such without their being in the least aware of the fact themselves, for we all pretend to believe liars to their face!

It is like possessing a fortune to be endowed with a love of truth for its own sake, and I doubt if any man was ever truly great without it. The mind of the truly gifted appears to me to lie parallel with nature, so that if an idea comes into being, all other ideas related to it are close at hand, and in a line with it.

The value of this view to the science of criticism is incommensurable: this I will now illustrate. The idea and its relations, which increase its intensity and beauty, may be variously expressed. Say Shakespeare knew a girl who was in love but concealed it, and so, pining, grew hectic and sallow; but bore it with patience. Such would be the prose version of the fact, and is not very emotional. But the poet would look as steadfastly at the sufferer as would a lover, then his sympathy would inflame, and in the developing of his mental vision he would see a rose that must prematurely perish through the cankering worm that gnaws at its heart. That rose is the hectic blush, its damask is reflected on the maiden cheek as she pines. But such an image cannot end here, this image of death in life; and in the next parallel appears a living monument of immortalizing sculpture beyond which the mind cannot rise.

(1) She never told her love—

(2) But let concealment, like a worm in the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek.
(3) She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

Poetry is co-extensive with Nature, but cannot exceed her limits. She has her mystical number, which is three. Her suns rise; they reach their zenith; they have their setting: it is their morning, their noon, and their night. The earth has its three dimensions; the elements and all the things it consists of can assume but three forms, the solid, the liquid, the gaseous. Her productions have their three stages, and, running through these, they begin again. Man, in common with all that is organic, is born, he lives, he dies; the plant yearly has its growth, its flowering, its seed-time. This is the trinity of Nature; and poetry, which is her vocal manifestation, has its three parallels.

This truth, instances of which the reader himself may multiply at will, serves to illuminate the poetic argument which is to follow. An idea in imaginative poetry, which is the greatest and the only truly great, has three parallels as already exemplified; it cannot have more, and to be of the highest quality it cannot have less. There are as many sources of these parallels as there are objects in the three natural kingdoms, that most marvellous of the threefold series, the conjoint animal, vegetable, and mineral, in which all things subsist; in which every object is an ante-type of the poetic evolution just defined.

It is not necessary that these parallels should be separated by intervening details of any length, whence it is that short passages, or short poems like the sonnet, when woven with a due regard to their effectiveness, become poetic gems. Such are the first four lines of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet; such are Coleridge’s lines on “Time Real and Imaginary,” and those on “Work without Hope.” All these I will now cite, numbering the parallels in their gradual ascent from the subject to its evolution, and thence into its transcendental expression in the ideal.

Sonnet XXXIII. (Shakespeare).

(1) Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye;

(2) Kissing with golden face the meadows green;

(3) Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.

Time Real and Imaginary (Coleridge).

(1) Two lovely children ran an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
(2) She far outstripped the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind;
(3) For he, alas! is blind.

Work without Hope (Coleridge).

(1) All nature seems at work:
(2) Slugs leave their lair;
The bees are stirring, birds are on the wing,
(3) And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
(1) And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,

(2) Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,

Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.

(3) Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may;

For me ye bloom not. Glide, rich streams, away!

With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll;

And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And hope without an object cannot live.

Shakespeare, in the citation “She never told her love,” gives out his subject in five words; from this he rises into the amplification of it through an exquisite metaphor and thence inters its divine ideal in imagery that can never be surpassed. Such is the working principle in imaginative verse, and it may be readily found that the principle does not pervade narrative poetry except in authors of the very highest class. It is the sure test of genius, so sure that a classification of the poets, in the order of their merit, might be based upon it.

It may be perceived that these poetic gems are as perfect in themselves as any epic of many pages. But as gems differ, so do these: the citations from Shakespeare and from Coleridge have their parallels in the line of ascent; they rise into their climax. The question whether the expression “slugs leave their lair,” should not be “stags leave their lair,” might surely be decided by reference to the first edition of “Work without Hope.” I possessed Gagliani’s reprint of Coleridge in 1832; if “slugs” in that issue stood as a printer’s error, the author was alive to protest against it. However, in an early edition of his poems, edited by Coleridge, I find it is “stags.” I feel that it was consonant with Coleridge’s mind to have begun the poem with “Slugs leave their lair;” it is not only more musical than “stags” through the triple alliteration, but more orderly, beginning with the slowest of animated creatures as typical of the condition of apathy that he was himself consigned to.

XXXIX.

There are three lofty and emotional verses in Wordsworth’s “Intimations,” which should be spoken of. The first of these is a gem, and would have been without flaw but that it begins in the climacteric, while the subject and development of it, which should come first, begin at the sixth line, thus:

“It is not now as it hath been of yore,”

down to the end.

It is almost sad to observe what splendid material Wordsworth sacrifices through his want of poetic art.

The stanza needs no verbal correction; its fault is in the misplacement of the lines. It is one of the most important verses in the language, or I would not trouble the critic about it, but I will ask him to read it thus by transposing the lines:

(1. The Subject.)

It is not now as it hath been of yore;

(2. The Development.)

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

(3. The Grand Climax.)

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream!

The qualifications of one who could be classed with the greatest of poets are deducible from Shakespeare alone; they are as follows:—

1. Imagination.

2. Philosophic vision.

3. A sense of the ludicrous.

4. An emotional perception of beauty.

5. Harmony.

6. Art.

All of these might be dilated on, but not here.

It is a notable truth that the poetic mind never appears fully to mature. A man often writes a whole bible of verses, of which but one per cent., or from that to ten, is worth preserving. If he produces one or two favourite poems, a mild people accepts the whole, but only feeds on the little income of its large capital. A voluminous writer may succeed in yielding a fine harvest on the whole; the wheats beyond all praise, the barleys good, the oats plentiful; but the roots indifferent and the potato crop decidedly bad.

It would be a curious sight if one could inspect the proceedings of Fame Insurance Companies, in which Shakespeare had a policy for millions all paid up, and invested in the hearts of generations unborn; in which, if Coleridge has not a tithe of the amount, he is yet rich with the well-earned increment ever increasing; and Wordsworth, who teaches moral as well as poetic divinity, is not very far behind him. There I pause, accepting contemporary poets as more or less life-annuitants.

There is, perhaps, no example of retrospective imagination (it is at once so dramatic, so poetic) like the opening words of Gloucester in the play of Richard III.

Before Shakespeare’s day, drama and poetry lived very much apart—one may say entirely separate in the Greek; no less so than chemical science and geology may do at the present time: Shakespeare, in much of his work, made them one.

“Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;”

in this the action is dramatic, the verbal structure metaphoric.

The same is true of—

“Nor made to court an amourous looking-glass;”

while the words,

“He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber,

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute,”

surpasses both, as not being metaphoric, yet poetic as well as dramatic.

Furthermore, the latter line—

“To strut before a wanton, ambling nymph,”

is most perfect in drama-poetic expression. It is exquisite in its contempt; it is ever visible in its movement; it is ludicrous too. Here lies the highest triumph of poetry, to do that which ordinary speech can barely effect in any single sentence—to attain to the most beautiful expression without a single metaphor; that is, by absolute simplicity of speech.

Of course, metaphor is a great resource in composition; it involves not only the fact, but its simile in one and the same epithet.

The line in Hamlet—

“Whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul,”

has as strong a simile in it, through “harrow up,” as is contained in the expression—

“Thy matted and combined locks to part …

Like quills upon a fretful porcupine.”

But the last is pure poetry; the other is dramatic poetry.

Of course, pure poetry has the highest quality of all; it is so sincere, so convincing, that it requires no help to render it beautiful and effective.

The whole address in Hamlet delivered by the Ghost is free from metaphor with few exceptions towards the end, as—

“Make thy two eyes like stars dart from their spheres;”

also—

“Like quills upon a fretful porcupine.”

These two lines are the only exceptions. They are mighty, and at the very summit of human art, but in this respect do not actually reveal more than may be set forth in a pure simplicity of diction.

This great truth of truths was known to David and Solomon. It came to them as the only means through which the interests of a pure humanity could be enlarged on, and made to reach the heart.

Moses enjoyed the art, as shown in his account of the creation; so likewise did the authors of Esther, Ruth, and Job. It came to them because their poetry was so human, and consisted not, as it did with the Greeks, in exalting heroes and conquerors.

It is easy enough to use simple language in descriptive poetry or in prose; not so easy to attain to sublimity by its means. To do this demands genius of the first order. Shakespeare, the most gifted of men, was not too great to employ it in his highest achievements. He was a perfect master of simplicity; he knew that there was but one simple thing, and that was truth.

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,”

and the lines that follow, are entirely free from metaphor, yet no purer and nobler description ever found utterance. The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears. Let every man of genius mark my words, that He who delivered the parables to the multitude was Sincerity itself; that His teachings were allegories, but that metaphor never crossed His lips. Take as examples those exquisite poems—for such they are, unfettered by artificial metre—the parables of the Prodigal Son, and of the Ten Virgins: a critical reading of them will readily reveal that not a single metaphor exists in either, and yet what an elevated poetry pervades them! After perusing them, turn at once to Milton and read his account of Satan’s exaltation in hell—

“High on a throne of royal state which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus, or of Ind,

Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,

Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence.”

This is great language, is marvellous, high-sounding, impressive, but is it sincere? Would an angel sent from heaven to report on the proceedings in hell, have brought back such a description as this of what he had beheld?

It is grand, as is Homer’s exaltation of his heroes; but does it touch the innermost heart?

This is said not to find fault; not to withdraw admiration from one of the few who have made their country famous before all other lands, for there is time for all things; for

“The pomp and circumstance of glorious war,”

and for sadness at the sufferings of humanity.

In writing about Shakespeare and Coleridge, I have showed that poems from their hand, however short, had the three essentials of art—that is, the three parallels, not more or less—namely, the statement of the subject, the development of it in detail, and the climax. The bare statement of the subject is the basis of the whole; the development employs the retrospective imagination which embraces an acquaintance with all nature and human life; finally, the climax involves the moral by means of the prospective imagination or the circumspective, and rises into the incommensurable.

An analysis of the parables shows that these three parallels are invariably to be found in each. A poet who cares little or nothing for nature uses the introspective imagination, substituting himself for the universe, whence his climax often sinks into a mere reflection.

I would say a few more words on the subject of parables.

Dr. Angus, the masterly author of an English Grammar, defines the allegory, parable, and fable. He says of the parable that it is an allegory of something that might happen, written in metaphoric language. This is an instance in which a great scholar may err by dispensing with scrutiny and relying on his instinctive belief.

XL.

But I must not forget that these records are meant to be about myself, the author of poems and other effusions let loose when from time to time he drew out the spigot. The author’s insurance policy is still under discussion. His trial is still going on, as did that of Warren Hastings; it has gone into a new generation, and some say that when, like the traditional door-nail, he is dead, it will terminate in his acquittal, it being found at last that he did not make himself, but was planned out by Nature to serve her purpose; having fulfilled which, she withdrew the chemical compound of which he consisted, and utilized his waste materials.

As said before, I had the “Piromides” printed and published; it was by Saunders and Ottley, in 1839, while I resided in Gordon Square on my return from Paris, where I had spent twelve months in making the acquaintance of scientific physicians, naturalists, and others; going round the wards of La Charité with Andral every morning at six o’clock; attending the lectures on chemistry of Thénard at a later hour, and revelling in the bones of Cuvier’s osteological museum. I was much with Milne-Edwards; and with Dujardin, whose éclairage for the microscope I introduced into London, lending mine to Ross and to Powell as a pattern, and these opticians and their successors have supplied the scientific profession with it ever since. It consisted of an achromatic illuminator, the invention of which Wollaston pronounced impossible, and which Dujardin achieved.

In that year I made the discovery of an animalcule in the liver; it was a time when such things were unknown, now fifty years ago. This discovery has recently attracted the attention of the Pathological Society, who have given an account of it in their “Transactions” for 1890, in a eulogistic tone.

In that year, too, I published “Vates.”

From 1839 to 1853, living in East Anglia, I was engaged in an art-novel or romance, called “Valdarno,” taking it up only from time to time, as Goethe did his “Faust.” I began its foundations in Florence, and published four numbers under the title of “Vates,” illustrated by Charles Landseer, and I then dropped it, as in costing too much money it became a gift to the world. Dante Rossetti, whose father was a professor at King’s, like Pepoli at University College, used, as a student-boy at the first-named, to purchase “Vates,” and devour it eagerly; so he told me when many years later we met.

Leaving the arena of letters and art for country life, which is, however, worth seeing once, I settled myself down in the monastic borough of Bury St. Edmunds. Like all the old county towns, it was formerly the little metropolis of a squirearchy, where the dowagers retired for life into the family mansions. The place has great architectural features in the shape of abbey ruins, still haunted by the ghost of Abbot Sampson; of noble churches, such as are not built now; of Norman tower and Gothic gateway, such as may never be built again.

There was no lord in the place to adorn it, but there was a great plenty of the kind to bless it and conserve it within reach—the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquis of Bristol, and baronets sufficient in number to engage the fingers of one hand when counted up. But the town itself had its magnates; there was an honourable Mr. Petre, brother of a lord of that name, and an honourable Mr. Pellew, son of the naval hero, and my own familiar friend, not to mention an admiral of the great name and family of Wollaston, and a post-captain, with a C.B. that he never wore; and it must not be forgotten that the august mother of the Bishop of London, Dr. Bloomfield, also resided there, among others of great worth, including a solitary baronet and his lady, Sir John Walsham.

There was a famous grammar school, too, with Dr. Donaldson of classic fame as head master, which had supplied England with a president of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Thomas Watson; a lord chancellor, Sir Robert Rolfe, Lord Cranworth; besides a bishop of London, whose scholarship was on a par with that of the most learned of the day; and all these alive at the same time.

The Marquis of Bristol was the younger son of the earl of that house, who was also Bishop of Derry, and owing to his elder brother’s early death, he became the owner of Ickworth, a park within a short drive of Bury, which, including all the parish and part of the one adjoining, lies within a circuit of eleven miles. It is said that the father disliked the son, probably owing to some act of disobedience, and exercised his power of depriving the inheritance of its charm. He destroyed all the fine old timber in the park, but nearly a hundred years have sufficed to restore it; and he left the plan of a colossal palace, of which he himself erected the central shell, and laid the whole of the foundations. I was credibly informed that ten thousand a year was to be spent for fifty years, according to the bishop’s will, to complete the structure.

The building was completed on the original grand scale about fifty years ago, and it took fifty years to finish. In the drawings of this marvellous structure it is designated Ickworth Building, and it bears that name, which, given it by Time, it will always retain, for people call it by no other.

Ickworth Building was the design of a Mr. Sandys, I believe a clergyman, not an architect by profession. He had been much in Rome, as had the bishop, who loved Italy, and lived more in that country than elsewhere; and, though an absentee bishop, the beneficence he exercised in his see was so great that at his death the people of Derry subscribed to raise a monument of their gratitude to him, which stands near the building in Ickworth Park.

There must be descriptions of Ickworth Building in works on architecture, and I think one will be found in Mr. Rookwood Gage’s fine “History of Suffolk;” but I do not possess such, and what I say is from memory.

I have heard Lord Bristol say that often when he looked out of window in the morning on the new building from the old, he wished the earth would swallow it up. One knows the feeling of something always hanging over one; it is like that of a man sitting underneath a gallows after an execution.

The marquis might doubtless have eluded the burden imposed on him by his father’s will, but je noublieray jamais was the motto he inherited, and he lived to finish his task and to enjoy the magnificent dwelling-place as a home. The building itself, wholly unique in grace and beauty, consists of a central structure, almost circular, surmounted by a dome, intended to represent the Coliseum; its summit is belted by sculptures of the Homeric legends, the work of Flaxman. There are two square wings at a proportionate distance from the body of the building, connected with it by corridors, each being the segment of a circle, with its concavity to the front. The left wing was designed for a picture-gallery, the right one for a gallery of sculpture, intended by the bishop to receive his collections of art.

The building is of white material externally; its area is planted with cedars alone. Of all the palaces and mansions I have ever beheld, it is the most surprising; perhaps equalled only, though not in grace, by the temples of India, with the designs of which one is familiar.

The Pavilion at Brighton should not be forgotten in such a comparison, but that is semi-barbarous, while Ickworth is classic, of the Ionic and Corinthian orders.

Approached by a serpentine road, its perspective conveys the impression of a moving object; it seems to swing round, as on a pivot, at every turn one takes in driving towards the portico, now slowly, now rapidly revolving, on its aërial axis, now remaining still.

I am not aware of it, if what follows has ever been put on record authentically, though it may have been so in part. The earl-bishop lived much at Rome and spent his large income in making a collection of pictures and sculptures to fill the galleries at Ickworth. It was at the time when we were at war with France on account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s usurpations.

The bishop having completed his collections of sculptures made his arrangements for transmitting them to England, when they were seized on their way by Bonaparte as belonging to a British subject. This act aroused a strong feeling of indignation in the minds of the Italian artists, who had met with so generous a patron in the bishop, and, that he might not be a sufferer, they subscribed a large sum of money and offered it to Bonaparte as a ransom for the treasures he had put under confiscation. Bonaparte took the money and set the collection free, restoring it to their owner, when it was no sooner despatched a second time than he seized it again.

No more fortunate fate awaited the pictures. The bishop succeeded in having them safely conveyed to Dover, but while in the custom house the building was burnt down, and the fine collection of paintings was destroyed in the flames.

I was told by one of the family a singular anecdote of the bishop. When at Rome he was invited to a banquet by the cardinals, and, while the company gathered, he learnt accidentally that the dining-hall was over the debtor’s prison. His anger at once burst forth and knew no bounds. He, a prelate of the Church of England, was insulted; he had been asked to dine over the heads of those wretched prisoners who, during the feast, would be pining in their narrow cells. His hosts naturally explained that such an affront was unintended by them; but he was not to be pacified. At length his course was determined on: he would remain where he was until a full list of all the prisoners’ debts was brought him. For this he waited sulkily, and when it arrived he wrote a cheque for the entire amount.

The prison doors were opened, and he sat down.

The private history of a country has not the same interest as the public, which is enduring; but it has a charm and is instructive. Biology profits by observing the influence of a higher life on the temperaments of men, on their principles, their manners, and their views. How different all these become to what we meet with in the common working men, from whom the best of us are descended!

The bishop was for some time confined by the republicans in the castle of Milan, and afterwards still remained in Italy, where he died in 1803. Except the central shell and the foundations, Ickworth was left for the next successor to erect: a gigantic undertaking.

The Herveys were always distinguished by their manners; Lord Hervey, in Pope’s time, was so conspicuous on this ground as to be called “Fanny Hervey.” It was with him, probably, the saying arose that the human race was divided into men, women, and Herveys.

The present Lord Arthur, now bishop of Bath and Wells, has a manner which, once seen, could never be forgotten. The same might be said of Lord Charles Hervey, who, however, had taken a different polish from having been a member of the Spanish embassy.

Lord Bristol was at Ickworth chiefly at Christmas, when he packed his house with all his descendants, having a separate table for those who were yet children.

Unfortunately, the offices being in the basement, half a mile distant, as people said, the dinner had plenty of time to cool before it reached the table.

Lord Bristol was always very pleasant with his guests: after dinner he would sit with his legs crossed and enter into familiar chat on political matters. He had veered a good deal towards the Liberal side. I remember his saying to me, “It is incumbent on us to move with the times; it was very easy to govern when there was only a population of eleven millions, but it is a different matter now.”

Earl Jermyn was very unlike his younger brothers and his father. He had a manner peculiarly his own, a politeness so mingled with shyness that one could not distinguish the one from the other, but withal a commanding air. His countess, Lady Catherine Jermyn, sister of the present Duke of Rutland, had a most imposing figure, and was both beautiful and full of charm. She died in London in her prime, so absolutely the prey of small-pox that no feature was longer recognizable.

Lord Alfred was member for Bury at one time, with Earl Jermyn, but he made no place for himself in political life.

I was informed that the earl-bishop had built himself a residence in Ireland, similar to the Ickworth Building, but on a greatly reduced scale. When I read Lever’s novel of “The Bishop’s Folly,” I wondered whether its plot was laid in the place in question. I quite read the work with the impression that it was so.

XLI.

Much culture shows itself in the families of Suffolk. I often thought it was owing to the vicinity of Cambridge, which is not more than a drive of thirty miles from Bury. This remark applies to many of the resident gentry, and notably to two sons of Sir Henry Bunbury: to his eldest, Sir C. F. Bunbury, the late baronet and a distinguished botanist, who was only debarred from a Fellowship of Trinity by his being an heir to an estate and title; an honour which his next brother, Sir Edward, received, and who sustained his reputation in becoming the most learned ancient geographer of the day.

Sir Henry, a lieutenant-general, was a man not to be readily forgotten. He had a sound judgment, was a constant reader of books, old and new, a clear-headed critic of art productions, and he held temperate opinions on national affairs; in fact, he encouraged the repeal of the corn laws, though at Barton and Mildenhall the owner of over fifteen thousand acres of land. He was the son of a famous man, the greatest of caricaturists, Henry Bunbury, whose initials of H. B. were adopted by one who came later and who reaped fame on the bold impersonation.

Henry Bunbury was the friend of Sir Joshua, and there are several Reynoldses at Barton Hall; one of priceless value, a full-length portraiture of Lady Sarah Lennox as Venus sacrificing to the Graces—a lady destined to perform a notable part in life.

It was said that her beauty was the exciting cause of her sovereign’s madness, for it was well-known that she smote him to the quick; but she was fated to a higher lot, though her path to it was thorny.

Lady Sarah Lennox was married to Sir Charles Bunbury, the uncle of Sir Henry, a man in whose life the world can take no interest, for he was simply of the horse-racing class, the least admirable of shrewd, clever men.

One may imagine the kind of character Sir Charles was when it is told that he grew tired of his lovely wife! She was finally divorced from so unworthy a partner, and retired to Ireland, in the bitterness of her heart.

After a lapse of several years, Lady Sarah met with a Colonel Napier, who belonged to the historical family of that name, and she married him. From that date her better destiny began. She became a mother, but of such a family! Of her five sons, three were Peninsula heroes, with the friendly eye of Wellington always upon them. Sir Charles Napier, the first general of his day; Sir William, the historian of the Peninsular War; and Sir George, a brave, good man, who was governor of the Cape.

Another son of this great lady was a barrister, and a fifth was a post-captain.

But to one, the only daughter, the sister in so bright a galaxy, one may readily credit the charm that attached to her! To complete the romance, she became the second wife of Sir Henry Bunbury, coming to Barton Hall, to find her beautiful mother’s image there, where it had remained over the great library mantelpiece, sacrificing to the Graces still.

Barton was a comfortable home, and Providence, to make perfection joyous, bestowed on Lady Bunbury a niece whose countenance was the daylight, whose voice was the music of all around. This was Cecilia Napier, the only living child of Sir George. She inherited the beauty and grace of Lady Sarah, whose portraiture by Reynolds was hers also. The family of Sir Henry came of a first marriage, but he loved the adopted one of his second wife as his own. This lovely girl became the wife of his third son, Henry, a colonel in the army.

One would almost think that Providence was the near relation of some families—it appoints them to such pleasant places, makes them so welcome upon earth, lets them want for nothing. So it was apparently at Barton Hall, on which the divine patronage was very generously bestowed.

As we learnt at school, Natura beatis omnibus esse dedit. Still, as a physician would say, this is only the predisposing cause; exciting causes must follow. And here Providence steps in, with the patronage of a prime minister, which is not, in appearance, dealt out disinterestedly; but there is not enough for all.

Sir Henry, on account of his conciliatory manners, was selected after the war to communicate to General Bonaparte his pending sentence of lifelong exile. Sir Hudson Lowe might perhaps have been as well appointed to the task, for the ex-emperor simply burst out into a torrent of abuse and rage, which not all the persuasiveness of the baronet could soften.

