Life of Frances Power Cobbe As Told by Herself

CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD.

30

Newbridge, Co. Dublin.

31I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason, however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their “little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.

A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed with my good old Irish nurse, Mary 32Malone, in the large nursery at the end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal straight terraces and broad grass walks.

In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot, of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my brother men and sister women, I 33feel appalled to reflect, by how different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!

In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”

My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course 34I was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence, and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked: “Mama, is it not a very comflin thing to have a little girl?” an observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.

My nurse who had attended all my brothers, was already an elderly woman when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a playfellow 35for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I may say I have never felt depressed when living alone. As a child I have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you bould Puckhawn (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get shut of you!” I think I feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, sotto voce, to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house 36which stood in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.

My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject, having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with abhorrence.

Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.

Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of “old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren 37were still living, recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno” occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks. Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.

On the retirement of my nurse, the charge of my little person was committed to my mother’s maid and housekeeper, Martha Jones. She came to my mother a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died of old age and sorrow when I left Newbridge at my father’s death half-a-century afterwards. She was a fine, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a certain refinement above her class. Her father had been an officer in the army, and she was educated (not very extensively) at some little school in Dublin where her particular friend was Moore’s (the poet’s) sister. She used to tell us how Moore as a lad was always contriving to get into the school and romping with the girls. The legend has sufficient verisimilitude to need no confirmation!

“Joney” was indulgence itself, and under her mild sway, and with my mother for instructress in my little lessons of spelling and geography, Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor, I was as happy a little animal as well might be. One day being allowed as usual to play on the grass before the drawing-room windows I took it into my head that I should dearly like to go and pay a visit to my nurse at her cottage at the end of the shrubbery. “Joney” had taken me there more than once, but still the mile-long shrubbery, some of it very dark with fir trees and great laurels, complicated with crossing walks, and containing two or three 38alarming shelter-huts and tonnelles (which I long after regarded with awe), was a tremendous pilgrimage to encounter alone. After some hesitation I set off; ran as long as I could, and then with panting chest and beating heart, went on, daring not to look to right or left, till (after ages as it seemed to me) I reached the little window of my nurse’s house in the ivy wall; and set up—loud enough no doubt—a call for “Nanno!” The good soul could not believe her eyes when she found me alone but, hugging me in her arms, brought me back as fast as she could to my distracted mother who had, of course, discovered my evasion. Two years later, when I was seven years old, I was naughty enough to run away again, this time in the streets of Bath, in company with a hoop, and the Town Crier was engaged to “cry” me, but I found my way home at last alone. How curiously vividly silly little incidents like these stand out in the misty memory of childhood, like objects suddenly perceived close to us in a fog! I seem now, after sixty years, to see my nurse’s little brown figure and white kerchief, as she rushed out and caught her stray “darlint” in her arms; and also I see a dignified, gouty gentleman leaning on his stick, parading the broad pavement of Bath Crescent, up whose whole person my misguided and muddy hoop went bounding in my second escapade. I ought to apologise perhaps to the reader for narrating such trivial incidents, but they have left a charm in my memory.

At seven I was provided with a nursery governess, and my dear mother’s lessons came to an end. So gentle and sweet had they been that I have loved ever since everything she taught me, and have a vivid recollection of the old map book from whence she had herself learned Geography, and of Mrs. Trimmer’s Histories, “Sacred” and “Profane”; not forgetting the almost incredibly bad accompanying volumes of 39woodcuts with poor Eli a complete smudge and Sesostris driving the nine kings (with their crowns, of course) harnessed to his chariot. Who would have dreamed we should now possess photos of the mummy of the real Sesostris (Rameses II.), who seemed then quite as mythical a personage as Polyphemus? To remember the hideous aberrations of Art which then illustrated books for children, and compare them to the exquisite pictures in “Little Folks,” is to realise one of the many changes the world has seen since my childhood. Mrs. Trimmer’s books cost, I remember being told, ten shillings apiece! My governess Miss Kinnear’s lessons, though not very severe (our old doctor, bless him for it! solemnly advised that I should never be called on to study after twelve o’clock), were far from being as attractive as those of my mother, and as soon as I learned to write, I drew on the gravel walk this, as I conceived, deeply touching and impressive sentence: “Lessons! Thou tyrant of the mind!” I could not at all understand my mother’s hilarity over this inscription, which proved so convincingly my need, at all events of those particular lessons of which Lindley Murray was the author. I envied the peacock who could sit all day in the sun, and who ate bowls-full of the griddle-bread of which I was so fond; and never was expected to learn anything? Poor bird, he came to a sad end. A dog terrified him one day and he took a great flight and was observed to go into one of the tall limes near the house but was never seen alive again. When the leaves fell in the autumn the rain-washed feathers and skeleton of poor Pe-ho were found wedged in a fork of the tree. He had met the fate of “Lost Sir Massingberd.”

Some years later, my antipathy to lessons having not at all diminished, I read a book which had just appeared, and of which all the elders of the house were talking, Keith’s Signs of the Times. In this work, as I remember, it was set 40forth that a “Vial” was shortly to be emptied into or near the Euphrates, after which the end of the world was to follow immediately. The writer accordingly warned his readers that they would soon hear startling news from the Euphrates. From that time I persistently inquired of anybody whom I saw reading the newspaper (a small sheet which in the Thirties only came three times a week) or who seemed well-informed about public affairs, “What news was there from the Euphrates?” The singular question at last called forth the inquiry, “Why I wanted to know?” and I was obliged to confess that I was hoping for the emptying of the “Vial” which would put an end to my sums and spelling lessons.

My seventh year was spent with my parents at Bath, where we had a house for the winter in James’ Square, where brothers and cousins came for the holidays, and in London, where I well remember going with my mother to see the Diorama in the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, of St. Peter’s, and a Swiss Cottage, and the statues of Tam o’ Shanter and his wife (which I had implored her to be allowed to see, having imagined them to be living ogres) and vainly entreating to be taken to see the Siamese Twins. This last longing, however, was gratified just thirty years afterwards. We travelled back to Ireland, posting all the way to Holyhead by the then new high road through Wales and over the Menai Bridge. My chief recollection of the long journey is humiliating. A box of Shrewsbury cakes, exactly like those now sold in the town, was bought for me in situ, and I was told to bring it over to Ireland to give to my little cousin Charley. I was pleased to give the cakes to Charley, but then Charley was at the moment far away, and the cakes were always at hand in the carriage; and the road was tedious and the cakes delicious; and so it came to pass somehow that I broke off first a little bit, and then another 41day a larger bit, till cake after cake vanished, and with sorrow and shame I was obliged to present the empty box to Charley on my arrival. Greediness alas! has been a besetting sin of mine all my life.

This Charley was a dear little boy, and about this date was occasionally my companion. His father, my uncle, was Captain William Cobbe, R.N., who had fought under Nelson, and at the end of the war, married and took a house near Newbridge, where he acted as my father’s agent. He was a fine, brave fellow, and much beloved by every one. One day, long after his sudden, untimely death, we heard from a coastguardsman who had been a sailor in his ship, that he had probably caught the disease of which he died in the performance of a gallant action, of which he had never told any one, even his wife. A man had fallen overboard from his ship one bitterly cold night in the northern seas near Copenhagen. My uncle, on hearing what had happened, jumped from his warm berth and plunged into the sea, where he succeeded in rescuing the sailor, but in doing so caught a chill which eventually shortened his days. He had five children, the eldest being Charley, some months younger than I. When my uncle came over to see his brother and do business, Charley, as he grew old enough to take the walk, was often allowed to come with him; and great was my enjoyment of the unwonted pleasure of a young companion. Considerably greater, I believe, than that of my mother and governess, who justly dreaded the escapades which our fertile little brains rarely failed to devise. We climbed over everything climbable by aid of the arrangement that Charley always mounted on my strong shoulders and then helped me up. One day my father said to us: “Children, there is a savage bull come, you must take care not to go near him.” Charley and I looked at each other and mutually understood. The next moment we 42were alone we whispered, “We must get some hairs of his tail!” and away we scampered till we found the new bull in a shed in the cow-yard. Valiantly we seized the tail, and as the bull fortunately paid no attention to his Lilliputian foes, we escaped in triumph with the hairs. Another time, a lovely April evening, I remember we were told it was damp, and that we must not go out of the house. We had discovered, however, a door leading out upon the roof,—and we agreed that “on” the house could not properly be considered “out” of the house; and very soon we were clambering up the slates, and walking along the parapet at a height of fifty or sixty feet from the ground. My mother, passing through one of the halls, observed a group of servants looking up in evident alarm and making signs to us to come down. As quickly as her feebleness permitted she climbed to our door of exit, and called to us over the roofs. Charley and I felt like Adam and Eve on the fatal evening after they had eaten the apple! After dreadful moments of hesitation we came down and received the solemn rebuke and condemnation we deserved. It was not a very severe chastisement allotted to us, though we considered it such. We were told that the game of Pope Joan, promised for the evening, should not be played. That was the severest, if not the only punishment, my mother ever inflicted on me.

On rainy days when Charley and I were driven to amuse ourselves in the great empty rooms and corridors upstairs, we were wont to discuss profound problems of theology. I remember one conclusion relating thereto at which we unanimously arrived. Both of us bore the name of “Power” as a second name, in honour of our grandmother Anne Trench’s mother, Fanny Power of Coreen. On this circumstance we founded the certainty that we should both go to Heaven, because we heard it said in church, “The Heavens and all the Powers therein.”

43Alas poor “Little Charley” as everybody called him, after growing to be a fine six-foot fellow, and a very popular officer, died sadly while still young, at the Cape.

In those early days, let us say about my tenth year, and for long afterwards, it was my father’s habit to fill his house with all the offshoots of the family at Christmas, and with a good many of them for the Midsummer holidays, when my two eldest brothers and the youngest came home from Charterhouse and Oxford, and the third from Sandhurst. These brothers of mine were kind, dear lads, always gentle and petting to their little sister, who was a mere baby when they were schoolboys, and of course never really a companion to them. I recollect they once tried to teach me Cricket, and straightway knocked me over with a ball; and then carried me, all four in tears and despair, to our mother thinking they had broken my ribs. I was very fond of them, and thought a great deal about their holidays, but naturally in early years saw very little of them.

Beside my brothers, and generally coming to Newbridge at the same holiday seasons, there was a regiment of young cousins, male and female. My mother’s only brother, Adjutant General Conway, had five children, all of whom were practically my father’s wards during the years of their education at Haileybury and in a ladies’ boarding-school in London. Then, beside my father’s youngest brother William’s family of five, of whom I have already spoken, his next eldest brother, George, of the Horse Artillery (Lieut. General Cobbe in his later years), had five more, and finally the third brother, Thomas, went out to India in his youth as aide-de-camp to his cousin, the Marquis of Hastings, held several good appointments (at Moorshedabad and elsewhere), married and had ten children, (all of whom passed into my father’s charge) and finally died, poor fellow! on his voyage home from India, after thirty 44years’ absence. Thus there were, in fact, including his own children, thirty young people more or less my father’s wards, and all of them looking to Newbridge as the place where holidays were naturally spent, and to my father’s not very long purse as the resource for everybody in emergencies. One of them, indeed, carried this view of the case rather unfortunately far. A gentleman visiting us, happening to mention that he had lately been to Malta, we naturally asked him if he had met a young officer of our name quartered there? “Oh dear, yes! a delightful fellow! All the ladies adore him. He gives charming picnics, and gets nosegays for them all from Naples.” “I am afraid he can scarcely afford that sort of thing,” someone timidly observed. “Oh, he says,” replied the visitor, “that he has an old uncle somewhere who——Good Lord! I am afraid I have put my foot in it,” abruptly concluded our friend, noticing the looks exchanged round the circle.

My father’s brother Henry, my god-father, died early and unmarried. He was Rector of Templeton, and was very intimate with his neighbours there, the Edgeworths and Granards. The greater part of the library at Newbridge, as it was in my time, had been collected by him, and included an alarming proportion of divinity. The story of his life might serve for such a novel as his friend, Miss Edgeworth, would have written and entitled “Procrastination.” He was much attached for a long time to a charming Miss Lindsay, who was quite willing to accept his hand, had he offered it. My poor uncle, however, continued to flirt and dangle and to postpone any definite declaration, till at last the girl’s mother—who, I rather believe, was a Lady Charlotte Lindsay, well known in her generation—told her that a conclusion must be put to this sort of thing. She would invite Mr. Cobbe to their house for a fortnight, and during that time every opportunity should be afforded him of making a proposal in 45form, if he should be so minded. If, however, at the end of this probation, he had said nothing, Miss Lindsay was to give him up, and he was to be allowed no more chances of addressing her. The visit was paid, and nothing could be more agreeable or devoted than my uncle; but he did not propose to Miss Lindsay! The days passed, and as the end of the allotted time drew near, the lady innocently arranged a few walks en tête-à-tête, and talked in a manner which afforded him every opportunity of saying the words which seemed always on the tip of his tongue. At last the final day arrived. “My dear,” said Lady Charlotte (if such was the mother’s name) to her daughter, “I shall go out with the rest of the party for the whole day and leave you and Mr. Cobbe together. When I return, it must be decided one way or the other.”

The hours flew in pleasant and confidential talk—still no proposal! Miss Lindsay, who knew that the final minutes of grace were passing for her unconscious lover, once more despairingly tried, being really attached to him, to make him say something which she could report to her mother. As he afterwards averred he was on the very brink of asking her to marry him when he caught the sound of her mother’s carriage returning to the door, and said to himself, “I’ll wait for another opportunity.”

The opportunity was never granted to him. Lady Charlotte gave him his congé very peremptorily next morning. My uncle was furious, and in despair; but it was too late! Like other disappointed men he went off rashly, and almost immediately engaged himself (with no delay this time) to Miss Flora Long of Rood Ashton, Wiltshire, a lady of considerable fortune and attractions and of excellent connections, but of such exceedingly rigid piety of the Calvinistic type of the period, that I believe my uncle was soon fairly afraid of his promised bride. At all events his 46procrastinations began afresh. He remained at Templeton on one excuse after another, till Miss Long wrote to ask; “Whether he wished to keep their engagement?” My poor uncle was nearly driven now to the wall, but his health was bad and might prove his apology for fresh delays. Before replying to his Flora, he went to Dublin and consulted Sir Philip Crampton. After detailing his ailments, he asked what he ought to do, hoping (I am afraid) that the great surgeon would say, “O you must keep quiet!” Instead of this verdict Crampton said, “Go and get married by all means!” No further excuse was possible, and my poor uncle wrote to say he was on his way to claim his bride. Ere he reached her, however, while stopping at his mother’s house in Bath, he was found dead in his bed on the morning on which he should have gone to Rood Ashton. He must have expired suddenly while reading a good little book. All this happened somewhere about 1823.

To return to our old life at Newbridge, about 1833 and for many years afterwards, the assembling of my father’s brothers, and brothers’ wives and children at Christmas was the great event of the year in my almost solitary childhood. Often a party of twenty or more sat down every day for three or four weeks together in the dining-room, and we younger ones naturally spent the short days and long evenings in boyish and girlish sports and play. Certain very noisy and romping games—Blindman’s buff, Prisoner’s Bass, Giant, and Puss in the Corner and Hunt the Hare—as we played them through the halls below stairs, and the long corridors and rooms above, still appear to me as among the most delightful things in a world which was then all delight. As we grew a little older and my dear, clever brother Tom came home from Oxford and Germany, charades and plays and masquerading and dancing came into 47fashion. In short ours was, for the time, like other large country houses, full of happy young people, with the high spirits common in those old days. The rest of the year, except during the summer vacation, when brothers and cousins mustered again, the place was singularly quiet, and my life strangely solitary for a child. Very early I made a concordat with each of my four successive governesses, that when lessons were ended, precisely at twelve, I was free to wander where I pleased about the park and woods, to row the boat on the pond or ride my pony on the sands of the sea-shore two miles from the house. I was not to be expected to have any concern with my instructress outside the doors. The arrangement suited them, of course, perfectly; and my childhood was thus mainly a lonely one. I was so uniformly happy that I was (what I suppose few children are) quite conscious of my own happiness. I remember often thinking whether other children were all as happy as I, and sometimes, especially on a spring morning of the 18th March,—my mother’s birthday, when I had a holiday, and used to make coronets of primroses and violets for her,—I can recall walking along the grass walks of that beautiful old garden and feeling as if everything in the world was perfect, and my life complete bliss for which I could never thank God enough.

When the weather was too bad to spend my leisure hours out of doors I plunged into the library at haphazard, often making “discovery” of books of which I had never been told, but which, thus found for myself, were doubly precious. Never shall I forget thus falling by chance on Kubla Khan in its first pamphlet-shape. I also gloated over Southey’s Curse of Kehama, and The Cid and Scott’s earlier works. My mother did very wisely, I think, to allow me thus to rove over the shelves at my own will. By degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I became a 48studious girl, as I shall presently describe. Beside the library, however, I had a play-house of my own for wet days. There were, at that time, two garrets only in the house (the bedrooms having all lofty coved ceilings), and these two garrets, over the lobbies, were altogether disused. I took possession of them, and kept the keys lest anybody should pry into them, and truly they must have been a remarkable sight! On the sloping roofs I pinned the eyes of my peacock’s feathers in the relative positions of the stars of the chief constellations; one of my hobbies being Astronomy. On another wall I fastened a rack full of carpenter’s tools, which I could use pretty deftly on the bench beneath. The principal wall was an armoury of old court-swords, and home-made pikes, decorated with green and white flags (I was an Irish patriot at that epoch), sundry javelins, bows and arrows, and a magnificently painted shield with the family arms. On the floor of one room was a collection of shells from the neighbouring shore, and lastly there was a table with pens, ink and paper; implements wherewith I perpetrated, inter alia, several poems of which I can just recall one. The motif of the story was obviously borrowed from a stanza in Moore’s Irish Melodies. Even now I do not think the verses very bad for 12 or 13 years old.

and so on, and so on! I wrote a great deal of this sort of thing then and for a few years afterwards; and of course, like everyone else who has ever been given to waste paper and ink, I tried my hand on a tragedy. I had no real power or originality, only a little Fancy perhaps, and a dangerous facility for flowing versification. After a time my early ambition to become a Poet died out under the terrible hard mental strain and very serious study through which I passed in seeking religious faith. But I have always passionately loved poetry of a certain kind, specially that of Shelley; and perhaps some of my prose writings have been the better for my early efforts to cultivate harmony and for my delight in good similes. This last propensity is even now very strong in me, and whenever I write con amore, comparisons and metaphors come tumbling out of my head, till my difficulty is to exclude mixed ones!

My education at this time was of a simple kind. After Miss Kinnear left us to marry, I had another nursery governess, a good creature properly entitled “Miss Daly,” but called by my profane brothers, “the Daily Nuisance.” 51After her came a real governess, the daughter of a bankrupt Liverpool merchant who made my life a burden with her strict discipline and her “I-have-seen-better-days” airs; and who, at last, I detected in a trick which to me appeared one of unparalleled turpitude! She had asked me to let her read something which I had written in a copy-book and I had peremptorily declined to obey her request, and had locked up my papers in my beloved little writing-desk which my dear brother Tom had bought for me out of his school-boy’s pocket-money. The keys of this desk I kept with other things in one of the old-fashioned pockets which everybody then wore, and which formed a separate article of under clothing. This pocket my maid naturally placed at night on the chair beside my little bed, and the curtains of the bed being drawn, Miss W. no doubt after a time concluded I was asleep and cautiously approached the chair on tiptoe. As it happened I was wide awake, having at that time the habit of repeating certain hymns and other religious things to myself before I went to sleep; and when I perceived through the white curtain the shadow of my governess close outside, and then heard the slight jingle made by my keys as she abstracted them from my pocket, I felt as if I were witness of a crime! Anything so base I had never dreamed as existing outside story books of wicked children. Drawing the curtain I could see that Miss W. had gone with her candle into the inner room (one of the old “powdering closets” attached to all the rooms in Newbridge) and was busy with the desk which lay on the table therein. Very shortly I heard the desk close again with an angry click,—and no wonder! Poor Miss W., who no doubt fancied she was going to detect her strange pupil in some particular naughtiness, found the MS. in the desk, to consist of solemn religious “Reflections,” in the style of Mrs. Trimmer; and of a poetical description 52(in round hand) of the Last Judgment! My governess replaced the bunch of keys in my pocket and noiselessly withdrew, but it was long before I could sleep for sheer horror; and next day I, of course, confided to my mother the terrible incident. Nothing, I think, was said to Miss W. about it, but she was very shortly afterwards allowed to return to her beloved Liverpool, where, for all I know, she may be living still.

My fourth and last governess was a remarkable woman, a Mdlle. Montriou, a person of considerable force of character, and in many respects an admirable teacher. With her I read a good deal of solid history, beginning with Rollin and going on to Plutarch and Gibbon; also some modern historians. She further taught me systematically a scheme of chronology and royal successions, till I had an amount of knowledge of such things which I afterwards found was not shared by any of my schoolfellows. She had the excellent sense also to allow me to use a considerable part of my lesson hours with a map book before me, asking her endless questions on all things connected with the various countries; and as she was extremely well and widely informed, this was almost the best part of my instruction. I became really interested in these studies, and also in the great poets, French and English, to whom she introduced me. Of course my governess taught me music, including what was then called Thorough Bass, and now Harmony; but very little of the practical part of performance could I learn then or at any time. Independently of her, I read every book on Astronomy which I could lay hold of, and I well remember the excitement wherewith I waited for years for the appearance of the Comet of 1835, which one of these books had foretold. At last a report reached me that the village tailor had seen the comet the previous night. Of course I scanned the sky with renewed ardour, and thought I had discovered the desired object in a misty-looking star of which my planisphere gave no notice. My father however pooh-poohed this bold hypothesis, and I was fain to wait till the next night. Then, as soon as it was dark, I ran up to a window whence I could command the constellation wherein the comet was bound to show itself. A small hazy star—and a long train of light from it—greeted my enchanted eyes! My limbs could hardly bear me as I tore downstairs into the drawing-room, nor my voice publish the triumphant intelligence, “It is the comet!” “It has a tail!” Everybody (in far too leisurely a way as I considered) went up and saw it, and confessed that the comet it certainly must be, with that appendage of the tail! Few events in my long life have caused me such delightful excitement. This was in 1835.

Newbridge, Co. Dublin.

CHAPTER III. SCHOOL AND AFTER.

57When my father, in 1836, had decided, by my governess’s advice, to send me to school, my dear mother, though already old and feeble, made the journey, long as it was in those days, from Ireland to Brighton to see for herself where I was to be placed, and to invoke the kindness of my schoolmistresses for me. We sailed to Bristol—a 30 hours’ passage usually, but sometimes longer,—and then travelled by postchaises to Brighton, taking, I think, three days on the road and visiting Stonehenge by the way, to my mother’s great delight. My eldest brother, then at Oxford, attended her and acted courier. When we came in sight of Brighton the lamps were lighted along the long perspective of the shore. Gas was still sufficiently a novelty to cause this sight to be immensely impressive to us all.