Sir Henry began military life at the battle of Maida, under General Stuart, and wrote an account of it in pamphlet form, but I think not for general circulation. He also similarly described his interview with Napoleon. It gave a fuller account of what passed than appears in Sir Walter Scott’s work, which was borrowed from it by Sir Henry’s permission.

Sir George Napier I knew very well; he was sometimes at Barton. Sir Charles I saw only once, and was charmed by the gentle and unpretending manner of the man who had performed such marvels of valour. When last in India, at the conquest of Scinde, he contracted a dysentery, which afterwards returned and proved fatal. He annexed Scinde, in violation of the orders from home. Lady Bunbury told me she had heard, but could not vouch for the truth of it, that in his despatch to the Government he announced what he had done in one apologetic word—peccavi.

It was said that the moral influence enjoyed over the troops by this great soldier even exceeded that of his command as general.

It may be interesting to note that Sir Henry’s successor, the late Charles Fox Bunbury, married a daughter of Leonard Horner, a sister of Lady Lyell. They lived at the old mansion at Mildenhall.

I knew Sir Charles Lyell in 1839, when I was the bearer to him of some fossils; and I met him with Lady Lyell and her sisters in 1853, when I delivered a lecture to a select company in the house.

XLII.

One’s memoirs never seem to end; the more one advances the more one seems to remember. It is like living over again on somewhat easy terms, for a repetition of the reality would by all, if offered it, be respectfully declined, even by those who have passed through it the most smoothly. But this revival of a long life in memory itself is a good; one can set aside and suppress the bad feelings that have had their place in alternate succession, and can so purify being, though too late, as one passes through it over again. We have all had friends, and in thus reviving their recollection we feel how far less stable within us are their failings than their kindly deeds. The models of good men are those who never speak ill of others; there are many such, and in passing once more from childhood to old age we may imitate them at last.

The Duke of Norfolk was a friend of mine, for he sent me game at a time when he did not even know me, with his compliments; the only man who ever did so before or since. This good duke, this most high and puissant prince, resided in a pleasant, not pretentious mansion near Bury, from which he drove in an open carriage with one horse on a Sunday to his Catholic Church. It was said that neither he nor his predecessor, known as Jockey of Norfolk, were acquainted with their near relationship. The duke whom he succeeded was said to have once determined to invite all who were descendants of his house to a banquet at Arundel, but that when the number of claimants reached two hundred, he paused and abandoned his purpose. His next of kin, on whom I am now engaged, was a man of business in the City; had his office, and responded to orders for wine. While thus honourably occupied he had to be looked up, and was credibly informed that he was wanted, not by the law only, but to take over the lordship of Arundel Castle, together with the premier dukedom, besides earldoms enough, and over a dozen baronies; a number of peerages sufficient to constitute a full committee of the House of Lords.

This nobleman thus entered on many homes, but he preferred his own country seat, to which he had been accustomed, to castle and palace, and there, full of years and honours, he suddenly died. His heir had gone by the historical name of the Earl of Surrey, and his grandson by that of Lord Fitzalan; but the latter at the duke’s death assumed the earldom of Arundel and Surrey.

Lord Fitzalan, travelling in the Mediterranean, had fallen ill. He was the guest of Admiral Lyons, and became attached to the daughter of that heroic seaman. This lady, who only died lately, was justly beloved; her charity to the poor had no bounds. A priest at Lymington, who was one of her almoners, told me he could ask her for whatever he saw needed by the poor, and, no matter what the cost, it was given. The present duke is her worthy son.

The residence of the old duke, who lived there now three generations ago, was at Fornham All Saints, in a good park. After his death it was purchased for a young man named Lord Manners, the son of an Irish lord chancellor, and has been resold. This fortunate youth had all his work done for him beforehand. I met him at dinner often at Culford Hall, and I recall my amused state of mind at seeing him lean back in his chair and play with a feather from the dress of a lady at his side, which he peacefully blew up in the air.

In close vicinity to Fornham Park was another, where stood a mansion which, if anything can do so, must last for ever, not because of its strength, but its beauty. This is Hengrave Hall, a proud example, almost unique, of our domestic architecture. It is very fully displayed in Rookwood-Gage’s work, which I was once permitted to devour on the premises. Sir Thomas Gage was the owner, but he was very little there, preferring the society of Vienna to that of his eastern county home. He was of a knightly family, and himself an elegant man of fashion; he represented the elder branch of the Gages, the lord of that name notwithstanding. His ancestor conferred a benefit on his country as durable as sunshine and time, one that every Englishman profits by and enjoys from childhood to old age; he introduced the greengage from Vienna into this country, and it has ever since borne his name.

I was just now speaking of Culford Hall, which the press, no doubt on intimate terms with its present proprietor, Lord Cadogan, and acquainted with all his movements, calls Culford Abbey. It is a modern, monkless building, and the parish was once a lordship of Bury Abbey; nothing more. The place has an exemplary record; it was purchased more than half of this century ago, of Lord Cornwallis’s daughters, by Mr. Benyon de Beauvoir. For several years he spent the rental of the estate, some eleven thousand acres, in rebuilding all its farmhouses and cottages, which done he entailed it on his nephew, the Rev. Edward Benyon. It was, like most of the great dwellings in the county, the home of good company, hospitality, and sport: and for pheasant and partridge shooting Suffolk is not unfamed.

Mr. Benyon had no heir, and the estate went, with another vast property of sixty thousand acres, to the present Mr. Benyon, of Berkshire.

XLIII.

A family with which I was in close intimacy, indeed on affectionate terms, was the Wilsons, of Stowlangtoft Hall. Let those who from their disappointments in life have formed a bad opinion of mankind go among such people as these!

The father of Henry Wilson resided on his estate at Highbury; he had been a great merchant, a calling from which so many great things have emanated in our country, and one which will cease to exist when we reach our socialistic days; for who would give the energy of his commercial genius as a servant of the State, and pile up tens of thousands to enrich Cabinets whose members had better have remained prize-fighters and the like?

Mr. Wilson purchased two baronets’ estates in Suffolk—one of Sir George Wombwell, the historic seat of Stowlangtoft; one, Langham Hall, the property adjoining, of Sir Henry Blake. He also held lands in Norfolk.

Henry Wilson, his son and my kindest and best of friends, resided always at Stowlangtoft; at one time he represented the county in Parliament. He was educated at Oxford, where he made friends enough to last for a lifetime, all of whom, like himself, were thoroughly good men, and many of them fellow-students of Oriel. There was Rickards, who became his rector, a college-friend; and one of those who joined the set of Newman and Manning for a time. There was Porcher, Yarde Buller of Downs,[2] Kindersley, Mozley; nearly all these were guests from time to time of Rickards and Wilson; in fact, the only one I do not recall as having met at the hall or rectory was Newman.

It was a deadly surprise to Rickards when Newman and Manning kicked against the Reformation and became inceptor-candidates for the Papacy. The Church, from its own point of view, may have deemed it fortunate that these two gentlemen took their stroll from Oxford to Rome, or they might have become Anglican archbishops, and have looked the Holy City up later in life.

Sir R. Kindersley was a most genial man, quiet and sensible, like most of those who rise to eminence. He gave his daughter in marriage to Wilson’s eldest son, and Wilson gave one of his daughters to Kindersley’s eldest son, and a daughter by this marriage is now Lady Herschell. Miss Wilson had been long adopted by the Porchers, who wished her and young Kindersley to be their heirs.

Henry Wilson had a large family by his first wife, who was a Maitland. He married a second time, the daughter of Lord Henry Fitz-Roy, a son of the Duke of Grafton. This lady brought him several children. She was a devoted mother to both families; as conscientious a lady as was ever born to fulfil great duties. She not only treated her stepchildren exactly as she did her own, but acquired for them the same affection as she felt for those which she had brought into the world.

Those who knew her may think themselves happy if they ever see her like again.

My first acquaintance with Sir R. Kindersley was at a dinner at Trinity College, which I went to with Dr. J. W. Donaldson, the Greek scholar and philologer. Donaldson was then head-master at the Bury School. It was my good fortune on the same occasion to meet Professor Sedgwick, some of whose anecdotes have served my purpose ever since. A very good one was of a French general who visited England and enjoyed Sedgwick’s attentions, among those of many others. On taking final leave of the general he asked him how he liked the English ladies. After some hesitation the answer came. It was: “I like them very much. They are very beautiful, but they have one great fault; they are too virtuous. Elles sont trop vertueuses.”

I reminded Kindersley of that pleasant dinner when I met him again, and he remembered it well.

Wilson was boundless in his hospitality to his neighbours, poor and rich. Could every parish be under the management of such a squire and such a rector, poverty would cease to be an evil. Wilson may have felt this organically; it may have been under its influence that he desired to establish his family on the soil during succeeding generations. He was an ardent admirer of enterprise and self-aid; he turned his own name into his motto—“Will soon will.”

He was bent on building a mansion on the Stowlangtoft estate, and this he did ultimately on a larger scale than had sufficed for the home of Sir George Wombwell or of Sir Simonds d’Ewes, his predecessors; but not before his father died, who left him a purse of twenty-four thousand pounds a year.

The old Wilson, the London merchant, told me that he met Sir George Wombwell at his bankers’ to pay him the ninety thousand pounds in notes which he gave for the Stowlangtoft estate, and that the baronet stuffed the money into his hinder coat pocket, and so walked away.

The old hall was a very comfortable one, commodious, picturesque. A man does no good to his family in replacing old mansions by new in country places, to which the owner resorts, often, only for the shooting season. This adding on to and rebuilding often ends in disappointment to those who follow later. I saw recently an advertisement in the paper—“To be let, Stowlangtoft Hall, with the shooting over seven thousand acres of land.” My friend Mr. Thornhill, of Riddlesworth Hall, Norfolk, enlarged his mansion, which had sufficed for his wealthy father; he wished his descendants to reside there for generations, but his son has thought differently. I saw an advertisement immediately under the above concerning Stowlangtoft, which ran thus—“To be sold, the property of Sir Thomas Thornhill, Bart., the well-known sporting estate of Riddlesworth Hall.” How little influence can the dead exercise over the living!

We must now speak of old Rickards, a name he had gone by all his life, with the many who loved him. His hair had always been white, his complexion red, and he always blushed heartily when he laughed. He had been a Fellow of Oriel till he wedded Miss Wilmot, a daughter of Sir Robert Wilmot, of Chadsden Hall, Derbyshire, the liveliest, brightest, tenderest, sweetest of women; a girl to the last; and I hope still alive, though all this was fifty years ago. But every one is dead nowadays. Time was when I saw in the paper the death of some acquaintance almost weekly, then it got to monthly, then perhaps once in a year, but never now, for every one I ever knew seems dead and gone. I have a brother left, and a school-fellow and friend;[3] all others appear children.

But how the newly dead who have lived in us half a century and much more still survive and perform their parts within us, still laughing, still blushing, still merry, still sensible and intelligent there, telling us all they ever told us over again: still glad at seeing us, still shaking us by the hand, still bidding us welcome. Yes, the obituary notices of them were premature; they live while we live, they die only when we die.

There is one soothing circumstance, however, attendant on death: we do not miss ourselves when we are dead; not so much even as we do a shirt-button when we are alive!

[2] Afterwards Lord Churston.

[3] H. W. Statham, since dead.

XLIV.

Mrs. Rickards was a pretty creature, her husband was plain, her daughter was plainer, but when one looked at them, in the magic of the moment, they all looked alike,—happy and good. One forgot that beauty existed elsewhere, save as an art.

They were of course constant guests at the hall. Miss Rickards herself painted, baked, and glazed every window in Stowlangtoft Church.

The Rev. Mr. Mozley, well-known as belonging to the Tractarian reformation, was an intimate friend of the Rickards and Wilsons. He was one of three or four who wrote the leaders for the Times. His account of the duty, told only in confidence to private friends, was that he and his colleagues attended at the office every night at twelve o’clock, one day excepted; and that a committee was there, at the same hour, to discuss the subjects of the articles for the day following, and to determine the line to be taken. Then a subject thus selected was handed to each of the writers who were in waiting, in separate rooms.

On one occasion when Mr. Mozley was staying at the hall, a Times commissioner was present at the dinner. He was the bearer of introductions to the various landowners; his mission was to obtain information on subjects connected with the land. He was not what one calls refined, and he spoke with great freedom on the affairs of the journal, not knowing that Mr. Mozley was connected with the Times, but who was greatly amused at this gentleman’s pretended knowledge about the most secret details of the paper.

I was myself of the party, and, knowing the situation, was equally amused, with the rest of the company.

It occurs to me that the commissioner was named Foster. He was sent about the country at the time of the incendiary fires. The circumstance brings to my mind a character living at Ashfield, near Stowlangtoft—Lord Thurlow, grandson of the great chancellor. He was a very shy man, and at the same time very able, being a good chemist. He conversed well, but with diffidence; the researches of Liebig, then fresh, made a strong impression on his mind, and I was able to draw him out, being equally interested in them myself. He had a fire-engine, and whenever a fire broke out, he mounted his engine and took the direction of the flames.

I am chary of introducing the names and places of men who lived only for themselves. There are families without any link between them and the world at large who fill up certain gaps, but when they die they seem to have been even of less use than they were. These are not only in the majority, but they constitute the bulk of the social class.

I must not omit the name of Henry Oakes, the Suffolk banker, who, though not a public man himself, gave his son to the Parliament as a Conservative member. He lived at Nowton Court, the residence of his father before him.

Henry Oakes was of a generous, confiding character in proportion to his means. His son, the borough member, inherited a kindly disposition not only from him, but from his truly amiable mother, the daughter of a bishop; and she, like her husband, was well beloved.

The charming daughter of the house was married to the son of Sir Henry Blake, whose title she now shares, if, as I trust, she still lives.

I have not yet spoken of the Mills family of Great Saxham Hall, which I do now out of pure affection. They were connections of mine by marriage, as were also the Carrighans of the adjoining parish of Barrow. Mr. Mills and Mrs. Carrighan were brother and sister. The Rev. Arthur Carrighan had the rectory; it was in the presentation of St. John’s College, and was once held by Dr. Francis, the noted translator of Horace, and father of Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of the “Junius Letters.”

Carrighan was a student and Fellow of St. John’s, under the name of Gosli—a name adopted by his father as a Sligo man, he reversing the syllables. The history of this singular proceeding is associated with a duel in which Mr. Carrighan, the father, was led to believe he had killed his opponent. He thereupon changed his name, and in an unhappy state of mind wandered over the Continent for twenty years more or less; when, one day, he met the very man whom he supposed had received a death-blow at his hands. On this important discovery he restored his true name to his family.

Carrighan had many charms, but it will suffice to say he was a gentleman and a scholar, which includes all that is good besides. Sir Thomas Watson, his fellow-collegian, was his attached friend; I received the hearty thanks of that great physician for my attention to Arthur Carrighan in his last illness.

When one has been long on the Continent, he no sooner reaches Dover than every woman looks beautiful. How would it have been with him if the first one whom his eyes fell upon had been Mrs. Mills? She had a daughter, Susan, as lovely as herself, who married Mr. Skrine, a considerable Somersetshire squire, whose estates are within a ride of Bath. Susan Mills had a most engaging expression. A neighbouring squire, in his simple way, said, “One can’t help falling in love with her, she holds her head on one side, so pretty!”

I took Mr. Borrow, who was my guest, to Saxham Hall with me to dinner once, but it was the black eyes of another daughter that played their conjuring trick on him. Long afterwards, his inquiries after the black eyes were unfailing. Saxham adjoins Ickworth, and Lord Bristol always found it a very pleasant place of call, on account of the charm which surrounded the family.

XLV.

George Borrow was one of those whose mental powers are strong, and whose bodily frame is yet stronger—a conjunction of forces often detrimental to a literary career, in an age of intellectual predominance. His temper was good and bad; his pride was humility; his humility was pride; his vanity, in being negative, was of the most positive kind. He was reticent and candid, measured in speech, with an emphasis that made trifles significant.

Borrow was essentially hypochondriacal. Society he loved and hated alike: he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince that he felt himself in its midst. His figure was tall, and his bearing very noble: he had a finely moulded head, and thick white hair—white from his youth; his brown eyes were soft, yet piercing; his nose somewhat of the “semitic” type, which gave his face the cast of the young Memnon. His mouth had a generous curve; and his features, for beauty and true power, were such as can have no parallel in our portrait gallery, where it is to be hoped the likeness of him, in Mr. Murray’s possession, may one day find a place.

Borrow and his family used to stay with me at Bury; I visited him, less often, at his cottage on the lake at Oulton, a fine sheet of water that flows into the sea at Lowestoft. He was much courted there by his neighbours and by visitors to the seaside. I there met Baron Alderson and his daughters who had ridden from Lowestoft to see him, and I had a long talk with the judge on wine. Borrow, being a lion, was invited to accompany me to some of the great houses in the neighbourhood. On one occasion we went to dine at Hardwick Hall, the residence of Sir Thomas and Lady Cullum. The party consisted of Lord Bristol; Lady Augusta Seymour, his daughter; Lord and Lady Arthur Hervey; Sir Fitzroy Kelly; Mr. Thackeray, and ourselves. At that date, Thackeray had made money by lectures on the Satirists, and was in good swing; but he never could realize the independent feelings of those who happen to be born to fortune—a thing which a man of genius should be able to do with ease. He told Lady Cullum, which she repeated to me, that no one could conceive how it mortified him to be making a provision for his daughters by delivering lectures; and I thought she rather sympathized with him in this his degradation. He approached Borrow, who, however, received him very dryly. As a last attempt to get up a conversation with him, he said, “Have you read my Snob Papers in Punch?”

“In Punch?” asked Borrow. “It is a periodical I never look at!”

It was a very fine dinner. The plates at dessert were of gold; they once belonged to the Emperor of the French, and were marked with his “N” and his Eagle.

Thackeray, as if under the impression that the party was invited to look at him, thought it necessary to make a figure, and absorb attention during the dessert, by telling stories and more than half acting them; the aristocratic party listening, but appearing little amused. Borrow knew better how to behave in good company, and kept quiet; though, doubtless, he felt his mane.

Lady Cullum was a young woman of high principle; she became a firm friend of Borrow for many years after, looking him up in London when he moved to Hereford Square. Sir Thomas Cullum was a quiet, kind-hearted man; he was the father-in-law of Mr. Milner Gibson, who married his only daughter, born of a first marriage. Gibson was a man of pleasing manners; I remember his saying that parliamentary life enabled one to bear anything of an adversary with temper, except being touched by him.

But I am sorry to say Borrow was not always on his best behaviour in company. He once went with me to a dinner at Mr. Bevan’s country house, Rougham Rookery, and placed me in an extremely awkward position.

Mr. Bevan was a Suffolk banker, a partner of Mr. Oakes. He was one of the kindest and most benevolent of men. His wife was gentle, unassuming, attentive to her guests. In fact, not only they, but their sons and daughters were beloved on account of their amiable dispositions.

A friend of Borrow, the heir to a very considerable estate, had run himself into difficulties, and owed money, which was not forthcoming, to the Bury banking house; and in order to secure repayment, Mr. Bevan was said to have “struck the docket.” I knew this beforehand from Borrow, who, however, accepted the invitation, and was seated at dinner at Mrs. Bevan’s side.

This lady, a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him, said, “Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!” On which he exclaimed, “Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?” On this he fretted and fumed, rose from the table and walked up and down among the servants, during the whole of dinner, and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passage, till the carriage could be ordered for our return home.

Mr. J. W. Donne, the librarian of the London library, and afterwards reader of plays, told me, while he was a resident at Bury, that Borrow had behaved in a somewhat like manner to Miss Agnes Strickland, who, hearing that Borrow was in the same room with her, at a reception, urged him to make her acquainted with her brother-author. Borrow was unwilling to be introduced, but was prevailed on to submit. He sat down at her side; before long, she spoke with rapture of his works, and asked his permission to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.” He exclaimed, “For God’s sake, don’t, madame; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.” On this he rose, fuming, as was his wont when offended, and said to Mr. Donne, “What a damned fool that woman is!”

The fact is that, whenever Borrow was induced to do anything unwillingly, he lost his temper.

XLVI.

The Bullers, a political family, had a son who filled the rectory of Troston, and were often on a visit to him there. They were the parents of Charles Buller, Lord Durham’s secretary in Canada, afterwards member for Liskeard, and the pet of the House.

These Bullers were much of the Lord John Russell set; were friends of the Grotes, the Nussau Seniors, the Thackerays, the Sidney Smiths, the Walshams, and their like, not to mention the Bunburys, all more or less philosophers of the advanced type.

I liked Charles Buller’s company. He was good-natured, moderate in his views, the friend of the opinionated without being conceited himself. He was a fine speaker, but afflicted with asthma, the greatest curse that can befall a rising statesman.

I heard much about Whigism in this circle, and always with disgust; they were too autocratic, too grasping, too well off to obtain the confidence of those who, at a glance, could see behind their scenes.

There was Lord John, who began life as the fool of the family; and this character in the Alabama business reached its highest pitch. He was a sprig of the dukedom, so he did not like that Mr. Delane (the editor of the Times), and would not invite him to his receptions. So that Mr. Delane, who knew his own value, ordered the lord-John speeches in Parliament to be only indicated in brief, not reported. On this Lord John did like that Mr. Delane, and sent him invitations; so his speeches were reported once more in full.

He, too, must be an earl, and what are these beggars on England-back going to do with their titles after all? One would think that a true man would shrink from being mylorded by his filthy valet; but they can bear it!

Charles Buller was a man for every one to love, and he died too soon.

On the whole, Samuel Rickards’s parsonage was the most literary house to be at, though his knowledge was a good deal confined. But he and his wife were open to everything, botany especially, and antiquities. I recollect their showing me an iron ring that had been dug up on the glebe, which had an inscription on it that Rickards could not interpret. It was Bertus beriori. I suggested that it was monkish latin, and might signify A greatest to a greater warrior, assuming it to be derived from berus, berior, bertus, and this pleased him much.

Who, belonging to the days of which I write, does not remember the cheery voice and the bright, handsome face of Tom Thornhill, the son of the first winner of the Derby, and the inheritor of the Norfolk estate, Riddlesworth Hall! Who has forgotten his hospitality, and the famous still champagne, the bountiful stock of which was left by the father, and kept up by the son!

I often stayed at Riddlesworth with the Thornhills; they saw a good deal of company there, both from Norfolk and from town. Lord Sandwich was very fond of talking to doctors, so they said; and he often talked to me. I recollect his saying that his father-in-law, Lord Anglesey, forgot, not unfrequently, that he had only one leg (for the sensation of every part of the body is cerebral), and he would sometimes jump out of bed in the morning as if he had two, and fall on the floor.

I once accidentally met Colonel Keppel, the late Earl of Albemarle, at the same house. I was then staying at Riddlesworth, but there was no company there, when Colonel Keppel was announced. This caused some perturbation, as only a family dinner was prepared. It appeared that the colonel was to be of a party there on the morrow, but had mistaken the day. All, however, went off well; and since, when I heard of the homage paid him on his almost last birthday, as almost the last survivor of the battle, on the field of Waterloo, it recalled to me the charm of his manner and conversation.

At the time his father and brother were still alive, residing at Quiddenham Hall.

What one missed in these great houses was the company of one’s own class, men in the pursuit of literature or science; but such things are of no use in the patrician circles, they would only be in the way. These lords of the soil love horses, carriages, plate, all of which one can see in great perfection in the parks, and at the silversmiths’, as well as in private houses, and the pleasure in any case is but momentary. In justice, however, it must be said that high-class people are often capable of conversing with those who have little to show besides their brains; and are not slow in eliciting information from them. Lord Sandwich was a good example of such; but Lord Albemarle had a naïveté and an intelligence so delightful as to need nothing at another’s hands. Then, a rich aristocracy has opportunities which do not belong to the men who have their money to make. The one class has not to consider in his dealings with others how he can make the most out of them, but is able to be generous; this alone has an ennobling influence. An American made the remark that, many as are the faults of the English nobility, they always kept their promise.

The reason why authors, deserving of encouragement from the intrinsic value of their work, are no longer patronized and brought into notice by the great, is that the influence of the nobility has wholly died out. The literary leaders, great editors, and the like, play but a minor part; they are not enough looked up to by the people at large, who do not understand them. They can confer fame on men among their own select class, but that fame cannot over-leap its boundary, and reach even the intelligent vulgar.

Even the Royal Society, begun by a king, was long afraid to venture in its career with anything less than a royal or noble president, and this within the memory of man; but happily it now runs alone, as do all the other learned bodies in its track.

The truth may lie here—though scientific men are not growing rich, rich men are growing scientific.

I must not leave Riddlesworth without a tribute to Mrs. Thornhill, a lady so conscientious; and that means gentle, kind and full of charity. She was the daughter of Mr. Waddington, of Cavenham Hall, the county member; a devoted mother, a constant friend.

I suppose, like everybody else, except myself, she is dead; that class of people live too luxuriously to last very long.

Mrs. Thornhill’s mother, Mrs. Waddington, was a lady of extraordinary beauty. She was of the Milnes family of which Moncton Milnes was the recent head, a wit and writer who tried to legitimize bad grammar on the liberal principle that every one had a right to do what he liked with his own language. He, too, like the brewers, could not do without being a lord, though already a patrician, which is greater, and which a king cannot create. He was called the “Cool of the Evening,” which must imply that he was a very pleasant guest on a hot summer’s night.

Our country parishes, with their resident squires, are really little republics with the squire himself at their head as president, and the clergyman acting as his prime minister. It is a form of paternal government without the despotism. The parish clerk, humble as he is, fills the office of a secretary of state, the rest are the people. Where the squire lives on his estate, how many of these happy republics may be seen! All the parishes, pretty much, that I have described are of this category, and I hold it beyond human wit to improve them. All are free!

Mrs. Newton of Elvedon was the sister of Mrs. Waddington. The place of that name has since become the property of Duleep Singh. In the time of the Newtons it was no exception to the happily-governed squirearchies of East Anglia.

Two or three places of mark remain to be mentioned, and as many to be omitted, before quitting the subject. One is the seat of the Duke of Grafton, Euston Hall, inherited by the family from Lord Arlington, in the time of Charles II. The duke, who was Earl of Euston when I first knew him, lived much on his Northamptonshire property, but was a good deal in Norfolk too, where his interests were large. He showed me the principal rooms in his fine mansion, which, though large, bespoke great comfort. The drawing-room, which was very long, had bay-windows, with a daïs under each for seats. There is a grand staircase; on one wall of this was hung a portrait of the duchess, mother of the first duke, then seven or eight generations ago, a lapse of time when the bar-sinister had ceased to cross the shield; nevertheless, it was retained in the armorial bearings of the house, and this may be regarded as a proper pride.

I was shown a picture of the hall as it was originally, with gilded pinnacles, but these had disappeared.

The usual entrance was at the back of the building, flanked by the stables; the front entrance was approached through the park gates, which, as was an old custom, were never opened except to royalty.

The duke, regardless of the example set by his ancestors in contenting themselves with a life interest in so fine a property, for the good of those to come, was quite willing to sell Euston if he could have got his price, but it did not change hands.

I was not acquainted with the duke in fashionable life, so I know little of his character there; but I believe he was thought to be eccentric. All I know is that he was a benevolent and kind-hearted president of his village republic. He was married to the daughter of the last Earl of Berkeley—a sister of the famed colonel of that name—a lady of great worth. My acquaintance with the family was professional only; in this way. I had to advise several members of the house, and this sufficed to confirm me in the opinion that the higher you go the greater is the amiability you encounter. It may be good breeding only, but whatever its source may be, it is deserving of admiration.

One more place I will mention in Norfolk to which I was summoned, the seat of Mr. Angerstein. In point of decoration, it was a gilded palace, the most superb in its interior that I had ever seen. I remained there for the night, and had a most agreeable conversation with the head of the house and his two sons, the general and the member for Greenwich.

Some very fine pictures remain in the mansion. The one I was most gratified in seeing was a Rembrandt, the finest almost of that artist’s work; it was a Charles I., on horseback, under an archway. I never met with the equal of this fine painting, except in the equestrian figure of the Duke of Galiere,—Brignole Sale,—by the same hand, in the palazzo Rosso at Genoa.

I remember being told by General Angerstein that his father had always regretted the sale of the pictures to the nation, which was, however, made compulsory by the terms of his predecessor’s will.

XLVII.

As the Lady Abbess of St. Albans might have said, there was an abomination of parsons in the county town; some schoolmasters who were not in clerical practice, but cleric; some in actual service. They did not in those days wear livery as servants, not necessarily apostles, of I.H.S. Two of them I still see talking automatically, faster than they could think; one of these with the nose and mouth of Punch. I still see another, a pale-faced pulpiteer and a screamer; the confidence-reservoir of single ladies turned forty odd; a man who met you with a twirl of his glove by its finger, and a sort of whistling smile that seemed to say to itself, “I have done him before I have begun.” The men did not care for him because what gossip is to some was censoriousness in him; still the women liked him, and thought five of his ten toes were already in heaven.

The parsonics are the only professionals who do not seem able to get their own living by going into practice—they like to be endowed. Some are glad to get a hundred pounds per annum for life; some, doing the same work as they do, bid for two, four, six, eight, and ten hundred; others, with yet less work, accept much more than this; but they have uncles. Why don’t these guaranteed rats set up for themselves in practice like the nonconformists? They would be found churches. Doctors do so, and lawyers. They should obtain the licence like these, then preach what they liked within limits, prescribed by the Royal Church. Doctors do all this within the rules of their royal colleges.

Imagine the great profession of physic endowed, and its baronets, arch-doctors of Canterbury and York, giving away livings to their nephews and nieces: the doctor of St. James’s £1000 per annum, the doctor of St. Giles’s £150. It is a little so with the law—the chancellors, attorney-generals, and judges are endowed, but not so the barristers, except with wit; and what poor creatures would these be compared to what they are, if they had to begin on curacies, and, perhaps, end on them, say of £100 per annum, unless they had influence enough to get themselves made vicars of law, rectors of law, as well as deans of arches?

But no Church has ever reformed itself: non possumus is the motto of them all.

But the Church has got its large fortune safely invested, and in the best order, as if to make confiscation easy. Its proprietary consists of human beings not differing from others, and rich in worldly wisdom. If they really wished to save the Church, they would do their utmost to throw off the State and take their money with them, and reform themselves on the model of the civil service and the army, dividing the revenues into livings of equal amount, to be gained by competitive examinations. But human nature must have its way; it will last their time, and after them the deluge. In two or three more new parliaments they will be too late.

In the present condition of clericism, many do not know what to be at. An intimate of mine who would have liked to steal a spiritual march on me, which no man ever did yet, was a curate of twenty years’ standing, and so far a perpetual one in the sense of being the hireling of vicars and subject to a month’s warning, like the moon. He had subscribed his mite of belief to the doctrine of eternal punishment.

This good personification of humanity had a vivid notion, together with an unwholesome fear, of our modern Hades, formed originally out of a few metaphors of Scripture, and improved by Dantesque and Miltonic talent, though its latitude and longitude is still undiscovered among the heavenly bodies.

This well-meaning teacher, some two or three years after my accident (a leg divided against itself so that it could not stand, and made into two unequal halves at the socket), suggested persuasively that I must have felt very grateful to the Almighty at not being killed outright. But he was so much at fault that I avoided the discussion, and answered, “I am my own chaplain, and transact all my spiritual business myself, under my own frontal bone (os frontis); but should I be in want of spiritual assistance, my inclination would be to apply to the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the Bishop of London as the best authorities in Divine practice. However, not to be over reticent, I may tell you that no sense of future favours as regards gratitude arose in my mind; for we cannot entertain two ideas at once, and mine was to ask myself, as a scientific physician would do, whether my leg was as I last left it, or whether the head of the femur and the shaft had parted company. As to thankfulness at not having lost my life, that would have involved an emotion functionally incompatible with the faintness and pain that got hold of me. The pain has continued; I am taken prisoner by it, and condemned to an armchair for life. Not unfrequently, therefore, I think how much better it would have been for me had I been killed off at once. So you must perceive that your forecast is made without any knowledge of the facts.”

A doctor never gives his opinion of another without being called in; why, then, should a parson? But it was well meant, though deficient in the greatest of delicacies, called tact.

XLVIII.

Among the clergy of Bury was a curate, I think of St. Mary’s, who was named Cookesley. His mother was a school-fellow of my mother at Exeter, now about a hundred years ago! He became intimate with me, and was often my guest. He was a son of Dr. Cookesley, D.D., and a brother of a well-known man who was long an assistant-master at Eton, and was as such spoken of with great favour by Beaconsfield in his novel of “Coningsby.” Afterwards he had a church at Hammersmith, St. Peter’s, and lived in that place, where I knew him, and attached much interest to his acquaintance. He used to dine with me at Alton Lodge, Roehampton, which was within a walk of his house. Cookesley was, above all things, a good fellow, besides being a good scholar and a most amusing companion. He was a sturdy Churchman, and much mixed up with the writers of “Essays and Reviews”—Dr. Temple (now Bishop of London), Dr. Williams, and their set.

I introduce the name here on account of Cookesley having attacked Donaldson’s work, by pamphlet, on the subject of “Jashar,” the name of a Latin book of great pretensions and no authority.

Donaldson, previously mentioned by me, was in many things a good fellow too, but owing to his overweening vanity, which had no repose, he was incapable of the higher virtues. That vanity which stands in the way of friendship, even of truth itself, was his to a degree that may be pronounced abnormal. He wanted to be thought the greatest of Bentleys, the cleverest of Christian Voltaires, the choicest of wits; but a man who is now two-thirds a scholar and one-third a wit may, if very vain, conceive himself to be a Dr. Parr.

I liked Donaldson much, not very much, and as character is of no use after a man is dead, it no longer subserving his human interests, I wish to do him justice, for better as well as for worse, since he was a man to be biographized for the common good. For some years I associated with him almost daily, walked and talked with him, dined with him in many houses, in his as well as my own, knew his thoughts, his opinions, and was conversant with whatever he was about.

His disposition was candid, genial, good-natured. He was a child in his love of fun, and had laughter enough in him to respond to all the humour ever uttered by word of mouth, from Rabelais to Molière. I was going to say he had not a bad heart; I will go further, and say that I am sure he had a good one for an occasion, but not one of a serious and responsible order.

But these excellent qualities were marred in him, not unfrequently, by a vanity which was incommensurable.

I would not undertake to pronounce him blamable in anything he did, said, or wrote; I am a physiologist in judging of good deeds, a pathologist in judging of bad. When I call up Donaldson’s head and face, and see a large, wide, overhanging forehead, big enough to be hydrocephalic, a forehead such as one meets with in cases of epilepsy and in cases of genius alike, I pause before criticising its function; and such was Donaldson’s forehead, while his mouth was the mouth of Punch. Its laugh, almost always silent, seemed loud, and suppressed only to make it last the longer. There was more going on always under that forehead of his than in any half-dozen brains of the common type. Fortunate for him was it that the mental workings are inaudible, or he would have been stunned by his own thoughts; so busy were they at all times, and so noisy.

He was a work of Nature, a thinking and sensitive machine, which set going must work on like the rapidest wheel moved by steam; so rapid sometimes as to acquire invisibility as it revolved before your eyes.

The fly-wheel—that wonderful invention of machinery that carries the largest wheel over the dead point—in him was vanity, and it never allowed its machinery to pause; it was, therefore, quite impossible for it to ask itself if it went wrong when it never stopped. All Donaldson knew about right and wrong was that what he achieved was perfect—that, even if a little wrong, the reason was not quite within reach of vulgar scrutiny.

Cookesley was the first to take unfavourable notice of his “Jashar;” Perowne was the next. Neither wrote of it dispassionately, but this was in no very unkind spirit. Their criticism was as they felt to be just. The origin of “Jashar” was partly told by Donaldson in his reply, but he was not over-candid in his details. From his account he was only going to pursue a course that others had taken: Welcker, in collecting the fragments of Æschylus; Meinche, in doing the same for the Comœdians; and so on for Alcæus and the Lyric Poets, without a thought, he said, on their part of also doing what he had done for Jashar—an omission at which he expressed his great surprise.

Now, the surprise he here expresses is not a real transcript from his memory; the labours of which he speaks he had been long acquainted with. He had himself edited the works of Pindar, with the fragments of his lost compositions; which circumstance would have included him among those at whose shortcomings his astonishment was expressed. But I may say he only imagined himself so astonished, on writing his Præfatio; for I know perfectly well that one evening, when dining with Sir Thomas Cullum, the worthy baronet showed him Knights’s volume, with plates, “On the Worship of Priapus,” and that it so attracted his fancy that he borrowed it and took it home. He showed it to me soon after—it might have been the next day—and told me that he had caught from it an interpretation of a certain text of Scripture, viz. Genesis iii. 8-15.

Out of this, and a certain plate, came “Jashar,” which, whether true or false, scholarly or unscholarly, is a wonderful intellectual feat; and if the subject is susceptible of treatment under new accretions of knowledge, justice must be accorded it as a first and bold attempt. The part relating to the worship of Priapus, which immediately follows the Prolegomena, is a marvellous evolution of the verses cited.

The details would be in place if printed in an anatomical work; perhaps next to that they are best buried in Latin.

XLIX.

It was an easy task for a scholar like Perowne to penetrate Donaldson’s plot, but the marvel is that it should have deceived its author, who had so acute a mind. The pointing out of its obvious fallacies was a vexation, but the replying was a pleasure, and was intended for a fresh literary feat. The worst of it for Donaldson was that the day of invective had gone by; the finest satire that could be written would have remained unread. It was therefore a poor substitute in the case for a sound refutation, which alone could have extricated the offending scholar from his dilemma.

Perowne almost justly accused Donaldson of maliciousness; but I believe that it was boast, an attempt of the criticised to establish his superiority to criticism itself, unaware of the weakness of his weapon, the use of which a century before might have led to his being called the greatest controversionalist of his day; and, though his invective was powerless, he believed that he should be so esteemed in a century to come.

Donaldson had immense merit. While an articled clerk he attended lectures at University College, and, so disclosing a facility in acquiring Greek, went to Cambridge instead of pursuing law any further; and, in the short period of his terms, not only did the work necessary for the examinations, but came out the second classic, beaten only by Kennedy.

Such men should reap all their fame in their lifetime, like men of science. Their names are soon lost in the history of the knowledge wherein alone they survive, unless they are Scotts and Liddells, to be hourly referred to. Donaldson was a lifelong student, impelled by vanity, the motor-power of all noble work, but which, as in his case, often breaks up the brain prematurely. By his “Jasher” and his “Varronianus,” he was accused of striking a blow at the Church. He may have done so against its dogmatists and bigots, but he broke his knuckles even in that slight aim. They would have liked to have received him as Professor of Greek at Cambridge; they told him so, but they did not dare elect him.

Donaldson, as the world goes, was a good citizen, and unexceptionable as a husband and parent. He was not sympathetic; the advancement of friends delighted him as gossip, but did not touch him much within.

He was too active in his movements, mental as well as bodily, to be profound; he had not sufficient pause. Expediency with him did not go against the grain. In matters of religion he was fully aware that, though the thumb-screw, rack, and faggot had fallen into disuse, their office was exercised by public feeling as their successor, through which men stood in terror, not of their lives, but of their living. On these grounds only Donaldson quoted Scripture against Perowne in his controversy with him. This served his purpose, as he had no other moral philosophy to quote. But he did not give the slightest adhesion, really, to any kind of dogma. Science alone will reveal to great and modest minds the truth that the best of men cannot credit themselves with their own goodness They might as well assume that they made themselves; but religion has to teach this to common understandings.

I can assert of Donaldson that what he says in his “Reply” is most strictly true of himself—

“Doubtless it is the duty of Christians to be patient under injuries. But our Saviour has expressly said (Luke xvii. 3), ‘If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.’ On this rule I shall always endeavour to act. I bear no malice against any man in this world. And those who are acquainted with my life, know that, when I have been wronged, I have always been willing to welcome the first advances towards reconciliation.”

I said to Donaldson once, “Why in your laborious efforts do you refute the fallacies of our Church by learned quotation, when they are so obvious to the simplest reason?” His reply was, “You forget that I am a Doctor of Divinity.”

Verily the divines are the most potent of metaphysicians. What beautiful systems have come down to them from the ages that produced a Pythagoras and an Epicurus! They now anticipate all things, interpolating Nature at every point with dogma, to satisfy the desires of the millions in every new generation!

One cannot but admit that metaphysicians are clever, but they have not the active industry of the experimental classes, who realize that there is nothing for them beyond the actual phenomena, although it demands the most effective operation of their intellects to arrange these in the order of their succession.

The why and the wherefore of the universe, and of Nature as its conductor, is, for a very simple reason, quite impenetrable; so completely so that the uneducated peasant will always know as much about it as the president of any learned society.

For the benefit of those who do not quite see this, and who think that things may be one day cleared up, on this one spot, it cannot be too definitively stated what a human intellect is at the utmost, and within what limits its activity lies.

This intellect is a mere organic tool. It can only operate on efficient causes, which here mean the moving functions of a universal machine in full activity already. It can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch; it can set the results of sensation in order, and observe them as a whole, and choose a line of action coincident with them. It is a mere instrument for effecting these ends.

This is the whole story of Nature. She reveals herself as a function, acting continuously before senses which are mirrors; and here lies the absolute limit. She reveals her Efficient Causes without affording the remotest glimpse of her Predisposing Causes.

L.

All know how tired the patrician gets of perpetual country life; and in that one respect I was a patrician. I had seen the things most worth seeing in the leading towns of Europe in my early days; and had a longing to witness how forty or fifty millions of people got on in the new country of Canada and the United States. I had a fancy to see Quebec. I had a grandfather who was on the staff of General Wolfe, and who saw him die. I had a great-grandfather, also a British officer, father of the above, one David Gordon, of Park, who was on duty at Halifax and there met his death and burial. Not that I would cross the waves on these accounts; I simply wanted change, so sought it in New-idea-land, U.S. I went to Philadelphia, thence to Columbus and Galena; from Galena round about, crossing the Mississippi on foot over its admirable winter pavement when boats change places with sledges. Then I went to Boston, thence to Quebec; from Quebec to New York, not to mention all the stoppages at intervening places; from New York, after not a few circumgyrations, I found my way back to London again.

I saw a large portion of the New World; it proved to be exactly what a hundred people had described already, and I do not care to add my account, only to make up a hundred and one American nights entertainments.

My ghost of travel not being yet laid, I took to the waves again and sojourned for a while at Jersey, where I had relatives and friends. At length I settled down in Grosvenor Street, Park Lane; when I was invited to take charge of the Earl of Ripon’s health at his villa on Putney Heath. After a lapse of time, I took a small house in Spring Gardens; later on, I built myself a villa on three acres of park land at Roehampton; then, still later on, I lived for some years at Parson’s Green, Fulham; and after some more movements, in separate years, now to Florence, now to German-Saxony, now to Venice and Rome, which last visit was eighteen years ago, I am settled, perhaps for good, in St. John’s Wood, where I am within an easy distance of Highgate Cemetery; so I hope a one-horse coach will end my journeys.

On looking for the moss I have gathered I find its quantity very small.

At my leisure I hope to fill up the gaps left between the skeleton outlines of my map of life—what remains to be said, extending over the nett balance of my years, of which I seem to have more to say than can reasonably be expected of a man past his eighty-third birthday. But I have been asked to write a memoir, first by one, then by another; by one who has long been, and who continues to be, the greatest master of heart-finding fiction in our time. One comes to me and asks how I get on with it. One reads a portion and calls it interesting; so, in a way, I am urged on with my task.

At Boston I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence; he formerly filled the United States Embassy at our Court. He was gentleman enough to have been an English duke. He had nothing to say about the old country that was not good and admiring, and told me many anecdotes of his own country people while in London.

Remarking on the strict etiquette observed by us, in never addressing a man you are not introduced to, he observed that he sat opposite to another every morning at breakfast in the Athenæum Club, for two years, without their exchanging a word, when, one day a carriage called to take him to a country house, and he found his silent companion already seated in it. In this way they became known to each other and entered into conversation. To give effect to his own story, a countryman of his own, he said, came to England and travelled all over it without introductions, and calling on him he said that he had not been able to speak to any one for months, and being one day on the chain pier at Brighton, he could bear it no longer, and observed to a gentleman there: “It’s a fine day, sir!”

But Mr. Lawrence, instead of condoling with him in his trials, replied: “I wonder at your impudence!”

Mrs. Lawrence did not appear to have been at all Anglicized; she rather looked for perfection in the English undergoing the process of Americanization. Sir Charles Lyell had been a good republican when in the new country, she said, and had greatly improved through his visits, but not so fully as she should have liked; and this she emphasized in good Yankee brogue. I was acquainted with Sir Charles; it was on his introduction that I came to know the Lawrence family; and I never saw a sign in him of such improvement. I was among his friends in Boston; on his introductions I saw Mr. Prescott, but he did not impress me.

My experience of Americans is that they are less advanced in the art of humbug, and therefore more earnest and sincere than the British. They, therefore, perform the duties of friendship with great thoroughness.

An interesting feature of immorality has often struck me: it consists in the never-failing breach of promise made in all the apparent sincerity felt by men who do not fail to keep their word. Such men—I could give the names of many for recognition—are very peculiarly framed. They are contented with the thanks one feels on a kindly proposition being made by them while they are with you; not caring to gather the gratitude attendant on the completion of a promise. I know men who play this skeleton part every day of their lives, and I class them with swindlers.

As one advances in life one gets to know the sowers of this harvest of tares, and to separate them from those of the wheat crops, without fouling one’s barn with the results of their labour; the effect of it being merely amusing at last. What cruelty it can inflict is practised on children and young people. They are born with implicit confidence: to them it acts educationally. It affords them a most thorough teaching of mistrust, which, more than any other branch of education, makes a bad citizen.

Some evils in life are unavoidable, but the training that comes from behind the falsehood habitually worn by an amateur friend is not one of these.

These moral ornaments of the social system have a game of their own to play; they know no other, and they play it with all the finesse exercised over a game of whist.

This recalls Mr. Stillman to my mind, almost the only one of Rossetti’s set whom in this sense I can refer to with unmixed pleasure—Stillman, an American gentleman of high culture, and his faultless lady, a Greek by birth! He is now the Times correspondent in Rome. I have met him and lost sight of him often, and when I meet him after an interval of years, he is always the same kind, attentive friend, though we have no interests in common beyond each other.

It having been made known at Boston that I had certain scientific tendencies, I was invited to deliver a lecture there. It was not the season for such a purpose, but the influence of the Lawrences sufficed to get an audience together of about fifteen hundred. I gave a choice of some subjects, as “The Correlation of Forces, Physical and Vital,” “The Cyclical Phenomena of the Universe,” and “Sleep, Dreams, Somnambulism, Sleep-talking, and the Mesmeric State.” The last subject was selected, and the lecture was received with great politeness by an attentive audience.

I had intercourse with several leading medical gentlemen at Boston, and was treated by them with much hospitality. They have a method of maintaining hospitals peculiarly their own, much of the money being subscribed out of their own pockets—all for the good of their science.

Dr. Warren was at that time the most noted physician in Boston. He gave me some brochures of his writing, one alluding to the reflex actions of the great sympathetic nerve. I found it very suggestive. He had taken the trouble to collect all that had been written on the sea-serpent, and to sift the statements of travellers by sea, with a resulting belief in its individuality.