Next day my mother took me to my future tyrants, and fondly bargained (as she was paying enormously) that I should have sundry indulgences, and principally a bedroom to myself. A room was shown to her with only one small bed in it, and this she was told would be mine. When I went to it next night, heart broken after her departure, I found that another bed had been put up, and a schoolfellow was already asleep in it. I flung myself down on my knees by my own and cried my heart out, and was accordingly reprimanded next morning before the whole school for having been seen to cry at my prayers.^[8]

58The education of women was probably at its lowest ebb about half-a-century ago. It was at that period more pretentious than it had ever been before, and infinitely more costly than it is now; and it was likewise more shallow and senseless than can easily be believed. To inspire young women with due gratitude for their present privileges, won for them by my contemporaries, I can think of nothing better than to acquaint them with some of the features of school life in England in the days of their mothers. I say advisedly the days of their mothers, for in those of their grandmothers, things were by no means equally bad. There was much less pretence and more genuine instruction, so far as it extended.

For a moment let us, however, go back to these earlier grandmothers’ schools, say those of the year 1790 or thereabouts. From the reports of my own mother, and of a friend whose mother was educated in the same place, I can accurately describe a school which flourished at that date in the fashionable region of Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The mistress was a certain Mrs. Devis, who must have been a woman of ability for she published a very good little English Grammar for the express use of her pupils; also a Geography, and a capital book of maps, which possessed the inestimable advantage of recording only those towns, cities, rivers, and mountains which were mentioned in the Geography, and not confusing the mind (as maps are too apt to do) with extraneous and superfluous towns and hills. I speak with personal gratitude of those venerable books, for out of them chiefly I obtained such inklings of Geography as have sufficed generally for my wants through life; the only disadvantage they entailed being a firm impression, still rooted in my mind, that there is a “Kingdom of Poland” somewhere about the middle of Europe.

Beside Grammar and Geography and a very fair share of history (“Ancient” derived from Rollin, and “Sacred” from Mrs. Trimmer), the young ladies at Mrs. Devis’ school 59learned to speak and read French with a very good accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste, if not with a very learned appreciation of “severe” music. The “Battle of Prague” and Hook’s Sonatas were, I believe, their culminating achievements. But it was not considered in those times that packing the brains of girls with facts, or even teaching their fingers to run over the keys of instruments, or to handle pen and pencil, was the Alpha and Omega of education. William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth Manne,” was understood to hold good emphatically concerning the making of Woman. The abrupt speaking, courtesy-neglecting, slouching, slangy young damsel who may now perhaps carry off the glories of a University degree, would have seemed to Mrs. Devis still needing to be taught the very rudiments of feminine knowledge. “Decorum” (delightful word! the very sound of which brings back the smell of Maréchale powder) was the imperative law of a lady’s inner life as well as of her outward habits; and in Queen Square nothing that was not decorous was for a moment admitted. Every movement of the body in entering and quitting a room, in taking a seat and rising from it, was duly criticised. There was kept, in the back premises, a carriage taken off the wheels, and propped up en permanence, for the purpose of enabling the young ladies to practise ascending and descending with calmness and grace, and without any unnecessary display of their ankles. Every girl was dressed in the full fashion of the day. My mother, like all her companions, wore hair-powder and rouge on her cheeks when she entered the school a blooming girl of fifteen; that excellent rouge at five guineas a pot, which (as she explained to me in later years) did not spoil the complexion like ordinary compounds, and which I can witness really left a beautiful, clear skin when disused thirty years afterwards.

60Beyond these matters of fashion, however,—so droll now to remember,—there must have been at Mrs. Devis’ seminary a great deal of careful training in what may be called the great Art of Society; the art of properly paying and receiving visits, of saluting acquaintances in the street and drawing-room; and of writing letters of compliment. When I recall the type of perfect womanly gentleness and high breeding which then and there was formed, it seems to me as if, in comparison, modern manners are all rough and brusque. We have graceful women in abundance still, but the peculiar old-fashioned suavity, the tact which made everybody in a company happy and at ease,—most of all the humblest individual present,—and which at the same time effectually prevented the most audacious from transgressing les bienséances by a hair; of that suavity and tact we seem to have lost the tradition.

The great Bloomsbury school, however, passed away at length, good Mrs. Devis having departed to the land where I trust the Rivers of Paradise formed part of her new study of Geography. Nearly half-a-century later, when it came to my turn to receive education, it was not in London but in Brighton that the ladies’ schools most in estimation were to be found. There were even then (about 1836) not less than a hundred such establishments in the town, but that at No. 32, Brunswick Terrace, of which Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were mistresses, and which had been founded some time before by a celebrated Miss Poggi, was supposed to be nec pluribus impar. It was, at all events, the most outrageously expensive, the nominal tariff of £120 or £130 per annum representing scarcely a fourth of the charges for “extras” which actually appeared in the bills of many of the pupils. My own, I know, amounted to £1,000 for two years’ schooling.

I shall write of this school quite frankly, since the two 61poor ladies, well-meaning but very unwise, to whom it belonged have been dead for nearly thirty years, and it can hurt nobody to record my conviction that a better system than theirs could scarcely have been devised had it been designed to attain the maximum of cost and labour and the minimum of solid results. It was the typical Higher Education of the period, carried out to the extreme of expenditure and high pressure.

Profane persons were apt to describe our school as a Convent, and to refer to the back door of our garden, whence we issued on our dismal diurnal walks, as the “postern.” If we in any degree resembled nuns, however, it was assuredly not those of either a Contemplative or Silent Order. The din of our large double schoolrooms was something frightful. Sitting in either of them, four pianos might be heard going at once in rooms above and around us, while at numerous tables scattered about the rooms there were girls reading aloud to the governesses and reciting lessons in English, French, German, and Italian. This hideous clatter continued the entire day till we went to bed at night, there being no time whatever allowed for recreation, unless the dreary hour of walking with our teachers (when we recited our verbs), could so be described by a fantastic imagination. In the midst of the uproar we were obliged to write our exercises, to compose our themes, and to commit to memory whole pages of prose. On Saturday afternoons, instead of play, there was a terrible ordeal generally known as the “Judgment Day.” The two schoolmistresses sat side by side, solemn and stern, at the head of the long table. Behind them sat all the governesses as Assessors. On the table were the books wherein our evil deeds of the week were recorded; and round the room against the wall, seated on stools of penitential discomfort, we sat, five-and-twenty “damosels,” 62anything but “Blessed,” expecting our sentences according to our ill-deserts. It must be explained that the fiendish ingenuity of some teacher had invented for our torment a system of imaginary “cards,” which we were supposed to “lose” (though we never gained any) whenever we had not finished all our various lessons and practisings every night before bed-time, or whenever we had been given the mark for “stooping,” or had been impertinent, or had been “turned” in our lessons, or had been marked “P” by the music master, or had been convicted of “disorder” (e.g., having our long shoe-strings untied), or, lastly, had told lies! Any one crime in this heterogeneous list entailed the same penalty, namely, the sentence, “You have lost your card, Miss So and so, for such and such a thing;” and when Saturday came round, if three cards had been lost in the week, the law wreaked its justice on the unhappy sinner’s head! Her confession having been wrung from her at the awful judgment-seat above described, and the books having been consulted, she was solemnly scolded and told to sit in the corner for the rest of the evening! Anything more ridiculous than the scene which followed can hardly be conceived. I have seen (after a week in which a sort of feminine barring-out had taken place) no less than nine young ladies obliged to sit for hours in the angles of the three rooms, like naughty babies, with their faces to the wall; half of them being quite of marriageable age, and all dressed, as was de rigueur with us every day, in full evening attire of silk or muslin, with gloves and kid slippers. Naturally, Saturday evenings, instead of affording some relief to the incessant overstrain of the week, were looked upon with terror as the worst time of all. Those who escaped the fell destiny of the corner were allowed, if they chose to write to their parents, but our letters were perforce committed at night to the schoolmistress to seal, and were not as may be 63imagined, exactly the natural outpouring of our sentiments as regarded those ladies and their school.

Our household was a large one. It consisted of the two schoolmistresses and joint proprietors, of the sister of one of them and another English governess; of a French, an Italian, and a German lady teacher; of a considerable staff of respectable servants; and finally of twenty-five or twenty-six pupils, varying in age from nine to nineteen. All the pupils were daughters of men of some standing, mostly country gentlemen, members of Parliament, and offshoots of the peerage. There were several heiresses amongst us, and one girl whom we all liked and recognised as the beauty of the school, the daughter of Horace Smith, author of Rejected Addresses. On the whole, looking back after the long interval, it seems to me that the young creatures there assembled were full of capabilities for widely extended usefulness and influence. Many were decidedly clever and nearly all were well disposed. There was very little malice or any other vicious ideas or feelings, and no worldliness at all amongst us. I make this last remark because the novel of Rose, Blanche and Violet, by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, is evidently intended in sundry details to describe this particular school, and yet most falsely represents the girls as thinking a great deal of each other’s wealth or comparative poverty. Nothing was further from the fact. One of our heiresses, I well remember, and another damsel of high degree, the granddaughter of a duke, were our constant butts for their ignorance and stupidity, rather than the objects of any preferential flattery. Of vulgarity of feeling of the kind imagined by Mr. Lewes, I cannot recall a trace.

But all this fine human material was deplorably wasted. Nobody dreamed that any one of us could in later life be more or less than an “Ornament of Society.” That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist, or authoress, would 64have been looked upon by both Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts as a deplorable dereliction. Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society, was the raison d’être of each acquirement. Everything was taught us in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing; miserably poor music, too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano. I can recall an amusing instance in which the order of precedence above described was naïvely betrayed by one of our schoolmistresses when she was admonishing one of the girls who had been detected in a lie. “Don’t you know, you naughty girl,” said Miss R. impressively, before the whole school: “don’t you know we had almost rather find you have a P——” (the mark of Pretty Well) “in your music, than tell such falsehoods?”

It mattered nothing whether we had any “music in our souls” or any voices in our throats, equally we were driven through the dreary course of practising daily for a couple of hours under a German teacher, and then receiving lessons twice or three times a week from a music master (Griesbach by name) and a singing master. Many of us, myself in particular, in addition to these had a harp master, a Frenchman named Labarre, who gave us lessons at a guinea apiece, while we could only play with one hand at a time. Lastly there were a few young ladies who took instructions in the new instruments, the concertina and the accordion!

The waste of money involved in all this, the piles of useless music, and songs never to be sung, for which our parents had to pay, and the loss of priceless time for ourselves, were truly deplorable; and the result of course in many cases (as in my own) complete failure. One day I said to the good 65little German teacher, who nourished a hopeless attachment for Schiller’s Marquis Posa, and was altogether a sympathetic person, “My dear Fraulein, I mean to practise this piece of Beethoven’s till I conquer it.” “My dear,” responded the honest Fraulein, “you do practice that piece for seex hours a day, and you do live till you are seexty, at the end you will not play it!” Yet so hopeless a pupil was compelled to learn for years, not only the piano, but the harp and singing!

Next to music in importance in our curriculum came dancing. The famous old Madame Michaud and her husband both attended us constantly, and we danced to their direction in our large play-room (lucus a non lucendo), till we had learned not only all the dances in use in England in that ante-polka epoch, but almost every national dance in Europe, the Minuet, the Gavotte, the Cachucha, the Bolero, the Mazurka, and the Tarantella. To see the stout old lady in her heavy green velvet dress, with furbelow a foot deep of sable, going through the latter cheerful performance for our ensample, was a sight not to be forgotten. Beside the dancing we had “calisthenic” lessons every week from a “Capitaine” Somebody, who put us through manifold exercises with poles and dumbbells. How much better a few good country scrambles would have been than all these calisthenics it is needless to say, but our dismal walks were confined to parading the esplanade and neighbouring terraces. Our parties never exceeded six, a governess being one of the number, and we looked down from an immeasurable height of superiority on the processions of twenty and thirty girls belonging to other schools. The governess who accompanied us had enough to do with her small party, for it was her duty to utilise these brief hours of bodily exercise by hearing us repeat our French, Italian or German verbs, according to her own nationality.

Next to Music and Dancing and Deportment, came Drawing, but that was not a sufficiently voyant accomplishment, and no 66great attention was paid to it; the instruction also being of a second-rate kind, except that it included lessons in perspective which have been useful to me ever since. Then followed Modern Languages. No Greek or Latin were heard of at the school, but French, Italian and German were chattered all day long, our tongues being only set at liberty at six o’clock to speak English. Such French, such Italian, and such German as we actually spoke may be more easily imagined than described. We had bad “Marks” for speaking wrong languages, e.g., French when we bound to speak Italian or German, and a dreadful mark for bad French, which was transferred from one to another all day long, and was a fertile source of tears and quarrels, involving as it did a heavy lesson out of Noel et Chapsal’s Grammar on the last holder at night. We also read in each language every day to the French, Italian and German ladies, recited lessons to them, and wrote exercises for the respective masters who attended every week. One of these foreign masters, by the way, was the patriot Berchet; a sad, grim-looking man of whom I am afraid we rather made fun; and on one occasion, when he had gone back to Italy, a compatriot, whom we were told was a very great personage indeed, took his classes to prevent them from being transferred to any other of the Brighton teachers of Italian. If my memory have not played me a trick, this illustrious substitute for Berchet was Manzoni, the author of the Promessi Sposi; a distinguished-looking middle-aged man, who won all our hearts by pronouncing everything we did admirable, even, I think, on the occasion when one young lady freely translated Tasso,—

into French as follows:—

67Naturally after (a very long way after) foreign languages came the study of English. We had a writing and arithmetic master (whom we unanimously abhorred and despised, though one and all of us grievously needed his instructions) and an “English master,” who taught us to write “themes,” and to whom I, for one, feel that I owe, perhaps, more than to any other teacher in that school, few as were the hours which we were permitted to waste on so insignificant an art as composition in our native tongue!

Beyond all this, our English studies embraced one long, awful lesson each week to be repeated to the schoolmistress herself by a class, in history one week, in geography the week following. Our first class, I remember, had once to commit to memory—Heaven alone knows how—no less than thirteen pages of Woodhouselee’s Universal History!

Lastly, as I have said, in point of importance, came our religious instruction. Our well-meaning schoolmistresses thought it was obligatory on them to teach us something of the kind, but, being very obviously altogether worldly women themselves, they were puzzled how to carry out their intentions. They marched us to church every Sunday when it did not rain, and they made us on Sunday mornings repeat the Collect and Catechism; but beyond these exercises of body and mind, it was hard for them to see what to do for our spiritual welfare. One Ash Wednesday, I remember, they provided us with a dish of salt-fish, and when this was removed to make room for the roast mutton, they addressed us in a short discourse, setting forth the merits of fasting, and ending by the remark that they left us free to take meat or not as we pleased, but that they hoped we should fast; “it would be good for our souls AND OUR FIGURES!”

Each morning we were bound publicly to repeat a text out of certain little books, called Daily Bread, left in our bedrooms, and always scanned in frantic haste while “doing-up” 68our hair at the glass, or gabbled aloud by one damsel so occupied while her room-fellow (there were never more than two in each bed-chamber) was splashing about behind the screen in her bath. Down, when the prayer-bell rang, both were obliged to hurry and breathlessly to await the chance of being called on first to repeat the text of the day, the penalty for oblivion being the loss of a “card.” Then came a chapter of the Bible, read verse by verse amongst us, and then our books were shut and a solemn question was asked. On one occasion I remember it was: “What have you just been reading, Miss S——?” Miss S—— (now a lady of high rank and fashion, whose small wits had been woolgathering) peeped surreptitiously into her Bible again, and then responded with just confidence, “The First Epistle, Ma’am, of General Peter.”

It is almost needless to add, in concluding these reminiscences, that the heterogeneous studies pursued in this helter-skelter fashion were of the smallest possible utility in later life; each acquirement being of the shallowest and most imperfect kind, and all real education worthy of the name having to be begun on our return home, after we had been pronounced “finished.” Meanwhile the strain on our mental powers of getting through daily, for six months at a time, this mass of ill-arranged and miscellaneous lessons, was extremely great and trying.

One droll reminiscence must not be forgotten. The pupils at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Roberts’ were all supposed to have obtained the fullest instruction in Science by attending a course of Nine Lectures delivered by a gentleman named Walker in a public room in Brighton. The course comprised one Lecture on Electricity, another on Galvanism, another on Optics, others I think, on Hydrostatics, Mechanics, and Pneumatics, and finally three, which gave me infinite satisfaction, on Astronomy.

69If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge, mine at school certainly proved a notable failure. I was brought home (no girl could travel in those days alone) from Brighton by a coach called the Red Rover, which performed, as a species of miracle, in one day the journey to Bristol, from whence I embarked for Ireland. My convoy-brother naturally mounted the box, and left me to enjoy the interior all day by myself; and the reflections of those solitary hours of first emancipation remain with me as lively as if they had taken place yesterday. “What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I must know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”

This noble resolve lasted I fancy a few months, and then, depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly! I tried to supply first one deficiency and then another, till after a year or two, I began to educate myself in earnest. The reader need not be troubled with a long story. I spent four years in the study of History—constructing while I did so some Tables of Royal Successions on a plan of my own which enabled me to see at a glance the descent, succession and date of each reigning sovereign of every country, ancient and modern, possessing any History of which I could find a trace. These Tables I still have by me, and they certainly testify to considerable industry. Then the parson of our parish, who had been a tutor in Dublin College, came up three times a week for several years, and taught me a little Greek (enough to read the Gospels and to stumble through Plato’s Krito), and rather more geometry, to which science I took an immense 70fancy, and in which he carried me over Euclid and Conic Sections, and through two most delightful books of Archimedes’ spherics. I tried Algebra, but had as much disinclination for that form of mental labour as I had enjoyment in the reasoning required by Geometry. My tutor told me he was able to teach me in one lesson as many propositions as he habitually taught the undergraduates of Dublin College in two. I have ever since strongly recommended this study to women as specially fitted to counteract our habits of hasty judgment and slovenly statement, and to impress upon us the nature of real demonstration.

I also read at this time, by myself, as many of the great books of the world as I could reach; making it a rule always (whether bored or not) to go on to the end of each, and also following generally Gibbon’s advice, viz., to rehearse in one’s mind in a walk before beginning a great book all that one knows of the subject, and then, having finished it, to take another walk, and register how much has been added to our store of ideas. In these ways I read all the Faery Queen, all Milton’s poetry, and the Divina Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata in the originals. Also (in translations) I read through the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, and all or nearly all, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, &c. There was a fairly good library at Newbridge, and I could also go when I pleased, and read in Archbishop Marsh’s old library in Dublin, where there were splendid old books, though none I think more recent than a hundred and fifty years before my time. My mother possessed a small collection of classics—Dryden, Pope, Milton, Horace, &c., which she gave me, and I bought for myself such other books as I needed out of my liberal pin-money. Happily, I had at that time a really good memory for literature, being able to carry away almost the words of passages which much interested me in prose or 71verse, and to bring them into use when required, though I had, oddly enough, at the same period so imperfect a recollection of persons and daily events that, being very anxious to do justice to our servants, I was obliged to keep a book of memoranda of the characters and circumstances of all who left us, that I might give accurate and truthful recommendations.

By degrees these discursive studies—I took up various hobbies from time to time—Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, and many others—centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil du Perron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu; and all I could learn about the Greek and Alexandrian philosophers from Diogenes Laertius and the old translators (Taylor, of Norwich, and others) and a large Biographical Dictionary which we had in our library. Having always a passion for Synopses, I constructed, somewhere about 1840, a Table, big enough to cover a sheet of double-elephant paper, wherein the principal Greek philosophers were ranged,—their lives, ethics, cosmogonies and special doctrines,—in separate columns. After this I made a similar Table of the early Gnostics and other heresiarchs, with the aid of Mosheim, Sozomen, and Eusebius.

Does the reader smile to find these studies recorded as the principal concern of the life of a young lady from 16 to 20, and in fact to 35 years of age? It was even so! They were (beside Religion, of which I shall speak elsewhere) my supreme interest. As I have said in the beginning, I had neither cares of love, or cares of money to occupy my mind or my heart. My parents wished me to go a little into society when I was about 18, and I was, for the moment, pleased and interested in the few balls and drawing-rooms (in 72Dublin) to which my father and afterwards my uncle, General George Cobbe, conducted me. But I was rather bored than amused by my dancing partners, and my dear mother, already in declining years and completely an invalid, could never accompany me, and I pined for her motherly presence and guidance, the loss of which was only half compensated for by her comments on the long reports of all I had seen and said and done, as I sat on her bed, on my return home. By degrees also, my thoughts came to be so gravely employed by efforts to find my way to religious truth, that the whole glamour of social pleasures disappeared and became a weariness; and by the time I was 19 I begged to be allowed to stay at home and only to receive our own guests, and attend the occasional dinners in our neighbourhood. With some regret my parents yielded the point, and except for a visit every two or three years to London for a few weeks of sightseeing, and one or two trips in Ireland to houses of our relations, my life, for a long time, was perfectly secluded. I have found some verses in which I described it.

In one of our summer excursions I remember my father and one of my brothers and I lionized Winchester, and came 73upon an exquisite chapel, which was at that time, and perhaps still is, a sort of sanctuary of books, in the midst of a lovely, silent cloister. To describe the longing I felt then, and long after, to spend all my life studying there in peace and undisturbed, “hiving learning with each studious year,”—would be impossible!

I think there is a great, and it must be said lamentable, difference between the genuine passion for study such as many men and women in my time and before it experienced, and the hurried anxious gobbling up of knowledge which has been introduced by competitive examinations, and the eternal necessity for getting something else beside knowledge; something to be represented by M.A. or B.Sch., or, perhaps, by £ s. d.! When I was young there were no honours, no rewards of any kind for a woman’s learning; and as there were no examinations, there was no hurry or anxiety. There was only healthy thirst for knowledge of one kind or another, and of one kind after another. When I came across a reference to a matter which I did not understand, it was not then necessary, as it seems to be to young students now, to hasten over it, leaving the unknown name, or event, or doctrine, like an enemy’s fortress on the road of an advancing army. I stopped and sat down before it, perhaps for days and weeks, but I conquered it at last, and then went on my way strengthened by the victory. Recently, I have actually heard of students at a college for ladies being advised by their “coach” to skip a number of propositions in Euclid, as it was certain they would not be examined in them! One might as well help a climber by taking rungs out of his ladder! I can make no sort of pretensions to have acquired, even in my best days, anything like the instruction which the young students of Girton and Newnham and Lady Margaret Hall are so fortunate as to possess; and much I envy their opportunities for obtaining 74accurate scholarship. But I know not whether the method they follow can, on the whole, convey as much of the pure delight in learning as did my solitary early studies. When the summer morning sun rose over the trees and shone as it often did into my bedroom finding me still over my books from the evening before, and when I then sauntered out to take a sleep on one of the garden seats in the shrubbery, the sense of having learned something, or cleared up some hitherto doubted point, or added a store of fresh ideas to my mental riches, was one of purest satisfaction.

As to writing as well as reading, I had very early a great love of the art and frequently wrote small essays and stories, working my way towards something of good style. Our English master at school on seeing my first exercise (on Roman History, I think it was), had asked Miss Runciman whether she were sure I had written it unaided, and observed that the turn of the sentences was not girl-like, and that he “thought I should grow up to be a fine writer.” My schoolmistress laughed, of course, at the suggestion, and I fancy she thought less of poor Mr. Turnbull for his absurd judgment. But as men and women who are to be good musicians love their pianos and violins as children, so I early began to love that noble instrument, the English Language, and in my small way to study how to play upon it. At one time when quite young I wrote several imitations of the style of Gibbon and other authors, just as an exercise. Eventually without of course copying anybody in particular, I fell into what I must suppose to be a style of my own, since those familiar with it easily detect passages of my writing wherever they come across them. I was at a later time much interested in seeing many of my articles translated into French (chiefly in the French Protestant periodicals) and to note how little it is possible to render the real feeling of such words as those with which 75our tongue supplies us by those of that language. At a still later date, when I edited the Zoophile, I was perpetually disappointed by the failures of the best translators I could engage, to render my meaning. Among the things for which to be thankful in life, I think we, English, ought to assign no small place to our inheritance of that grand legacy of our forefathers, the English Language.