It was at New York that I made the valued and intimate acquaintance of Mr. Bancroft, the historian, and his lady, a truly noble pair. Mr. Bancroft was a man of universal knowledge. This he showed conspicuously in a lecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but not the contents. Its purpose was to show the rapid and far-reaching advance that science had made up to that day.

I met again at New York that gifted artist, Mr. Lawrence, whom I had known in England. He preceded Richmond, and was his equal in drawing likenesses in chalks—works which are much prized—among them those of Thackeray, Tennyson, and other celebrities.

I visited Quebec, and at Lord Elgin’s, the governor-general’s, had the pleasure of meeting the present Lord Albemarle, then a youth. At the same party I became acquainted with Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, who, later, becoming a writer, I may as well depict the impression he made on me. He was a little man, his manner very gentle and sympathetic, with such amiability of countenance as to leave little room for intellectual expression, though no doubt his abilities fell little short of his good intentions.

I must mention the kindness shown me at New York by the eminent house of Middleton and Co., whose friendship in financial matters I have availed myself of to this day. The family belong to the West Indian islands and are British.

I pass over my explorations in the south and west; they were the same as other people’s, now well known to book-life; but I do not forget that I once walked across the Mississippi, a mile wide, on the ice, from Wisconsin into Minnesota. There is another thing ever to be remembered: while at Philadelphia I was treated with a dish of terrapine, a small sort of turtle, surpassing the gigantic species in flavour to such a degree as to wholly eclipse its merits. Why is it not imported? The very taste of it would raise the feeblest palate from the dead!

It is nearly forty years since I saw the United States: I have had plenty of time to think over what I thought of them then. The enthusiastic admirers of America are men who, being a little eminent before going, receive an ovation on their arrival. These men adore the worthy republicans, write about them, mention their names in print in the order in which they bestowed their attentions on them. If these men who, being a little eminent, went to ever-glorious France and received an ovation, which they don’t, their enthusiasm would alike tingle at the roots of their hair.

The Americans are nearly as good as older states, perhaps better than some. As three hundred years of civilization is, say, to six hundred, in that proportion they are as good as Europeans.

But the greatness of America has to come. Time will be when America, perhaps with Australian lands, will be arbiter of the civilized world—if it likes.

With some exceptions, if we take any one of the United States, it will be found to be monotonous; there is as much variety in an English county as in any one of these.

I compare the United States to a book: it is a new and cheap edition of England in one volume; price, one almighty dollar.

Altogether, there is no difference of moment between the best English and the best Americans, or the worst English and worst Americans.

Lawrence and Bancroft would have made good dukes!

I remember dining with a great merchant at Philadelphia, who told me that after receiving a classical education at the University of Dublin, he emigrated and became a clerk in an American house, and that after a time he saw his way to establish a business for himself, and had realized a large fortune. He told me this that he might add the singular assurance that he never once, in his almost lifelong residence in America, had an opportunity of showing how good his education had been, or of using a single Latin word.

LI.

It was after the good Lord Ripon’s death, which happened only too soon, that I went to Spring Gardens to live, purposing to resume my medical connection with the public, and to continue my duties as physician at the West London Hospital, to which I was attached. It then had not long been instituted, but it is now an extensive and flourishing establishment in a populous suburb, where it is much needed.

Mr. Cowell, a good and chivalrous benefactor of the sick poor, now senior surgeon of the Westminster Hospital, was resident surgeon of the West London at that time; and Mr. Bird, who, in conjunction with his father, was its founder, was one of the surgical staff.

The Countess Dowager of Ripon spent the season at Carlton Gardens, in the family mansion; and, continuing my professional engagement, after the earl’s death, to her, I had the pleasure of visiting her daily.

Lady Ripon was a woman who deserved to be remembered as long as the lives of the good and great have an interest for mankind, and let us hope that may be as long as the human race endures. Her belief was as implicit in a happy future, as it was in the morrow of every day; and she regulated her actions accordingly, as inseparable from the duties devolving on her responsible position.

There are many such women in every class who, if they changed places, would remain the same; but they have not an equal opportunity of making it manifest how true they are. The countess felt her position as the daughter and the wife of an earl; it made her feel the more for those whom circumstances made dependent on her. She had been a great heiress, born to the inheritance of Nocton and other estates, in Lincolnshire; and she firmly regarded herself as appointed by Heaven, or rather entrusted, to administer the large means that belonged to her for the good of those who had a claim on her for support.

When at Stutgard in 1833, during a wide continental tour, not so commonly made in those days as now, I became acquainted with Sir Edward Disbrowe, the British minister, and the other members of the embassy. These were Mr. Wellesley, the eldest son of Lord Cowley, and Mr. Gordon, the eldest son of Gordon, of Ellon Castle. At that house I met Count Pozzo di Borgo, and a young Buonaparte, who was a guest of the King of Wurtemburg.

Mr. Wellesley was quite a young man and very sociable; Mr. Gordon was yet younger, and of very engaging ways. Count Pozzo di Borgo was getting on in life, but very upright, and, with his orders on, made a brilliant show. He was perfectly free in his conversation, and spoke on political matters without any reserve. He remarked pretty plainly, but with a playful naïveté, to the young Prince Buonaparte, who was present, that if his advice had been followed in the days of Elba, the battle of Waterloo would not have been fought.

Some say how small the world is: certainly, in its fortuitous concourse of live atoms. There is not so much room but that many meet after long intervals again. So, after a lapse of some thirty years, the youthful Gordon, whom I knew so well as Sir Edward Disbrowe’s attaché, then as much boy as man, turns up again on a visit to Lady Ripon, with a grisly beard, and a face that showed no marks of having once been young. But this is not all: on a similar visit appeared two young ladies of fashion as daughters of Sir Edward Disbrowe. They were either babes or not born at the time when I knew their father so well.

The Gordons were cousins of Lady Ripon. A Colonel Gordon, the brother of Gordon who was soon to be Gordon of Ellon, was my particular friend as long as he lived. He had retired from active service on returning finally from India, but his desire was to die in the army, though, by not selling out, he was the loser by several thousand pounds.

I would mention one lady in particular, who consulted me while I was in Spring Gardens, because she was the Queen of Beauty at Lord Eglinton’s tournament, besides being the grand-daughter of Sheridan, and the wife of the Duke of Somerset. A beautiful youth, Lord Edward St. Maur, one afternoon drove up to my house and asked me if I would go with him to the Admiralty and see his mother, the duchess. It was on a slight matter affecting her daughter, and she afterwards asked me to see her son, Lord St. Maur. All this was easy work, but I was pleased at seeing another grandchild of Sheridan, for I had known Mrs. Norton over a quarter of a century before.

But the young man, Lord Edward, for him a sad fate was in waiting; more sad than that which later befel his elder brother.

The sons of great houses have few means of distinction, however ambitious, except in politics, which many of them abhor. They are shut out from the nobler professions. Lord Edward, a young man of courage, sought excitement in the jungles of India, and this ended in his being torn to pieces by a tiger.

Having an acute mind, which at all times lay parallel with truth, I was a good diagnostic of disease (agnostics were then in their infancy), and I was able to weigh a good many experiences under one in the same balance. I made this remarkably evident during the last illness of Lord Ripon, which was a very costly one, for all the celebrities in Physic were in attendance at Putney. Perhaps I took an unfair advantage, for I was so absolutely independent in my position that I could give an unbiassed opinion, while the physicians and surgeons, under the influence of expediency, agreed on a still favourable view of the case. That such could happen is the fault of the patient’s friends. If the physicians abandon hope while there is life, others are uselessly called in. After they left, with the assurance that the patient was all right, Lord Goderich and Sir Charles Douglas, who was a friend of the family, asked me to take a turn with them in the grounds, wishing to hear my opinion, which I frankly gave, to the effect that in a fortnight the earl would no longer be living.

But I was wrong, too, in my way, for he lived just seventeen days from that time.

LII.

While in Spring Gardens—this was in 1860—I got together my researches on “The Bones in Scrofula,” which Dr. Baly presented to the Medico-Chirurgical Society, before which it was read, and a very full abstract of it was published in their “Proceedings,” and in all the medical journals of the day.

Lord Goderich, a young man of great promise, then member for one of the Yorkshire Ridings, succeeded his father in the House of Lords, very unwillingly, as he liked the Commons better, and he humorously declared himself disfranchised. Three months later his uncle, Earl de Grey, died, whose title he took, and he then became sole owner of Studley Royal, which before him belonged to the two brothers.

Lord Goderich was married to a young lady who, to save time, I may say was possessed of every charm—animation, beauty, simplicity, humour, a hearty ringing laugh—and these shaped themselves into countless groups, all equally pleasing.

Now that I am unable to visit her, I have her promise of seeing her yet again, from time to time, and this alone is enough to keep me alive.

The present earl, now Marquis of Ripon, soon became a useful public servant under Lord Palmerston, as an under-secretary, first of the Local Government Board, then of the India Office, and rose ultimately to be Viceroy of India, by the Queen’s express wish, her Majesty having known him when he was a child, and the playmate of the Prince of Wales. He has always been in sympathy with the classes beneath him, and his strictly conscientious character affords the clue to every action of his life.

He is a descendant both of Hampden and Cromwell. The head representative of the Cromwell family was Mr. Field, in my time the apothecary to Christ’s Hospital; the next is the Count of Palavicini, of Genoa; and then comes the Marquis of Ripon.

The Fields, I believe, are the same as those of Ozokerit fame.

In London I frequented the laboratory of my old friend, Dr. Marcet, at the Westminster Hospital, where he was the chemical professor; and I attended the meetings of the Chemical Society, which I belonged to, and there met again Dr. Faraday, whose lectures I had followed in early life. I had met him, too, at Brighton, at a scientific meeting. He was then asked to say something by way of an address, which he did, but told us that he was so accustomed to speak with apparatus in his hands, that he found it difficult to say anything without it. At that time I met Mr. Davies Gilbert. Seated by him and talking with him on the advanced state of knowledge, he remarked that all that was known of the sciences in his early days was contained in Boyle’s Dictionary. This was at a dinner given to the great geologist, Gideon Mantell.

During my visit to America, I read before a medical society at Boston a paper “On Vital Force, its Pulmonic Origin, and the General Laws of its Metamorphosis.” It was founded on a lecture that I delivered in 1853 at Bury, at the Young Men’s Institution, of which I was the president. This paper, which showed that carbon was the element out of which this force arose during its combustion at the lungs, was published in an American journal in 1854, and republished in London. This I mention because I was the first to take that view. Mayer saw it later, and I think has all the credit of it. I added to this republication some scientific views of interest, especially one on the water of organization.

While on these subjects I may as well mention that, between the years 1839 and 1853, I contributed largely to the medical press; my papers are noted from time to time in the Directory of those years. In one series that I gave to the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal of the Association, then edited by Dr. Streeter, “A Critical Analysis of the Principal Facts of Disease,” I showed by elaborate experiments that the movement of the blood in the capillary vessels was due to the spinal nerves, and not to the great sympathetic.

In the same series I pointed out the importance of taking the temperature of the body, internal and external, in disease, and constructed tables for noting the variations, and this at a time (about 1840 or 1841) when the thermometer had not come into use in medical practice.

I would allude here to a physiological inquiry made by me, and which occupied much of my time for twenty years or more, on a grammatical subject, that of the sequence of sound in speech, with the laws of diphthongism and accent.

There is another work I would make a record of, it is unpublished, “A New Cosmogony.”

Stray papers, published or unpublished, I need hardly note, except one on Drapery, which sculptors and artists would do well to study. It was published not so very long ago in Merry England, a monthly magazine.

I have already alluded to the resuscitation of my work on Varicose Capillaries by the Pathological Society; it had been in a state of suspended animation for fifty-one years.

LIII.

Circumstances connected with the increasing delicacy of Lady Ripon’s health brought me into nearer relations with the family, and although I kept up my own establishment, I lived much at Putney Heath. I may say I was made a friend of by this good lady, whom it was a pleasure to serve, and was engaged by her often in matters pertaining to her private life. She liked me sometimes to visit Nocton, her paternal home, and report to her of people and things which, on account of her inability to visit the place herself, were drifting from her, though her interest in them was unbroken.

She was gifted with a very fine intellect: she had been carefully trained in her childhood, and given all the knowledge that is becoming in a woman. She had a natural wit, and her conversation was much to be desired, full of anecdotes on past events in which she had taken part. When I came to know her she lived retired, at the same time exercising hospitality without limit towards many pleasant guests. When she returned from Carlton Gardens to Putney Heath for the winter, I found it difficult to go to and fro from town, so I settled down at Roehampton, which was near. Among those who visited her were Sir Charles and Lady Douglas and Mrs. Charles Lushington, sister of Sir Stafford Northcote, all very old friends, and these would be with her for the week or month together. Lord and Lady de Grey, too, were, of course, much with her.

At this time George Borrow, having sickened, like myself, of the charm of country life, was living in Hereford Square; so we met again and had many dinners together, and as many pleasant walks; these chiefly in Richmond Park, which my home overlooked, being close to the Robinhood Gate.

While at Roehampton I accidentally made the acquaintance of Dr. Robert Latham, the grammarian; not exactly a nice person to see much of, though a good companion, and one overflowing with every sort of knowledge.

While at Roehampton, too, it was that I called on Rossetti. I saw him then for the first time, and was received by him very warmly, so much so that he accepted my invitation to dine with me the next day, and many hours were passed in conversation of the most exhilarating kind.

A generation before, Rossetti had written to me regarding my “Valdarno, or the Ordeal of Art Worship,” then appearing in Ainsworth’s Magazine.

Before that visit to him I had returned to Poetry, my first and last love, having plenty of leisure, with my imagination unemployed. Spending some weeks at Nocton, where I went by Lady Ripon’s request, to look over her beautiful estate and visit the tomb of the late earl, I was often of a morning in the ancient wood, revelling in it for hours, the ground covered with hyacinths and lilies of the valley, the stock doves pouring out their sweet notes from every bough. It was there, to commemorate my visit, that I committed to paper my pastoral poem of “The Lily of the Valley,” which will take any one who reads it into Nocton Wood.

“Old Souls” I wrote while staying in Lady Ripon’s house at Putney: Mrs. Lushington and her beautiful family of daughters were guests. One Sunday, on returning from church with her to lunch, the idea of that poem crossed my mind, impressed by the finely dressed crowd that was chatting and laughing on the way to the fashionable villas in Wimbledon Park.

These two poems were the beginning of a volume named “The World’s Epitaph,” which was printed anonymously and distributed at random among friends and strangers, as well as editors of the press, and apparently it attracted no sort of notice, except from the librarian of a Cambridge college, who said that he had made it his companion during a pleasant tour.

I have forgotten the name of this gentleman, and of his college, but I will one day try to recall it. I must have distributed over a hundred copies.

One copy, sold at W. B. Scott’s sale, the words “D. G. Rossetti, with the author’s compliments,” written on the title-page, found its way into a bookseller’s, who advertised it in his catalogue, price eight shillings and sixpence. A relative of mine, who called to see it, was informed that it had been purchased for the library of the British Museum.

Evidently Rossetti had lent the volume to Scott; in his keeping it shared the lot of so many borrowed books, in being never returned.

A literary celebrity once pointed out to me four hundred books on his shelves, all of which, he said, had been borrowed.

Mr. Buxton Forman told me only the other day (Nov. ’91), that he was one evening at Madox Brown’s, when Rossetti entered in a state of excitement, with the “World’s Epitaph” in his pocket, which he produced, and did little but talk about “Old Souls.” It must have been the copy of which I have spoken, dated 1866, a beautifully printed little book from the press of Woodfall and Kinder.

Dr. R. Latham was good enough to send some copies of the book to his friends, and they took it as his in their reply, which he regarded as too good a joke to disturb.

LIV.

Latham was a singular anomaly of our organization. No one could help liking and disliking him. He was logical in mind, illogical in action. As captain of Eton College, he became a Fellow of King’s, and before long was the greatest authority on English grammar. He was Physician to the Middlesex Hospital; he was Professor of the English Language at University College. He dressed like a respectable clergyman. Then, from being a great man, he gradually became a little man, and dressed like a clergyman of a less reputable type; his white necktie unlaundressed, his fine chin ill-shaven, his black coat unskilfully brushed, if at all; but his eye and tongue continued in full practice for satire or fun. Unable to finance in his own affairs, he thought his true function in life would have been that of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that he had so missed his mark. A common saying of his, with an earnest look and his hand on a friend’s shoulder, was, “Will you lend me a sovereign that you will never see again?” An acquaintance of his, feeling touched at his outward display of poverty, almost amounting to boastfulness, inwardly gifted as he was, on putting gold apologetically on his table, received the reply: “I am glad you are in a position to do it; what may your income be?” Another, treating him similarly, heard a laugh, with the words, “It is very nice to put your hand in your waistcoat pocket and do that. What income tax do you chance to pay?”

Nature ought not to put such organic prescriptions through the process of being dispensed.

He was heir-presumptive to a fine landed property, the reversion of which he sold for a sum not larger than a year of its rental. The heir-apparent died, and the estate fell in, never to reach him. His wife said she thought it a pity to have lost the property as he had done. He answered, “But, my dear, you cannot say you have lost what has never been yours!”

Like a good chancellor of the exchequer, he had the habit of assessing people’s incomes at a guess, for the purpose of determining what they ought to give towards the subscriptions so constantly on foot for his benefit.

Latham once made the effort to ask Mr. Gladstone for a pension. The minister said that it was a matter resting with Lord Palmerston, the premier, who was very jealous of his rights, and advised the applicant to state his claim in the proper quarter.

On this, Latham let the subject drop, when some time afterwards he received a notice that he was placed on the civil list for £100 a year, and received, according to custom, the amount in advance.

His difficulties occupied the attention of many, and he was made more easy in his circumstance as age overtook him; but on his pension being alluded to, he related, as a joke, that he had sold that before its first year had expired.

Latham had a very handsome person, with a smiling, knowing look, the most knowing I ever saw.

He was decidedly of a kindly nature: fond of his family, genial to excess, recognisant of his friends. He was probably spoiled by falling into the worst habits of college life, instead of the best.

Nothing that I have written would offend his shade. He was proud intellectually, but he abandoned position, and, I really believe, purposely exhibited himself as poor, when he would walk home with a cabbage balanced upon his arm. It was meant as a reproach to the world, on which he had so decided a claim.

One day Latham called on me and brought Mr. Theodore Watts with him, an old friend of his, and the son of a yet older friend. Watts and I came into concord on the same octave, and we soon attuned ourselves in friendly duets.

Later on, George Borrow turned up while Watts was there, and we went through a pleasant trio, in which Borrow, as was his wont, took the first fiddle. The reader must not here take metaphor for music. Borrow made himself very agreeable to Watts, recited a fairy tale in the best style to him, and liked him.

This was not their only meeting, for both came often to my house, from which we strolled for an hour or two into the park—strolls deserving of remembrance, as shown in sonnet form by me in my “New Day.”

Latham wanted much to meet Borrow at my table; I told him it would not do. He said he would be on his best behaviour, and promised to say nothing that could offend the most sensitive.

I proposed it to Borrow; he was willing, and they met.

All, like most things else that are planned, began well. But with Latham life was a game of show. He had to put forth all his knowledge of subjects in which he deemed Borrow an adept. He began with horse-racing. Borrow quietly assented. He showed off all he knew of the ring. Borrow freely responded. He had to show what he knew of publishers, instancing the Longmans. Borrow said, “I suppose you dine with your publishers sometimes?” It was Latham’s opportunity; he could not resist it, and replied, “Never; I hope I should never do anything so low. You do not dine with John Murray, I presume?” “Indeed, I do,” said Borrow emotionally. “He is a most kind friend. When I have had sickness in my house, he has been unfailing in his goodness towards me. There is no man I value more.”

Latham’s conversation was fast falling under the influence of wine; with this his better taste departed from him. “I have heard,” he said, “that you are a brave man over a bottle of good wine. Now, how many bottles can you get through at a sitting?”

Borrow saw what the other was; he was resolved not to take offence at what was only impertinent and self-asserting, so he said, “When I was in Madrid, I knew a priest who would sit down alone to his two bottles.”

“Yes,” replied Latham, with his knowing look, and his head on one side like a bird, “but what I want to know is, how many bottles you can manage at one sitting?”

“I once knew another priest,” said Borrow. “It was at Oporto; I have seen him get through two bottles by himself.”

By this time Latham was a little unsteady; he slipped from his chair as if it had been an inclined plane, and lay on the carpet, on which he made his mark as betokening more than nausea. He was unable to rise, but he held his head up, with a cunning smile, saying, “This must be a very disreputable house.”

Borrow saw Latham after this at times on his way to me, and always stopped to say a kind word to him, seeing his forlorn condition.

LV.

It must have been in 1871 that I made the acquaintance of Rossetti. This was some time after Lady Ripon’s death, on which I visited my married daughter in Germany, but finally returned to Roehampton. It was then that I called on the poet-painter, as described. After dining with me, he was so good as to send me a note, in which he said he should like to ask some of his friends to meet me at dinner. In reply, I said that it would be a pleasure to me to dine with him, but begged him not to inconvenience himself on my account, as it would suit me at any time to visit him.

On the day finally fixed there were many at dinner, and as many later. Many of these, at the time, had good positions as editors, writers, and painters. W. B. Scott was at the table, also Mr. Sidney Colvin, Mr. Joseph Knight, Dr. Hüffer, Mr. William Rossetti, and so on; and in the evening, Dr. Westland Marston, Mr. O’Shaugnessy, Philip Marston, Madox Brown, Dr. Appleton, a wife or two, and not a few besides.

Some of these have increased in fame since then, some are dead, some are forgotten. Madox Brown, a painter with a fine historic imagination, flourishes still.

Rossetti’s topic was still “Old Souls;” Scott was his echo. They said it was a subject that could never be written on again.

At this date Rossetti’s poems were passing through the press, and I had a bundle of verse myself ready for it.

I was very much moved by the contents of Rossetti’s volume. I still admire it much, but with a severer criticism than then.

I could say much of Rossetti’s later life, but am compelled to omit all such details, for they are intimately mixed up with illness, which to a physician the witness of it, is sacred ground. Then again, friends are bad biographers, because they know too much and cannot shape the character to that ideal which those personally unknown to a great poet might expect.

Rossetti’s intellectual force was not of a striking order, but it was adequate; his charm lay in the artistic colouring of his mind, arrayed as it was in the fascinations of a Provençal attire. This is very different to the charm in which Nature invests her lovers; and yet it is so bewitching as to claim a rivalry, and to almost appear the subject of her inspirations in some enchanted guise.

I had heard that paintings were leaving Cheyne Walk, such as in colouring had not been seen since Titian lived; and, with a claim on his acquaintance, I was induced to visit him.

What Reynolds’s faded works once were we no longer know, but when I saw Rossetti’s paintings I was reminded of what was said of one—the Infant Hercules, sent to Russia—that it looked as if it had been boiled in brandy.

It is a pleasure to me to think that I was once a comfort to Rossetti in his trying illness. I went to him on his summoning me to Scotland. I passed six weeks with him there; first at Stobbs Hall, afterwards outside Crieff, to which place, among others, I travelled to find him a suitable abode. I walked with him by day, I sat at his bedside by night, relating to him the history of almost every one I had ever known, and by diverting his mind from itself, I left him comparatively restored.

If he forgot all this, it was no fault of his own making; his illness never fully subsided. But I was among the favoured still who had known him in his best days, and was appointed to serve him in his most trying hour.

I can further say that when I saw Rossetti in his prime, a healthy man, he was the noblest of men, and had a heart so good that I have never known a better, seldom its equal.

Illness changed him, but then he was no longer himself.

Taking Rossetti’s pictures and his verse together as one, he was a great poet; his poetics and paintings help each other, as did Blake’s in a vastly inferior degree, but their separation shows faults in each with distinctness. When one reads his poems, one thinks of his paintings; when one looks at his paintings, one thinks of his poems; whence the charm that surrounds all his work.