While these studies were going on, from the time I left school in 1838 till I left Newbridge in 1857, it may be noted that I had the not inconsiderable charge of keeping house for my father. My mother at once put the whole responsibility of the matter in my hands, refusing even to be told beforehand what I had ordered for the rather formal dinner parties of those days, and I accepted the task with pleasure, both because I could thus relieve her, and also because then and ever since I have really liked housekeeping. I love a well-ordered house and table, rooms pleasantly arranged and lighted, and decorated with flowers, hospitable attentions to guests, and all the other pleasant cares of the mistress of a family. In the midst of my studies I always went every morning regularly to my housekeeper’s room and wrote out a careful menu for the upstairs and downstairs meals. I visited the larders and the fine old kitchen frequently, and paid the servants’ wages on every quarter day; and once a year went over my lists of everything in the charge of either the men or women servants. In particular I took very special care of the china, which happened to be magnificent; and hereby hangs the memory of a droll incident with which I may close this chapter.

A certain dignified old lady, the Hon. Mrs. X., had paid a visit to Newbridge with her daughters, and in return she invited one of my brothers and myself to spend some days at her “show” place in ——. While stopping there I talked with the enthusiasm of my age to her very charming young 76daughters of the pleasures of study, urging them strenuously to learn Greek and Mathematics. Mrs. X., overhearing me, intervened in the conversation, and said somewhat tartly, “I do not at all agree with you, Miss Cobbe! I think the duty of a lady is to attend to her house, and to her husband and children. I beg you will not incite my girls to take up your studies.”

Of course I bowed to the decree, and soon after began admiring some of the china about the room. “There is,” said Mrs. X., “some very fine old china belonging to this house. There is one dessert-service which is said to have cost £800 forty or fifty years ago. Would you like to see it?”

Having gratefully accepted the invitation, I followed my hostess to the basement of the house, and there, for the first time in my life, I recognised that condition of disorder and slatternliness which I had heard described as characteristic of Irish houses. At last we reached an underground china closet, and after some delay and reluctance on the part of the servant, a key was found and the door opened. There, on the shelves and the floor, lay piled, higgledy-piggledy, dishes and plates of exquisite china mixed up with the commonest earthenware jugs, basins, cups, and willow-pattern kitchen dishes; and the great dessert-service among the rest—with the dessert of the previous summer rotting on the plates! Yes! there was no mistake. Some of the superb plates handed to me by the servant for examination by the light of the window, had on them peach and plum-stones and grape-stalks, obviously left as they had been taken from the table in the dining-room many months before! Poor Mrs. X. muttered some expressions of dismay and reproach to her servants, which of course I did not seem to hear, but I had not the strength of mind to resist saying: “Indeed this is a splendid service; Style de 77l’Empire I should call it. We have nothing like it, but when next you do us the pleasure to come to Newbridge I shall like to show you our Indian and Worcester services. Do you know I always take up all the plates and dishes myself when they have been washed the day after a party, and put them on their proper shelves with my own hands,—though I do know a little Greek and geometry, Mrs. X.!”

CHAPTER IV. RELIGION.

81I do not think that any one not being a fanatic, can regret having been brought up as an Evangelical Christian. I do not include Calvinistic Christianity in this remark; for it must surely cloud all the years of mortal life to have received the first impressions of Time and Eternity through that dreadful, discoloured glass whereby the “Sun is turned into darkness and the moon into blood.” I speak of the mild, devout, philanthropic Arminianism of the Clapham School, which prevailed amongst pious people in England and Ireland from the beginning of the century till the rise of the Oxford movement, and of which William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury were successively representatives. To this school my parents belonged. The conversion of my father’s grandmother by Lady Huntingdon, of which I have spoken, had, no doubt, directed his attention in early life to religion, but he was himself no Methodist, or Quietist, but a typical Churchman as Churchmen were in the first half of the century. All our relatives far and near, so far as I have ever heard, were the same. We had five archbishops and a bishop among our near kindred,—Cobbe, Beresfords, and Trenchs, great-grandfather, uncle, and cousins,—and (as I have narrated) my father’s ablest brother, my god-father, was a clergyman. I was the first heretic ever known amongst us.

My earliest recollections include the lessons of both my father and mother in religion. I can almost feel myself now kneeling at my dear mother’s knees repeating the Lord’s Prayer after her clear sweet voice. Then came learning the 82magnificent Collects, to be repeated to my father on Sunday mornings in his study; and later the church catechism and a great many hymns. Sunday was kept exceedingly strictly at Newbridge in those days; and no books were allowed except religious ones, nor any amusement, save a walk after church. Thus there was abundant time for reading the Bible and looking over the pictures in various large editions, and in Calmet’s great folio Dictionary, beside listening to the sermon in church, and to another sermon which my father read in the evening to the assembled household. Of course, every day of the week there were Morning Prayers in the library,—and a “Short Discourse” from good, prosy old Jay, of Bath’s “Exercises.” In this way, altogether I received a good deal of direct religious instruction, beside very frequent reference to God and Duty and Heaven, in the ordinary talk of my parents with their children.

What was the result of this training? I can only suppose that my nature was a favourable soil for such seed, for it took root early and grew apace. I cannot recall any time when I could not have been described by any one who knew my little heart (I was very shy about it, and few, if any, did know it)—as a very religious child. Religious ideas were from the first intensely interesting and exciting to me. In great measure I fancy it was the element of the sublime in them which moved me first, just as I was moved by the thunder, and the storm and was wont to go out alone into the woods or into the long, solitary corridors to enjoy them more fully. I recollect being stirred to rapture by a little poem which I can repeat to this day, beginning:

83One of the stanzas suggested that the Divine seat might be in some region of the starry universe:

Ideas like these used to make my cheek turn pale and lift me as if on wings; and naturally Religion was the great storehouse of them. But I think, even in childhood, there was in me a good deal beside of the moral, if not yet the spiritual element of real Religion. Of course the great beauty and glory of Evangelical Christianity, its thorough amalgamation of the ideas of Duty and Devotion (elsewhere often so lamentably distinct), was very prominent in my parents’ lessons. God was always to me the All-seeing Judge. His eye looking into my heart and beholding all its naughtiness and little duplicities (which of course I was taught to consider serious sins) was so familiar a conception that I might be said to live and move in the sense of it. Thus my life in childhood morally, was much the same as it is physically to live in a room full of sunlight. Later on, the evils which belong to this Evangelical training, the excessive self-introspection and self-consciousness, made themselves painfully felt, but in early years there was nothing that was not perfectly wholesome in the religion which I had so readily assimilated.

Further, I was, as I have said, a very happy child, even conscious of my own happiness; and gratitude to God or man has always come to me as a sentiment enhancing my enjoyment of the good for which I have been thankful. Thus I was,—not conventionally merely,—but genuinely and spontaneously grateful to the Giver of all the pleasures which were poured on my head. I think I may say, that I loved God, when I was quite a young child. I can even remember 84being dimly conscious that my good father and mother performed their religious exercises more as a duty,—whereas to me such things, so far as I could understand them, were real pleasures; like being taken to see somebody I loved. I have since recognised that both my parents were, in Evangelical parlance, “under the law;” while in my childish heart the germ of the mysterious New Life was already planted. I think my mother was aware of something of the kind and looked with a little wonder, blended with her tenderness at my violent outbursts of penitence, and at my strange fancy for reading the most serious books in my playhours. My brothers had not exhibited any such symptoms, but then they were healthy schoolboys, always engaged eagerly in their natural sports and pursuits; while I was a lonely, dreaming girl.

When I was seven years old, my father undertook to read the Pilgrim’s Progress to my brothers, then aged from 12 to 18, and I was allowed to sit in the room and provided with a slate and sums. The sums, it appeared, were never worked, while my eyes were fixed in absorbed interest on the reader, evening after evening. Once or twice when the delightful old copy of Bunyan was left about after the lesson, my slate was covered with drawings of Apollyon and Great Heart which were pronounced “wonderful for the child.” By the time Christian had come to the Dark River, all pretence of arithmetic was abandoned and I was permitted, proud and enchanted, to join the group of boys and listen with my whole soul to the marvellous tale. When the reading was over my father gave the volume (which had belonged to his grandmother) to me, for my “very own”; and I read it over and over continually for years, till the idea it is meant to convey,—Life a progress to Heaven—was engraved indelibly on my mind. It seems to me that few of those who have praised Bunyan most loudly have 85recognized that he was not only a great religious genius, but a born poet, a Puritan-Tinker-Shelley; possessed of what is almost the highest gift of poetry, the sense of the analogy between outward nature and the human soul. He used allegory instead of metaphor, a clumsier vehicle by far, but it carried the same exquisite thoughts. I have the dear old book still, and it is one of my treasures with its ineffably quaint old woodcuts and its delicious marginal notes; as, for example, when “Giant Despair” is said to be unable one day to maul the pilgrims in his dungeon, because he had fits. “For sometimes,” says Bunyan, “in sunshiny weather Giant Despair has fits.” Could any one believe that this gem of poetical thought and deep experience is noted by the words in the margin, “His Fits!”? My father wrote on the flyleaf of the blessed old book these still legible words:—

“This book, which belonged to my grandmother, was given as a present to my dear daughter Fanny upon witnessing her delight in reading it. May she keep the Celestial City steadfastly in view; may she surmount the dangers and trials she must meet with on the road; and, finally, be re-united with those she loved on earth in singing praises for ever and ever to Him who loved them and gave himself for them, is the fervent prayer of her affectionate father,

The notion of “getting to Heaven” by means of a faithful pilgrimage through this “Vale of Tears” was the prominent feature I think, always, in my father’s religion, and naturally took great hold on me. When the day came whereon I began to doubt whether there were any Heaven to be reached, that moral earthquake, as was inevitable, shook not only my religion but my morality to their foundations; and my experience of the perils of those years, has made me ever since 86anxious to base religion in every young mind, on ground liable to no such catastrophes. The danger came to me on this wise.

Up to my eleventh year, my little life inward and outward had flown in a bright and even current. Looking back at it and comparing my childhood with that of others I seem to have been—probably from the effects of solitude—devout beyond what was normal at my age. I used to spend a great deal of time secretly reading the Bible and that dullest of dull books The Whole Duty of Man (the latter a curious foretaste of my subsequent life-long interest in the study of ethics)—not exactly enjoying them but happy in the feeling that I was somehow approaching God. I used to keep awake at night to repeat various prayers and (wonderful to remember!) the Creed and Commandments! I made all sorts of severe rules for myself, and if I broke them, manfully mulcted myself of any little pleasures or endured some small self-imposed penance. Of none of these things had any one, even my dear mother, the remotest idea, except once when I felt driven like a veritable Cain, by my agonised conscience to go and confess to her that I had said in a recent rage (to myself) “Curse them all!” referring to my family in general and to my governess in particular! The tempest of my tears and sobs on this occasion evidently astonished her, and I remember lying exhausted on the floor in a recess in her bedroom, for a long time before I was able to move.

But the hour of doubt and difficulty was approaching. The first question which ever arose in my mind was concerning the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. I can recall the scene vividly. It was a winter’s night, my father was reading the Sunday evening Sermon in the dining-room. The servants, whose attendance was de rigueur, were seated in a row down the room. My father faced them, and my mother and I and my governess sat round the 87fire near him. I was opposite the beautiful classic black marble mantelpiece, surmounted with an antique head of Jupiter Serapis (all photographed on my brain even now), and listening with all my might, as in duty bound, to the sermon which described the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. “How did it happen exactly?” I began cheerfully to think, quite imagining I was doing the right thing to try to understand it all. “Well! first there were the fishes and the loaves. But what was done to them? Did the fish grow and grow as they were eaten and broken? And the bread the same? No! that is nonsense. And then the twelve basketsful taken up at the end, when there was not nearly so much at the beginning. It is not possible!” “O! Heavens! (was the next thought) I am doubting the Bible! God forgive me! I must never think of it again.”

But the little rift had begun, and as time went on other difficulties arose. Nothing very seriously, however, distracted my faith or altered the intensity of my religious feelings for the next two years, till in October, 1836, I was sent to school as I have narrated in the last chapter, at Brighton and a new description of life opened. At school I came under influence of two kinds. One was the preaching of the Evangelical Mr. Vaughan, in whose church (Christ Church) were our seats; and I recall vividly the emotion with which one winter’s night I listened to his sermon on the great theme, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as wool.” The sense of “the exceeding sinfulness of sin,” the rapturous joy of purification therefrom, came home to me, and as I walked back to school with the waves thundering up the Brighton beach beside us and the wind tossing the clouds in the evening sky overhead, the whole tremendous realities of the moral life seemed borne in on my heart. On the other hand, the perpetual overstrain of schoolwork, and unjust blame and penalty for failure to do what it 88was impossible to accomplish in the given time, drove me to all sorts of faults for which I hated and despised myself. When I knelt by my bed at night, after the schoolfellow who shared my room was, as I fancied, asleep, she would get up and pound my head with a bolster, laughing and crying out, “Get up, you horrid hypocrite; get up! I’ll go on beating you till you do!” It was not strange if, under such circumstances, my beautiful childish religion fell into abeyance and my conscience into disquietude. But, as I have narrated, I came home at sixteen, and then, once more able to enjoy the solitude of the woods and of my own bedroom and its inner study where no one intruded, the old feelings, tinged with deep remorse for the failures of my school life and for many present faults (amongst others a very bitter and unforgiving temper) come back with fresh vigour. I have always considered that in that summer in my seventeenth year I went through what Evangelical Christians call “conversion.” Religion became the supreme interest of life; and the sense that I was pardoned its greatest joy. I was, of course, a Christian of the usual Protestant type, finding infinite pleasure in the simple old “Communion” of those pre-ritualistic days, and in endless Bible readings to myself. Sometimes I rose in the early summer dawn and read a whole Gospel before I dressed. I think I never ran up into my room in the daytime for any change of attire without glancing into the book and carrying away some echo of what I believed to be “God’s Word.” Nobody knew anything about all this, of course; but as time went on there were great and terrible perturbations in my inner life, and these perhaps I did not always succeed in concealing from the watchful eyes of my dear mother.

So far as I can recall, the ideas of Christ and of God the Father, were for all practical religious purposes identified in my young mind. It was as God upon earth,—the Redeemer 89God, that I worshipped Jesus. To be pardoned through his “atonement” and at death to enter Heaven, were the religious objects of life. But a new and most disturbing element here entered my thoughts. How did anybody know all that story of Galilee to be true? How could we believe the miracles? I had read very carefully Gibbon’s XV. and XVI. chapters, and other books enough to teach me that everything in historical Christianity had been questioned; and my own awakening critical, and reasoning, and above all, ethical,—faculties supplied fresh crops of doubts of the truth of the story and of the morality of much of the Old Testament history, and of the scheme of Atonement itself.

Then ensued four years on which I look back as pitiful in the extreme. In complete mental solitude and great ignorance, I found myself facing all the dread problems of human existence. For a long time my intense desire to remain a Christian predominated, and brought me back from each return to scepticism in a passion of repentance and prayer to Christ to take my life or my reason sooner than allow me to stray from his fold. In those days no such thing was heard of as “Broad” interpretations of Scripture doctrines. We were fifty years before Lux Mundi and thirty before even Essays and Reviews. To be a “Christian,” then, was to believe implicitly in the verbal inspiration of every word of the Bible, and to adore Christ as “very God of very God.” With such implicit belief it was permitted to hope we might, by a good life and through Christ’s Atonement, attain after death to Heaven. Without the faith or the good life, it was certain we should go to hell. It was taught us all that to be good only from fear of Hell was not the highest motive; the highest motive was the hope of Heaven! Had anything like modern rationalising theories of the Atonement, or modern expositions of the Bible stories, or finally modern loftier doctrines of 90disinterested morality and religion, been known to me at this crisis of my life, it is possible that the whole course of my spiritual history would have been different. But of all such “raising up the astral spirits of dead creeds,” as Carlyle called it, or as Broad churchmen say, “Liberating the kernel of Christianity from the husk,” I knew, and could know nothing. Evangelical Christianity in 1840 presented itself as a thing to be taken whole, or rejected wholly; and for years the alternations went on in my poor young heart and brain, one week or month of rational and moral disbelief, and the next of vehement, remorseful return to the faith which I supposed could alone give me the joy of religion. As time went on, and my reading supplied me with a little more knowledge and my doubts deepened and accumulated, the returns to Christian faith grew fewer and shorter, and, as I had no idea of the possibility of reaching any other vital religion, I saw all that had made to me the supreme joy and glory of life fade out of it, while that motive which had been presented to me as the mainspring of duty and curb of passion, namely, the Hope of Heaven, vanished as a dream. I always had, as I have described, somewhat of that mal-du-ciel which Lamartine talks of, that longing, as from the very depths of our being for an Eden of Divine eternal love. I could scarcely in those days read even such poor stuff as the song of the Peri in Moore’s Lalla Rookh (not to speak of Bunyan’s vision of the Celestial City) without tears rushing to my eyes. But this, I saw, must all go with the rest. If, as Clough was saying, all unknown to me, about that same time,—

If all the Christian revelation were a mass of mistakes and errors, no firmer ground on which to build than the promises 91of Mahomet, or of Buddha, or of the Old Man of the Mountain,—of course there was (so far as I saw) no reason left for believing in any Heaven at all, or any life after death. Neither had the Moral Law, which had come to me through that supposed revelation on Sinai and the Mount of Galilee, any claim to my obedience other than might be made out by identifying it with principles common to heathen and Christian alike; an identity of which, at that epoch, I had as yet only the vaguest ideas. In short my poor young soul was in a fearful dilemma. On the one hand I had the choice to accept a whole mass of dogmas against which my reason and conscience rebelled; on the other, to abandon those dogmas and strive no more to believe the incredible, or to revere what I instinctively condemned; and then, as a necessary sequel, to cast aside the laws of Duty which I had hitherto cherished; to cease to pray or take the sacrament; and to relinquish the hope of a life beyond the grave.

It was not very wonderful if, as I think I can recall, my disposition underwent a considerable change for the worse while all these tremendous questions were being debated in my solitary walks in the woods and by the sea-shore, and in my room at night over my Gibbon or my Bible. I know I was often bitter and morose and selfish; and then came the alternate spell of paroxysms of self-reproach and fanciful self-tormentings.

The life of a young woman in such a home as mine is so guarded round on every side and the instincts of a girl are so healthy, that the dangers incurred even in such a spiritual landslip as I have described are very limited compared to what they must inevitably be in the case of young men or of women less happily circumstanced. It has been my profound sense of the awful perils of such a downfall of faith as I experienced, the peril of moral shipwreck without compass or anchorage amid the tempests of youth, which 92has spurred me ever since to strive to forestall for others the hour of danger.

At last my efforts to believe in orthodox Christianity ceased altogether. In the summer after my twentieth birthday I had reached the end of the long struggle. The complete downfall of Evangelicalism,—which seems to have been effected in George Eliot’s strong brain in a single fortnight of intercourse with Mr. and Mrs. Bray,—had taken in my case four long years of miserable mental conflict and unspeakable pain. It left me with something as nearly like a Tabula rasa of faith as can well be imagined. I definitely disbelieved in human immortality and in a supernatural revelation. The existence of God I neither denied nor affirmed. I felt I had no means of coming to any knowledge of Him. I was, in fact (long before the word was invented), precisely—an Agnostic.

One day, while thus literally creedless, I wandered out alone as was my wont into a part of our park a little more wild than the rest, where deer were formerly kept and sat down among the rocks and the gorse which was then in its summer glory of odorous blossoms, ever since rich to me with memories of that hour. It was a sunny day in May, and after reading a little of my favourite Shelley, I fell, as often happened, into mournful thought. I was profoundly miserable; profoundly conscious of the deterioration and sliding down of all my feelings and conduct from the high ambitions of righteousness and holiness which had been mine in the days of my Christian faith and prayer; and at the same time I knew that the whole scaffolding of that higher life had fallen to pieces and could never be built up again. While I was thus musing despairingly, something stirred within me, and I asked myself, “Can I not rise once more, conquer my faults, and live up to my own idea of what is right and good? Even though there be no life after death, I 93may yet deserve my own respect here and now, and, if there be a God, He must approve me.”

The resolution was made very seriously. I came home to begin a new course and to cultivate a different spirit. Was it strange that in a few days I began instinctively, and almost without reflection, to pray again? No longer did I make any kind of effort to believe this thing or the other about God. I simply addressed Him as the Lord of conscience, whom I implored to strengthen my good resolutions, to forgive my faults, “to lift me out of the mire and clay and set my feet upon a rock and order my goings.” Of course, there was Christian sentiment and the results of Christian training in all I felt and did. I could no more have cast them off than I could have leaped off my shadow. But of dogmatical Christianity there was never any more. I have never from that time, now more than fifty years ago, attached, or wished I could attach, credence to any part of what Dr. Martineau has called the Apocalyptic side of Christianity, nor (I may add with thankfulness) have I ever lost faith in God.

The storms of my youth were over. Henceforth through many years there was a progressive advance to Theism as I have attempted to describe it in my books; and there were many, many hard moral fights with various Apollyons all along the road; but no more spiritual revolutions.

About thirty years after that day, to me so memorable, I read in Mr. Stopford Brooke’s Life of Robertson, these words which seem truly to tell my own story and which I believe recorded Robertson’s own experience, a little while later:

“It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it blindly rested are many of them rotten.... I know but one way in which a man can come forth from this agony scatheless: it is by holding fast to those things which are certain still. In the darkest hour 94through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state, even then it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be true than false, better to be brave than a coward. Blessed beyond all earthly blessedness is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these landmarks. I appeal to the recollection of any man who has passed through that agony and stood upon the rock at last, with a faith and hope and trust no longer traditional but his own.”

It may be asked, “What was my creed for those first years of what I may call indigenous religion?” Naturally, with no better guide than the inductive philosophy of Locke and Bacon, I could have no outlook beyond the Deism of the last century. Miracles and miraculous inspiration being formally given up, there remained only (as I supposed) as testimony to the existence and character of God such inductions as were drawn in Paley’s Theology and the Bridgwater Treatises; with all of which I was very familiar. Voltaire’s “Dieu Toutpuissant, Remunerateur Vengeur,” the God whose garb (as Goethe says,) is woven in “Nature’s roaring loom”; the Beneficent Creator, from whom came all the blessings which filled my cup; these were the outlines of Deity for me for the time. The theoretical connection between such a God and my own duty I had yet to work out through much hard study, but fortunately moral instinct was practically sufficient to identify them; nay, it was, as I have just narrated, through such moral instincts that I was led back straight to religion, and began to pray to my Maker as my Moral Lord, so soon as ever I strove in earnest to obey my conscience.

There was nothing in such simple Deism to warrant a belief in a future life, and I deliberately trained myself to abandon a hope which was always very dear to me. As regards Christ, there was inevitably, at first, some reaction 95in my mind from the worship of my Christian days. I almost felt I had been led into idolatry, and I bitterly resented then (and ever since) the paramount prominence, the genuflexions at the creed, and the especially reverential voice and language applied constantly by Christians to the Son, rather than to the Father. But after I had read F. W. Newman’s book of the Soul, I recognised, with relief, how many of the phenomena of the spiritual life which Christians are wont to treat as exclusively bound up with their creed are, in truth, phases of the natural history of all devout spirits; and my longing has ever since been rather to find grounds of sympathy with believers in Christ and for union with them on the broadest bases of common gratitude, penitence, restoration and adoration, rather than to accentuate our differences. The view which I eventually reached of Christ as an historical human character, is set forth at large in my Broken Lights. He was, I think, the man whose life was to the life of Humanity what Regeneration is to the individual soul.

I may here conclude the story of my religious life extending through the years after the above described momentous change. After a time, occupied in part with study and with efforts to be useful to our poor neighbours and to my parents, my Deism was lifted to a higher plane by one of those inflowings of truth which seem the simplest things in the world, but are as rain on the dry ground in summer to the mind which receives them. One day while praying quietly, the thought came to me with extraordinary lucidity: “God’s Goodness is what I mean by Goodness! It is not a mere title, like the ‘Majesty’ of a King. He has really that character which we call ‘Good.’ He is Just, as I understand Justice, only more perfectly just. He is Good as I understand Goodness, only more perfectly good. He is not good in time and tremendous in eternity; not good to some of His creatures and cruel to others, but wholly, eternally, 96universally good. If I could know and understand all His acts from eternity, there would not be one which would not deepen my reverence and call forth my adoring praise.”

To some readers this discovery may seem a mere platitude and truism: the assertion of a thing which they have never failed to understand. To me it was a real revelation which transformed my religion from one of reverence only into one of vivid love for that Infinite Goodness which I then beheld unclouded. The deep shadow left for years on my soul by the doctrine of eternal Hell had rolled away at last. Another truth came home to me many years later, and not till after I had written my first book. It was one night, after sitting up late in my room reading (for once) no grave work, but a pretty little story by Mrs. Gaskell. Up to that time I had found the pleasures of knowledge the keenest of all, and gloried in the old philosopher’s dictum, “Man was created to know and to contemplate.” I looked on the pleasures of the affections as secondary and inferior to those of the intellect, and I strove to perform my duties to those around me, rather in a spirit of moral rectitude and obedience to law than in one of lovingkindness. Suddenly again it came to me to see that Love is greater than Knowledge; that it is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to “hive up learning with each studious year,” to compassionate the failures of others and ignore them when possible, rather than undertake the hard process (I always found it so!) of forgiveness of injuries; to say, “What may I be allowed to do to help and bless this one—or that?” rather than “What am I bound by duty to do for him, or her; and how little will suffice?” As these thoughts swelled in my heart, I threw myself down in a passion of happy tears, and passed most of the night thinking how I should work out what I had learned. I had scarcely fallen asleep towards morning when I was wakened by the intelligence that one of the servants, a young laundress, was 97dying. I hurried to the poor woman’s room which was at a great distance from mine, and found all the men and women servants collected round her. She wished for some one to pray for her, and there was no one to do it but myself, and so, while the innocent girl’s soul passed away, I led, for the first and only time, the prayers of my father’s household.

I had read a good number of books by Deists during the preceding years. Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works (which I greatly admired), Hume, Tindal, Collins, Voltaire, beside as many of the old heathen moralists and philosophers as I could reach; Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch’s Moralia, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and a little of Plato. But of any modern book touching on the particular questions which had tortured me I knew nothing till, by the merest good fortune, I fell in with Blanco White’s Life. How much comfort and help I found in his Meditations the reader may guess. Curiously enough, long years afterwards, Bishop Colenso told me that the same book, falling into his hands in Natal by the singular chance of a colonist possessing the volumes, had determined him to come over to England and bring out his Pentateuch. Thus poor Blanco White, after all prophesied rightly when he said that he was “one of those who, falling in the ditch, help other men to pass over”!

Another book some years later was very helpful to me—F. W. Newman’s Soul. Dean Stanley told me that he thought in the far future that single book would be held to outweigh in value all that the author’s brother, Cardinal Newman, had ever written. I entered not long after into correspondence with Professor Newman, and have had the pleasure of calling him my friend ever since. We have interchanged letters, or at least friendly greetings, at short intervals now for nearly fifty years.

But the epoch-making book for me was Theodore Parker’s Discourse of Religion. Reading a notice of it in the Athenæum, 98soon after its publication (somewhere about the year 1845), I sent for it, and words fail to tell the satisfaction and encouragement it gave me. One must have been isolated and care-laden as I to estimate the value of such a book. I had come, as I have narrated above, to the main conclusions of Parker,—namely, the absolute goodness of God and the non-veracity of popular Christianity,—three years before; so that it has been a mistake into which some of my friends have fallen when they have described me as converted from orthodoxy by Parker. But his book threw a flood of light on my difficult way. It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory to find the ideas which I had hammered out painfully and often imperfectly, at last welded together, set forth in lucid order, supported by apparently adequate erudition and heartwarmed by fervent piety. But, in the second place, the Discourse helped me most importantly by teaching me to regard Divine Inspiration no longer as a miraculous and therefore incredible thing; but as normal, and in accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and finite spirit; a Divine inflowing of mental Light precisely analogous to that moral influence which divines call Grace. As every devout and obedient soul may expect to share in Divine Grace, so the devout and obedient souls of all the ages have shared (as Parker taught) in Divine Inspiration. And, as the reception of Grace, even in large measure, does not render us impeccable, so neither does the reception of Inspiration make us Infallible. It is at this point that Deism stops and Theism begins; namely, when our faith transcends all that can be gleaned from the testimony of the bodily senses and accepts as supremely trustworthy the direct Divine teaching, the “original revelation” of God’s holiness and love in the depths of the soul. Theodore Parker adopted the alternative synonym to mark the vital difference in the philosophy which underlies the two creeds; a theoretic difference leading to most important 99practical consequences in the whole temper and spirit of Theism as distinct from Deism. I saw all this clearly ere long, and ranged myself thenceforth as a Theist: a name now familiar to everybody, but which, when my family came to know I took it, led them to tell me with some contempt that it was “a word in a Dictionary, not a Religion.”

A few months after I had absorbed Parker’s Discourse, the great sorrow of my life befell me. My mother, whose health had been feeble ever since I could remember her, and who was now seventy years of age, passed away from a world which has surely held few spirits so pure and sweet. She died with her weeping husband and sons beside her bed and with her head resting on my breast. Almost her last words were to tell me I had been “the pride and joy” of her life. The agony I suffered when I realised that she was gone I shall not try to tell. She was the one being in the world whom I truly loved through all the passionate years of youth and early womanhood; the only one who really loved me. Never one word of anger or bitterness had passed from her lips to me, nor (thank God!) from mine to her in the twenty-four years in which she blessed my life; and for the latter part of that time her physical weakness had drawn a thousand tender cares of mine around her. No relationship in all the world, I think, can ever be so perfect as that of mother and daughter under such circumstances, when the strength of youth becomes the support of age, and the sweet dependance of childhood is reversed.

But it was all over—I was alone; no more motherly love and tenderness were ever again to reach my thirsting heart. But this was not as I recall it, the worst pang in that dreadful agony. I had (as I said above) ceased to believe in a future life, and therefore I had no choice but to think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the kingdoms of earth had actually ceased to be. She was a “Memory;” nothing more

100I was not then or at any time one of those fortunate people who can suddenly cast aside the conclusions which they have reached by careful intellectual processes, and leap to opposite opinions at the call of sentiment. I played no tricks with my convictions, but strove as best I could to endure the awful strain, and to recognise the Divine Justice and Goodness through the darkness of death. I need not and cannot say more on the subject.

Happily for me, there were many duties waiting for me, and I could recognise even then that, though pleasure seemed gone for ever, yet it was a relief to feel I had still duties. “Something to do for others” was an assuagement of misery. My father claimed first and much attention, and the position I now held of the female head of the family and household gave me a good deal of employment. To this I added teaching in my village school a mile from our house two or three times a week, and looking after all the sick and hungry in the two villages of Donabate and Balisk. Those were the years of Famine and Fever in Ireland, and there was abundant call for all our energies to combat them. I shall write of these matters in the next chapter.

I had, though with pain, kept my heresies secret during my mother’s declining years and till my father had somewhat recovered from his sorrow. I had continued to attend family prayers and church services, with the exception of the Communion, and had only vaguely allowed it to be understood that I was not in harmony with them all. When my poor father learned the full extent of my “infidelity,” it was a terrible blow to him, for which I have, in later years, sincerely pitied him. He could not trust himself to speak to me, but though I was in his house, he wrote to tell me I had better go away. My second brother, a barrister, had a year before given up his house in Queen Anne Street under a terrible affliction, and had gone, broken-hearted, 101to live on a farm which he hired in the wilds of Donegal. There I went as my father desired and remained for nearly a year; not knowing whether I should ever be permitted to return home and rather expecting to be disinherited. He wrote to me two or three times and said that if my doubts only extended in certain directions he could bear with them, “but if I rejected Christ and disbelieved the Bible, a man was called upon to keep the plague of such opinions from his own house.” Then he required me to answer him on those points categorically. Of course I did so plainly, and told him I did not believe that Christ was God; and I did not (in his sense) believe in the inspiration or authority of the Bible. After this ensued a very long silence, in which I remained entirely ignorant of my destiny and braced myself to think of earning my future livelihood. I was absolutely lonely; my brother, though always very kind to me, had not the least sympathy with my heresies, and thought my father’s conduct (as I do) quite natural; and I had not a friend or relative from whom I could look for any sort of comfort. A young cousin to whom I had spoken of them freely, and who had, in a way, adopted my ideas, wrote to me to say she had been shown the error of them, and was shocked to think she had been so misguided. This was the last straw. After I received this letter I wandered out in the dusk as usual down to a favourite nook—a natural seat under the bank in a bend of the river which ran through Bonny Glen,—and buried my face in the grass. As I did so my lips touched a primrose which had blossomed in that precise spot since I had last been there, and the soft, sweet flower which I had in childhood chosen for my mother’s birthday garland seemed actually to kiss my face. No one who has not experienced utter loneliness can perhaps quite imagine how much comfort such an incident can bring.

102As I had no duties in Donegal, and seldom saw our few neighbours, I occupied myself, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in writing an Essay on True Religion. I possess this MS. still, and have been lately examining it. Of course, as a first literary effort, it has many faults, and my limited opportunities for reference render parts of it very incomplete; but it is not a bad piece of work. The first part is employed in setting forth my reasons for belief in God. The second, those for not believing in (the apocalyptic part of) Christianity. The chapter on Miracles and Prophecy (written from the literal and matter-of-fact standpoint of that epoch) are not ill-done, while the moral failure of the Bible and of the orthodox theology, the histories of Jacob, Jael, David, &c., and the dogmas of Original Sin, the Atonement, a Devil and eternal Hell, are criticised pretty successfully. A considerable part of the book consists in a comparison in parallel columns of moral precepts from the Old and New Testaments on one side, and from non-Christian writers, Euripides, Socrates (Xenophon), Plutarch, Sextius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, the Zend Avesta (Anquetil du Perron’s), The Institutes of Menu (Sir W. Jones’), the Damma Padan, the Talmud, &c., on the other. For years I had seized every opportunity of collecting the most striking ethical dicta, and I thus marshalled them to what appeared to me good purpose, namely, the disproof of the originality or exceptional loftiness of Christian Morals. I did not apprehend till later years, how the supreme achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a new, still less of a systematic Morality; but the introduction of a new spirit into Morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.

Reading Parker’s Discourse, as I did very naturally in my solitude once again, it occurred to me to write to him and ask him to tell me on what ground he based the faith which I perceived he held, in a life after death? It had seemed to me 103that the guarantee of Revelation having proved worthless, there remained no sufficient reason for hope to counter-weigh the obvious difficulty of conceiving of a survival of the soul. Parker answered me in a most kind letter, accompanied by his Sermon of the Immortal Life. Of course I studied this with utmost care and sympathy, and by slow, very slow degrees, as I came more to take in the full scope of the Theistic, as distinguished from the Deistic view, I saw my way to a renewal of the Hope of the Human Race which, twenty years later, I set forth as best as I could in the little book of that name. I learned to trust the intuition of Immortality which is “written in the heart of man by a Hand which writes no falsehoods.” I deemed also that I could see (as Parker says) the evidence of “a summer yet to be in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter;” the presence in human nature of many efflorescences—and they the fairest of all—quite unaccountable and unmeaning on the hypothesis that the end of the man is in the grave. In later years I think, as the gloom of the evil and cruelty of the world has shrouded more the almost cloudless skies of my youth, I have almost fervently held by the doctrine of Immortality because it is, to me the indispensable corollary of that of the Goodness of God. I am not afraid to repeat the words, which so deeply shocked, when they were first published, my old friend, F. W. Newman. “If Man be not immortal, God is not Just.”

Recovering this faith, as I may say, rationally and not by any gust of emotion, I had the inexpressible happiness of thinking henceforth of my mother as still existing in God’s universe, and (as well as I knew) loving me wherever she might be, and under whatever loftier condition of being. To meet her again “spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost,” has been to me for forty years, the sweetest thought connected with death. Ere long, now, it must be realised.

104After nine or ten months of this, by no means harsh, exile, my father summoned me to return home. I resumed my place as his daughter in doing all I could for his comfort, and as the head of his house; merely thenceforth abstaining from attendance either at Church or at family prayer. I had several favourite nooks and huts near and far in the woods, which I made into little Oratories for myself, and to one or other of them I resorted almost every evening at dusk; making it a habit—not broken for many years afterwards, to repeat a certain versified Litany of Thanksgiving which I had written and read to my mother. On Sundays, when the rest of the family went to the village church, I had the old garden for a beautiful cathedral. Having let myself in with my own key, and locked the doors, I knew I had the lovely six acres within the high walls, free for hours from all observation or intrusion. How much difference it makes in life to have at command such peace and solitude it is hard to estimate. I look back to some of the summer forenoons spent alone in that garden as to the flowering time of my seventy years. God grant that the afterglow of such hours may remain with me to the last, and that “at eventide it may be light!”

I knew that there were Unitarian chapels in Dublin at this time, and much wished to attend them now and then; but I would not cause annoyance to my father by the notice which my journey to the town on a Sunday would have attracted. Only on New Year’s Day I thought I might go unobserved and interpolate attendance at the service among my usual engagements. I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st of January and drove to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big, dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The service was a miserable, hybrid affair, 105neither Christian as I understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At last, the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived. The old Minister in his black-gown ascended the pulpit, having taken with him—what?—could I believe my eyes? It was an old printed book, bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1810 or thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek article when used before the word Θεός! My disappointment not to say disgust were such that,—as it was easy from my seat to leave the place without disturbing any one,—I escaped into the street, never (it may be believed) to repeat my experiment.

It was an anomalous position that which I held at Newbridge from the time of my return from Donegal, till my father’s death eight years later. I took my place as head of the household at the family table and in welcoming our guests, but I was all the time in a sort of moral Coventry, under a vague atmosphere of disapprobation wherein all I said was listened to cautiously as likely to conceal some poisonous heresy. Everything of this kind, however, wears down and becomes easier and softer as time goes on, and most so when people are, au fond, just-minded and good-hearted; and the years during which I remained at home till my father’s death, though mentally very lonely, were far from unhappy. In particular, the perfect clearness and straightforwardness of my position was, and has ever since been, a source of strength and satisfaction to me, for which I have thanked God a thousand times. My inner life was made happy by my simple faith in God’s infinite and perfect love; and I never had any doubt whether I had erred in abandoning the creed of my youth. On the contrary, as 106the whole tendency of modern science and criticism showed itself stronger and stronger against the old orthodoxy, my hopes were unduly raised of a not distant New Reformation which I might even live to see. These sanguine hopes have faded. As Dean Stanley seems to have felt, there was, somewhere between the years ’74 and ’78, a turn in the tide of men’s thoughts (due, I think, to the paramount influence and insolence which physical science then assumed), which has postponed any decisive “broad” movement for years beyond my possible span of life. But though nothing appears quite so bright to my old eyes as all things did to me in youth, though familiarity with human wickedness and misery, and still more with the horrors of scientific cruelty to animals, have strained my faith in God’s justice sometimes even to agony,—I know that no form of religious creed could have helped me any more than my own or as much as it has done to bear the brunt of such trial; and I remain to the present unshaken both in respect to the denials and the affirmations of Theism. There are great difficulties, soul-torturing difficulties besetting it; but the same or worse, beset every other form of faith in God; and infinitely more, and to my mind insurmountable ones, beset Atheism.

For fifty years Theism has been my staff of life. I must soon try how it will support me down the last few steps of my earthly way. I believe it will do so well.

CHAPTER V. MY FIRST BOOK.

109When I was thirty years of age I had an attack of bronchitis from which I nearly died. When very ill and not expecting to recover, I reflected that while my own life had been made happy and strong by the faith which had been given to me, I had done nothing to help any other human soul to find that solution of the dread problem which had brought such peace to me. I felt, as Mrs. Browning says, that a Truth was “like bread at Sacrament” to be passed on. When, unexpectedly to myself, I slowly recovered after a sojourn in Devonshire, I resolved to set about writing something which should convey as much as possible of my own convictions to whosoever should read it. For a time I thought of enlarging and completing my MS. Essay on True Religion, written for my own instruction; but the more I reflected the less I cared to labour to pull down hastily the crumbling walls which yet sheltered millions of souls, and the more I longed to build up anew on solid base a stronghold of refuge for those driven like myself from the old ground of faith in God and Duty. Especially I felt that as the worst dangers of such transitions lay in the sudden snapping of the supposed bond of Morality, and collapse of the hopes of heaven and terrors of hell which had been used as motives of virtue and deterrents from vice; so the most urgent need lay in the direction of a system of ethics which should base Duty on ground absolutely apart from that of the supposed supernatural revelation and supply sanctions and motives unconnected therewith. As it happened at this very time, my good (orthodox) friend, Miss Felicia Skene, had 110recommended me to read Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics, and I had procured Semple’s translation and found it almost dazzlingly enlightening to my mind. It would be presumptuous for me to say that then, or at any time, I have thoroughly mastered either this book or the Reinun Vernunft of this greatest of thinkers; but, so far as I have been able to do so, I can say for my own individual mind (as his German disciples were wont to do for themselves), “God said, Let there be Light! and there was—the Kantian Philosophy.” It has been, and no doubt will be still further, modified by succeeding metaphysicians and sometimes it may appear to have been superseded, but I cannot think otherwise than that Kant was and will finally be recognised to have been the Newton of the laws of Mind.

I shall now endeavour to explain the purpose of my first book (which is also my magnum opus) by quoting the Preface at some length; and, as the third edition has long been out of print and is unattainable in England or America, I shall permit myself to embody in this chapter a general account of the drift of it, with extracts sufficient to serve as samples of the whole. Looking over it now, after the lapse of just forty years, I can see that my reading at that time had lain so much among old books that the style is almost that of a didactic Treatise of the seventeenth century; and the ideas, likewise, are necessarily exclusively those of the pre-Darwinian Era. Conceptions so familiar to us now as that of an “hereditary set of the brain,” and of the “Capitalised experience of the tribe,” were then utterly unthought of. I have been well aware that it would, consequently, have been necessary,—had the book been republished any time during the last twenty years,—to rewrite much of it and define the standpoint of an Intuitionist as regards the theory of Evolution in its bearing on the foundation of 111ethics. For this task, however, I have always lacked leisure: and my article on “Darwinism in Morals” (reprinted in the book of that name) has been the best effort I have made in such direction. I may here, perhaps, nevertheless be allowed to say as a last word in favour of this Essay, namely, that such as it is, it has served me, personally, as a scaffolding for all my life-work, a key to open most of the locks which might have barred my way. If now I feel (as men and women are wont to do at three-score years and ten), that I hold all philosophic opinions with less tenacious grasp, less “cocksureness” than in earlier days, and know that the great realities to which they led, will remain realities for me still should those opinions prove here and there unstable,—it is not that I am disposed in any way to abandon them, still less that I have found any other systems of ethics or theology more, or equally, sound and self-consistent.

I wrote the “Essay on the Theory of Intuitive Morals” between my thirtieth and thirty-third years. I had a great deal else to do—to amuse and help my father (then growing old); to direct our household, entertain our guests, carry on the feminine correspondence of the family, teach in my village school twice a week or so, and to attend every case of illness or other tribulation in Donabate and Balisk. My leisure for writing and for the preliminary reading for writing, was principally at night or in the early morning; and at last it was accomplished. No one but my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, had seen any part of the MS., and, as I have said, nobody belonging to my family had ever (so far as I know) employed a printer or publisher before. I took the MS. with me to London, where my father and I were fortunately going for a holiday, and called with it in Paternoster Row, on Mr. William Longman, to whom I had a letter of business introduction from my Dublin 112bookseller. When I opened my affair to Mr. Longman, it was truly a case of Byron’s address to Murray—

Mr. Longman politely veiled a smile, and adopted the voice of friendly dissuasion from my enterprise, looking no doubt on a young lady (as I still was) as a very unpromising author for a treatise on Kantian ethics! My spirit, however, rose with the challenge. I poured out for some minutes much that I had been thinking over for years, and as I paused at last, Mr. Longman said briefly, but decidedly, “I’ll publish your book.”

After this fateful interview, I remember going into St. Paul’s and sitting there a long while alone.

The sheets of the book passed rapidly through the press, and I usually took them to the British Museum to verify quotations and work quietly over difficulties, for in the house which we occupied in Connaught Square I had no study to myself. The foot-notes to the book (collected some in the Museum, some from my own books and some from old works in Archbishop Marsh’s Library) were themselves a heavy part of the work. Glancing over the pages as I write, I see extracts, for example, from the following:—Cudworth (I had got at some inedited MSS. of his in the British Museum), Montesquieu, Philo, Hooker, Proclus, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Müller, Whewell, Mozley, Leibnitz, St. Augustine, Phillipsohn, Strabo, St. Chrysostom, Morell, Lewes, Dugald Stewart, Mill, Oërsted, the Adée-Grunt’h (sacred book of the Sikhs), Herbert Spencer, Hume, Maximus Tyriensis, Institutes of Menu, Victor Cousin, Sir William Hamilton, Lucian, Seneca, Cory’s Fragments, 113St. Gregory the Great, Justin Martyr, Jeremy Taylor, the Yajur Veda, Shaftesbury, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Confucius, and many more. There are also in the Notes sketches of the history of the doctrines of Predestination, and of Original Sin, which involved very considerable research.

At last the proofs were corrected, the Notes verified, and the time had come when the Preface must be written! How was I to find a quiet hour to compose it? Like most women I was bound hand and foot by a fine web of little duties and attentions, which men never feel or brush aside remorselessly, (it was only Hooker, who rocked a cradle with his foot while he wrote the Ecclesiastical Polity!); and it was a serious question for me when I could find leisure and solitude. Luckily, just on the critical day, my father was seized with a fancy to go to the play, and, equally luckily, I had so bad a cold that it was out of question that I should, as usual, accompany him. Accordingly I had an evening all alone, and wrote fast and hard the pages which I shall presently quote, finishing the last sentence of my Preface as I heard my father’s knock at the hall door.

I had all along told my father (though, alas; to his displeasure), that I was going to publish a book; of course, anonymously, to save him annoyance. When the printing was completed, the torn and defaced sheets of the MS. lay together in a heap for removal by the housemaid. Pointing to this, my poor father said solemnly to me: “Don’t leave those about; you don’t know into whose hands they may fall.” It was needless to observe to him, that I was on the point of publishing the “perilous stuff”!