The celebrity that awaited Rossetti’s poems among critics was latent in his paintings, which were already famous for their emotional colouring and fine portraiture of women; and, being in intimate social relation with many leading members of the press, his poetical pretensions were accepted by acclamation. Then he had a powerful clientèle among buyers. Those who possessed his pictures were very ready to receive and admire the poems of their favourite artist, and to push them about in the fashionable and the wealthy world, as the works of the poet-painter, a title rarely obtained, so many gifts does it imply.

It was this that at once secured him his deserved success. He had published the “Blessed Damozel,” one of the poems on which his reputation rests, when a young man unknown to art, and it attracted no attention in the world at large; for justice is not done to merit of any kind unless it can pay its way.

The “Blessed Damozel” may be characterized as a drawing with tender descriptions of convent life, with the Virgin Mary as lady abbess; the whole lifted into remotest space, where lies the boundary-line of Heaven; the damozel being a sort of nun living among the holy, while all her reflections are human; the burden of them from first to last on love for an absent one, without whose presence she can find no happiness in her purgatorial heaven. It reads like the suggestion of a picture done in mediæval times—as old as the court cards in the pack used by players—at a period when the glory of saints and of christs was symbolized by a sort of curtain-ring round the head, or by circular fireworks which emitted sparks in perpetual corruscation.

I do not feel that the antique moulding of this poem is a fair excuse for its being illogical in places. The sun was so far off that it was scarcely visible—say two billion miles or so, like Uranus or Neptune; but that it looked like a bridge, is a simile that cannot be made suggestive of any round body save the moon. That she can see the earth spin like a fretful midge, does not please the logical understanding, when that body is at least as far off as the scarce-visible sun. We are comparatively close to our neighbouring orbs, Venus and Mars, which do not exhibit the slightest motion to our eyes—how then should a world as remote from the damozel as Uranus is from us be seen in motion?

We are made to realize that the “Blessed Damozel” is of flesh and blood; she stoops and bends forward until her bosom makes the bar she leans on warm. But the souls mounting up to God were spirits; they passed by her like thin flame. This does not show the logical consistency which poetry demands even more rigidly than prose.

The poem is strictly sentimental. The one feeling of love-longings runs through every stanza.

The subject was painted for Lord Mount Temple. I have not seen the work, but doubtless it is composed of the three first verses of the poem, which must have been painted on the author’s mind long before it reached the canvas. The poem, which is not very musical or imaginative beyond the motif it carries out, has a great charm for many. It is simple in diction and emotional, and a merit not often found in Rossetti’s love poetry is its spiritual character, the lover not being near to incite the girl to passion of the naked kind which pervades his sonnets.

The author cannot be said to exhibit himself personally in this poem, nor in the other with which his fame is equally bound up, namely, “Sister Helen.” Both appear to tell their own story, which is the perfection of narrative, a truth which critics cannot too forcibly insist on. It is no easy matter for a writer himself to appear beautiful in the midst of his beautiful verses, unless his subject and its treatment is of the most elevated kind, as in Coleridge’s “Love,” which is so deliciously pure, and in the first verse or two of Wordsworth’s “Intimations.”

LVI.

A subject overwrought, like the sermon of a Calvin, must verge on the satanic. The poem of “Sister Helen” escapes this only through the pangs of hate being mollified in every verse by the despairing, heart-broken utterance of a refrain addressed to the Virgin Mother, and poured out in the agony of a once-religious, still-believing, soul, wailing with a bitterness which nothing can soften—an eternal hatred of her seducer; nothing short of seeing him in the flames of hell,—willing herself to suffer in them a torment that is only less than her thirst of revenue.

That she should breathe forth all this in a subdued voice of sorrow in the ear of the blessed Mary Mother is almost too touching for perusal; yet the pathos of the situation is even further enhanced by the tender and sad replies she gives to her innocent little brother, from whom she struggles to conceal, almost vainly, the anguish of her heart and its wicked aim. The refrains, for the most part full, are not always equal to the occasion, but might easily have been so rendered by so feeling a writer.

Of course the time must come when the poetry of England is melted down and merged into an anthology, and it is probable that the “Sister Helen,” as being the strongest emotional poem, as yet, in the language, will be among the most lasting works, and escape dissolution for a long time to come; perhaps will survive all change. And here a very remarkable fact thrusts itself before the mind; a representative one, which is that if Rossetti had written not another line besides this poem, his genius would have appeared all the greater: for lesser work is a fatal commentary on greater.

All suffer from this comparison with themselves except Gray, who wrote so little; and even he, after his Elegy, is scarcely saved the self-reproach.

Rossetti, in his writings, did not exercise much imagination, and none of the philosophic kind, by means of which the idea ascends, metaphor above metaphor, as high as the perspective of thought can attain. He did not look to musical sonance in his metre and his choice of words. He did not realize that love, to be acceptable in verse to the higher orders of mind, must be spiritual and chaste, that when carnal we possess it only in common with the beasts of the field. He could not have put on canvas the scenery of his fifth sonnet for exhibition, except in contravention of Lord Campbell’s Act.

From what I have read of his sonnets in his first edition, the vehicle of expression which such composition should formulate was beyond his reach. Above all other forms it demands the philosophic imagination, which scarcely any poet has enjoyed, because its possessors revert to science, as being within their compass, and as subject to higher reward. In Rossetti’s sonnet the expression of the thought rises no higher than its first statement, it has no grand climacteric. His imagination, in fact, was introspective rather than retrospective, and was scarcely prospective at all.

Rossetti was a charming companion: he spoke well and freely on all subjects, literary and artistic, and with much knowledge of contemporary writings. His studio was a favourite resort of men whose names were on title pages, to whom he showed the work he had in progress; and, to his intimate friends, he would sometimes read a poem in a rich and sonorous voice. He had a very just mind. When an author was discussed, whatever might be said against him, he would insist on his merits being remembered. From rivalship and its jealousies he was absolutely free, and his hospitality was without limit. Above all, he was ready at all times to serve a friend, and to exert his influence to that end.

Interesting as Rossetti must always be to a large section of society, I have not considered myself justified in entering at any length on his domestic life, intimately as at one time it was mixed up with my own. Still, without impropriety, I may rest lightly on it, in such manner as to contribute some touches towards the picture of a man whose influence on art will last longer than the canvas on which his ideas are so brilliantly spread. I, therefore, propose to myself the task of narrating my visits to him, in Perthshire, and afterwards at Kelmscott, and at Bognor.

One morning I visited him at Cheyne Walk, when I saw that the restlessness of the past night had pursued him into daytime. Qualifying his request with an expression of great regard, he asked me not to stay. His medical attendants were consulting in another room: I joined them there, and told them that my house at Roehampton was open to Rossetti if they decided that he needed change.

On the same evening, in company with his brother and Mr. Madox Brown, he came to Roehampton, and I remember well his saying, as he sat in my quiet drawing-room, that he was enjoying what he had so long ceased to feel, and that was peace. He sat up late in conversation with his brother on various family matters, but his night was the most troubled one that he had hitherto passed through. The next day he was visited by his mother, and other members of his family, his medical attendant from town preceding them. Miss Rossetti, the gifted author of “The Shadow of Dante,” and her brother, took a walk with me in Richmond Park, while the mother remained with her son.

Mr. Madox Brown joined us later, and the party left the invalid in the evening.

But when the mind is restless, a sick man imagines there is relief to be found in change, and, after a few days, Rossetti returned to town, not to his own house, but to that of Madox Brown, where I saw him again, his restlessness unrelieved.

He had a good friend in Mr. Graham, the member for Glasgow. That gentleman rented two sporting seats in Perthshire, and he placed them at the disposal of Rossetti, who then went to Scotland. But he soon moved from one of these mansions to Stobbs Castle, the other, a place belonging to Lady Willouby de Eresby. While there he felt the want of my assistance, and urgently requested that I would leave without delay. I had a garden-party for the next day from London; this I left to my housekeeper and sons to conduct, and went by the next train.

W. B. Scott and Madox Brown, two faithful friends, were at the castle, ministering to their brother artist. My son George, who had finished his terms at Oxford, and had no present engagement, was there too, and I found all so far satisfactory that Rossetti was contented, enjoying the quiet which was not to be found in his own home.

Stobbs Hall is an ancient inheritance of the Drummonds, a solitude on the heights over-reaching the Tay, with a parapet wall and a Dutch garden, in which is a sundial erected on masonry, which might have been there before the invention of clocks. Below and to the right is a fine reach of the river; on the opposite side is a vast plain of cornfield, planted at intervals, and stretching on northwards to the forest and Grampian hills. On that side, the lords Mansfield enjoy the salmon fisheries; their lands extending eastward to Scone Palace. The two families take it by turns to fish both sides of the river.

Any one wishing to read an account of this scenery in poetic form, can turn to a sonnet called “Rest,” in “New Symbols.”

Scott and Brown soon left the castle, a place with not too much furnished accommodation. Over the mantelpiece, in the one sitting-room, hung a framed set of verses by Drummond, the Scotch poet.

It was not very long before Rossetti’s occupation of the place came to a close. He was fast improving in health; he took long walks, but without any enjoyment of the scenery which was made romantic by water-fall and splashed leaves, ever fresh, the elastic boughs bending under the weight of a torrent. So far recovered, he desired to remain in Perthshire, but still craved for the utmost solitude. In search of such a home I took the train to Perth, visited St. Andrews, returned to Perth, and proceeded to Crieff, where I remained for some days and scoured the environs. At last it occurred to me to call on the leading practitioner, Dr. Gairdner, and was directed by him to a farm-house two or three miles from the town, on the river side. The house had every requirement, and was kept by a lady-farmer, whose manner and person had every agreeable trait. On this, I telegraphed to Rossetti and my son to follow me at once to Crieff, and at the right time I met them at the station there, and we drove to the new home.

It was a pleasant spot, with a walk into Crieff by the river-side, down to a wilderness of waters. There was plenty of mountain scenery in view, with pine forest to the summits, and lake not remote; not to forget the sky-threading mists and the abundance of water from above. Descriptive of this aspect is my sonnet called “Unrest.” Rossetti rapidly improved in health, stumping his way over long areas of path and road, with his thick stick in hand, but holding no intercourse with Nature. It was not long before he summoned his assistant, with the implements of his art, and he was once more happy.

At this time he made a chalk drawing of me, and one of my son.

The first of these was reproduced in a volume of sonnets, called by me, “The New Day.”

The portrait of George was somewhat peculiar; the neck was outstretched, and the expression was heightened by the face being free of hair, which elicited from Latham one of his quaint remarks. He gazed at it for some time with his head like a connoisseur’s on one side; then said, “Yes, a South American slave-driver, who had returned to Portugal to be shaved.”

There are very few male portraits by Rossetti: the only three others are one of Mr. Stillman; one of a youth, in his large picture of Dante’s Dream; and one of Theodore Watts, which is a very good one, but more vivacious than the original, and there is more of the military air than was ever assumed by that peaceful citizen, which makes him look at least a lieutenant-colonel.

As a domestic trait, I would mention that Rossetti was very hearty at all times over his meals. He would wear out three knives and forks to my one; and to me, whose breakfast seldom exceeded one cup of coffee, his plate of bacon, surrounded by eggs that overlapped the rim, was amazing. I may further truly say that he, not being a believer in physiological things, did not regard tea as possessing the attributes of Totality.

While at this farm residence, he read with great eagerness and delight the newly published life of Edmund Kean.

By a careful treatment of him I procured him good nights, effecting this object chiefly by remaining at his bedside and draining my memory of every anecdote I had ever heard, and relating to him every amusing incident that I had encountered during life in my intercourse with the world.

Finding him so well recovered, I left him in the hands of his assistant and of my son, after an absence of many weeks.

Towards the end of the year—it was 1872—Rossetti, with my son, left Scotland and proceeded to Kelmscott Manorhouse, which he tenanted with his friend Mr. Morris. I visited him there, and found him in good health and spirits, after a journey spent, as I heard, with great joviality, the travellers taking a third-class carriage to themselves. He was already settled down to his art in a pleasant studio, loving to talk while he painted; at other times deep in the works of Dumas. In the afternoon he took vigorous walks in the meadows which one after another stretch out in front of the mansion.

The next day we went over the house and grounds. It is an old place, with its seven or rather twelve gables—such a sample of antiquity as you don’t meet with often. The windows are square casements with stone mullions, and the walls very thick. The garden has its yew-tree hedges, cut into fantastic shapes. The river is flooded like a lake, so that old Thames don’t know itself again. It is a most primitive village that surrounds the place—a few scattered free-stone habitations, some ivy-covered. There are no neighbours to interfere with the liberty of the subject.

George was a good boatman, and he often rowed me up the river, which half-way was spanned by an elegant arched bridge, and bounded further on by a weir. The scenery was very satisfying: on the left bank one overlooked a gay meadow, the cattle crowding to the bank to stare us out of sight; on the other side were lofty trees, while in midstream we had often to cut our way through islands of weed. The memory of this and of a later visit to the place was embodied in a poem, which I called “Reminiscence,” in which the scenery lives.

I found opportunities of talking with Rossetti about Mr. Theodore Watts, whose acquaintance I wished him to make more fully, for I had already introduced them to each other. While leading a country life Watts had not only acquired a knowledge of books, but had written poetry, and had thought out many literary problems for himself.

The Manorhouse was adequately furnished, but some exquisite chalk drawings, one especially, of female heads, gave it a charm. I thought that no one ever could paint a woman’s eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere but in living beings, and that how rarely!

Rossetti was unwilling to separate himself from George, and I consented to his retaining him as his secretary, for such a one was very necessary to him at that time.

I saw Mr. Morris at Kelmscott, and afterwards in society; he was inscrutable then, and has since been inscrutability in his career. W. B. Scott was also there, and when I left it was with him. Like his countrymen, he practised an exemplary carefulness in money matters, a habit which makes every Scotchman well off. In the train he counted his money with the dry remark, “One does not save anything by making a visit to a friend!”

A letter from my son George, dated December 19, 1875, written at Aldwich Lodge, Bognor, begins by a rejoicing to hear that I had accepted Rossetti’s invitation to spend Christmas with him at the seaside.

I sometimes look at the bottom of an antique silver snuff-box, a reservoir more than two hundred years old, the lid of elephant’s tooth, and I read—

“T. G. H.,
from
D. G. R.,
1875.”

A memorial to me of better things than an old-fashioned Christmas gathering.

And I use this snuff-reservoir every day; it affords me nasal recreation.

Snuff-taking did not go out with the pigtails, but it is on the wane; it has given way to smoking: and diminished is the number of gifts, such graceful objects for monarchs to present to men like myself—if they did but know me!—of platinum or golden boxes set in diamonds. And would you know the reason of my persistence in taking snuff? It not only wakes up that torpor so prevalent between the nose and the brain, making the wings of an idea uncurl like those of a new-born butterfly, but while others sneeze, and run at the eyes and nose, my schneiderian membrane is impervious to weather, or, to be explicit, I never take cold in my head.

Bath was my tarrying-place when Rossetti’s invitation came to me, and I went to Bognor. The great poet-painter occupied a commodious villa and grounds in a lane, west of the town, and near to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.

Rossetti had packed his house. Mrs. Rossetti, the mother; Miss Maria and Miss Christina, the sisters; Misses Polidori, who were the aunts; and Watts, who was the friend, were there, together with my sons, Edmund and Henry, for the festive week. The villa had good rooms; upstairs was a gallery with bedchambers on both sides, and ending in a large apartment which became a studio. There Rossetti worked, and liked to be read to while he improved his canvas, till the afternoon, when he took a violent walk over the boulders by the sea, towards Selsey Bay, among the ruined wooden groynes which had become seaweed gardens, hideous of aspect, as if invented and laid out by fish made man.

I walked with Rossetti daily over this penal shore, reflecting on absent pleasure, he unconscious of present pain. He talked but little while his feet crunched the boulders, and took no heed of the aspects of the scene, but seemed to be stamping health out of what was left unused for the six days’ creation.

Mrs. Rossetti was a sweet lady, and Christina, who still lives, a higher poet than her brother, is of the noblest brand. The family, one and all, are almost purely Italian. The father, a poet, was a Neapolitan; the mother was a Tuscan, with some Scotch blood. Rossetti may be regarded, not as English, but as one of those powerful leavens with which the genius of one country sometimes ferments that of another, to give it a new vitality.

Watts, who was now on terms of brotherly intimacy with him, bore him through any passing difficulties that needed only better guidance than his own.

That holiday was made cheerful, less perhaps by the host himself than by his guests. In truth, I saw regretfully that Rossetti was much unstrung; as so many do, even when in health, he got tired of his visitors, and ere long the party dispersed.

LVII.

Circumstances brought me into intimate association with Mr. Noble, a most excellent and useful sculptor. He was employed in producing a recumbent statue of Lord Ripon. This memorial figure was placed in Nocton church, the more welcome there since the structure, a design of Gilbert Scott, was due to Lady Ripon’s bounty. He also made a fine bust of the deceased earl, all of which work was done by order of his devoted countess, whose name and the date of whose death are inscribed on the tomb beneath his.

During the lifetime of the good Lady Ripon, I spent several weeks from year to year during the summer at Nocton Hall, by her wish, having some of my family with me, and, on one occasion, the boy Lord Goderich. During these visits I looked well over the estate and reported my observations, or any suggestions for changes, with Lord de Grey’s approval.

The climate of the eastern country, from my experience in East Anglia, and later in Lincolnshire, I pronounce the best in England during the warm season, when the air is well “cooked” by the sun. I once wrote to Lady Ripon from Nocton, that it was as if cod-liver oil was floating in the air. But I must say that in the early months of the year, when the east wind is “raw,” the climate is not fit for a pet dog.

This very summer of ’91, when rain has turned all our houses in the south and west into arks, and ourselves into Noahs, I have said to friends, some going to the Isle of Wight, others still farther into the wet lands towards the Atlantic, “Go eastward as far as you can away from the rain; go to Aldeburgh; go to Cromer; go to Lowestoft; go to Mablesthorpe, where wind and rain part company before reaching so far.” They abided by my advice; and while the millions on the west side were soaked through, those on the east had not a wet day once a week, and, departing in sickly condition, came back in health too good to last!

Ask the people on the west and on the east of Scotland what sort of weather they have had in any summer. When I was in Perthshire for six weeks, it rained pretty well every day; and as I left by the train I saw the September harvest between Crieff and Perth cut and afloat on the meadows.

A fearful loss of oats! I had a friend that very same season living on the coast of Fifeshire. It was a lady. She informed me that all was sunshine, scarce a drop of rain, during the period I speak of.

Why should Egypt be said to monopolize all the dry weather!

“Madeline and other Poems” appeared not long after Rossetti’s volume. I kept myself clear of all models and other modes of thought—a fact recognized by every writer that reviewed my book. Rossetti was the first to say this, which he did in the Academy, the generosity of which proceeding cannot be too strongly put forward when one recollects that his own poems were in the hands of the critics at the same time. He read the poem before publication, and from what he wrote to me I learned that the metre itself in “Madeline” had a great charm for him.

I became known to Theodore Watts about the time “Madeline” came out. He was then comparatively young, and had formed for himself, in the country, certain poetic tenets which twenty years of experience have since greatly enlarged. He did not then think that “Madeline” had the elements of success within it. In intellect, in isolated quotable passages, according to his view, it abounded; for the rest it came strange to him.

Twenty years of experience and change of feeling affects us all; we become blasé for better or worse; authors in whom we revelled go stale; others, that we found it hard to bite at, seem to yield a light that was but a spark before. The change is in ourselves.

Not many months ago, after the publication of “The New Day,” Watts was with me, and said, “I have been reading ‘Madeline’ again; for sheer originality, both of conception and of treatment, I consider that it stands alone.”

I do not intend to submit this sentence to him for further consideration; it was once in his mouth, and thence it issued!

LVIII.

I may tell the origin of “Madeline” in a brief sentence. I had framed and delivered a lecture, scientifically treated, on “Sleep, Dreams, Sleep-walking, Sleep-talking and the Mesmeric State,” which last I explained by the facts of hypnotism. It was many years after this that I conceived the idea of conducting a character, in metre, through all these states of the human soul, and “Madeline” became that character.

Dr. Marston said, and I think truly, that the poem had too much machinery—a mistake which I have now corrected by erasure, in case an edition of the work should ever be required.

Watts is a man of many rich endowments; he has a fine poetic faculty, logical, yet warm; with an imagination not introspective only, but one that ranges over nature, and which might be called circumspective. His sonnets will bear the analysis to which I have submitted Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, in a previous page.

Watts is now one of our most esteemed critics.

I had a close acquaintance with Harrison Ainsworth among novelistic editors; he tried to obtain for me the separate publication of “Valdarno,” and, failing, wrote me his confident belief that it must be resuscitated one day.

Ainsworth was a manly and handsome-looking person. His romances gave great pleasure to the readers of his time, which showed how willing people are to live others’ lives without the penalties, though they would very firmly decline living their own over again, without the experience they had too late acquired.

I suppose, in reading every novel, one tastes of all the vices and virtues that have ever been indulged in. One likes to be great and generous vicariously; one even enjoys the sufferings of the wicked at second hand, and to commit even murder on the like terms.

We have all the character, in substrata, not only of the savage, but of the wild beast, of the vulture, of the shark, of the boa constrictor, of the clawed crab, of the animalcule itself. Some feel this, some are wholly unconscious of it until it is accidentally roused, some possess it only in a state of inanimate suppression.

A novel founded on vulture life would have a great run. It should dwell on the domestic virtues of the bird, and show how it held an appointment under Providence to follow in the wake of armies.

One of the finest novels I have read of late years is that of Mr. Eden, entitled “George Donnington,” a work replete with experiences, sympathetic in character, in purpose wise; less a fiction than a narrative of true Russian life, and written with as firm a hand as was ever trained for literary success.

Though I could wish to have done with the “strange eventful history” of a life, thus lived over again, I must not rush on too fast, but must revert to “Parables and Tales.”

The publisher of “Madeline” asked me to add four more poems to “Old Souls,” and the three others of the same metre, for an illustrated work; accordingly, I gave him “Mother and Child,” “The Blind Boy,” “The Cripple,” and “Old Morality.”

One morning at Cheyne Walk I read “The Cripple” to Rossetti and Hüffer, and saw them both in tears.

I had written “The Blind Boy” before the new volume was contemplated, and I sent it to Rossetti. In answer he wrote to me, saying that he was on the point of going out when it reached him, but that he stayed in to read it, and was so impressed on doing so, that he at once sat down and wrote to Mr. John Morley, advising its insertion in the Fortnightly Review. But Morley had recently printed in that vehicle a long poem of W. B. Scott’s, and had thereupon resolved never to admit again another verse of any author whatsoever.

When “Parables and Tales” appeared Rossetti selected the Fortnightly for his review of the new volume. He never wrote any reviews except of my poems. All the notices I ever received of my writings were by strangers, except those kindly given of them by Rossetti and his brother: that is all I owe to friendship.

At this time I was personally free from professional engagements. Lady Ripon was no more, greatly to my sorrow, so I went for a few weeks to Bath.

It was a great pleasure to me when staying in that beautiful and healthful city to visit the grave of Beckford, the wonderful author of “Vatec.”

The cemetery and tomb of Beckford would have been a scene for Volney, though it is not a ruin, unless it be regarded as one of human vanity. “Vatec” is monument enough without a sarcophagus of polished porphyry, and a tower lined with the same costly stone.

A medical friend of Mr. Beckford’s told me some curious details respecting that gentleman’s will. He had sunk his remaining property in an annuity, with the exception of a unique collection of pictures and statues valued at £100,000, destined for Hamilton Palace, his daughter’s home. The result is one of many instances which show how little influence the dead exercise over the living.

There was an insuperable difficulty in the dead being buried in his own beautiful cemetery, which was unconsecrated ground, so the heir, the then Duke of Hamilton, had the sarcophagus deposited in the cemetery on the opposite side of the river. The grounds of the one laid out with so much loving care by the deceased, with their tower and exquisitely carved gateway and their finely wrought palings, the porphyry of the tower alone having been brought from Egypt at an expense of £50,000, were sold for £1500, and were about to be converted into a tea-garden for the Lansdown races held hard by.

These preliminaries got through, of course by the duke’s agents, preparations were made for the removal of the pictures and sculptures, but the executors of the will stepped in, and announced that those treasures were not to be given up until Mr. Beckford’s cemetery held his remains.

This was a cruel dilemma, for the property had to be repurchased at an enormous advance on the price paid; but it was done, and the terms of the bishop to consecrate the soil, previously declined, were acceded to. These were that the cemetery should become the property of the Church!

The game was thus cleverly won and profitably; the cemetery is fashionable, people pay high prices for being buried in such good company. Every one visits Beckford’s tomb, and the Church, in acquiring the freehold, will be thought by many to have done well for religion. But my mind is of a perverse nature, and is apt to wander. It sometimes comes across the word “infernal,” in relation to things on high, and is sometimes arrested, as by an erratic block, by the word “humbug,” but it would not like to see the two words in juxtaposition in reference to Church doings.

Beckford had desired that his sarcophagus should be placed on the summit of his tower, whence, should he open his eyes again, and be able to see through porphyry, he would behold Fonthill Abbey.

But this pleasure was denied him, and he only lies above the grass instead of below.

On the tomb one reads—

“Eternal Power,

Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpse

Of thy bright presence in my dying hour.”

After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter, Mrs. Dupré, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was gradually blocked out from its connection with the Baltic, and had evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil. The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.

Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.

And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame, surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt enough to supply the world for ever.

Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for ages unknown.

This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time. There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind, but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower. Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England before it migrated to our shores.

Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take them with us to newer lands.

My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus Dupré was elected in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine. He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and three grown-up sons.

I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under Dupré. He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.

LIX.

My daughter was very happy in her domestic life in Stassfurt. She was married from Lady Ripon’s house on Putney Heath, where a grand breakfast was provided for a large party of friends. Lady de Grey, Lord Goderich, Colonel Bertie Gordon, Mr. and Mrs. Dupré, my sons, George, Egmont and Henry, Mr. and Mrs. William Hake (my brother and his wife) and other members of my family and friends, with myself, were there, the good countess presiding with her usual kindness and grace.

The tables were hung round with festoons of grapes, beneath which the guests were seated.

Every one was struck by the likeness of Mr. Dupré to Bonaparte without any knowledge of the reason, which was that they had a common ancestor in the female line of Feisch, mother of the cardinal of that name. When Mr. Dupré was page to the King of Wurtemberg, Jerome Bonaparte, through this connection, the guard often presented arms as he passed, mistaking him for one of the royal house.

He belonged to an old French family, that of Dupré de St. Maur, with the rank of marquis, a title never entirely dropped, and to which my son-in-law now stands next in succession, though he may never use it.

There was once an event of moment to the Protestants of France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes: this drove my son’s branch of the Duprés into Germany and another to England, whose descendants are settled in Buckinghamshire.

I went with all my family to the Harz, a mountain which is like a large purse full of uncoined money; it is said to contain every metal. Men whistle when they have nothing better to do, and they puff out their cheeks when they are hot. This they are taught by Nature: she whistles and behold a Vesuvius in full blast; she puffs out her cheeks and behold the Harz mountains.

In England no place is more than 100 miles from the sea; but except a strip of the Baltic all the salt water of Germany is inland, and where its waves spout out, the people have towns, which, like our horse-troughs, are called Watering Places. In Germany those who can afford the luxury of gradual suicide, caused by over-good drinking and eating, go there yearly to settle accounts with their system.

These towns have their pilgrims from many lands, who go as to Æsculapian Temples to repent of their Hoch: but their sins are very curious; they break out all over and all inside their bodies. There are reddish and purple sins; these do penance sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the large toes, and other joints; sometimes they blossom all over the skin. Then there are sins of the stomachic, hepatic, renal, and pulmonic kind, each symbolizing local contrition; and the penitents, with their sins thus upon them, go every season to drink of those holy waters, and some of them, for a time, are forgiven.

Midway between Stassfurt and Magdeburg there is a sort of park, called Schönebeck, where people go for an idle day. It is bounded by a noted salt-water evaporator which is a wall a mile long. There is an hotel, and stalls for the sale of ephemeral goods, as books, toys, and drinks, and a band plays all day the music of the best composers. George, who went with me by way of Hamburg, returned with me to England by way of Cologne and Brussels.

My Roehampton days were now over. After a stay in London, Brighton, and elsewhere, I went to Bath early in 1873, and spent the August of that year at Dover in company with my son Egmont; I then went to Paris, where my eldest son, Thomas St. Edmund, joined me, making the very naïve remark during our walks, that one learns a good deal of French out of doors. This I capped by saying that English, too, might be learnt on the shop-windows; but it was broken English, for the gold letters stuck on the glass, of “English spoken here,” often got loose, while some were missing. My next movement was through the Cenis Tunnel to Turin, where I met my youngest son, Henry, who was a student of chemistry at the University of Giesen, under Dr. Will.

After some stay at Turin we visited Genoa; passing the month of November there, during which I was bitten by mosquitos over the face in a manner expressive of small-pox.

LX.

The most pleasurable recollection of this period was a day spent at Nervi, ten miles from Genoa on the Riviera Levante.

The lovely bay of Nervi, on a sunny day, is enriched with every colour: the steep shores of black, veined with white, a magnesian limestone, worn by the waves into waves; the blue waters breaking over projecting rocks, curdling into white, while pools of foamy green fill the basins. It was here that I collected my colours and ideas for “The Painter” in “New Symbols,” which I wrote on returning to Genoa, a place not so attractive as some Italian cities, though the Palazzo Rosso, with its art collection, is never to be forgotten.

There is no sea coast worth visiting at Genoa, scarcely a bathing place; all occupied and spoilt by fortifications. Nevertheless we wandered among the vineyards and villas, our eyes doing honour to the one that had belonged to Paganini.

On a descending road we walked along a festooned vineyard, regarding the ripe fruit with longing eyes, for it was sultry weather, and our great contribution to it was thirst. At the bottom of the hill was a fruiterer’s shop, where a barrowful of grapes had just arrived, and we gained permission to eat. Our thirst was slaked and we asked what we owed in payment; it was a few coppers, and we took from our pockets at random, a good half-dozen times the amount demanded. For such small pay, we witnessed a rapture such as no stage exhibits.

On reaching the streets of the city we encountered a crowd, in the midst of which two men, a large and a small one, were wrestling in an agony of rage. The big man suddenly wrested a knife from the hand of the little one, and flung it far from him, pointing at it in triumphant scorn.

The little man, all over in a fury that actor never attained to, rushed to his house close by, imploring his wife, who was at the door, to give him another knife; but she refused, so the fight was over.

We have not forgotten the Via Nuova, that narrow street of palaces of which our Pall Mall is a resemblance; and we have not forgotten the statue of Columbus,—it was nearly opposite our hotel.

More of Genoa I do not care to note, except that the villas of various colours, red, blue, green, and yellow, surrounding it, look suited to the climate; that of Novello more picturesque than the shop in London where he gathered together all his money.

Henry toiled up the hill to inspect the cemetery.

It is a saying, rife at Genoa, that it takes three Jews to cheat one Genoese. The inhabitants are, certainly, a very business-like people.

The remembrance comes up in my mind that the cactus grows wild here on the old crumbling walls; as the houseleek does on our tiles.

We crossed the mountain that separates Genoa and Spezia—a picturesque journey, with frequent sea-views. The only conveyance was by Diligence, and there is danger; the driving becoming furious as soon as the descent into Spezia begins; nevertheless, we entered the town in safety.

Spezia has its charm; the old streets at the back, the new ones in front near the sea, the temple of Venus on the hill to the right of the shore, Lerici on the left, where Shelley died. But those marble hills that surround the place! As the sun sets, they and the sea become of one pink colour; as the sun sinks deeper, the brilliance quits the water, except where the little waves rise and just dip their crests into it once more.

We took the train to Florence, Henry getting out at Pisa to join me again.

I had returned to Florence after over forty years. Not a soul that I formerly knew was there; all had vanished, lost in the crowd of the absent or dead.

I felt like the last man! But I met with new friends there; the truest of all, Madame Mazzini, was almost the first of these. During my forty years’ absence she had been born, had married, and become a mother, and then a widow, afterwards to become the wife of an illustrious Italian, Signor Villari, senator, and now, in ’91, a member of the Government, as Minister of Education.

She, like her husband, a distinguished author, has been my sincere friend for twenty years.

There was nothing to take me to Florence, nothing but a longing that time could not extinguish, a longing to see again its palaces, its churches, its Palazzo Vecchio in its over-powering might of grandeur embossing architecture on the sky; the Palazzo Strozzi, so defiant of all that is plebeian; the Casa Ricarsoli, so graceful as almost to say a house may be of the fairer sex! The Duomo, the Campanile, not yet under a glass case, as Michael Angelo said playfully, it was worthy to be; and the Sacristy at its side. These and more I longed to see again, with a passion that impels the wanderer to return to his native land. And those delicious walks to Fiesole and Bellosguardo, whence, from summits, one gazes on Florence as on an enchanted city!

Then the Tuscans, with their bright intellects and fine faces, from prince to peasant; their gentleness towards the stranger; their melodious, grammatical enunciation of the one sweet language perfected in the course of ages out of the beautiful words handed down from Greece and Rome.

I had thus reached Florence by Mont Cenis, Turin, Alexandria, and Pisa. At Genoa I inquired of a peasant my way; he took me to the place I wanted, a steep ascent. I offered him a gratuity, which he refused, saying, “The signor is a stranger!” Forty years before, one dark night, I asked a Prince Corsini, not knowing whom he was, to direct me to the Via Maggio where I lived. He turned out of his path and escorted me home.

LXI.

It was in September, ’73; I had much worldly business on hand for present time, and much that was prospective. I was sixty-three years old, yet in my prime; for I felt as if what Montaigne said was my case: every man thinks he has twenty years more to live—and I have done it, so at eighty-three, I have yet twenty before me! Yet, four days ago, December 4, ’91, was the third anni-re-versary of my broken leg, which will imprison me (without hard labour, unless word-picking and hemp-picking are one) for the term of my natural life!

Henry’s stay with me in Florence was short, but he went over the galleries with me, and the walks, then returned to Germany, while I settled myself down in pleasant rooms on the Lungarno Acciajoli (No. 18), overlooking river, bridges, heights of Boboli, Bellosguardo, and St. Miniato, my new and cheerful winter home, the air bright, the temperature 68° F., sun shining all day on my delightful windows.

What walks I thence took; often to the Boboli Gardens, whence falls on the vision a superb view of the city with its various tints of brown and white, so chaste, so compact, as to look like a massive cameo!

And I walked to all the old places, to Fiesole and back, the walk of many hours, but enchanting all the way; now past the villa of Walter Savage Landor, now the Villa Palmieri, the scene of the Decameron.

Then the walk over the Viale, then the walk along the sweet, soft Certosa Road, the monastery now inhabited by a single monk, the caretaker of the past. These walks and many others made Florence an ideal native land.

Then I settled down to my table to take stock of my work. I had, while at Bath, received many reviews of my last volume, always favourable; and I now contemplated a further adventure.

During a visit to Kelmscott, I wrote “Reminiscence,” a poem describing the manor-house, the river, and surrounding scenery.

I took this to Florence with me, together with “Ecce Homo,” “The Exile,” and “Ortrud’s Vision;” there I added others, “The Painter,” “Michael Angelo,” and one or two besides, to my little store; and some I wrote on my return to London, the next year, making in all a dozen poems, which came out, not before 1876, as “New Symbols.”

My correspondence with Rossetti from Florence was constant; it was after his reading “The Painter” that he offered a suggestion to me to write “The Sculptor,” which I did, giving it the name of his idol, “Michael Angelo.”

This poem I sent to Rossetti in manuscript, and he was pleased to return me the following gracious reply, which I extract from a long letter.

“I read ‘The Sculptor,’ which may perhaps rank as the most masterly of your poems; some passages (as stanza three) having absolutely a new and valuable image in every couplet, and being as perfect in expression as words can make them. I found the poem still further a gainer on being submitted to the ordeal of vivâ voce reading, on the occasion of Brown’s being here lately, when the whole was encored and several stanzas more than encored.”

I sketched out the “Birth of Venus” while in Italy; this time I had seen that imaginary drama acted, in the waters of Nervi. In reply to a copy I sent Rossetti of it, he remarked on two lines in the thirty-eighth stanza, where the goddess sees herself reflected in the water. “It is an idea so beautiful,” he said, “as to seldom occur to any poet during a lifetime.” The lines are—

“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror shows

A form divine, enamelled in the sky.”

He wrote in exactly the same tone of a verse in “Michael Angelo,” the four last lines of stanza three.

Should the reader trouble himself to run his mind over the early stanzas he will recall the writer’s visit to Spezia, among the marble hills: before then he had no conception of the mountains themselves being of that precious stone; he had only pictured to himself the quarries whence it was drawn.

Mr. William Rossetti, in a review in the Academy, of 1886, was so complimentary as to call “Michael Angelo” “a sculptured poem.” The introductory lines preceding stanza one greatly pleased Dante Rossetti.

I visited the monument of the Duke d’Urbino in the Capella dei Medici, until I had well mastered Angelo’s greatest work, and interpreted and translated it into metaphoric thought. I went to the opera to set my thoughts to music, the language of verse.

LXII.

We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!

All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.

But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels when, resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others, drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’ trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of distant music.

How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and learn how like it is to our own!

My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum, at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations. They were always performed on anæstheticized dogs. I learned much of him. He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with the extensive garden.

Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English of fashion, and they got Capponi on their side; the most deservedly esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of the professor.

This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that the operations on animals were painless.

However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.

Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight wailings.

The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St. Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and Lady Cottenham.

I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to a passion. The people, she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely! Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!

As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said, is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.

I wish that I could give her name.

The last I heard of Professor Schiff was that his enemies had prevailed, and that he had returned to Berne, welcomed by his own people.

In the November of this year, I revised “Ecce Homo,” and composed the “Double Soul,” both of which are in “New Symbols.” I also wrote “Lucilla, the First Saved,” at that time, a favourite of the good and gifted Christina Rossetti.

It was at this period that I was engaged on “The Sculptor” (M. Angelo). I sat in the Hall of Niobe for the manner, and stood in the Chapel of the Medici for the matter, of this little poem. I sent it as aforesaid, to Rossetti, who was at Kelmscott.

“Pythagoras,” too, was of this period.

In February, 1874, I wrote an article on some of Professor Schiff’s work, and sent it to Dr. Anstey, to be inserted in The Practitioner, in which it shortly appeared, giving much satisfaction to Schiff himself.

During this visit to “Florence my Fair,” I was in constant correspondence with D. G. Rossetti, Theodore Watts, and other friends; and I left behind me many there whom I had reason to esteem. Colonel and Mrs. Gillum showed me many kindly attentions, not the least of which was that of asking me to meet Madame Mazzini at their table. He, in common with that lady, took a deep interest in a recently deceased friend, Miss Blagden, who, through Mr. Watts, had appointed to meet me at Florence. She was an authoress of promise. But, before I reached Italy, she was lying in the English cemetery at Florence, where, with her friends, I visited her grave.

It was, however, as a social centre that she took her high position in Florence. She was the intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and she is the heroine of Madame Villari’s novel, “In Change Unchanged.”

LXIII.

I left Florence for Venice on the 2nd of March, 1874.

In leaving Florence I seemed to be leaving home; on reaching Venice I seemed only on a visit, and so I felt as long as I was there. So striking is this city, that all who reach it determine to remain for a length of time; but it palls upon them, and a fortnight is generally the limit of their stay.

But it is always great in memory.

Venice! One sits in peaceful repose, no sound of voices, or wheels, or hoofs, in the Piazza San Marco, over coffee, which the place turns to nectar. One swallows with insatiate mental appetite the Duomo; and what a breakfast it is for hungry eyes! One walks round the palace of those Doges, more majestic than man ever was or can ever be; a prison on the right side for the commission of cruel sins, a cathedral round the corner for their pardon, and that even up to plenary indulgence.

What a curious thing it is not to be at home, but how most curious of all it is to be at Venice! Would you know what it is to be there, imagine such a town as Brighton, with all the streets filled with water and changed to canals, with little bridges everywhere to enable you to cross from one side of the way to the other! Then, to turn the sea into a Grand Canal, imagine a row of palaces outside the piers, from Hove to Kemptown, and you are at Venice!

I walked all over Venice, where walking was possible: down calle, or lanes, with opposite houses so near to each other that a good harlequin might turn a somersault across from one window to another!

Edmund Kean would have done this, though the windows were closed.

One gets from calle to calle over the daintiest little bridges, some of white chiselled marble; from these you look up and down a canal between towering houses, and here and there see a family keep its gondola, as some of us at home keep our carriage. There the gondolas are tethered to the house steps, as our horses are to the manger.

When there is no more walking possible, one takes to a gondola at the Piazzetta, which sweeps by palaces of loveliest architecture on both sides of the Grand Canal. A sort of Thames, down stream, reaches the Rialto bridge, not built so early as Shakespeare’s time; still, there was a bank of that name, Riva Alto, where the merchants of Venice met, close by; but it is a scanty spot, and little suited to business transactions.

At the Rialto one gets out of the gondola and crosses the bridge. It has paltry shops on either side, that might have been stocked from the vast surplus of Manchester or Birmingham. One returns to one’s gondola, ready to drop a mean opinion, and resume one’s sense of beauty. “What palace is this, O songless Signor Gondolier?” “The General Post Office, signor,” answers the gondolier. We glide to and fro, we pause before the Fondaco dei Turchi, and look at it until we feel that its beauty can never be erased from our mental vision.

We pause before the Palazzo Pesaro, before La Ça Doro, Il Palazzo Guistiniani, Il Palazzo Foscari. We think we should like to live in them all, and we think what a great lord it would take to live in any one of them.

A tremendous organization is that of Venice still. The fine arsenal that stands boldly out, as one looks down the canal, might say aut pax, aut bellum! The Gallery, a convent turned into a palace of art. It supplied me with an answer once, when I was shown a property in Titians by a friend in London. He confidently inquired of me if I did not think they were genuine works. My answer was, “Go to Venice, look at the Titians there, and on your return ask me the question again.”

Then the churches; they are of course noble, but I cannot love anything that is angular, which to me—but I am only one!—is the fault of ecclesiastical architecture in Italy. I could say much of angularity: all that ranks beneath the human form is angular. As a type, study the features of a cat! Its ears are angular, its eyes are angularly set, its nose, its mouth all form angles. I love the dome,—my own St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s at Rome, S. Maria del Fiore at Florence, the Basilica di San Marco, and the S. Maria della Salute at Venice—all noble churches; and yet the wonderful St. Mark’s is provokingly like the Pavilion at Brighton, only it is not Chinese but Byzantine.

The Doge’s palace, empty but full of reminiscences! Art there takes the place of old Reality: it laughs at the security of living queens and kings. St. Mark’s Square is like another and more charming Palais Royal; its arched windows soothe and fascinate the eyes.

There is a long, broad street in Venice—the Via Garibaldi. It is sixty of my feet wide; and there are two good squares, the Piazza Santo Maurizio and the Piazza Santo Stefano.

I had a very odd sensation on reaching these squares: I felt just as if I was on dry land!

When one thinks of a city of solid houses situated on a network of water, it may naturally recall the moats that surround fortified castles. But an enemy could cross a moat: could he riddle his way through the countless canals of Venezia? How safe must the inhabitants of the interior feel in time of war! If an army starting from the square of St. Marco reached the calle, it would have to march in single file between windows that might be used as loopholes.

Venice was very cold in the month of March. I complained. “Never mind,” was the reply; “we shall have the mosquitoes in April, and they will bring six months of warm weather!”

This is Italy: cold winters and no provision against cold! The natives get hot-through in the six spring and summer months, and it takes the remaining six to cool them.

If I ascended in a captive balloon which broke loose, making me a prisoner, to undergo the sentence of transportation with hard-breathing in the cold, scant air; and if offered a ticket-of-leave and a parachute, with a choice of where I would descend, it would be in St. Mark’s Square, the sun shining, the band playing, the cup of hot coffee on the table just poured out. It is the only perfect square upon earth—no dust, no noisy cabs to run over your toes as you stretch out your legs on the smoothly paved ground.

Seated in the Piazza San Marco over coffee and cigar, one reflects how Venice has more than one Shakespearian interest: how the Rialto, now a bridge, was in our dramatist’s day a bank of the Grand Canal, the riva alto. But a yet greater interest attaches to the circumstance which led him wrong, yet right, in his not knowing that there were two Othello families, one of which was distinguished as Il Moro, the Mulberry, because they held estates in the Morea.

And this was Shakespeare’s Moor!

London is dusty, every other town is dusty; Venice is not. London registers a good one death per diem under cab wheels. In Venice a cab wheel is never seen; but whether the bicycle has reached it now I do not know.

I went one evening to the Malibran theatre, and on Sunday to the Fenice opera house. I had indulged my eyes to the full, so I gave my ears a turn, and they were gratified in hearing William Tell. I did not fail to visit the island of Lido in a steam ’bus to see the true Adriatic. The clean sands, whence no land is visible, is all that is to be seen there, though, as I did, you walk across from shore to shore.

I scarcely completed the traditional fortnight at Venice, but it was not my last visit there. What had I seen? It was like something colossal, though only human; it was like having turned over a huge book of wonderful pictures, leaf after leaf: the first an enchanted square, its mosque, its more than kingly palace, its obtrusive campanile; lastly, a wonderful line of arches, a mile long between Venice and the coast, along which glided a railway train.

When I had dwelt on every page of the volume and reached the end, I had no desire to begin again, but took the treasured-up remembrance of it across the Brenner.

Sleeping at Verona, I stayed there for a day that I might see the great fortress, which forms part of the quadrilateral, and also the Roman coliseum there, which is in a very perfect state. The town must have suffered much from time, even since Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen” left it to make the acquaintance of Sylvia. As I stood on the bridge and looked about me, the houses seemed to be crumbling before my very eyes. This done, I proceeded to Stassfurt, taking Munich on my way.

I remained for several months at Stassfurt, the summers in Germany always being for the most part fine. I made excursions with some of my family into the Harz, went up and round the mountains, spent a night on the Brocken, witnessed the sun rise from beneath my feet, and made a stay afterwards at Thale, ascending the picturesque heights from that locality. We took our route to the Harz by the weird Affenthaler valley, visiting the admirable old lordly castle of Falconstein on our way, and not for the last time. The sombre hills, the narrow pass, the pine forest on either side, the river, once seen can never but be recalled to mind again.

The Brocken is covered with huge masses of stone, evidently the work of a volcano. Other masses have been hurled downwards, rudely paving the pine-covered descent. I suggested that the scattered heaps on the summit should be piled up as a rude and lasting monument to Goethe.

I had yet to make my visit to Rome; it was from Stassfurt again. The weather in October was getting cold over the plains of Saxony, and my son-in-law, Dr. Dupré, reminded me that it would be still colder on the Alps. He went with me on part of my journey; we took train from Leipsic to Munich, arriving at dark, and renewed our tickets for Botzen. There we had supper in company with a smart English-Greek, a native of Corfu, and his friend, together with a French lady of fine proportions and laughing face, besides a young Bavarian officer of the rapid-mannered kind.

There were other rooms in the hotel besides the one in which we supped, and to which the three gentlemen described followed the lady wherever she went, her laughter taking the form of fits. And such is the politeness of what we call foreigners, they accompanied her even to her chamber door. She returned to the supper-room after all this. Dr. Dupré was there alone, and she told him, half in complaint, the other half in fun, what had been going on.