The book was brought out by Longmans that year (1855) and afterwards by Crosby and Nichols in Boston, and again by Trübner in London. It was reviewed rather largely and, on the whole, very kindly, considering it was by an 114unknown and altogether unfriended author; but sometimes also in a manner which it is pleasant to know has gone out of fashion in these latter days. It was amusing to see that not one of my critics had a suspicion they were dealing with a woman’s work. They all said, “He reasons clearly.” “His spirit and manner are particularly well suited to ethical discussion.” “His treatment of morals” (said the Guardian) “is often both true and beautiful.” “It is a most noble performance,” (said the Caledonian Mercury), “the work of a masculine and lofty mind.” “It is impossible,” (said the Scotsman), “to deny the ability of the writer, or not to admire his high moral tone, his earnestness and the fulness of his knowledge.” But the heresy of the book brought down heavy denunciation from the “religious” papers on the audacious writer who, “instead of walking softly and humbly on the firm ground and taking the Word of God as a lamp,” &c., had indulged in “insect reasonings.” A rumour at last went out that a woman was the author of this “able and attractive but deceptive and dangerous work,” and then the criticisms were barbed with sharper teeth. “The writer” (says the Christian Observer), “we are told, is a lady, but there is nothing feeble or even feminine in the tone of the work.... Our dislike is increased when we are told it is a female (!) who has propounded so unfeminine and stoical a theory ... and has contradicted openly the true sayings of the living God!” The Guardian (November 21st, 1855) finally had this delightful paragraph: “The author professes great admiration for Theodore Parker and Francis Newman, but his own pages are not disfigured by the arrogance of the one or the shallow levity of the other” (think of the shallow levity of Newman’s book of the Soul!). “He writes gravely, not defiantly, as befits a man giving utterance to thoughts which he knows will be generally regarded as impious.”

115I shall now offer the reader a few extracts; and first from the Preface:—

“It cannot surely be questioned but that we want a System of Morals better than any of those which are current amongst us. We want a system which shall neither be too shallow for the requirements of thinking men, nor too abstruse for popular acceptation; but which shall be based upon the ultimate grounds of philosophy, and be developed with such distinctness as to be understood by every one capable of studying the subject. We want a System of Morals which shall not entangle itself with sectarian creeds, nor imperil its authority with that of tottering Churches, but which shall be indissolubly blended with a Theology fulfilling all the demands of the Religious Sentiment—a Theology forming a part, and the one living part, of all the theologies which ever have been or shall be. We want a system which shall not degrade the Law of the Eternal Right by announcing it as a mere contrivance for the production of human happiness, or by tracing our knowledge of it to the experience of the senses, or by cajoling us into obeying it as a matter of expediency; but a system which shall ascribe to that Law its own sublime office in the universe, which shall recognise in man the faculties by which he obtains a supersensible knowledge of it, and which shall inculcate obedience to it on motives so pure and holy, that the mere statement of them shall awaken in every breast that higher and better self which can never be aroused by the call of interest or expediency.

“It would be in itself a presumption for me to disclaim the ability necessary for supplying such a want as this. In writing this book, I have aimed chiefly at two objects. First. I have sought to unite into one homogeneous and self-consistent whole the purest and most enlarged theories hitherto propounded on ethical science. Especially I have endeavoured to popularise those of Kant, by giving the simplest possible presentation to his doctrines regarding the Freedom of the Will and the supersensible source of 116our knowledge of all Necessary Truths, including those of Morals. I do not claim however, even so far as regards these doctrines, to be an exact exponent of Kant’s opinions.... Secondly. I have sought (and this has been my chief aim) to place for the first time, at the foundation of ethics, the great but neglected truth that the End of Creation is not the Happiness, but the Virtue, of Rational Souls. I believe that this truth will be found to throw most valuable light, not only upon the Theory, but upon all the details of Practical Morals. Nay, more, I believe that we must look to it for such a solution of the ‘Riddle of the World’ as shall satisfy the demands of the Intellect while presenting to the Religious Sentiment that same God of perfect Justice and Goodness whose ideal it intuitively conceives and spontaneously adores. Only with this view of the Designs of God can we understand how His Moral Attributes are consistent with the creation of a race which is indeed ‘groaning in sin’ and ‘travailing in sorrow’; but by whose freedom to sin and trial of sorrow shall be worked out at last the most blessed End which Infinite Love could devise. With this clew, we shall also see how (as the Virtue of each individual must be produced by himself, and is the share committed to him in the grand end of creation) all Duties must necessarily range themselves accordingly—the Personal before the Social—in a sequence entirely different from that which is comformable with the hypothesis that Happiness is ‘our being’s end and aim’; but which is, nevertheless, precisely the sequence in which Intuition has always peremptorily demanded that they should be arranged. We shall see how (as the bestowal of Happiness on man must always be postponed by God to the still more blessed aim of conducing to his Virtue) the greatest outward woes and trials, so far from inspiring us with doubts of His Goodness, must be taken as evidences of the glory of that End of Virtue to which they lead, even as the depths of the foundations of a cathedral may show how high the towers and spires will one day ascend.”—Pref., pp. V.–X.

117In the first chapter, entitled What is the Moral Law? I take for motto Antigone’s great speech:—

I begin by defining Moral actions and sentiments as those of Rational Free Agents, to which alone may be applied the terms of Right or Wrong, Good or Evil, Virtuous or Vicious. I then proceed to say:—

“This moral character of good or evil is a real, universal and eternal distinction, existing through all worlds and for ever, wherever there are rational creatures and free agents. As one kind of line is a straight line, and another a crooked line, and as no line can be both straight and crooked, so one kind of action or sentiment is right, and another is wrong, and no action or sentiment can be both right or wrong. And as the same line which is straight on this planet would be straight in Sirius or Alcyone, and what constitutes straightness in the nineteenth century will constitute straightness in the nineteenth millennium, so that sentiment or action which is right in our world, is right in all worlds; and that which constitutes righteousness now will constitute righteousness through all eternity. And as the character of straightness belongs to the line, by whatsoever hand it may have been traced, so the character of righteousness belongs to the sentiment or action, by what rational free agent soever it may have been felt or performed.”

“And of this distinction language affords a reliable exponent. When we have designated one kind of figure by the word Circle, and another by the word Triangle, those terms, having become the names of the respective figures, cannot be transposed without transgression of the laws of language. Thus it would be absurd to argue that the 118figure we call a circle, may not be a circle; that a ‘plane figure, containing a point from which all right lines drawn to the circumference shall be equal,’ may not be a circle, but a triangle. In like manner, when we have designated one kind of sentiment or action as Right, and another as Wrong, it becomes an absurdity to say that the kind of sentiments or actions we call Right may, perhaps, be Wrong. If a figure be not a circle, according to our sense of the word, it is not a circle at all, but an Ellipse, a Triangle, Trapezium, or something else. If a sentiment or action be not Right, according to our sense of the word, it is not Right at all, but, according to the laws of language, must be called Wrong.

“It is not maintained that we can commit no error in affixing the name of Circle to a particular figure, or of Right to a particular sentiment or action. We may at a hasty glance pronounce an ellipse to be a circle; but when we have proved the radii to be unequal, needs must we arrive at a better judgment. Our error was caused by our first haste and misjudgment, not by our inability to decide whether an object presented to us bears or does not bear a character to which we have agreed to affix a certain name. In like manner, from haste or prejudice, we may pronounce a faulty sentiment or action to be Right; but when we have examined it in all its bearings, we ourselves are the first to call it Wrong.”—Pp. 4–7.

After much more on the positive nature of Good, and the negative nature of Evil, and on the relation of the Moral Law to God as impersonated in His Will, and not the result (as Ockham taught) of his arbitrary decree,—I sum up the argument of this first chapter. To the question, What is the Moral Law? I answer:—

“The Moral Law is the embodiment of the eternal Necessary obligation of all Rational Free Agents to do and feel those actions and sentiments which are Right. The identification 119of this law with His will constitutes the Holiness of the infinite God. Voluntary and disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the Virtue of all finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless approach to the Divine nature, and to perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and (doubtless) all worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only reigns throughout His creation (its behests being finally enforced therein by His power), but is itself the reason why that creation exists. The material universe, with all its laws, and all the events which result therefrom, has one great purpose, and tends to one great end. It is that end which infinite Love has designed, and which infinite Power shall surely accomplish,—the everlasting approximation of all created souls to Goodness and to God.”—(Pp. 62, 63.)

The second chapter undertakes to answer the question, Where is the Moral Law Found? and begins by a brief analysis of the two great classes of human knowledge as a preliminary to ascertaining to which of these our knowledge of ethics belongs.

“All sciences are either Exact or Physical (or are applications of Exact to Physical science).

“Exact sciences are deduced from axiomatic Necessary truths and results in universal propositions, each of which is a Necessary Truth.

“Physical sciences are induced from Experimental Contingent truths, and result in General Propositions, each of which is a contingent truth.

“We obtain our knowledge of the Experimental Contingent Truths from which Physical science is induced, by the united action of our bodily senses and of our minds themselves, which must both in each case contribute their proper quota to make knowledge possible. Every perception necessitates this double element of sensation and intuition,—the objective and subjective factor in combination.

120“We obtain our knowledge of the axiomatic Necessary Truths from which Exact science is deduced, by the à priori operation of the mind alone, and (quoad the exact science in question) without the aid of sensation (not, indeed, by à priori operation of a mind which has never worked with sensation, for such a mind would be altogether barren; but of one which has reached normal development under normal conditions; which conditions involve the continual united action productive of perceptions of contingent truths).

“In this distinction between the sources of our knowledge lies the most important discovery of philosophy. Into whatsoever knowledge the element of Sensation necessarily enters as a constituent part, therein there can be no absolute certainty of truth; the fallibility of Sensation being recognised on all hands, and neutralising the certainty of the pure mental element. But when we discover an order of sciences which, without aid from sensation, are deduced by the mind’s own operation from those Necessary truths which we hold on a tenure marking indelibly their distinction from all contingent truths whatsoever, then we obtain footing in a new realm....

“In the ensuing pages I shall endeavour to demonstrate that the science of Morals belongs to the class of Exact sciences, and that it has consequently a right to that credence wherewith we hold the truths of arithmetic and geometry....”

The test which divides the two classes is as follows:—

“What truth soever is Necessary and of universal extent is derived by the mind from its own operation, and does not rest on observation or experience; as, conversely, what truth or perception soever is present to the mind with a consciousness, not of its Necessity, but of its Contingency, is ascribable not to the original agency of the mind itself, but derives its origin from observation and experience.”

121After lengthened discussion on this head and on the supposed mistakes of moral intuition, I go on to say:

“The consciousness of the Contingency, or the consciousness of the Necessity (i.e., the consciousness that the truth cannot be contingent, but must hold good in all worlds for ever), these consciousnesses are to be relied on, for they have their origin in, and are the marks of, the different elements from which they have been derived.^[9] We may apply them to the fundamental truths of any science, and by observing whether the reception of such truths into our minds be accompanied by the consciousness of Necessity or of Contingency, we may decide whether the science be rightfully Exact or Physical, deductive or inductive.

“For example, we take the axioms of arithmetic and geometry, and we find that we have distinct consciousness that they are Necessary truths. We cannot conceive them altered any where or at any time. The sciences which are deduced from these and from similar axioms are then, Exact sciences.

“Again: we take the ultimate facts of geology and anatomy, and we find that we have distinct consciousness that they are Contingent truths. We can readily suppose them other than we find them. The sciences, then, which are induced from these and similar facts are not Exact sciences.

“If, then, morals can be shown to bear this test equally with mathematics,—if there be any fundamental truths of morals holding in our minds the status of those axioms of geometry and arithmetic of whose Necessity we are conscious, 122then these fundamental truths of morals are entitled to be made the basis of an Exact science the subsequent theorems of which must all be deduced from them.—(P. 76.)...

“Men like Hume traverse the history of our race, to collect all the piteous instances of aberrations which have resulted from neglect or imperfect study of the moral consciousness; and then they cry, ‘Behold what it teaches!’ Yet I suppose that it will be admitted that Man is an animal capable of knowing geometry; though, if we were to go up and down the world, asking rich and poor, Englishman and Esquimaux, what are the ratios of solidity and superficies of a sphere, a right cylinder and an equilateral cone circumscribed about it, there are sundry chances that we should hear of other ratios besides the sesquialterate.

“He who should argue that, because people ignorant of geometry did not know the sesquialterate ratio of the sphere, cylinder and cone, therefore no man could know it, or that because they disputed it, that therefore it was uncertain, would argue no more absurdly than he who urges the divergencies of half civilised and barbarian nations as a reason why no man could know, or know with certainty, the higher propositions of morals.”

After analysing the Utilitarian and other theories which derive Morality from Contingent truths, I conclude that “the truths of Morals are Necessary Truths. The origin of our knowledge of them is Intuitive, and their proper treatment is Deductive.”

The third Chapter treats of the proposition, “That the Moral Law can be obeyed,” and discusses the doctrine of Kant, that the true self of Man, the Homo Noumenon, is free, self-legislative of Law fit for Law Universal; while as the Homo Phenomenon, an inhabitant of the world of sense, he is a mere link in the chain of causes and effects, and his actions are locked up in mechanic laws which, had he no other rank, would ensue exactly according to the physical 123impulses given by the instincts and solicitations in the sensory. But as an inhabitant (also) of the supersensitive world his position is among the causalities which taking their rise therein, are the intimate ground of phenomena. The discussion in this chapter on the above proposition cannot be condensed into any space admissible here.

The fourth Chapter seeks to determine Why the Moral Law should be Obeyed. It begins thus:—

“In the last Chapter (Chapter III.) I endeavoured to demonstrate that the pure Will, the true self of man, is by nature righteous; self-legislative of the only Universal Law, viz., the Moral; and that by this spontaneous autonomy would all his actions be squared, were it not for his lower nature, which is by its constitution unmoral, neither righteous nor unrighteous, but capable only of determining its choice by its instinctive propensities and the gratifications offered to them. Thus these two are contrary one to another, ‘and the spirit lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit.’ In the valour of the higher nature acquired by its victory over the lower, in the virtue of the tried and conquering soul, we look for the glorious end of creation, the sublime result contemplated by Infinite Benevolence in calling man into existence and fitting him with the complicated nature capable of developing that Virtue which alone can be the crown of finite intelligences. The great practical problem of human life is this: ‘How is the Moral Will to gain the victory over the unmoral instincts, the Homo Noumenon over the Homo Phenomenon, Michael over the Evil One, Mithras over Hyle?’”

In pursuing this enquiry of how the Moral Will is to be rendered victorious, I am led back to the question: Is Happiness “our end and aim?” What relation does it bear to Morality as a motive?

“I have already argued, in Chapter I., that Happiness, properly speaking, is the gratification of all the desires of 124our compound nature, and that moral, intellectual, affectional, and sensual pleasures are all to be considered as integers, whose sum, when complete, would constitute perfect Happiness. From this multiform nature of Happiness it has arisen, that those systems of ethics which set it forth as the proper motive of Virtue have differed immensely from one another, according as the Happiness they respectively contemplated was thought of as consisting in the pleasures of our Moral, or of our Intellectual, Affectional, and Sensual natures; whether the pleasures were to be sought by the virtuous man for his own enjoyment, or for the general happiness of the community.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of its intrinsic, i.e., Moral pleasure, is designated Euthumism.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of the extrinsic Affectional, Intellectual, and Sensual pleasure resulting from it, is designated Eudaimonism.

“Euthumism is of one kind only, for the individual can only seek the intrinsic pleasure of Virtue for his own enjoyment thereof.

“Eudaimonism, on the contrary, is of two most distinct lands. That which I have called Public Eudaimonism sets forth the intellectual, affectional, and sensual pleasures of all mankind as the proper object of the Virtue of each individual. Private Eudaimonism sets forth the same pleasures of the individual himself as the proper object of his Virtue.

“These two latter systems are commonly confounded under the name of ‘Utilitarian Ethics.’ Their principles, as I have stated them, will be seen to be wide asunder; yet there are few of the advocates of either who have not endeavoured to stand on the grounds of both, and even to borrow elevation from those of the Euthumist. Thus, by appealing alternately to philanthropy^[10] and to a gross and a refined Selfishness, they suit the purpose of the moment, and prevent their scheme from deviating too far from the 125intuitive conscience of mankind. It may be remarked, also, that the Private Eudaimonists insist more particularly on the pleasure of a Future Life; and in the exposition of them necessarily approach nearer to the Euthumists.”

I here proceeded to discuss the three systems which have arisen from the above-defined different views of Happiness; each contemplating it as the proper motive of Virtue: namely, 1st, Euthumism; 2nd, Public Eudaimonism; and 3rd, Private Eudaimonism.

“1st. Euthumism. This system, as I have said, sets forth the Moral Pleasure, the peace and cheerfulness of mind, and applause of conscience enjoyed in Virtue, as the proper motive for its practice. Conversely, it sets forth as the dissuadent from Vice, the pain of remorse, the inward uneasiness and self-contempt which belong to it.

“Democritus appears to have been the first who gave clear utterance to this doctrine, maintaining that Εύθυμία was the proper End of human actions, and sharply distinguishing it from the ‘Ηδονή’ proposed as such by Aristippus. The claims of a ‘mens conscia recti’ to be the ‘Summum Bonum,’ occupied, as is well known, a large portion of the subsequent disputes of the Epicureans, Cynics, Stoics and Academics, and were eagerly argued by Cicero, and even down to the time of Boethius. Many of these sects, however, and in particular the Stoics, though maintaining that Virtue alone is sufficient for Happiness (that is, that the inward joy of Virtue is enough to constitute Happiness in the midst of torments), yet by no means set forth that Happiness as the sole motive of Virtue. They held, on the contrary, the noblest ideas of ‘living according to Nature,’ that is, as Chrysippus explained it, according to the ‘Nature of the universe, the common Law of all, which is the right reason spread everywhere, the same by which Jupiter governs the world’; and that both Virtue and Happiness consisted in so regulating our actions that they should produce harmony between the 126Spirit in each of us, and the Will of Him who rules the universe. There is little or no trace of Euthumism in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, or (to my knowledge) in the sacred books of the Brahmins, Buddhists, or Parsees. The ethical problems argued by the mediæval Schoolmen do not, so far as I am aware, embrace the subject in question. The doctrine was revived, however, in the seventeenth century, and besides blending with more or less distinctness with the views of a vast number of lesser moralists, it reckons among its professed adherents no less names than Henry More and Bishop Cumberland. Euthumism, philosophically considered, will be found to affix itself most properly on the doctrine of the ‘Moral Sense’ laid down by Shaftesbury as the origin of our knowledge of moral distinctions, which, if it were, it would naturally follow that it must afford also the right motive of Virtue. Hutcheson, also, still more distinctly stated that this Moral Pleasure in Virtue (which both he and Shaftesbury likened to the æsthetic Pleasure in Beauty) was the true ground of our choice. To this Balguy replied, that ‘to make the rectitude of moral actions depend upon instinct, and, in proportion to the warmth and strength of the Moral Sense, rise and fall like spirits in a thermometer, is depreciating the most sacred thing in the world, and almost exposing it to ridicule.’ And Whewell has shown that the doctrine of the Moral Sense as the foundation of Morals must always fail, whether understood as meaning a sense like that of Beauty (which may or may not be merely a modification of the Agreeable), or a sense like those of Touch or Taste (which no one can fairly maintain that any of our moral perceptions really resemble).

“But though neither the true source of our Knowledge of Moral Distinctions nor yet the right Motive why we are to choose the Good, this Moral Sense of Pleasure in Virtue, and Pain in Vice, is a psychological fact demanding the investigation of the Moralist. Moreover, the error of allowing our moral choice to be decided by a regard to the pure joy of Virtue or awful pangs of self-condemnation, is 127an error so venial in comparison of other moral heresies, and so easily to be confounded with a truer principle of Morals, that it is particularly necessary to warn generous natures against it. ‘It is quite beyond the grasp of human thought,’ says Kant, ‘to explain how reason can be practical; how the mere Morality of the law, independently of every object man can be interested in, can itself beget an interest which is purely Ethical; how a naked thought, containing in it nothing of the sensory, can bring forth an emotion of pleasure or pain.’

“Unconsciously this Sense of Pleasure in a Virtuous Act, the thought of the peace of conscience which will follow it, or the dread of remorse for its neglect, must mingle with our motives. But we can never be permitted, consciously to exhibit them to ourselves as the ground of our resolution to obey the Law. That Law is not valid for man because it interests him, but it interests him because it has validity for him—because it springs from his true being, his proper self. The interest he feels is an Effect, not a Cause; a Contingency, not a Necessity. Were he to obey the Law merely from this Interest, it would not be free Self-legislation (autonomy), but (heteronomy) subservience of the Pure Will to a lower faculty—a Sense of Pleasure. And, practically, we may perceive that all manner of mischiefs and absurdities must arise if a man set forth Moral Pleasure as the determinator of his Will....

“Thus, the maxim of Euthumism, ‘Be virtuous for the sake of the Moral Pleasure of Virtue,’ may be pronounced false.

“2nd. Public Eudaimonism sets forth, both as the ground of our knowledge of Virtue and the motive for our practice of it, ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number.’ This Happiness, as Paley understood it, is composed of Pleasures to be estimated only by their Intensity and Duration; or, as Bentham added, by their Certainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, and Purity (or freedom from admixture of evil).

“Let it be granted for argument’s sake, that the calculable Happiness resulting from actions can determine their 128Virtue (although all experience teaches that resulting Happiness is not calculable, and that the Virtue must at least be one of the items determining the resulting Happiness). On the Utilitarian’s own assumption, what sort of motive for Virtue can be his end of ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number?’

“No sooner had Paley laid down the grand principle of his system, ‘Whatever is Expedient is Right,’ than he proceeds (as he thinks) to guard against its malapplication by arguing that nothing is expedient which produces, along with particular good consequences, general bad ones, and that this is done by the violation of any general rule. ‘You cannot,’ says he, ‘permit one action, and forbid another without showing a difference between them. Consequently the same sort of actions must be generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where therefore, the general permission of them would be pernicious, it becomes necessary to lay down and support the rule which generally forbids them.’

“Now, let the number of experienced consequences of actions be ever so great, it must be admitted that the Inductions we draw therefrom can, at the utmost, be only provisional, and subject to revision should new facts be brought in to bear in an opposite scale....

“Further, the rules induced by experience must be not only provisional, but partial. The lax term ‘general’ misleads us. A Moral Rule must be either universal and open to no exception, or, properly speaking, no rule at all. Each case of Morals stands alone.

“Thus, the Experimentalist’s conclusion, for example, that ‘Lying does more harm than good,’ may be quite remodelled by the fortunate discovery of so prudent a kind of falsification as shall obviate the mischief and leave the advantage. No doubt can remain on the mind of any student of Paley, that this would have been his own line of argument: ‘If we can only prove that a lie be expedient, then it becomes a duty to lie.’ As he says himself of the rule (which if any rule may do so may surely claim to be 129general) ‘Do not do evil that good may come,’ that it is ‘salutary, for the most part, the advantage seldom compensating for the violation of the rule.’ So to do evil is sometimes salutary, and does now and then compensate for disregarding even the Eudaimonist’s last resource—a General Rule!

“2nd. Private Eudaimonism. There are several formulas, in which this system, (the lowest, but the most logical, of Moral heresies) is embodied. Rutherford puts it thus: ‘Every man’s Happiness is the ultimate end which Reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and uniform practice of Virtue towards all mankind becomes our duty, when Revelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after this.’ Paley (who properly belongs to this school, but endeavours frequently to seat himself on the corners of the stools of Euthumism and Public Eudaimonism), Paley, the standard Moralist of England,^[11] defines Virtue thus: ‘Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of Everlasting Happiness. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject; the will of God the rule; and Everlasting Happiness the motive of Virtue.’

“Yet it seems to me, that if there be any one truth which intuition does teach us more clearly than another, it is precisely this one—that Virtue to be Virtue must be disinterested. The moment we picture any species of reward becoming the bait of our Morality, that moment we see the holy flame of Virtue annihilated in the noxious gas. A man is not Virtuous at all who is honest because it is ‘good policy,’ beneficent from love of approbation, pious for the sake of heaven. All this is prudence not virtue, selfishness not self-sacrifice. If he be honest for sake of policy, would he be dishonest, if it could be proved that it were more politic? If he would not, then he is not really honest from policy but from some deeper principle thrust 130into the background of his consciousness. If he would, then it is idlest mockery to call that honesty Virtuous which only waits a bribe to become dishonest.

“But there are many Eudaimonists who will be ready to acknowledge that a prudent postponement of our happiness in this world cannot constitute virtue. But wherefore do they say we are to postpone it? Not for present pleasure or pain, that would be base; but for that anticipation of future pleasure or pain which we call Hope and Fear. And this, not for the Hope and Fear of this world, which are still admitted to be base motives; but for Hope and Fear extended one step beyond the tomb—the Hope of Heaven and the Fear of Hell.”

After a general glance at the doctrine of Future Rewards and Punishments as held by Christians and heathens, I go on to argue:

“But in truth this doctrine of the Hope of Heaven being the true Motive of Virtue is (at least in theory) just as destructive of Virtue as that which makes the rewards of this life—health, wealth, or reputation—the motive of it. Well says brave Kingsley:

“If to act for a small reward cannot be virtuous, to act for a large one can certainly merit no more. To be bribed by a guinea is surely no better than to be bribed by a penny. To be deterred from ruin by fear of transportation for life, is no more noble than to be deterred by fear of twenty-four hours in prison. There is no use multiplying illustrations. He who can think that Virtue is the doing right for pay, may think himself very judicious to leave his pay in the savings-bank now and come into a fortune all at once by and by; but he who thinks that Virtue is the doing right for Right’s own sake, cannot possibly draw a distinction 131between small bribes and large ones; a reward to be given to-day, and a reward to be given in eternity.

“Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the belief in immortal progress is of incalculable value. Such belief, and that in an ever-present God, may be called the two wings of human Virtue. I look on the advantages of a faith in immortality to be two-fold. First, it cuts the knot of the world, and gives to our apprehension a God whose providence need no longer perplex us, and whose immeasurable and never-ending goodness shines ever brighter before our contemplating souls. Secondly, it gives an importance to personal progress which we can hardly attribute to it so long as we deem it is to be arrested for ever by death. The man who does not believe in Immortality may be, and often actually is, more virtuous than his neighbour; and it is quite certain that his Virtue is of far purer character than that which bargains for Heaven as its pay. But his task is a very hard one, a task without a result; and his road a dreary one, unenlightened even by the distant dawn of

We can scarcely do him better service than by leading him to trust that intuition of Immortality which is written in the heart of the human race by that Hand which writes no falsehoods.

“But if the attainment of Heaven be no true motive for the pursuit of Virtue, surely I may be held excused from denouncing that practice of holding out the fear of Hell wherewith many fill up the measure of moral degradation? Here it is vain to suppose that the fear is that of the immortality of sin and banishment from God; as we are sometimes told the hope of Heaven is that of an immortality of Virtue and union with Him. The mind which sinks to the debasement of any Fear is already below the level at which sin and estrangement are terrors. It is his weakness of will which alone hinders the Prodigal from saying, ‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ and unless we 132can strengthen that Will by some different motive, it is idle to threaten him with its own persistence.

“Returning from the contemplation of the lowness of aim common to all the forms of Eudaimonism, how magnificent seems the grand and holy doctrine of true Intuitive Morality? Do Right for the Right’s own sake: Love God and Goodness because they are Good! The soul seems to awake from death at such archangel’s call as this, and mortal man puts on his rightful immortality. The prodigal grovels no longer, seeking for Happiness amid the husks of pleasure; but, ‘coming to himself,’ he arises and goes to his Father, heedless if it be but as the lowest of His servants he may yet dwell beneath that Father’s smile. Hope and fear for this life or the next, mercenary bargainings, and labour of eye-service, all are at end. He is a Freeman, and free shall be the oblation of his soul and body, the reasonable, holy, and acceptable sacrifice.

“O Living Soul! wilt thou follow that mighty hand, and obey that summons of the trumpet? Perchance thou hast reached life’s solemn noon, and with the bright hues of thy morning have faded away the beautiful aspirations of thy youth. Doubtless thou hast often struggled for the Right; but, weary with frequent overthrows, thou criest, ‘This also is vanity.’ But think again, O Soul, whose sun shall never set! Have no poor and selfish ambitions mingled with those struggles and made them vanity? Have no theologic dogmas from which thy maturer reason revolts, been blended with thy purer principle? Hast thou nourished no extravagant hope of becoming suddenly sinless, or of heaping up with an hour’s labour a mountain of benefits on thy race? Surely some mistake like these lies at the root of all moral discouragement. But mark:—

“Pure morals forbid all base and selfish motives—all happiness-seeking, fame-seeking, love-seeking—in this world or the next, as motives of Virtue. Pure Morals rest not on 133any traditional dogma, not on history, on philology, on criticism, but on those intuitions, clear as the axioms of geometry, which thine own soul finds in its depths, and knows to be necessary truths, which, short of madness, it cannot disbelieve.

“Pure Morals offer no panacea to cure in a moment all the diseases of the human heart, and transform the sinner into the saint. They teach that the passions, which are the machinery of our moral life, are not to be miraculously annihilated, but by slow and unwearying endeavour to be brought into obedience to the Holy Will; while to fall and rise again many a time in the path of virtue is the inevitable lot of every pilgrim therein.... Our hearts burn within us when for a moment the vision rises before our sight of what we might make our life even here upon earth. Faintly can any words picture that vision!

“A life of Benevolence, in which every word of our lips, every work of our hands, had been a contribution to human virtue or human happiness; a life in which, ever wider and warmer through its three score years and ten had grown our pure, unwavering, Godlike Love, till we had spread the same philanthropy through a thousand hearts ere we passed away from earth to love yet better still our brethren in the sky.

“A life of Personal Virtue, in which every evil disposition had been trampled down, every noble sentiment called forth and strengthened; a life in which, leaving day by day further behind us the pollutions of sin, we had also ascended daily to fresh heights of purity, till self-conquest, unceasingly achieved, became continually more secure and more complete, and at last—

and we could look back upon the great task of earth, and say, ‘It is finished!’

“A life of Religion, in which the delight in God’s presence, the reverence for His moral attributes, the desire to obey 134His Will, and the consciousness of His everlasting love, had grown continually clearer and stronger, and of which Prayer, deepest and intensest, had been the very heart and nucleus, till we had found God drawing ever nearer to us as we drew near to him, and vouchsafing to us a communion the bliss of which no human speech may ever tell; the dawning of that day of adoration which shall grow brighter and brighter still while all the clusters of the suns fade out and die.

“And turning from our own destiny, from the endless career opened to our Benevolence, our Personal Virtue, and our Piety, we take in a yet broader view, and behold the whole universe of God mapped out in one stupendous Plan of Love. In the abyss of the past eternity we see the Creator for ever designing and for ever accomplishing the supremest end at which infinite Justice and Goodness could aim, and absolute Wisdom and Power bring to pass. For this end, for the Virtue of all finite Intelligences, we behold Him building up millions of starry abodes and peopling them with immortal spirits clothed in the garbs of flesh, and endowed with that moral freedom whose bestowal was the highest boon of Omnipotence. As ages of millenniums roll away, we see a double progress working through all the realms of space; a progress of each race and of each individual. Slowly and securely, though with many an apparent retrogression, does each world-family become better, wiser, nobler, happier. Slowly and securely, though with many a grievous backsliding, each living soul grows up to Virtue. Nor pauses that awful march for a moment, even in the death of the being or the cataclysm of the world. Over all Death and Change reigns that Almighty changeless will which has decreed the holiness and happiness of every spirit He hath made. Through the gates of the grave, and on the ruins of worlds, shall those spirits climb, higher and yet higher through the infinite ages, nearer and yet nearer to Goodness and to God.”

CHAPTER VI. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE PEASANTRY.

137The prominence which Irish grievances have taken of late years in English politics has caused me often to review with fresh eyes the state of the country as it existed in my childhood and youth, when, of course, both the good and evil of it appeared to me to be part of the order of nature itself.

I will first speak of the condition of the working classes, then of the gentry and clergy.

I had considerable opportunities for many years of hearing and seeing all that was going on in our neighbourhood, which was in the district known as “Fingal” (the White Strangers’ land), having been once the territory of the Danes. Fingal extends along the sea-coast between Dublin and Drogheda, and our part lay exactly between Malahide and Rush. My father, and at a later time my eldest brother, were indefatigable as magistrates, Poor law Guardians and landlords, in their efforts to relieve the wants and improve the condition of the people; and it fell on me naturally, as the only active woman of the family, to play the part of Lady Bountiful on a rather large scale. There was my father’s own small village of Donabate in the first place, claiming my attention; and beyond it a larger straggling collection of mud cabins named “Balisk”; the landlord of which, Lord Trimleston, was an absentee, and the village a centre of fever and misery. In Donabate there was never any real distress. In every house there were wage-earners or pensioners enough to keep the wolf from the door. Only when sickness came was there need for extra food, wine, and 138so on. The wages of a field-labourer were, at that time, about 8s. a week; of course without keep. His diet consisted of oatmeal porridge, wheaten griddle-bread, potatoes and abundance of buttermilk. The potatoes, before the Famine, were delicious tubers. Many of the best kinds disappeared at that time (notably I recall the “Black Bangers”), and the Irish housewife cooked them in a manner which no English or French Cordon Bleu can approach. I remember constantly seeing little girls bringing the mid-day dinners to their fathers, who sat in summer under the trees, and in winter in a comfortable room in our stable-yard, with fire and tables and chairs. The cloth which carried the dinner being removed there appeared a plate of “smiling” potatoes (i.e., with cracked and peeling skins) and in the midst a well of about a sixth of a pound of butter. Along with the plate of potatoes was a big jug of milk, and a hunch of griddle-bread. On this food the men worked in summer from six (or earlier, if mowing was to be done) till breakfast, and from thence till one o’clock. After an hour’s dinner the great bell tolled again, and work went on till 6. In winter there was no cessation of work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., when it ended. Of course these long hours of labour in the fields, without the modern interruptions, were immensely valuable on the farm. I do not think I err in saying that my father had thirty per cent. more profitable labour from his men for 8s. a week, than is now to be had from labourers at 16s.; at all events where I live here, in Wales. It is fair to note that beside their wages my father’s men, and also the old women whose daughters (eight in number) worked in the shrubberies and other light work all the year round, were allowed each the grazing of a cow on his pastures, and were able to get coal from the ships he chartered every winter from Whitehaven for 11s. a ton, drawn to the village by his horses. At Christmas an ox was divided among them, and generally 139also a good quantity of frieze for the coats of the men, and for the capes of the eight “Amazons.”

I cannot say what amount of genuine loyalty really existed among our people at that time. Outwardly, it appeared they were happy and contented, though, in talking to the old people, one never failed to hear lamentations for the “good old times” of the past generations. In those times, as we knew very well, nothing like the care we gave to the wants of the working classes was so much as dreamed of by our forefathers. But they kept open house, where all comers were welcome to eat and drink in the servants’ hall when they came up on any pretext; and this kind of hospitality has ever been a supreme merit in Celtic eyes. Some readers will remember that the famous chieftainess, Grana Uaile, invading Howth in one of her piratical expeditions in the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” found the gates of the ancient castle of the St. Lawrences, closed, though it was dinner-time! Indignant at this breach of decency, Grana Uaile kidnapped the heir of the lordly house and carried him to her robbers’ fortress in Connaught, whence she only released him in subsequent years on the solemn engagement of the Lords of Howth always to dine with the doors of Howth Castle wide open. I believe it is not more than 50 years, if so much, since this practice was abolished.

I think the only act of “tyranny” with which I was charged when I kept my father’s house, and which provoked violent recalcitration, was when I gave orders that men coming from our mountains to Newbridge on business with “the Master” should be served with largest platefuls of meat and jugs of beer, but should not be left in the servants’ hall en tête-à-tête with whole rounds and sirloins of beef, of which no account could afterwards be obtained!

Of course, the poor labourer in Ireland at that time after the failure of the potatoes, who had no allowances, and had 140many young children unable to earn anything for themselves, was cruelly tightly placed. I shall copy here a calculation which I took down in a note-book, still in my possession, after sifting enquiries concerning prices at our village shops, in, or about, the year 1845:—

A family of 3 will therefore require 63 lbs. of food per week—e.g.,

A family of 5 will require—

141Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.

Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into miserable squat, sottish-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000 of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly, told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them “bames”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘handful of sprigs?’” “A handful of sprigs? What for?” asked my father; “Why for the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst the ould wan!”

I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles, dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a beauty-loving 142creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so, it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly “domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!

My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him) laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it seems to me to read exclusively, as I do 143so often now, of “tenants’ improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help as a magistrate to recover forty pounds, which an ill-conditioned member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private hiding-place “under the thatch.”

But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty, fifty years ago, which I can offer.

144Balisk was certainly not the “loveliest village of the plain.” Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked, straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs; some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen, three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed (sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog, and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman getting over a stile.

Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door 145and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr. Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew, however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk, even while the description I have given of it held true in every respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore, the stream had escaped into a ditch.

Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds, having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned. Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls, literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.

Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk in the Forties.

146Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout. It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.” Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages, and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years had 147passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use, as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you sit in heaven on a golden chair!”

Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate, the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him, and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”

Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle better than the rest, where butter, flour, and 148dip candles, Ingy-male (Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof broken in, and a pool of filth, en permanence, in the middle of the floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty. Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as she told me, to see her ghost.

“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven? and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her herself—my poor old mother?”

After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for her.

Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and showed me the 149book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas à Kempis.”

“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”

“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”

“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”

“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”

Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her, corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated. Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb, and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but it will never be a purty foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which “springs eternal in the (female) breast.”

Here, again, are half-a-dozen cabins, each occupied by widows with one or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons, always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all, are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught to them at least half as fast 150again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house, indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly, for the women, there were caps without borders!

Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered “No!”

But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible, and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind of sanitary 151measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, not the stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village, but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine, meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable. “Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected, and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however, being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting than it was intended to be. But absurd as their 152words might sometimes be (and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to Newbridge went empty away.

But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food; wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields, having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread. Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless, starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The 153widow looked up, rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.

Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died; those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and frugality.

Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not; possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would 154probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in Ireland has thus its lord de facto, who dwells in a handsome house in the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the village and is fully persuaded he is the lord de jure. In the endless changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious, however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper, then published in Dublin under the audacious name of The Felon, devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.

Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There was a long corridor which had once 155been all hung with weapons, and there was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98 were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings (i.e., tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant “puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden” rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by the English Government before every species of violence might be committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.

I have been told on good authority that Smith O’Brien made his escape from the police in the “habit” of an Anglican Sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon. Mrs. Monsell, was Superior.

156A little incident which occurred at the moment rather confirmed the idea that Balisk was transformed for the nonce into a little Hecla; not under snow, but mud. I was visiting the fever patients, and was detained late of a summer’s evening in the village. So many were ill, there seemed no end of sick to be supplied with food, wine and other things needed. In particular, three together were ill in a house already mentioned, where there were several grown-up sons, and the people were somewhat better off than usual, though by no means sufficiently so to be able to procure meat or similar luxuries. Here I lingered, questioning and prescribing, till at about nine o’clock my visit ended; and I left money to procure some of the things required. Next morning my father addressed me:—

“So you were at Balisk last night?”

“Yes, I was kept there.”

“You stayed in Tyrell’s house till nine o’clock?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“You gave six and sixpence to the mother to get provisions?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“Well, very simply. The police were watching the door and saw you through it. As soon as you were gone the Club assembled there. They were waiting for your departure; and the money you gave was subscribed to buy pikes; of course to pike me!”

A week later, the bubble burst in the memorable Cabbage garden. The rebel chiefs were leniently dealt with by the Government, and their would-be rebel followers fell back into all the old ways as if nothing had happened. What became of the pikes no one knew. Possibly they exist in Balisk still, waiting for a Home Rule Government to be brought forth. At the end of a few months the poor schoolmaster, claimant of Newbridge, died; and as I stood by his bedside and gave 157him the little succour possible, the poor fellow lifted his eyes full of meaning, and said, “To think you should come to help me now!” It was the last reference made to the once-dreaded rebellion.

After endless efforts my brother carried his point and drained the whole village—beaver bonnets notwithstanding. Whitewash became popular. “Middens” (as the Scotch call them, the Irish have a simpler phrase) were placed more frequently behind houses than in front of them. Costume underwent some vicissitudes, among which the introduction of shoes and stockings, among even the juvenile population, was the most remarkable feature; a great change truly, since I can remember an old woman, to whom my youngest brother had given a pair, complaining that she had caught cold in consequence of wearing, for the first time in her life, those superfluous garments.

Many were drawn into the stream of the Exodus, and have left the country. How helpless they are in their migrations, poor souls! was proved by one sad story. A steady, good young woman, whose sister had settled comfortably in New York, resolved to go out to join her, and for the purpose took her passage at an Emigration Agency office in Dublin. Coming to make her farewell respects at Newbridge, the following conversation ensued between her and myself:

“So, Bessie, you are going to America?”

“Yes, ma’am, to join Biddy at New York. She wrote for me to come, and sent the passage-money.”

“That is very good of her. Of course you have taken your passage direct to New York?”

“Well, no, ma’am. The agent said there was no ship going to New York, but one to some place close by, New-something-else.”

“New-something-else, near New York; I can’t think where that could be.”

158“Yes, ma’am, New—New—I disremember what it was, but he told me I could get from it to New York immadiently.”

“Oh, Bessie, it wasn’t New Orleans?”

“Yes, ma’am, that was it! New Orleans—New Orleans, close to New York, he said.”

“And you have paid your passage-money?”

“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister. That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”

The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the land to which they went!

Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to the children against their religion. What the 159priests really wanted was to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11 ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several times, when the class had been well got together and began to be interested, the priest announced that he would give them lessons on the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.

The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or the like of that. Priests does be dark!” I thought the phrase wonderfully significant.

My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never was openly, anything but civility between the successive curés and ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a revolting 160looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten), and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and “sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.

I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class, as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that St. John had a leathern griddle about his loins; and a young man with a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out divils through,—through, through,—Blazes, the chief of the Divils!”

In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “Ating camels, my lady!”

Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my lessons?”

“Ah, Ma’am, then, never a word!”

161“O, Andrew, Andrew! And have you forgotten all about the sun, the moon and stars, the day and night, and the Seasons?”

“O, no, Ma’am! I do remember now, and you set them on the schoolroom table, and Mars was a red gooseberry, and I ate him!”

CHAPTER VII. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE GENTRY.

165I now turn to describe, as my memory may serve, the life of the Irish gentry in the Forties. There never has been much of a middle class, unhappily, in the country, and therefore in speaking of the gentry I shall have in view mostly the landowners and their families. These, with few and always much noted exceptions, were Protestants, of English descent and almost exclusively of Saxon blood; the Anglo-Irish families however long settled in Ireland, naturally intermarrying chiefly with each other. So great was, in my time, the difference in outward looks between the two races, that I have often remarked that I could walk down Sackville Street and point to each passenger “Protestant,” “Catholic,” “Protestant,” “Catholic”; and scarcely be liable to make a mistake.

As I have said, my memory bridges over the gulf between a very typical ancien régime household and the present order of things, and I may be able to mark some changes, not unworthy of registration. But it must be understood that I make no attempt to describe what would be precisely called Irish society, for into this, I never really entered at all. I wearied of the little I had seen of it after a few balls and drawing-rooms in Dublin by the time I was eighteen and thenceforward only shared in home entertainments and dinners among neighbours in our own county, with a few visits to relatives at greater distance. I believe the origin of my great boredom in Dublin balls (for I 166was very fond of dancing) was the extraordinary inanity of the men whom I met. The larger number were officers of Horse Artillery, then under the command of my uncle, and I used to pity the poor youths, thinking that they danced with me as in duty bound, while their really marvellous silliness and dulness made conversation wearisome in the extreme. Many of these same empty-headed young coxcombs afterwards fought like Trojans through the Crimean War and came back,—transformed into heroes! I remember my dentist telling me, much to the same purpose, that half the officers in the garrison had come to him to have their teeth looked after before they went to the Crimea and had behaved abominably in his chair of torture, groaning and moaning and occasionally vituperating him and kicking his shins. But it was another story when some of those very men charged at Balaklava! We are not, I think, yet advanced far enough to dispense altogether with the stern teaching of war, or the virtues which spring out of the dreadful dust of the battlefield.

Railways were only beginning to be opened in 1840, and were much dreaded by landed proprietors through whose lands they ran. When surveyors came to plan the Dublin and Drogheda Railway my father and our neighbour Mrs. Evans, were up in arms and our farmers ready to throttle the trespassers. I suggested we should erect a Notice-board in Donabate with this inscription:—

The voyage to England, which most of us undertook at least once or twice a year, was a wretched transit in miserable, ill-smelling vessels. From Dublin to Bristol (our most convenient route) took at least thirty hours. From Holyhead to London was a two days’ journey by coach. On one of these journeys, having to stop at Bristol for two nights, I 167enjoyed an opportunity (enchanting at sixteen) of being swung in a basket backward and forward across the Avon, where the Suspension Bridge now stands. Preparations for these journeys of ours to England were not quite so serious as those which were necessarily made for our cousins when they went out to India and were obliged for five or six months wholly to dispense with the services of a laundress. Still, our hardships were considerable, and youngsters who were going to school or college were made up like little Micawbers “expecting dirty weather.” Elderly ladies, I remember, usually travelled in mourning and sometimes kept their little corkscrew curls in paper under their bonnet caps for the whole journey; a less distressing proceeding, however, than that of Lady Cahir thirty years earlier, who had her hair dressed, (powdered and on a cushion) by a famous hairdresser in Bath, and came over to exhibit it at St. Patrick’s ball in Dublin Castle, having passed five nights at sea, desperately ill, but heroically refusing to lie down and disarrange the magnificent structure on her aching head.

This lady by the way—of whom it was said that “Lady Cahir cares for no man”—had had a droll adventure in her youth, which my mother, who knew her well and I think was her schoolfellow, recounted to me. Before she married she lived with her mother, a rather extravagant widow, who plunged heavily into debt. One day the long-expected bailiffs came to arrest her and were announced as at the hall door. Quick as lightning Lady Cahir (then, I think, Miss Townsend) made her mother exchange dress and cap with her, to which she added the old lady’s wig and spectacles and then sat in her armchair knitting sedulously, with the blinds drawn down and her back to the window. The mother having vanished, the bailiff was shown up, and, exhibiting his credentials, requested the lady to accompany him to the sponging house. Of course there was a long palaver; but at last the captive 168consented to obey and merely said, “Well! I will go if you like, but I warn you that you are committing a great mistake in apprehending me.”

“O, O! We all know about that, Ma’am! Please come along! I have a hackney carriage at the door.”

The damsel, well wrapped in cloaks and furbelows and a great bonnet of the period, went quietly to her destination; but when the time came for closing the door on her as a prisoner, she jumped up, threw off wig, spectacles and old woman’s cap, and disclosed the blue eyes, golden hair, and radiant young beauty for which she was long afterwards renowned. Meanwhile, of course, her mother had had abundance of time to clear out of the way of her importunate creditors.

Many details of comforts and habits in those days were very much in arrear of ours, perhaps about equally in Ireland and in England. It is droll to remember, for example, as I do vividly, seeing in my childhood the housemaids striving with infinite pains and great loss of time to obtain a light with steel and flint and a tinder-box, when by some untoward accident all the fires in the house (habitually burning all night) had been extinguished.

The first matchbox I saw was a long upright red one containing a bottle of phosphorus and a few matches which were lighted by insertion in the bottle. After this we had Lucifers which nearly choked us with gas; but in which we gloried as among the greatest discoveries of all time. Seriously I believe few of the vaunted triumphs of science have contributed so much as these easy illuminators of our long dark Northern nights to the comfort and health of mankind.

Again our grandmothers had used exquisite China basins with round long-necked jugs for all their ablutions and we had advanced to the use of large basins and footpans, slipper 169baths and shower baths, when, as nearly as possible in 1840, the first sponge bath was brought to Ireland. I was paying a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock, at Drumcar in Co. Louth, when she exhibited with pride to me and her other guests the novel piece of bedroom furniture. When I returned home and described it my mother ordered a supply for our house, and we were wont for a long time to enquire of each other, “how we enjoyed our tubs?” as people are now supposed to ask: “Have you used Pears’ soap?” I believe it was from India these excellent inventions came.

Many other differences might be noted between the habits of those days and of ours. Diners Russes were, of course, not thought of. We dined at six, or six-thirty, at latest; and after the soup and fish, all the first course was placed at once on the table. For a party, for example, of 16 or 18, there would be eight dishes; joints, fowls and entrées. It was a triumph of good cookery, but rarely achieved, to serve them all hot at once. Tea, made with an urn, was a regular meal taken in the drawing-room about nine o’clock; never before dinner. The modern five o’clock tea was altogether unknown in the Forties, and when I ventured sometimes to introduce it in the Fifties, I was so severely reprehended that I used to hold a secret symposium for specially favoured guests in my own room after our return from drives or walks. All old gentlemen pronounced five o’clock tea an atrocious and disgraceful practice.

Another considerable difference in our lives was caused by the scarcity of newspapers and periodicals. I can remember when the Dublin Evening Mail,—then a single sheet, appearing three times a week and received at Newbridge on the day after publication,—was our only source of news. I do not think any one of our neighbours took the Times or any English paper. Of magazines we had Blackwood and the Quarterly, but illustrated ones were 170unknown. There was a tolerable circulating library in Dublin, to which I subscribed and from whence I obtained a good many French books; but the literary appetites of the Irish gentry generally were frugal in the extreme!

The real differences, however, between Life in 1840 and Life in 1890 were much deeper than any record of these altered manners, or even any references to the great changes caused by steam and the telegraph, can convey. There were certain principles which in those days were almost universally accepted and which profoundly influenced all our works and ways. The first of them was Parental and Marital Authority. Perhaps my particular circumstances as the daughter of a man of immense force of will, caused me to see the matter especially clearly, but I am sure that in the Thirties and Forties (at all events in Ireland) there was very little declension generally from the old Roman Patria Potestas. Fathers believed themselves to possess almost boundless rights over their children in the matter of pursuits, professions, marriages and so on; and the children usually felt that if they resisted any parental command it was on their peril and an act of extreme audacity. My brothers and I habitually spoke of our father, as did the servants and tenants, as “The Master;” and never was title more thoroughly deserved.

Another important difference was in the position of women. Of this I shall have more to say hereafter; suffice it to note that it was the universal opinion, that no gentlewoman could possibly earn money without derogating altogether from her rank (unless, indeed, by card-playing as my grandmother did regularly!); and that housekeeping and needlework (of the most inartistic kinds) were her only fitting pursuits. The one natural ambition of her life was supposed to be a “suitable” marriage; the phrase always referring to settlements, rather than sentiments. Study of any serious sort was disapproved, and “accomplishments” 171only were cultivated. My father prohibited me when very young from learning Latin from one of my brothers who kindly offered to teach me; but, as I have recounted, he paid largely and generously that I might be taught Music, for which I had no faculties at all. Other Irish girls my contemporaries, were much worse off than I, for my dear mother always did her utmost to help my studies and my liberal allowance permitted me to buy books.

The laws which concerned women at that date were so frightfully unjust that the most kindly disposed men inevitably took their cue from them, and looked on their mothers, wives, and sisters as beings with wholly inferior rights; with no rights, indeed, which should ever stand against theirs. The deconsideration of women (as dear Barbara Bodichon in later years used to say) was at once cause and result of our legal disabilities. Let the happier women of these times reflect on the state of things which existed when a married woman’s inheritance and even her own earnings (if she could make any), were legally robbed from her by her husband, and given, if he pleased, to his mistress! Let them remember that she could make no will, but that her husband might make one which should bequeath the control of her children to a man she abhorred or to a woman of evil life. Let them remember that a husband who had beaten and wronged his wife in every possible way could yet force her by law to live with him and become the mother of his children. Personally and most fortunately (for I know not of what crime I might not have been guilty if so tried!) I never had cause of complaint on the score of injustice or unkindness from any of the men with whom I had to do. But the knowledge, when it came to me, of the legalised oppressions under which other women groaned, lay heavy on my mind. I was not, however, in those early days, interested in politics or 172large social reforms; and did not covet the political franchise, finding in my manifold duties and studies over-abundant outlets for my energies.

Another difference between the first and latter half of the century is, I think, the far greater simplicity of character of the older generation. No doubt there were, at the time of which I write, many fine and subtle minds at work among the poets, philosophers and statesmen of the day; but ordinary ladies and gentlemen, even clever and well-educated ones, would, I think, if they could revive now, seem to us rather like our boys and girls than our grandparents. Thousands of allusions, ideas, shades of sentiment and reflection which have become common-places to us, were novel and strange to them. What Cowper’s poetry is to Tennyson’s, what the Vicar of Wakefield is to Middlemarch, so were their transparent minds to ours. I remember once (for a trivial example of what I mean) walking with my father in his later days in the old garden one exquisite spring day when the apple trees were covered with blossoms and the birds were singing all round us. As he leaned on my arm, having just recovered from an illness which had threatened to be fatal and was in a mood unusually tender, I was tempted to say, “Don’t you feel, Father, that a day like this is almost too beautiful and delicious, that it softens one’s feelings to the verge of pain?” In these times assuredly such a remark would have seemed to most people too obvious to deserve discussion, but it only brought from my father the reply: “God bless my soul, what nonsense you talk, my dear! I never heard the like. Of course a fine day makes everybody cheerful and a rainy day makes us dull and dismal.” Everyone I knew then, was, more or less, similarly simple; and in some of the ablest whom I met in later years of the same generation, (e.g., Mrs. Somerville) I found the same single-mindedness, the same absence of all experience of the subtler emotions. Conversation, 173as a natural consequence, was more downright and matter of fact, and rarely if ever was concerned with critical analyses of impressions. In short, (as I have said) our fathers were in many respects, like children compared to ourselves.

Another and a sad change has taken place in the amount of animal spirits generally shared by young and old in the Thirties and Forties and down, I think, to the Crimean War, which brought a great seriousness into all our lives. It was not only the young who laughed in joyous “fits” in those earlier days; the old laughed then more heartily and more often than I fear many young people do now; that blessed laugh of hearty amusement which causes the eyes to water and the sides to ache—a laugh one hardly ever hears now in any class or at any age. An evidence of the high level of ordinary spirits may be found in the readiness with which such genuine laughter responded to the smallest provocation. It did not need the delightful farce of the Keeley’s acting (though I recall the helpless state into which Mr. Keeley’s pride in his red waistcoat reduced half the house), but even an old, well-worn, good story, or family catch-word with some ludicrous association, was enough to provoke jovial mirth. It was part of a young lady’s and young gentleman’s home training to learn how to indulge in the freest enjoyment of fun without boisterousness or shrieks or discordance of any kind. Young people were for ever devising pranks and jests among themselves, and even their seniors occupied themselves in concocting jokes, many of which we should now think childish; the order of the “April Fool,” being the general type. Comic verse making; forging of love letters; disguising and begging as tramps; sending boxes of bogus presents; making “ghosts” with bolsters and burnt cork eyes to be placed in dark corners of passages; these and a score of such monkey-tricks for which nobody now has patience, were common diversions in 174every household, and were nearly always taken good-humouredly. My father used to tell of one ridiculous deception in which the chief actress and inventor was that very grande dame Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Moira, daughter of the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Moira, my father and two other young men, by means of advertising and letters, induced some wretched officer to walk up and down a certain part of Sackville Street for an hour with a red geranium in his buttonhole, to show himself off, as he thought, to a young lady with a large fortune who proposed to marry him. The conspirators sat in a window across the street watching their victim and exploding with glee at his peacock behaviour. The sequel was better than the joke. The poor man wrote a letter to his tormentress (whom he had at last detected) so pitiful that her kind heart melted, and she exerted her immense influence effectually on his behalf and provided for him comfortably for life.

Henry, the third Marquis of Waterford, husband of the gifted and beautiful lady whose charming biography Mr. Hare has recently written, was the last example I imagine in Ireland of these redundant spirits. It was told of him, and I remember hearing of it at the time, that a somewhat grave and self-important gentleman had ridden up to Curraghmore on business and left his bay horse at the door. Lord Waterford, seeing the animal, caught up a pot of whitewash in use by some labourer and rapidly whitewashed the horse; after which exploit he went indoors to interview his visitor, and began by observing, “That is a handsome grey horse of yours at the door.” “A bay, my Lord.”

“Not at all. It is a grey horse. I saw you on it.”

Eventually both parties adjourned to the front of the house and found the whitewashed horse walking up and down with a groom. “You see it is grey,” said the Marquis triumphantly.

175Certainly no one in those days dreamed of asking the question, “Is Life worth Living?” We were all, young and old, quite sure that life was extremely valuable; a boon for which to be grateful to God. I recall the amazement with which I first read of the Buddhist and Brahmin Doctrine that Existence is per se an evil, and that the reward of the highest virtue will be Absorption, or Nirvana. The pessimism which prevails in this fin de siècle was as unknown in the Forties as the potato disease before the great blight.

I much wish that some strong thinker would undertake the useful task of tracking this mental and moral anæmia of the present generation to its true origin, whether that origin be the ebb of religious hope and faith and the reaction from the extreme and too hasty optimism which culminated in 1851, and has fallen rapidly since 1875, or whether, in truth, our bodily conditions, though tending to prolong life and working power to an amazing degree, are yet less conducive to the development of the sanguine and hilarious temperament common in my youth. I have heard as a defence for the revolution which has taken place in medical treatment—from the depletory and antiphlogistic to the nourishing and stimulating, and for the total abandonment of the practice of bleeding—that it is not the doctors who have altered their minds, but the patients, whose bodies have undergone a profound modification. I can quite recall the time when (as all the novels of the period testify), if anybody had a fall or a fit, or almost any other mishap, it was the first business of the doctor to whip out his lancet, bare the sufferer’s arm, and draw a large quantity of blood, when everybody and the aforesaid novels always remarked; “It was providential that there was a doctor at hand” to do it. I have myself seen this operation performed on one of my brothers in our drawing-room about 1836, and I heard of it every day occurring 176among our neighbours, rich and poor. My father’s aunt, whom I well remember, Jane Power Trench (sister of the first Lord Clancarty), who lived in Marlborough Buildings in Bath, was habitually bled every year just before Easter, having previously spent the entire winter in her bedroom of which the windows were pasted down and the doors doubled. A few days after the phlebotomy the old lady invariably bought a new bonnet and walked in it up to the top of Beacon Hill. She continued the annual ritual unbroken till she died at 79. Surely these people were made of stronger pâte than we? In corroboration of this theory I may record how much more hardy were the gentlemen of the Forties in all their habits than are those of the Nineties. When my father and his friends went on grouse-shooting expeditions to our mountain-lodge, I used to provide for the large parties only abundance of plain food for dinners, and for luncheons merely sandwiches, bread and cheese, with a keg of ale, and a basket of apples. By degrees it became necessary (to please my brother’s guests) to provide the best of fish, fowl and flesh, champagne and peaches. The whole odious system of battues, rendering sport unmanly as well as cruel, with all its attendant waste and cost and disgusting butchery, has grown up within my recollection by the extension of luxury, laziness and ostentation.

To turn to another subject. There was very little immorality at that time in Ireland either in high or low life, and what there was received no quarter. But there was, certainly, together with the absence of vice, a lack of some of the virtues which have since developed amongst us. It is not easy to realise that in my lifetime men were hanged for forgery and for sheep-stealing; and that no one agitated for the repeal of such Draconian legislation, but everybody placidly repeated the observation (now-a-days so constantly applied to the scientific torture of animals), that it was 177“NECESSARY.” Cruelties, wrongs and oppressions of all kinds were rife, and there were (in Ireland at all events) none to raise an outcry such as would echo now from one end of England to the other.

The Protestant pulpit was occupied by two distinct classes of men. There were the younger sons of the gentry and nobles, who took the large livings and were booked for bishoprics; and these were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were more or less cultivated men and associated of course on equal terms with the best in the land. Not seldom they were men of noble lives, and extreme piety; such for example, as the last Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, and a certain Archdeacon Trench, whom I remember regarding with awe and curiosity since I had heard that he had once got up into his own pulpit, and (like Maxwell Gray’s Dean Maitland) made a public confession of all his life’s misdoings. The second class of Irish clergymen in those days were men of a rather lower social grade, educated in Trinity College, often, no doubt, of excellent character and devotion but generally extremely narrow in their views, conducting all controversies by citations of isolated Bible-texts and preaching to their sparse country congregations with Dublin brogues which, not seldom, reduced the sublimity of their subjects to bathos. There was one, for example, who said, as the peroration of his sermon on the Fear of Death:—

“Me brethren the doying Christian lepps into the arrums of Death and makes his hollow jaws ring with eternal hallelujahs!”

I have myself heard another read the concluding chapters of the gospels, substituting with extraordinary effect the words “two Meal-factors,” for the “two malefactors,” who were crucified. There was a chapter in the Acts which we dreaded to hear, so difficult was it to help laughing when we were told of “Perthians and Mades, and the dwellers in 178Mesopotamia and the parts of Libya about Cyraine, streengers of Roum, Jews and Proselytes, Crates and Arabians.” It was also hard to listen gravely to a vivid description of Jonah’s catastrophe, as I have heard it, thus: “The weves bate against the ship, and the ship bate against the weves;” (and, at last) “The Wheel swallowed Jonah!”

They had a difficult place to hold, these humbler Irish clergymen, properly associating with no class of their parishioners; but to their credit be it said, they were nearly all men of blameless lives, who did their duty as they understood it, fairly well. The disestablishment of the Irish Church which I had regarded beforehand with much prejudice, did (I have since been inclined to think), very little mischief, and certainly awakened in the minds of the Irish squirearchy who had to settle their creed afresh, an interest in theology which was never exhibited in my earlier days. I was absolutely astounded on paying a visit to my old home a few years after disestablishment and while the Convention (commonly called the Contention!) was going on, to hear sundry recondite mysteries discussed at my brother’s table and to find some of my old dancing partners actually greedily listening to what I could tell them of the then recent discovery of Mr. Edmund Ffoulkes,—that the doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost had been invented by King Reccared.

As regards any moral obligation or duty owed by men and women to the lower animals, such ideas were as yet scarcely beginning to be recognised. It was in 1822, the year in which I was born, that brave old Richard Martin carried in Parliament the first Act ever passed by any legislature in the world on behalf of the brutes. Tom Moore had laughed at this early Zoophilist.

179But in the history of human civilisation, “Martin’s Act” will hereafter assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney Smith, who did his best in the Edinburgh Review to sneer them down. But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of legislation must do, a system of moral education. A sense of the Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time, testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was morally wrong to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss Edgeworth’s then recent novel of Ennui had described her hero as riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard them) “Never fare! I’ll batther him out of that!” The picture of a “Rosinante,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago, instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his 180woodcut, Waiting for Death, tried to move the hearts of his generation to compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.

The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.

Among Irish ladies and gentlemen in the Forties there was a great deal of interest of course in our domestic pets, and I remember a beautiful and beloved young bride coming to pay us a visit, and asking in a tone of profound conviction: “What would life be without dogs?” Still there was nothing then existing, I think, in the world like the sentiment which inspired Mathew Arnold’s Geist or even his “Kaiser Dead.” The gulf between the canine race and ours was thought to be measureless. Darwin had not yet written the Descent of Man or made us imagine that “God had made of one blood” at least all the mammals “upon earth.” No one dreamed of trying to realise what must be the consciousness of suffering animals; nor did anyone, I think, live under the slightest sense of responsibility for their well-being. Even my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, though she was renowned through the county for her attachment to her great black Retrievers, said to me one day, many years after I had left Ireland, “I don’t understand your feelings about animals at all. To me a dog is a dog. To you it seems to be something else!”

Another difference was, that there was very little popularity-hunting in the Forties. The “working man” was seen, but not yet heard of; and, so far as I remember, we thought as little of the public opinion of our villages respecting us as we did of the public opinion of the stables. The wretched 181religious bigotry which, as we knew, made the Catholics look on us as infallibly condemned of God in this world and the next, was an insuperable barrier to sympathy from them, and we never expected them to understand either our acts or motives. But if we cared little or nothing what they thought of us, I must in justice say that we did care a great deal for their comfort, and were genuinely unhappy in their afflictions and active to relieve their miseries. When the famine came there was scarcely one Irish lady or gentleman, I think, who did not spend time, money and labour like water to supply food to the needy. I remember the horror with which my father listened to a visitor, who was not an Irishwoman but a purse-proud nouveau riche married to a very silly baronet in our neighbourhood, who told him that her husband’s Mayo property had just cost them £70. “That will go some way in supplying Indian meal to your tenants,” said my father, supposing that to such purpose it must be devoted. “O dear, no! We are not sending it for any such use,” said Lady —. “We are spending it on evictions!” “Good God!” shouted my father; “how shocking! At such a time as this!”

It has been people like these who have ever since done the hard things of which so much capital has been made by those whose interest it has been to stir up strife in the “distressful country.”

I happen to be able to recall precisely the day, almost the hour, when the blight fell on the potatoes and caused the great calamity. A party of us were driving to a seven o’clock dinner at the house of our neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of Portrane. As we passed a remarkably fine field of potatoes in blossom, the scent came through the open windows of the carriage and we remarked to each other how splendid was the crop. Three or four hours later, as we returned home in the dark, a dreadful smell came from the same field, and we exclaimed, 182“Something has happened to those potatoes; they do not smell at all as they did when we passed them on our way out.” Next morning there was a wail from one end of Ireland to the other. Every field was black and every root rendered unfit for human food. And there were nearly eight millions of people depending principally upon these potatoes for existence!

The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time warmed all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed the people. But the agitators were afraid it would promote too much good feeling between the nations, which would not have suited their game. I myself heard O’Connell in Conciliation Hall (that ill-named place!) endeavour to belittle English liberality. He spoke (a strange figure in the red robes of his Mayoralty and with a little sandy wig on his head) to the following purpose:—

“They have sent you over money in your distress. But do you think they do it for love of you, or because they feel for you, and are sorry for your trouble? Devil a bit! They are afraid of you!—that is it! They are afraid of you. You are eight millions strong.”

It was as wicked a speech as ever man made, but it was never, that I know of, reported or remarked upon. He spoke continually to similar purpose no doubt, in that Hall, where my cousin—afterwards the wife of John Locke, M.P. for Southwark—and I had gone to hear him out of girlish curiosity.

The part played by Anglo-Irish ladies when the great fever which followed the famine came on us, was the same. It became perfectly well known that if any of the upper classes caught the fever, they almost uniformly died. The working people could generally be cured by a total change of diet and abundant meat and wine, but to the others no difference could be made in that way, and numbers of ladies 183and gentlemen lost their lives by attending their poor in the disease. It was very infectious, or at least it was easily caught in each locality by those who went into the cabins.

There were few people whom I met in Ireland in those early days whose names would excite any interest in the reader’s mind. One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of the Crescent and the Cross, who came many times to Newbridge as an acquaintance of my brother. He was very refined and, as we considered, rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death! On the burning Amazon in mid-Atlantic he refused to take a place in the crowded boats, and was last seen standing alone beside the faithful Captain at the helm as the doomed vessel was wrapped in flames. I have never forgotten his pale, intellectual face and somewhat puny frame, and pictured him thus—a true hero.

His brother, who was commonly known as Hochelaga, from the name of his book on Canada, was a hale and genial young fellow, generally popular. One rainy day he was prompted by a silly young lady-guest of ours to sing a series of comic songs in our drawing-room, the point of the jokes turning on the advances of women to men. My dear mother, then old and feeble, after listening quietly for a time, slowly rose from her sofa, walked painfully across the room, and leaning over the piano said in her gentle way a few strong words of remonstrance. She could not bear, she said, that men should ridicule women. Respect and chivalrous feeling for them, even when they were foolish and ill-advised, were the part, she always thought, of a generous man. She would beg Mr. Warburton to choose some other songs for his fine voice. All this was done so gently and with her 184sweet, kind smile, that no one could take offence. Mr. Warburton was far from doing so. He was, I could see, touched with tender reverence for his aged monitress, and rising hastily from the piano, made the frankest apologies, which of course were instantly accepted. I have described this trivial incident because I think it illustrates the kind of influence which was exercised by women of the old school of “decorum.”

Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very charming person, without the slightest episcopal morgue or affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans; and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own, inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.”

Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s petticoat and powdered toupee, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly; the end of his “Vice” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then, in horror took the veil, and became a “No-vice,” duly admitted to her Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop 185of Rheims (my youngest brother in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell, but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s); and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the back of the sofa concluded the fate of the Novice and the charade.

There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments; he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.

At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him: “Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care, however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order; and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” might be dimly deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.

A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs. Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed 186table. She accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your plate at your bankers.”

Mrs. Evans, née Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and, beyond this lady 187again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.

Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly. She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies, having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.

When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful wreck of the Tayleur took place. On the shore below, under the lofty black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. 188The tide had risen, and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests.

Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. 189Evans was wont to live much alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane, close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.

A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order 190which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a “Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly. After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted 191them (like Tolstoi, whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said, “like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last long sleep.

I never saw much of Irish society out of our own county. Once, when I was eighteen, my father and I went a tour of visits to his relations in Connaught, travelling, as was necessary in those days, very slowly with post-horses to our carriage, my maid on the box, and obliged to stop at inns on the way. Some of these inns were wretched places. I remember in one finding a packet of letters addressed to some attorney, under my bolster! At another, this dialogue took place between me and the waiter:—

“What can we have for dinner?”

“Anything you please, Ma’am. Anything you please.”

“Well, but exactly what can we have?”

(Waiter, triumphantly): “You can have a pair of ducks.”

“I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else?”

“They are very fine ducks, Ma’am.”

“I dare say. But what else?”

“You might have the ducks boiled, Ma’am!”

“No, no. Can we have mutton?”

“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”

“Some beef?”

“No, Ma’am.”

192“Some veal?”

“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then, a fowl?”

“We haven’t got a fowl.”

“What on earth have you got, then?”

“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”

We went first to Drumcar and next (a two days’ drive) to Moydrum Castle which then belonged to my father’s cousin, old Lady Castlemaine. Another old cousin in the house showed me where, between two towers covered with ivy, she had looked one dark night out of her bedroom window on hearing a wailing noise below, and had seen some white object larger than any bird, floating slowly up and then sinking down into the shadow below again, and yet again. Of course it was the Banshee; and somebody had died afterwards! We also had our Banshee at Newbridge about that time. One stormy and rainy Sunday night in October my father was reading a sermon as usual to the assembled household, and the family, gathered near the fire in what we were wont to call on these evenings “Sinner’s chair” and the “Seat of the Scornful,” were rather somnolent, when the most piercing and unearthly shrieks arose apparently just outside the windows in the pleasure ground, and startled us all wide awake. At the head of the row of servants sat our dear old housekeeper “Joney” then the head-gardener’s wife, who had adopted a child of three years old, and this evening had left him fast asleep in the housekeeper’s room, which was under part of the drawing-room. Naturally she and all of us supposed that “Johnny” had wakened and was screaming on finding himself alone; and though the outcries were not like those of a child, “Joney” rose and hastily passed down the room and went to look after her charge. To reach the housekeeper’s 193room she necessarily passed the servants’ hall and out of it rushed the coachman—a big, usually red-faced Englishman, whom she declared was on that occasion as pale as death. The next instant one of the housemaids, who had likewise played truant from prayers, came tottering down from a bedroom (so remote that I have always wondered how any noise below the drawing-room could have reached it), and sunk fainting on a chair. The little boy meanwhile was sleeping like a cherub in undisturbed repose in a clothes basket! What that wild noise was,—heard by at least two dozen people,—we never learned and somehow did not care much to investigate.

After our visit at Moydrum my father and I went to yet other cousins at Garbally; his mother’s old home. At that time—I speak of more than half a century ago,—the Clancarty family was much respected in Ireland; and the household at Garbally was conducted on high religious principles and in a very dignified manner. It was in the Forties that the annual Sheep Fair of Ballinasloe was at its best, and something like 200,000 sheep were then commonly herded at night in Garbally Park. The scene of the Fair was described as curious, but (like a stupid young prig, as I must have been) I declined the place offered me in one of the carriages and stopped in the house on the plea of a cold, but really to enjoy a private hunt in the magnificent library of which I had caught a glimpse. When the various parties came back late in the day there was much talk of a droll mishap. The Marquis of Downshire of that time, who was stopping in the house, was a man of colossal strength, and rumour said he had killed two men by accidental blows intended as friendly. However this may be, he was on this occasion overthrown by sheep! He was standing in the gangway between the hurdles in the great fair, when an immense flock of terrified animals rushed through, overset 194him and trampled him under their feet. When he came home, laughing good humouredly at his disaster, he presented a marvellous spectacle with his rather voyant light costume of the morning in a frightful pickle. Another agreeable man in the house was the Lord Devon of that day, a very able and cultivated man (whom I straightway interrogated concerning Gibbon’s chapter on the Courtenays!); and poor Lord Leitrim, a kindly and good Irish landlord, afterwards most cruelly murdered. There were also the Ernes and Lord Enniskillen and many others whom I have forgotten, and a dear aged lady; the Marchioness of Ormonde. Hearing I had a cold, she kindly proposed to treat me medically and said: “I should advise you to try Brandy and Salt. For my own part I take Morrison’s pills whenever I am ill, if I cannot get hydropathic baths; but I have a very great opinion of Tar-water. Holloway’s ointment and pills, too, are excellent. My son, you know, joined Mr. ——” (I have forgotten the name) “to pay £15,000 to St. John Long for his famous recipe; but it turned out no good when he had it. No! I advise you decidedly to try brandy and salt.”

From Garbally we drove to Parsonstown, where Lady Rosse was good enough to welcome us to indulge my intense longing to see the great telescope, then quite recently erected. Lord Rosse at that time believed that, as he had resolved into separate stars many of the nebulæ which were irresolvable by Herschel’s telescope, there was a presumption that all were resolvable; and consequently that the nebular hypothesis must be abandoned. The later discovery of gaseous nebulæ by the spectroscope re-established the theory. I was very anxious on the subject, having pinned my faith already on the Vestiges of Creation (then a new book), in sequence to Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens: that prose-poem of science. Lord Rosse was infinitely indulgent to my girlish curiosity, and took me to see the 195process of polishing the speculum of his second telescope; a most ingenious piece of mechanism invented mainly by himself. He also showed me models which he has made in plaster of lunar craters. I saw the great telescope by day, but, alas, when darkness came and it was to have been ready for me to look through it and I was trembling with anticipation, the butler came to the drawing-room door and announced: “A rainy night, my lord”! It was a life-long disappointment, for we could not stay another day though hospitably pressed to do so; and I never had another chance.

Lord Rosse had guessed already that Robert Chambers was the author of the Vestiges. He explained to me the reason for the enormous mass of masonry on which the seven-foot telescope rested, by the curious fact that even where it stood within his park, the roll of a cart more than two miles away, outside, was enough to make the ground tremble and to disturb the observation.

There was a romantic story then current in Ireland about Lord and Lady Rosse. It was said that, as a young man, he had gone incog. and worked as a handicraftsman in some large foundry in the north of England to learn the secrets of machine making. After a time his employer, considering him a peculiarly promising young artisan, invited him occasionally to a Sunday family dinner when young Lord Parsons, as he then was, speedily fell in love with his host’s daughter. Observing what was going on, the father put a veto on what he thought would be a mésalliance for Miss Green, and the supposed artisan left his employment and the country; but not without receiving from the young lady an assurance that she returned his attachment. Shortly afterwards, having gone home and obtained his father, Lord Rosse’s consent, he re-appeared and now made his proposals to Mr. Green, père, in all due form as the heir of a good estate and an earldom. He was not rejected this time.

196I tell this story only as a pretty one current when I saw Lord and Lady Rosse; a very happy and united couple with little children who have since grown to be distinguished men. Very possibly it may be only a myth!

I never saw Archbishop Whately except when he confirmed me in the church of Malahide. He was no doubt a sincerely pious man, but, his rough and irreverent manner (intended, I believe, as a protest against the Pecksniffian tone then common among evangelical dignitaries) was almost repulsive and certainly startling. Outside his palace in Stephen’s Green there was at that time a row of short columns connected from top to top by heavy chains which fell in festoons and guarded the gardens of the square. Nothing would serve his Grace (we were told with horror by the spectators) than to go of a morning after breakfast and sit on these chains smoking his cigar as he swung gently back and forth, kicking the ground to gain impetus.

On the occasion of my confirmation he exhibited one of his whims most unpleasantly for me. This was, that he must actually touch, in his episcopal benediction, the head, not merely the hair, of the kneeling catechumen. Unhappily, my maid had not foreseen this contingency, but had thought she could not have a finer opportunity for displaying her skill in plaiting my redundant locks; and had built up such an edifice with plaits and pins, (on the part of my head which necessarily came under the Archbishop’s hand) that he had much ado to overthrow the same! He did so, however, effectually; and I finally walked back, through the church to my pew with all my chevelure hanging down in disorder, far from “admired” by me or anybody.

Of all the phases of orthodoxy I think that of Whately,—well called the Hard Church,—was the last which I could have adopted at any period of my life. It was obviously his view that a chain of propositions might be constructed by 197iron logic, beginning with the record of a miracle two thousand years ago and ending with unavoidable conversion to the love of God and Man!

The last person of whom I shall speak as known to me first in Ireland, was that dear and noble woman, Fanny Kemble. She has not mentioned in her delightful Records how our acquaintance, destined to ripen into a life-long friendship, began at Newbridge, but it was in a droll and characteristic way.

Mrs. Kemble’s friend “H.S.”—Harriet St. Leger—lived at Ardgillan Castle, eight Irish miles from Newbridge. Her sister, the wife of Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor and mother of the late Tory Whip, was my mother’s best-liked neighbour, and at an early age I was taught to look with respect on the somewhat singular figure of Miss St. Leger. In those days any departure from the conventional dress of the time was talked of as if it were altogether the most important fact connected with a woman, no matter what might be the greatness of her character or abilities. Like her contemporaries and fellow countrywomen, the Ladies of Llangollen, (also Irish), Harriet St. Leger early adopted a costume consisting of a riding habit (in her case with a skirt of sensible length) and a black beaver hat. All the empty-headed men and women in the county prated incessantly about these inoffensive garments, insomuch that I arrived early at the conviction that, rational and convenient as such dress would be, the game was not worth the candle. Things are altered so far now that, could dear Harriet reappear, I believe the universal comment on her dress would rather be: “How sensible and befitting”! rather than the silly, “How odd”! Anyway I imagine she must have afforded a somewhat singular contrast to her ever magnificent, not to say gorgeous friend Fanny Kemble, when at the great Exhibition of 1851, they were the observed of observers, sitting for a long time side by side close to the crystal fountain.

198Every reader of the charming Records of a Girlhood and Recollections of Later Life, must have felt some curiosity about the personality of the friend to whom those letters of our English Sevigné were addressed. I have before me as I write an excellent reproduction in platinotype from a daguerreotype of herself which dear Harriet gave me some twenty years ago. The pale, kind, sad face is, I think inexpressibly touching; and the woman who wore it deserved all the affection which Fanny Kemble gave her. She was a deep and singularly critical thinker and reader, and had one of the warmest hearts which ever beat under a cold and shy exterior. The iridescent genius of Fanny Kemble in the prime of her splendid womanhood, and my poor young soul, overburdened with thoughts too great and difficult for me, were equally drawn to seek her sympathy.

It happened once, somewhere in the early Fifties, that Mrs. Kemble was paying a visit to Miss St. Leger at Ardgillan, and we arranged that she should bring her over some day to Newbridge to luncheon. I was, of course, prepared to receive my guest very cordially but, to my astonishment, when Mrs. Kemble entered she made me the most formal salutation conceivable and, after being seated, answered all my small politenesses in monosyllables and with obvious annoyance and disinclination to converse with me or with any of my friends whom I presented to her. Something was evidently frightfully amiss, and Harriet perceived it; but what could it be? What could be done? Happily the gong sounded for luncheon, and, my father being absent, my eldest brother offered his arm to Mrs. Kemble and led her, walking with more than her usual stateliness across the two halls to the dining-room, where he placed her, of course, beside himself. I was at the other end of the table but I heard afterwards all that occurred. We were a party of 199eighteen, and naturally the long table had a good many dishes on it in the old fashion. My brother looked over it and asked: “What will you take, Mrs. Kemble? Roast fowl? or galantine? or a little Mayonnaise, or what else?”

“Thank you,” replied Mrs. Kemble, “If there be a potato!”

Of course there was a potato—nay, several; but a terrible gêne hung over us all till Miss Taylor hurriedly called for her carriage, and the party drove off.

The moment they left the door after our formal farewells, Harriet St. Leger (as she afterwards told me) fell on her friend: “Well, Fanny, never, never will I bring you anywhere again. How could you behave so to Fanny Cobbe?”

“I cannot permit any one,” said Mrs. Kemble, “to invite a number of people to meet me without having asked my consent; I do not choose to be made a gazing-stock to the county. Miss Cobbe had got up a regular party of all those people, and you could see the room was decorated for it.”

“Good Heavens, what are you talking of?” said Harriet, “those ladies and gentlemen are all her relations, stopping in the house. She could not turn them out because you were coming, and her room is always full of flowers.”

“Is that really so?” said Mrs. Kemble, “Then you shall tell Fanny Cobbe that I ask her pardon for my bad behaviour, and if she will forgive me and come to see me in London, I will never behave badly to her again?”

In a letter of hers to Harriet St. Leger given to me after her death, I was touched to read the following reference to this droll incident:—

“I am interrupted by a perfect bundle of fragrance and fresh colour sent by Miss Cobbe with a note in which I am 200sorry to say she gives me very little hope of seeing her at all while I am in Dublin. This, as you know, is a real disappointment to me. I had rather fallen in love with her, and wished very much to have had some opportunity of more intercourse with her. Her face when I came to talk to her seemed to me keen and sweet—a charming combination—and I was so grateful to her for not being repelled by my ungracious demeanour at her house, that I had quite looked forward to the pleasure of seeing her again.

I did go to see her in London; and she kept her word, and was my dear and affectionate friend and bore many things from me with perfect good humour, for forty years; including (horrible to recall!) my falling fast asleep while she was reading Shakespeare to Mary Lloyd and me in our drawing-room here at Hengwrt! Among her many kindnesses was the gift of a mass of her Correspondence from the beginning of her theatrical career in 1821 to her last years. She also successively gave me the MSS. of all her Records, but in each case I induced her to take them back and publish them herself. I have now, as a priceless legacy, a large parcel of her own letters, and five thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her by half the celebrated men and women of her time. They testify uniformly to the admiration, affection and respect wherewith,—her little foibles notwithstanding,—she was regarded by three generations.

CHAPTER VIII. UPROOTED.

203I draw now to the closing years of my life at Newbridge, after I had published my first book and before my father died. They were happy and peaceful years, though gradually overshadowed by the sense that the long tenure of that beloved home must soon end. It is one of the many perversities of woman’s destiny that she is, not only by hereditary instinct a home-making animal, but is encouraged to the uttermost to centre all her interests in her home; every pursuit which would give her anchorage elsewhere, (always excepting marriage) being more or less under general disapproval. Yet when the young woman takes thoroughly to this natural home-making, when she has, like a plant, sent her roots down into the cellars and her tendrils up into the garrets and every room bears the impress of her personality, when she glories in every good picture on the walls or bit of choice china on the tables and blushes for every stain on the carpets, when, in short, her home is, as it should be, her outer garment, her nest, her shell, fitted to her like that of a murex, then, almost invariably comes to her the order to leave it all, tear herself out of it,—and go to make (if she can) some other home elsewhere. Supposing her to have married early, and that she is spared the late uprooting from her father’s house at his death, she has usually to bear a similar transition when she survives her husband; and in this case often with the failing health and spirits of old age. I do not know how these heartbreaks are to be spared to women of the class of the daughters and wives of country gentlemen or clergymen; but they are 204hard to bear. Perhaps the most fortunate daughters (harsh as it seems to say so) are those whose fathers die while they are themselves still in full vigour and able to begin a new existence with spirit and make new friends; as was my case. Some of my contemporaries, whose fathers lived till they were fifty, or even older, had a bitterer trial in quitting their homes and were never able to start afresh.

In my last few years at Newbridge my father and I were both cheered by the frequent presence of my dear little niece, Helen, on whom he doted, and towards whom flowed out the tenderness which had scarcely been allowed its free course with his own children. L’Art d’être Grandpère is surely the most beautiful of arts! When all personal pleasures have pretty well died away then begins the reflected pleasure in the fresh, innocent delights of the child; a moonlight of happiness perhaps more sweet and tender than the garish joys of the noontide of life. To me, who had never lived in a house with little children, it brought a whole world of revelations to have this babe and afterwards her little sister, in a nursery under my supervision during their mother’s long illnesses. I understood for the first time all that a child may be in a woman’s life, and how their little hands may pull our heart-strings. My nieces were dear, good, little babes then; they are dear and good women now; the comfort of my age, as they were the darlings of my middle life.

Having received sufficient encouragement from the succès d’estime of my Theory of Intuitive Morals, I proceeded now to write the first of the three books on Practical Morals, with which I designed to complete the work. My volume of Religious Duty, then written, has proved, however, the only one of the series ever published. At a later time I wrote some chapters on Personal and on Social Duty, but was dissatisfied with them, and destroyed the MSS.

205As Religious Duty (3rd edition) is still to be had (included by Mr. Fisher Unwin in his late re-issue of my principal works), I need not trouble the reader by any such analysis of it as I have given of the former volume. In writing concerning Religious Duty at the time, I find in a letter of mine to Harriet St. Leger (returned to me when she grew blind), that I spoke of it thus:—

“You see I have, after all, inserted a little preface. I thought it necessary to explain the object of the book, lest it might seem superfluous where it coincides with orthodox teaching, and offensively daring where it diverges from it. Your cousin’s doubt about my Christianity lasting till she reached the end of Intuitive Morals, made me resolve to forestall in this case any such danger of seeming to fight without showing my colours. You see I have now nailed them mast-high. But though I have done this, I cannot say that it has been in any way to make converts to my own creed that I have written this book. I wanted to show those who are already Theists, actually or approximately, that Theism is something far more than they seem commonly to understand. I wanted, too, to show to those who have had their historical faith shaken, but who still cling to it from the belief that without it no real religion is possible, that they may find all which their hearts can need in a faith purely intuitive. Perhaps I ought rather to say that these objects have been before me in working at my book. I suppose in reality the impulse to such an undertaking comes more simply. We think we have found some truths, and we long to develop and communicate them. We do not sit down and say ‘Such and such sort of people want such and such a book. I will try and write it.’”

The plan of this book is simple. After discussing in the first chapter the Canon of Religious Duty, which I define to be “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and soul and strength,”—I discuss, in the next chapter, 206Religious Offences against that Law,—Blasphemy, Hypocrisy, Perjury, &c. The third chapter deals with Religious Faults (failures of duty) such as Thanklessness, Irreverence, Worldliness, &c. The fourth, which constitutes the main bulk of the book, consists of what are practically six Sermons on Thanksgiving, Adoration, Prayer, Repentance, Faith, and Self-Consecration.

The book has been very much liked by some readers, especially the chapter on Thanksgiving, which I reprinted later in a tiny volume. It is strange in these days of pessimism to read it again. I am glad I wrote it when my heart was unchilled, my sight undimmed, by the frozen fog which has been hanging over us for the last two decades. An incident connected with this chapter touched me deeply. My father in his last illness permitted it to be read to him. Having never before listened to anything I had written, and having, even then, no idea who wrote the book, he expressed pleasure and sympathy with it, especially with a passage in which I speak of the hope of being, in the future life, “young again in all that makes childhood beautiful and holy.” It was a pledge to me of how near our hearts truly were, under apparently the world-wide differences.

My father was now sinking slowly beneath the weight of years and of frequent returns of the malarial fever of India,—in those days called “Ague,”—which he had caught half a century before in the Mahratta wars. I have said something already of his powerful character, his upright, honourable, fearless nature; his strong sense of Duty. Of the lower sort of faults and vices he was absolutely incapable. No one who knew him could imagine him as saying a false or prevaricating word; of driving a hard bargain; of eating or drinking beyond the strictest rules of temperance; least of all, of faithlessness in thought or deed to his wife or her memory. His mistakes and errors, such 207as they were, arose solely from a fiery temper and a despotic will, nourished rather than checked by his ideas concerning the rights of parents, and husbands, masters and employers; and from his narrow religious creed. Such as he was, every one honoured, some feared, and many loved him.

Before I pass on to detail more of the incidents of my own life, I shall here narrate all that I can recall of his descriptions of the most important occurrence in his career—the battle of Assaye.

In Mr. George Hooper’s delightful Life of Wellington (English Men of Action Series) there is a spirited account of that battle, whereby British supremacy in India was practically secured. Mr. Hooper speaks enthusiastically of the behaviour, in that memorable fight, of the 19th Light Dragoons, and of its “splendid charge,” which, with the “irresistible sweep” of the 78th, proved the “decisive stroke” of the great day. He describes this charge thus:—

... “The piquets, or leading troops on the right were by mistake led off towards Assaye, uncovering the second line, and falling themselves into a deadly converging fire. The Seventy-Fourth followed the piquets into the cannonade, and a great gap was thus made in the array. The enemy’s horse rode up to charge, and so serious was the peril on the right that the Nineteenth Light Dragoons and a native cavalry regiment were obliged to charge at once. Eager for the fray, they galloped up, cheering as they went, and cheered by the wounded; and, riding home, even to the batteries, saved the remnants of the piquets and of the Seventy-Fourth.” (P. 76.)

My father, then a cornet in the regiment, carried the regimental flag of the Nineteenth through that charge, and for the rest of the day; the non-commissioned officer whose duty it was to bear it having been struck dead at the first onset, and my father saving the flag from falling into the hands of the Mahrattas.

208The Nineteenth Light Dragoons of that epoch wore a grey uniform, and heavy steel helmets with large red plumes, which caused the Mahrattas to nickname them “The Red Headed Rascals.” On their shoulders were simple epaulettes made of chains of some common white metal, one of which I retrieved from a heap of rubbish fifty years after Assaye, and still wear as a bracelet. The men could scarcely have deserved the name of Light if many of them weighed, as did my father at 18, no less than 18 stone, inclusive of his saddle and accoutrements! The fashion of long hair, tied in “pig tails,” still prevailed; and my father often laughingly boasted that the mass of his fair hair, duly tied with black ribbon, had descended far enough to reach his saddle and to form an efficient protection from sabre cuts on his back and shoulders. Mr. Hooper estimates the total number of the British army at Assaye at 5,000; my father used to speak of it as about 4,500; while the cavalry alone, of the enemy were some 30,000. The infantry were seemingly innumerable, and altogether covered the plain. There was also a considerable force of artillery on Scindias’ side, and, commanding them, was a French officer whose name my father repeatedly mentioned, but which I have unfortunately forgotten.^[12] The handful of 209English troops had done a full day’s march under an Indian sun before the battle began. When the Nineteenth received orders to charge they had been sitting long on their horses in a position which left them exposed to the ricochet of the shot of the enemy, and the strain on the discipline of the men, as one after another was picked off, had been enormous; not to prevent them from retreating—they had no such idea,—but to stop them from charging without orders. At last the word of command to charge came from Wellesley, and the whole regiment responded with a roar! Then came the fire of death and men and officers fell all around, as it seemed almost every second man. Among the rest, as I have said, the colour-sergeant was struck down, and my father, as was his duty, seized the flag from the poor fellow’s hands as he fell and carried it, waving in front of the regiment up to the guns of the enemy.

In one or other of the repeated charges which the Nineteenth continued to make even after their commanding officer, Colonel Maxwell, had been killed, my father found himself in hand to hand conflict with the French General who was in command of the Mahratta artillery. He wore an ordinary uniform and my father, having struck him with his sabre at the back of his neck, expected to see terrible results from the blow of a hand notorious all his life for its extraordinary strength. But fortunately the General had prudently included a coat of armour under his uniform; and the blow only resulted in a considerable dent in the blade of my father’s sabre; a dent which (in Biblical language) “may be seen unto this day,” where the weapon hangs in the study at Newbridge.

At another period of this awful battle the young Cornet dismounted beside a stream to drink, and to allow his horse to do the same. While so occupied, Colonel Wellesley came up to follow his example, and they conversed for a few 210minutes while dipping their hands and faces in the brook (or river). As they did so, there slowly oozed down upon them, trickling through the water, a streamlet of blood. Of course they both turned away in horror and remounted to return to the battle.

At last the tremendous struggle was over. An army of 4,500 or 5,000 tired English troops, had routed five times as many horsemen and perhaps twenty times as many infantry of the warlike Mahrattas. The field was clear and the English flag waved over the English Marathon.

After this the poor, wearied soldiers were compelled to ride back ten miles to camp for the night; and when they reached their ground and dismounted, many of them—my father among the rest—fell on the earth and slept where they lay. Next morning they marched back to the field of Assaye and the scene which met their eyes was one which no lapse of years could efface from memory. The pomp and glory and joy of victory were past; the horror of it was before them in mangled corpses of men and horses, over which hung clouds of flies