With this company of three I found myself in the same carriage the next day, the Greek and his friend leaving us the following day, at noon, at a house in that wonderful Alpine gorge between Botzen and Verona.

Dr. Dupré was on his return home, viâ Strasburg, where he went to purchase a horse from the king’s stables. I proceeded with the young officer and the lady.

The journey to Bologna which we made together was a comedy in a hundred acts, as long as a great Chinese drama. The gentleman perched himself on the arm of the seat, and took out a well-thumbed book of conversations in the usual four languages, to practise himself in the Italian, and from this he read aloud to the lady, who sat opposite to him, in the tone of one earnestly addressing another, now on business as if she were hotel-keeper, waiter, chambermaid, jeweller, dressmaker, or barber. She heartily enjoyed his frankness, and laughed over every question and answer.

That night we slept at Bologna, the lady proceeding to Naples, the officer taking down her address and promising to pay her a visit there before long.

When I left the German side of the Brenner it was in the cold season; the leaves were colouring, drooping, and falling. When I reached the plain of Lombardy the summer had not stirred, all was green and warm.

I went from Bologna to Florence (the beloved) with my Bavarian. There were two English ladies and their brother, a surgeon-major of artillery, in the same carriage with us, and we entered into a rapid acquaintance, I and the gentleman through professional, and the young officer and the ladies through moral, sympathy. He amused them as effectually as he had done the madame. We proceeded to the same hotel at Florence, the Porta Rossa. My German took the ladies about, with his open Bädeker, and showed them all the sights. They were single ladies, and, therefore, very much charmed. One day, walking with them on a country stroll, it evidently occurred to him that it was his duty to tell them who he was, and his way of doing this afforded them much amusement. He suddenly stopped before a cluster of violets, and bending his head to address them, said, “Sweet flowers, I dare say you would be pleased to know my name, who and what I am. My name is ⸺, and I am a captain in the Bavarian army!”

I lingered at Florence for a month, looking at my favourite models of art, the chief of which now was the Perseus, by Cellini, and what I loved to linger over, never tiring, the Six Vestals, of Greek sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi.

But to dwell too long on such exquisite works of man’s genius almost infatuates; whilst gazing on a single object one seems to frame from memory an old and new testament of the inspired artists, and to call some of them evangelists, and some apostles.

Look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper at Milan, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie: it is amongst the finest pictures in the world. And was it not inspired?

Look at the Twilight and the Dawn, the Night and Morning, of Michael Angelo: would it not illustrate the book of the creation?

Look at the Paradiso of Fra Angelico for a new art testament, and for an old one go back to the Parthenon, to the sculptures of ancient Greece.

During my short stay I visited all my most valued friends, and on the 21st of November I took train to Rome.

LXIV.

It is an amusing journey from Firenze to Rome. The Apennines, no longer imposing to one familiar with the Alps, spin with you; arches that you see above you go round and return nearer to you; then, swinging round once more, you are upon them, and finally above them.

A young Jesuit sat in the corner of the carriage opposite to my corner. On my first sight of him his eyes were closed, and his lips were moving as one sees in the low muttering delirium of the semi-conscious sick. In due time he took out a breviary, counted the beads on a string that hung from him, played with them as a child with sugar-plums, and pursued the silent muttering, as if reading a delirious dream. This went on for a fatiguing length of time. Being unaccustomed to religious manners, I felt sorry, because I thought the good man was fatuously disposed, when suddenly he, having counted his last bead, shut his book joyfully, and his intellect seemed restored.

He addressed me in sweet Italian, in la lingua Toscana in bocca Romana. We were gliding alongside the lake of Perugia, and from that time he did not cease to instruct me until our journey’s end.

A Jesuit is never wanting in knowledge, whatever a priest may be.

If we swept by a ruined bridge, he told me to what period of history it pertained, and to what event it owed its smashed condition; if we came to a hillside town, I heard from him its name, and for what it had been famed. So, as if school itself had become a delicious holiday, we passed by Perugia and Assisi and Terni, and other of these storied towns.

Italians tell one what they are. He was a Jesuit; he had found shelter among the nobles of Florence, who loved their old Government and hated their new, and who were generous to the clergy who had been turned out of their monasteries, then all empty. But a few months of employment awaited him; the libraries had been removed from the monasteries to the capital, and he had been summoned to assist in their arrangement.

“Non mi piace la vostra Roma,” said Victor Emmanuel, after his first session there as king. It gave great offence; yet must I humbly repeat his words on my own account.

I have imagined ancient Rome; I have seen a picture of it restored in all its grandeur. What does it look like now? A grand city that had been lifted bodily from the seven hills and valleys into the air, and let to fall, smashed in pieces, like a service of crockery.

“… Non mi piace la vostra Roma” were the words of the king, so I may venture to repeat them.

The place is very disappointing at first, but they say it grows upon you. The misfortune is that it is called Rome instead of Popesburg—ancient Rome is squeezed out; but Popesburg is a picturesque old Italian town, interspersed scantily with remains yet older. The Pantheon stands up complete on its old pillars, only stripped of all its outside marble; then, near Santa Maria in Cosmedia, there is a lovely little temple of Vesta, encircled by its Corinthian marble columns, but its surroundings are of mud and slush at this hour.

These interspersed antiquities, of which there are many in the form of columns, with a pediment sadly bruised and broken through age and fight, are the most picturesque of the remains. Where they turn up as forums, the wreck is exhibited some twelve or twenty feet deep in large walled-in pits, like outdoor museums—bits of columns arranged in old order, like skittles, ready to be bowled over again. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is to see modern Rome from the bridges, itself decaying and crumbling, when the ancient city has already crumbled and decayed.

During the last eight hundred years there has been a sort of rebuilding, but it is not the urbs recondita of Augustus, whose Pantheon is still standing to connect the present with the past. Why, the columns of that temple, as I paced them, measured a diameter of eight feet! Where other temples had stood, churches have sprung up; and where the sherds of foundations remained, there are palaces now; but the palace of the Cæsars is empty space; the Forum is a skeleton exhumed for show. The gaps will never be filled again; Rome will remain a ruin; its architectural condition only such as one might conceive of Hades, where Hercules wanders still in disaffection. How unlike its later contemporary, Venice, that has been preserved, perfect, under a blue-glass sky!

The antiquarian genius is always very busy at Rome, because its exhumations supply food to greedy minds bent on recovering the earliest history of our race, as if the future of mankind would one day turn up engraved on tiles. These sort of enthusiasts do not comprehend that the further they go back, the greater grows the historic lie, and that as far as it concerns true knowledge, their labours are utterly fruitless. Antiquarians and geologists are both earth-searchers; but does the ruin-grubber deem himself on a par with the inspector of organic remains?

I took my view of the Transfiguration of Rome, moulded by the avenger in a way no man could paint or model. I wanted to see the other Transfiguration, which art-genius pronounced the finest picture in the known world, as if it were as great a miracle as the one it represents.

Rome is rich in metamorphoses, besides being one itself: the fine bronze statue in the cathedral, a figure of Jupiter, has been transfigured into Peter, who reigns in its stead.

But the most valued Transfiguration of all is Raphael’s: it has a fault of the first magnitude, a ghastly fault that hands it over to the ruins.

The great painter was but a fragmentary genius, or he would not have made that hideous epileptic the conspicuous rival of Christ. Our eyes join the eyes of the painted crowd in looking at a sight so loathsome, and that in so healing a Presence.

But let us be thankful: Raphael has left us his mighty cartoons, his portraits, his Madonnas.

There were other treasures of art in the Vatican, notably the Laocoon, that I desired earnestly to examine. I had need to speak of it in my “sculptured poem,” but could draw no inspiration from it in the copy at Florence. Strange to say, though the copy and the original are so alike, the moment I saw this last its life passed into me. I required also to look at the Apollo Belvidere, but found it to be only Lord Chesterfield during his apotheosis.

In the Doge’s palace in Venice there is a striking picture of Ariadne. I knew there was a sculpture of the same in the Vatican gallery, a place which may be called an indoor street of marbles: this, too, I found. Then I made my way to the very end of this Via di Scolpitura, where stood the Athlete. How long I stayed with my eyes and heart upon it, I know not; but while looking at that most natural of all marble wonders, every Apollo had disappeared from mythology, from this world itself.

But now to the Barberini Palace, to visit the apocryphal portrait of Beatrice Cenci. We could kiss the very canvas did we not know that her tragedy is but a myth. She breathed into Shelley her tragic breath, so we all go to see the familiar face; and, hard by the Ghetto, the Cenci palace, too. But this, how changed. It was let out to the dirtier class by its then owner—a cardinal, too; and I saw that the grand entrance at the back was used for a dust-heap. All the property of a cardinal, all going to decay; yet is there a cleanly church opposite, built at the cost of a Cenci.

It is with some loss of equanimity that one thinks of Roma and finds that its citizens are proud of it in its humbled and chastised condition. It is like the worn-out pedigree of a once illustrious name. They may be proud of their tombs, for one is of the Scipios, of Seneca another; but their ruins are a disgrace, the work of their avenging, conquering foes, such as Guiscard in the eleventh century, who battered down every wall that it might never be defended again. But they are proud of their ruins! Their Forum, a bit of Palmyra; their Coliseum, a broken cup; their ghost of the palace of the Cæsars, its own burial-place; of their Baths of Caracalla, an artificial desert; of their Theatre of Marcellus, in one of the fine arches of which I saw a flourishing blacksmith’s forge, blazing to the memory of a glorious past.

Imagine the Florentines proud of their Palazzo Vecchio, with its mighty tower on the pavement; imagine the Venetians proud of a once Doge’s palace, the magnificent court where it was with only a wall or two standing, and the giant’s staircase, like Goliath, in the dust!

There are some old words that one likes better than the new ones: the name of the gate, now del Popolo, does not, to me, sound so æsthetically as Flaminia, its ancient name! Yet it took centuries to turn the one into the other for the worst, with the patriotic intention of being for the best! The popes do not pretend to be Cæsars, like the latter-day Napoleon, with his Dutch physiognomy; but they have now and then done their best to rebuild. Pius VII., so heavily handicapped by the Corsican parvenu, did much to lay the saddened ghost of Cæsarean times, by beautifying the Piazza del Popolo. Through him, Augustus might have looked on it again with composure. Its semicircular form, its fountains, its statues, would pacify the imperial rebuilder.

From the Porta del Popolo to the Capitol is a line ending in a steep ascent, one of the seven hills, the Capitoline: this long street is the backbone of Rome, from which its ribs more or less radiate. It is not gigantic with a broad stride, like the Via Larga (now Cavoura) at Florence; it is not beautiful, like the Genoese Via Nuova; it is more of a Bond Street, but a long one, with some fine buildings, and, as all long streets should be, it is cut in half by a good big square, the Piazza Colonna. Here we stumble against a column, look up, and for a minute or two we are in ancient Rome. It was set up by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, a man of fight, in order that his victories might not be forgotten. Its inside is hollow, except that it has steps up it, nearly two hundred—for we always count. We go up these steps, full of the Roman sensation, when, lo, and behold! (En et ecce! as Marcus Aurelius would now say with a stare), St. Paul has got up before us; has been turned into bronze, and gilded! Still there is something in it; he has made conquests over the Germans better than those of Marcus, so we may let him stay at the top, and be thankful; odd as it seems.

The obelisk which we come upon in the square of Monte Clitorio, was brought to Rome by Augustus, as Cleopatra’s Needle was brought to London by Sir Erasmus Wilson, Kt., F.R.C.S.; the one set up in the Campus Martius, the other on the Thames Embankment. That of Augustus got buried, and by a sort of lucky miracle was raised again by the sixth of the Pius popes.

But now stop a little longer than usual: this is the Palazzo Doria Pamfili.

One wants all the time to get up to the top of the Capitoline Hill; so, seeing a tremendous flight of steps, one goes upstairs. The things stuck in one’s way to arrest one’s progress towards the square at the top are first of all two lions. These, notwithstanding they are created out of black granite, and are therefore really dumb animals, unlike live lions, spout water at you, by way of making themselves heard: and this Keats should have done into the public ear, instead of letting his name be writ in the water itself.

But even now we cannot leave the last step to the Campidoglio; we are arrested by Castor and Pollux, two giants. We then look with much interest to see what sort of horses theirs were, and they rise in our estimation, tall as they are already, when we find that their nags are of the true Arab breed, thick-necked and straight-backed, not a bit like the flesh and blood abnormals of Newmarket Heath.

The Campidoglio is a fine square, and one has at least the satisfaction of feeling that the hill it surmounts is a part of ancient Rome. But where is the old Temple of Jupiter? we ask.

No answer.

However, here is something Roman: it is the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius—a survival.

There are other things up here of the Antonine brand, to show that Rome was once Rome; but there is such a variety of job lots here, all curiosities, swept by time into heaps, that the best course is not to puzzle one’s brains about them.

I, for one, wanted to see three things in this Capitol, still so called, but not recalling anything that existed under that name before Boniface IX. took to rebuilding. It is a museum containing a good deal of the private property of the old Roman lords, which belongs now to their natural heirs, and farthest off of kin, the people.

These people had ancestors who were the hereditary property of some seventy or eighty emperors. They are now owners of all these emperors’ heads, and of the heads of all these emperors’ families, which they keep on shelves in their Capitol museum, in a room that makes a sort of Golgotha.

At last we come upon the Dying Gladiator, one of the three figures I was in search of. We have all seen its shadow in casts and engravings; this is the unique original.

Another figure that I had occasion to see was La Bacchante, a marble figure, which is locked up and only shown on the payment of a fee; it is a most expressive statue.

These two figures I have delineated in my “sculptured poem” of Michael Angelo.

A third figure, the Faun, I readily found. It is a celebrated statue, and I desired to ascertain whether the ears were formed correctly; but they were not. In accordance with anatomical structure they should have pointed backwards, but they are erect. Some would say, “Yes; for the ears of lower animals at times are pricked.” But I say (it is in “Valdarno”), the end of all art is repose.

In the human ear may be seen a small rudiment of the elongated ear; it is so placed that, if redeveloped, it would point posteriorly, after the fashion of the lower animals, to the cervix, beneath the occipital bone.

Was it prophetic that, in digging the foundations of the Capitol, when it was first designed, a skull was turned out (caput), whence the name.

Nevertheless, the Capitol was founded upon a rock, though it was the Tarpeian.

LXV.

“What come ye for to see?” It is a wider question than was intended on its first ironical utterance, and many answers are always ready. A medical ignoramus of ability was asked if there was any danger. His answer was, “That depends on the event.” So it is in museum life; the majority know nothing of what they go to see, and what they do see depends on the event. But the specialists know exactly what go they for to see; and I am one of these. Relying on presumptive evidence, if a “Sir Leighton,” as the French would say, goes to Rome, it may be for to make a study of painted eyes, in some ten or a dozen galleries, to determine whether black, brown, or blue predominates. If a “Sir Boehm” goes to Rome, it may be for to inspect the lost head and legs of a Farnesian Hercules. If a “Sir Barry” goes to Rome, it is for to examine which of the stones in the Palazzo di Venezia were stolen by a pope from the Coliseum, and which were honestly got. However, we have no “Sir Barry” nowadays; premiers do not build houses, so that they do not baronetize architecture in lieu of fees. They take physic; they stand in need of bulletins when, on the eve of an unpleasant debate, a strong voice is weak. Being ourselves of physic and a little deaf, a clergyman once bawled into our best ear, in a voice so thunderous yet so piercing that had it been a prayer it might almost have been heard in heaven, “Doctor! can you give me something to strengthen my voice?”

Premiers are perfect artists in the baronetizing line; nay, they can even chisel a peer in invisible gold. A president of a royal academy, of a royal society, of a royal college of surgeons or physicians, fills a genteel trade; rank fits him well.

An oculist, if a premier has bad eyes and is going blind, may, like other professionals, be ennobled; but an aurist and a dentist, there is something in these—it is hard to say what—that does not ennoble well, which shows how greater are eyes than ears or teeth.

If a premier is not a teetotaler, he makes lords out of brewers, and yet not out of distillers, whose images are quite as golden. He does not mind it being thought that he takes a glass of pale ale, but whisky—that would not do.

All these industries, like myself, go to Rome chiefly on their own business. But what a wonderful crowd there is flocking there to see all that is left—the fragments of Cæsar’s lost compositions.

We business men, when we have found all we want, go the round; it is like walking through the street, looking at everybody, sometimes stopping to speak.

We meet a picture, a statue, a vase, an arch, a column, a palace, as we might do a friend; but those who undertake to see all might as well undertake to read the two or three billion letters that pass through the post-office in a year.

I set myself to visit the grave of poor Keats. He was sick of many griefs, but the greatest of these was that he could not make the vulgar howl their applause. He had all the enjoyment of a Divine gift; it could only be the bodily sickness affecting the mind when his heart was bitter, and he exclaimed his name was writ in water. Yet they have graved those feeble words on his tombstone!

Were I dying for praise, I should show my insight into man, and say, “My name is writ in brandy and water.” How that would be swallowed down!

I visited Keats’s grave from very mixed motives; life is sad enough without being sentimental. To stand before the grave is a little dangerous; if one walked backwards for a short distance in an absent fit, he would precipitate himself over a sunk wall into the adjoining cemetery, and lie there for good, like Shelley.

As in duty bound, I visited the tomb of Shelley also.

I was on my way to the church of St. Paolo fuori, a sight not to be neglected by any species of pilgrim whatever.

On one’s way one can leave a card on the Scipios; their tomb is handy, but they are always out, those wonderful people called the “authorities” having removed the sarcophagi and busts. But you will be asked in; and you can go down the windings by torchlight, and say you did it. Then, en route, one can pay one’s respects to the early Christians who owned some uncomfortable catacombs hereabout, in which they resided.

For an account of these and of how they shelved their dead, vide some more gushing writer.

St. Paolo is too magnificent for a church. It has a fine architectural pedigree up to Constantine, having endured all the horrors for generations of decay and fire, to be only rebuilt at greater cost than before.

I did not go on purpose to behold the church, but to almost adore the ancient cloisters at the back. The delicately twisted columns of the arches are so winning, they actually awake one’s affections; and if thinking of a thing ever after is love, they fill you with this fondest of recollections.

A good many of us rise in life. Wolsey, he rose; the Bonapartes rose; Coke rose (upon Littleton); the Gladstones rose; Lazarus rose; but no man, priest, soldier, lawyer, M.P., or resurrect, ever rose in death, as did St. Peter. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; writers as eminently inspired as Isaiah; Paul, the most gifted of apostles, whose ideas on charity lifted Christianity miles over the heads of all other religious or moral founders, had no such rise in death as Peter; but it was the keys that did it.

Peter has a palace, and a church, and a museum, such as monarchs envy in vain. Let us hope, pray, and entreat that it may never be demolished, like the palace of the Cæsars; that no republican Guiscard may arise; but that the President of the Future may take up his residence there, should the popes vacate it.

My friend, Theodore Watts, was at Rome with me a part of the time. I forget what he thought of it all; it is so long ago. I know we visited the poets’ tombs together, and St. Paolo fuori.

Pio Nino must have had a temper, because he studied the inconvenience of strangers by making them take tickets of admission in front of the Vatican, while he vaticinated that the back entrance not being handy, but involving a long walk, would excite irritation, so he admitted visitors only at his back door. The elliptical columns forming the portico in the Piazza S. Pietro, look like out-bent arms for receiving and hugging the flock.

I was with Watts, one day in December, on this little round. We stood with our backs against a wall, for shelter against a bitter wind, the sun shining through snow, and the warmth, so long as we remained there, delicious.

We went the usual round of the loggie, Raphaelizing, and of the indoor statuary squares and streets; and got into the Sixtine, on the roof of which Michael Angelo re-created the world.

LXVI.

I have left England twice since my visit to Rome: once in 1878, to stay at Ballenstedt, near the Harz, for a summer; once more to Stassfurt, for a prolonged sojourn. In my own country, Bath has been my favourite place, where I have been for several seasons. Brighton, too, I have often visited, having my brother there. Neither have I neglected the Isle of Wight, my favourite spot being on the unfashionable West, at Totland’s Bay.

There is, however, little left to say about England, by a native, therefore little to record; but I have found plenty to do at home.

Among other sights, while at Ballenstedt—it was in 1878—we went to the Duke of Brunswick’s castle of Blankenburg; not going over its four hundred chambers, but confining ourselves very much to the billiard-room and chapel. In that apartment the walls were decorated with engravings of race-horses, and of British sports of every kind—fox-hunting, cricket, and other games—all that are ever seen in shop-windows or elsewhere. A billiard-table occupied a corner of the room, with the rules of the game hung near it. The ducal family were Anglicized by the war, and the black dress of the troops is still worn. The chairs in the room were all backed by the arms of England and the Order of the Garter.

In the chapel there is an ivory crucifix attributed to Michael Angelo. The floor is, in one place, ostentatiously unboarded, to show the foundation to be rock.

Ballenstedt is a pleasant summer town. There is a fine avenue leading to the castle, and to the public gardens; the forest is close at hand, and a chain of trout streams and lakes descends from the neighbouring hills.

The Affenthaler valley, too, abuts on the place, leading to Falconstein, in whose castle are some of the noblest stag-antlers ever seen.

All that is written, all that comes to pass, has its concluding chapter; I am fast approaching mine.

In writing these memoirs, a love of my fellows has dominated my pen, as it does, always, in what I compose, for serious perusal. I am sometimes surprised at finding how this feeling keeps the upper hand, as, in the ordinary sense, it is not always deserved, nor always quite felt at starting: but it warms. As I began by saying, so I repeat, that, in a certain way, I am my own posterity; and, perhaps, I revive in myself the better feelings that a dead man would assuredly experience if he came suddenly to life.

I may end by saying yet a few more words about myself in concluding. As a sort of posterity I may allude even to the circumstance that my memory serves me as well as ever, as this memoir shows, and that, but for my disaster, I could give myself a certificate of health that would satisfy the most prying of life insurance companies.

I have all the buoyancy of youth! As a sort of posterity I have almost a disposition, in some things, to appreciate myself; but at this point decency forbids. I have quite recently written, 1st, a volume of “Epigrams,” from an experience quite deserving the attention of every innocent novice who looks up to mankind; 2nd, a volume of “Sonnets”; 3rd, my “Memoirs”; 4th, “Miscellaneous Essays and Verse.”

My mind holds out; it has increased in accuracy up to the present time, now that my 84th year has set in with a rush. But I find that my eyesight deteriorates, though slowly, and that, like everything else that is inevitable, I can bear it, though I should like to have my observers back, so lovely is the clear light of day!

I would altogether cease from work, but that time would hang so heavily. I shall be as idle as I can, and so end mine as Byron began his “Hours.”

In writing my memoirs the years have shrunk into days, but they fairly depict my part of Nature’s message of which she made me a commissionaire. She has told through me, in the fragmentary form of opinion, what her purpose is after being filtered through my brain, not what it is prior to the process of filtration, which leaves behind the insoluble matters, which, try as one will, are not to be got at. All things are comical in the process of production—the furnaces, the looms, the raw material, now a fibre, now a thread dipped in dye, now in mad haste rolling into a texture, now snipped with scissors into a man’s or woman’s shape, now on their backs as they make each other a bow, or kiss hands across a street, the bricks of which a year before were in a clay field growing wheat.

The epigrams that I have ready for the press, whenever the public may be disposed for a fresh jeu d’esprit, are three hundred and sixty-six in number, to correspond with leap-year.

They more or less pourtray the laughing side of life, but are not without their earnest moments, and they have references of ludicrous applicability.

It may be remarked that while that species of humour is liked and largely pervades our best authors, epigram has never been made a specialty by any one of them. There exists, therefore, a blank under this heading; and my attempt is to fill this vacancy in our literature, strange as it is that such should still be left among its crowded pages.

A poem, of whatever length, should start vividly, so as to wind up the ear and set the mind ticking. I have known poems with much latent beauty in them, set aside as rubbish, from failing to wake up the thoughts at starting. I remember a sonnet which an admirer pronounced the finest in the language (with about as much sense as George No. IV. called himself the first gentleman in Europe), and which had a clear-cut symmetry and depth, being called trashy by one who had critical power, but who did not warm his wax before taking its impression. Short poems have value to the author of them as being written on passing occasions, and thus becoming biographic. I possess a volume of this sort, called “Many Moods,” some of which have had publication.

Life is a comedy during this filtration, by means of which it receives its mysterious consciousness through a vulgar brain; death would be a comedy but that the joke is stale.

Nature seems as opinionated as she is universal. She uses millions of millions of brain-filters, all different, and all at the same time, in her thought-factory; the results some of us refilter to render them purer! The proceeding is ludicrous in the extreme at first sight, but it is amusing; and, strange to say, like the uproar of a mob, or sounds from a thousand blacksmiths’ forges, they unite into final harmoniousness.

Of my latter works above named, “The New Day” only has passed from darkness through man’s cerebral filter into the light. They have all been written during the mental cheerfulness of much bodily suffering, of which I have a pretty good twinge as I now scribble. A cracked hip never ceases to reproach me for having fallen on it, and cracked dreams pursue me through the night; but I can still smile, though I have no teeth to add grace to that labial twist which is so expressive of contentment.

All is for the best, devils on ticket-of-leave notwithstanding. Apparent evil generates and brings about good. Could we only obtain one glimpse of the invisible, which is so vast in comparison with all we dream of, how amazingly concurrent in this my view would men become. All would be judges; as on the delivery of a judgment from a full bench, all would say, “I concur.”

Evil has no place in the ultimatum, as will be found when that great diplomatic document is pronounced.

I reverence Nature, though she is wholly unaware of the homage I pay her. She is president of the abeternal, adeternal commonwealth, in which every atom exercises its vote, and yields her the beneficent despotism over all, that can be never shaken.

Those who can climb, in mental sight, their pleasant little knoll, and survey the surroundings, are burdened not with reverence for their fellow-men. They are conscious of no inferiority in the presence of their betters, so slight is the difference between the great and small; and they are conscious of no superiority in the presence of their inferiors.

All are so alike in actual importance among the so mighty things around, that were all who have lived, or are yet existing, to be arranged in a line, beginning with Shakespeare and Newton, Homer and Pythagoras, Phidias and Aristotle, Bacon, John Hunter and Goethe, followed by professors and students, labourers and mendicants, and ending with those who slobber while they talk,—and were the best made to stand forward in advance of the others in a degree proportioned to their excellence, the line of human beings, viewed at no great distance, would appear as straight as a ray of light.

LXVII.

Wisdom is an attribute of old age; not because the faculties grow keener, but rather because the feelings are less vivid, whence there is less bias. By this change the mind becomes more patient, more just, therefore, towards those of opposite opinions; and this should, above most other things, bring toleration to bear on religion.

Men like Disraeli, who are a creed unto themselves, are strongly impressed with the importance of religion to an ignorant country. They are aware that it is unlike what is discovered to us by Nature, that it is a sort of distinguished stranger in the great system of things, of so highly impressive a presence as to be a rival force.

In truth, religion is, in every respect, a power; and in relation to Nature it is imperium in imperio, and is even more strong than Nature in the minds of men.

It is more strong in its affinity to vast numbers, men and women, than the dictates of nature; so strong is its hold that it more frequently culminates in madness than does any other passion.

This should be a warning to the highly endowed intellectual and less emotional class, not to regard religious belief as a subject of too severe analysis and correction. Let them bear in mind that when it is of a kind to restrain evil, to paralyze with fear the murderer’s hand, to overawe the adulterer, to intimidate the unjust in their dealings, to make them do unto others as they would be done by themselves, it is not only a grand factor for good in human affairs, but that it is a better teacher than Nature herself, except in the most elevated minds.

Religion has its little hypocrites, so has irreligion: which of the two gives shelter to the largest number?

Whom do the benevolent intellects desire to teach? There are two classes for them to look down upon. The credulous are the happiest of the two and the best off; then why teach them to be incredulous, when there are millions for whom even their credulity is too good?

No one who has an acute mind should suppress his view of religious affairs, provided he is not offensive, because religion, though, like music, susceptible of variations, will survive all else, as it has ever done. Its durability belongs to the fact that it is emotional, and so is spontaneous, while intellectual development necessitates labour.

Its variations have always been adapted to the character and capacity of a people, and its trustees have always proved ready to effect this adaptation; not always because it pays better, for what pays best is that which is suitable.

In England there is a great variety of emotional character, and as great a variety of creeds—some say a hundred;—so religion among us is like a centipede, so many legs has it to go on.

What suits one people does not suit all others. Leo III. established plenary indulgence and the release of souls from purgatory through the virtue of a mass. This does not suit many of the English or Scotch; indeed, should any Leo III. set up a profitable business here on the same grounds, he would be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. But it suited the Italians at the time, and is held in favour by many of them still.

The religion of the Irish appears to require some re-adjustment; it does not in its present form give the Divine sanction to murder.

The most truly religious ought to be a middle class, who have a sufficiency of good things to supply their wants in moderation. One does not quite understand how the poor can work themselves up into gratitude to Heaven in the midst of want, or how the rich can work themselves down to it in the midst of superabundance.

There is one bit of advice, too, that one might give to the clergy, which is, not to waste too much time in trying to evangelize their betters, but rather to improve their own health by taking a course of moral mud baths in what is understood by the East End of London.

It would cost them less in dress.

Alas! for the West and the East—the gorgeous East changed from the sunny land into the home of the homeless, the paradise of ancient Adam yielding them only a rotten apple off the old tree of knowledge, while the West feeds on golden pippins! The clergy are endowed; they can afford Eastern travel; but less than O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! they love the slums of Shoreditch.

There is something tickling in the phrase, “the fashionable clergy.” One meets them at the receptions of a minister of State; but they do not seem wanted there, and they stand with their hands before them as if they had done preaching. The same congregation will listen to them at a distance in their box at the holy opera. But why do these good men trouble themselves with those gilt-edged Bible-bearers, who are gathered together in unconscious advertisement of the newest fashions from trans-Eastern looms, and the newest feathers from the accommodating bird of paradise, that shed them for their use?

Certainly the clergy waste their time on these delicacies of a perfected race; they are only courtiers, clergy of the bed-chamber, clergy-in-waiting. It is not a nice calling for one who is manly and cultured.

But they are not all alike. Many begin by being honest, and remain so for life.

Among the more recent events which have been of interest to me, I would mention that, in 1885, on the eve of a general election, my son Egmont engaged to deliver a lecture on Gordon in the chief cities; and very efficiently he performed his task. He concluded the work at St. James’s Hall, where I was present. I dined with the Walter Pollocks and we went together to the lecture, at which Lord Cranborne took the chair.

The audience was much moved during the recital of those circumstances which, easy to have been avoided, led to Gordon’s death.

After the lecture, Mrs. Pollock introduced me to Lady Wentworth and then to Lord Wentworth, the grandson of Byron; also to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the worthy daughter of our noblest patriot, Sir Francis Burdett. This lady feelingly expressed to me her regard for Gordon, and invited me to a pleasant luncheon at her house the next day, with Mrs. Pollock and my son and daughter.

But I must not go on talking for ever; my only excuse is, as I have already hinted, I am in my fourteenth year over death-time, and so far belong, in a way, to posterity, in the name of which I have occasionally ventured to opine. With this advantage over many contemporaries, some of whom were once of my own age, and some who were younger, I have a right to consider myself as my own posterity too; indeed, being fourteen years old, as such, I may regard myself as one of the Youths of the Future.

Yet there is something wanting to me in this peculiar situation. Things do not pass for the same as they did in one’s first youth: then I looked forward, now I look back.

But even this living backwards is more curious than may appear at a first glance. It is like taking up, let us say, some seven photos of one’s self with a ten-years’ interval between each. The last is wrinkled and bald; one looks at it and wonders how a countenance could have reached so dilapidated a stage.

One takes up the one before; gazing at it, one tries to hope backwards, but is not much encouraged; it is still wrinkled and bald in its sixtieth year.

The third manifests a slight gain—the wrinkles are in part removed, as if they had been under the beneficial influence of cosmetics.

Then comes the fourth in the order of precedence, and it is not so bad; it has all the promise of youth.

We go back a little further; the previous likeness has kept its word—it restores us to what we have been missing so long—our early prime.

But here sets in a most strange mental confusion. Up to this time we have been hoping backwards; we have looked over a past life with ever-increasing hope of the yet better days; our hair has been restored to its pristine beauty, our wrinkles are as if they had never been, our eyes are lustrous, our first youth returns; we shall soon be fourteen years of age once more. Of a sudden, after hoping backwards all this way and becoming our former selves more and more, we encounter our old hopes; so we are hoping both ways—backward, to our beautiful first childhood, forward to our second, in the midst of a mental hurricane, whirling us in an instant into old age again. So ends the pleasing retrospect—our second youth as far off as ever from our first.

LXVIII.

Photographs in my early days were not in use: so philographs must be produced in their stead. Daubs were as common as they are now, so we have a national portrait gallery. Some sort of likeness should be preserved, too, of men who have figured in physic, not so much for their own sake as for the dramatic addition they make to the age; so engaging is it to know how noted people have acted in the private play.

Among medical men, Sir Charles Clark was the best actor: he was every man’s equal. Gay, upright in figure, graceful, of middle stature, he seemed always ready. He acted the least joke, and so made it a good one. He told of how one day in his garden he had a fit and fell on the gravel walk, but jumped up directly and ran away for fear of his being caught by it again.

Sir Astley Cooper, when I knew him, was somewhat aged; he had returned from the fatigues of rest to practice again, much blamed by those who had succeeded him in his position. He had a grand figure; his face was flabby, his manner quiet, commanding, kindly. Every word he said to those who consulted him was treasured up as worth the guinea they put down. He had a laugh that removed any ill-founded fancy at one stroke.

Sir Benjamin Brodie was a little man, thin of feature, with a diffused acuteness of look that rather glowed because earnest. It demanded a good forehead, like his, and a clear eye to carry off this bright expression.

Dr. Chambers was a large, heavy man, with thick lips, full face, prompt though bulky, seeming to carry his advice in his whole body, and taking his fees as if he were relieving his patient.

John Nussey, the court apothecary, was a man who had the confidence of dukes. He was of large figure, doughy complexion, attentive manner: listening all over. He spoke good sense, and slowly, conveying the feeling that he had much more to say if it so pleased him. Not being wastefully communicative, he was sought after for what he yet had to say.

Sir Richard Quain was of a large countenance; his head heavy, but only because it was full. He had a quiet, not uncheerful, but almost complaining way, at times, as if the sick world expected more of his time than he had to give. He almost appeared injured towards evening, in being too much in demand. Without being deaf, his manner was a little like that of one who was: it was so gentle.

Dr. William Gairdner, a good man within himself, had a select practice among such high people as would allow a free-spoken physician to say what he liked to them. He was of the Scotch blood, with not well-shaped features, and with nose not well finished; but a face altogether good-natured, and a smile that drew your chair close up to his. To use an expression that dropped from my clever nurse, he seemed to listen with his eyes. He once said to a man who proposed to settle in London, as physician, “It will not suit you; it is not in you to do as I did the other day, to put your hand on the Lord Chancellor’s shoulder and tell him he was incapable of speaking truth.”

Dr. J. W. B. Williams, great lung-diagnoser as he was, had a busy, moving manner, which was more like that of a manager than of the head of a firm.

Mr. Robert Liston, the surgeon, was as playful in private as a gigantic kitten, and liked to hear his pretty daughter call him silly. He gave one the impression that he could do everything, and knew nothing. It was not very incorrect; his operating powers were due to a wrist with which he could have screwed off a man’s head in the days of decapitation.

Dr. Mark Latham had the knowing head and look peculiar to those of his name. His face was aquiline in its totality, and, like a bird, he thought on both sides of his head, turning it first on one side, then on another, instead of on the simultaneous mean. He received one very heartily; if it were about a consultation the tone was maintained, but if not, he suddenly appeared busy.

Mr. Stone was a delightful family practitioner, with no end of good recipes for the nursery or lady’s chamber. He was a very friendly, considerate man, well up to every mark; and, being already confided in by all, he was without pretension.

Sir Thomas Watson was what may be called a learned physician. He had a nice, clever, collegiate face, quite gentlemanly and good looking, with a show of languor over his town practice, but very bright when summoned to the country, as if the air did him good. He was quite the head of his profession.

Dr. Richard Bright bore a name that covered his entire nature. His countenance and his mind seemed one: the acuteness, humour, brightness of his inner character lost nothing in flowing to his face, and even hands. His words were so exactly like his thoughts, that on our hearing them they became thoughts again, losing nothing in their passage; their self-conservation of force being unfailing.

Dr. J. A. Wilson (he sometimes latinized his initials to Maxilla) was a man to know, to esteem, to honour. He must have improved many a man’s memory to this day, for he was one who could never be forgotten.

Benjamin Travers was a great thinker, and a perfect surgeon. It is difficult to describe him personally, because he was so gentlemanly, so handsome, of such noble bearing.

One may say the same of Sir William Lawrence, his aspect and his work were so classic. Besides, to describe very great men, like him, is an affront to all the rest.

Sir Henry Acland, an Oxford professor, I knew in my time. He had all the graces peculiar to his family. How delightful it must be for a physician, like him, to pass through life in learned elegance and successful ease!

Then there was Dr. Baly, with his round head, and a face that would cheer any man who had still an hour to live. He was a true man, and had all the medical science of the day at his command. But, even more than this, he knew how to manage the sick, how to give them every advantage that tact could devise; in a word, how to save a life if that life was to be saved.

One more, the one whose name among anatomists is the most enduring of all: Dr. Robert Lee. He discovered a new nervous system when anatomy was held to be complete. Some men are a disgrace to society, some societies are a disgrace to men. So was it with the Royal Society in not recognizing Lee’s merit when the Continent was ringing with his name.

These are a few of those whom I knew and esteemed in my day.

Among medical men, I think Stone was the best at anecdote. He might have written another “Gold-headed Cane.” He was fond of his friends, and was hospitable. He enjoyed his profession, his consultations, and he told a story well. As a sample, Dr. ⸺ was called at night to an old lady’s bedside, but was so inebriated as to do little towards ascertaining the state of the case. He retired to the table to prescribe, but he could not; he was too far gone to commit any remedial measures to paper. He tried over and over again, when, in despair, he described his own condition—“D—drunk, by G⸺!” and left. Early on the following day he received a summons to the lady. “Doctor,” said she, “how did you know what was the matter with me? and why were you so imprudent as to commit it to paper?”

Amongst scientific men of the century we have had Faraday, facile princeps—a man who, when he was doing nothing at all, always looked to me as if he was putting something in its place.

Stokes is the only man who has vied with Faraday, and touched Newton in revealing to us the invisible spectrum.

Then there is Tyndall still, an industrious peeper behind the scenes. It was kind of Faraday to leave him his old coat; but no man could wear it—no tailor could ever make it fit another.

And there is Huxley, who is so great in science, not satisfied with the comfort of believing in nothing himself, but he must strive to share the blessing with all—the blessing of believing in nothing but himself.

Then Darwin, who has been able to climb the hill safely, and reach the summit, with Goethe, Oken, Lamarc, and Geoffrey St. Hilaire on his back.

Then there are scientific men almost too great to be mentioned by name. These tell us the sun will wear out within the period they assign. If I saw them, I should suggest that the sun could not lose energy, because its elements are indestructible. If they asked me what I meant, I should reply that when oxygen and carbon produced heat, and lost it to the earth, they could produce just as much heat again, and that for ever.

“Matter and force,” I should say, “are one, and that one cannot lose or gain.”

If they made no answer, I should add, and then walk away—

“The materials of the sun cannot be diminished, as they can reach no other centre of gravity. But I admit that the sun is open to collision; not, however, within any calculable period of time.”

We should then both speak to some one else.

I now conclude.

In these my reminiscences I have made very free with my reader, and now I heartily wish him “Good day.”

POSTSCRIPT.

My respected publishers, now that my “Memoirs” are in print, have asked me if I wish to precede them by any prefatory remarks; this I have no need of doing, since the first paragraph in the work is a sufficient explanation of why the book was written. But an event having happened which has put half the nation in mourning, and perhaps most of all our august sovereign herself, I feel impelled to utter a few words of sympathy on that sad occasion to her, the loss of a deserving Poet Laureate.

The time has come when the nation’s trust is no longer reposed in any party, but it is to be hoped that its confidence in the throne is unabated. It has taken centuries to produce a sovereign Power whose unbiased will has become moulded to the English idea of rule, and which is in perfect accord with the desires of our now vast numbers; and it is ardently to be wished that a great people may realize, under every change, that they possess one true friend who occupies the first of the three estates of the realm.

As an individual, part owner of these three estates for yet a little while, I desire to leave behind me, not the words of a laureate, but of a loving subject of the best of sovereigns and the best of women. If I, as a poet, have a wish that I would see gratified, it is to hear my “Ode,” written and published during the year of the Jubilee, sung by loyal voices to the sound of trumpets and to the beating of the drum! It may come in appropriately, as by an amateur, during the present little interregnum. For the perusal of those who partake of my love for, my faith in, the throne, I give it here entire, and once more to my readers say, “Farewell!”

QUEEN VICTORIA’S DAY.
AN ODE OF TRIUMPH ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HER REIGN.

Statecraft and kingly power for ages schooled
The nations will; the rod of genius ruled;
At last, glad day, a maiden’s gentle hand

Sufficed to guide the reins of state by sea and land.

Then said a voice from heaven, “Her lengthened reign

Is to eclipse the pride of kings;
A virgin queen has come again,
And to all loving homes her blessing brings.
Soon this queen shall be a bride,

And with her faithful prince her state divide,

His virtues matched by hers alone,
A fitting glory to her throne.
So shall their perfect lives be blest
Till Heaven, who knows our welfare best,
Calls him the earliest to his rest.”

Since hath the gracious sun
Fifty times his year begun,
And she remains, our hope and hourly care,
Her children round her, many a happy pair!
England, be this a day of mirth
From dawn to utmost even!
It is a day to keep on earth;
This day is kept in heaven.
Partake the wine and break the bread;
This day shall all her poor be fed.

There is joy o’er the blessings her reign has showered down,

Yet lone is the star that shines in her crown.

Though sickness and sorrow are common to all,

In our joy let our hearts the departed recall;

Let us think of the friend
In her youth so beloved;
May our blessing attend
On his home far removed!

His name, held so dear, to our children be told!

He loved her, revered her, in days that are old.

He blesses her still, her children among;

For the days that are old are the days that were young.

O the days of our youth, what memories they fill!

We looked on her then, and we look on her still.

Who now blind once beheld her, to her are not blind,

They treasure their queen in their innermost mind;

Who deaf once gave ear to the tones of her voice,

Remember them still, in her accents rejoice.

Chorus.
Since hath the gracious sun
Fifty times his year begun,
And she remains, our hope and hourly care,
Her children round her, many a happy pair!
England, be this a day of mirth
From dawn to utmost even!
It is a day to keep on earth;
This day is kept in heaven.

Rejoice, the heart from labour free;
It is a holy Jubilee!
Where grief does not sadden
Let mirth the heart gladden;
Where our wanderings have been,
Where our footsteps may stray,
Remember the Queen
On her Jubilee day.
Rejoice, O brave legions
In the sun-gilded regions!
There reigns she afar.
Rejoice, O brave souls
At the furthermost poles!
Her children ye are.

May no grief her heart sadden,
May this day her heart gladden;
Victoria sits on her earth-rounded throne!

From the waters that freeze into mountains of stone

To the fire-flashing shores of the tropical zone,

When a soldier has fallen a tear can she shed,

With the widow she knows how to mourn for the dead;

She makes all the cares of her kingdom her own.

Though the touch of the monarch no longer heals,

As balm to the heart her sympathy steals.
’Tis her own Jubilee!
Where her ships plough the deep
Let no memories sleep;
Where the thunder hangs mute
Let her cannon salute
Every wave of the sea.

Musicians, whose glory it is to control

Our hearts, and to sunder our cares from the soul,

Strike deep where hope’s solace we seek for in vain;

Strike deep, though of ills hard to bear we complain;

Strike deep to the hearts of the soldiers who guard

The precincts of freedom, our love their reward;

Strike chords that in battle their sufferings appease,

Till their banners seem floating in victory’s breeze.

It is summer, the June of the Jubilee year,

The month when the first-fruits of spring-time appear,

The month when the lark thrills the sky with a song

Where the blue-bells hang silent the moorlands along.

It is June, glorious June, the month of the Queen!

The cornfields are paling, the pastures are green,

The ferns are uncurling, the hedgerows are gay

With wild roses as welcome as blossom of May.
The trees are swelled out
In the foliage of spring,
The cuckoo’s about
With its voice on the wing.

The morning has come, the churches pour forth

The battling of bells from the south to the north;

The peals from the belfries are merrily rung,

All hearts are rejoicing, all nature is young.

The joys of the earth while they last are our own;

Let us give them to her, to her hearth, to her throne.

Victoria, loved Queen! We proclaim thee again;

May the trust we repose ever sweeten thy reign!

Loud and deep are the cheers ’neath the old village oak;

The health, the long life of the Queen they invoke.

A fife at the lips and a drum all their band,
The villagers gladden the length of the land:
The bunting from gable to gable is swung,

The casements with flags and fond mottoes are hung.

In the love-threaded dance their steps are not tired

As they weave them to tunes by affection inspired.

The children are shouting and romping in throngs,

Like anthems seem holy their merriest songs;
The wayfarer pauses in crossing the stile,
And lists in a dream to their voices awhile:
The voices of children a stranger may win,

Through them are our hearts with the angels akin.

’Twas so on the day she ascended the throne;

We live o’er again the days that are gone.

The days of our youth—what memories they fill!

We looked on her then, and we look on her still.

Grand Chorus.

Victoria sits on her earth-rounded throne!

From the waters that freeze into mountains of stone

To the fire-flashing shores of the tropical zone,

Her kingdoms are free.

Where her ships plough the deep

Let no memories sleep;

Where the thunder hangs mute

Let her cannon salute

Every wave of the sea.

Rejoice, O brave legions

In the sun-gilded regions!

There reigns she afar.

Rejoice, hardy souls

At the furthermost poles!

Her children ye are.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

D. & Co.

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Table of Contents

- E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

- CONTENTS.

- ERRATA.

- Memoirs of Eighty Years.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- IV.

- V.

- VI.

- VII.

- VIII.

- IX.

- X.

- XI.

- XII.

- XIII.

- XIV.

- XV.

- XVI.

- XVII.

- XVIII.

- XIX.

- XX.

- XXI.

- XXII.

- XXIII.

- XXIV.

- XXV.

- XXVI.

- XXVII.

- XXVIII.

- XXIX.

- XXX.

- XXXI.

- XXXII.

- XXXIII.

- XXXIV.

- XXXV.

- XXXVI.

- XXXVII.

- XXXVIII.

- XXXIX.

- XL.

- XLI.

- XLII.

- XLIII.

- XLIV.

- XLV.

- XLVI.

- XLVII.

- XLVIII.

- XLIX.

- L.

- LI.

- LII.

- LIII.

- LIV.

- LV.

- LVI.

- LVII.

- LVIII.

- LIX.

- LX.

- LXI.

- LXII.

- LXIII.

- LXIV.

- LXV.

- LXVI.

- LXVII.

- LXVIII.

- POSTSCRIPT.

- QUEEN VICTORIA’S DAY. AN ODE OF TRIUMPH ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HER REIGN.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE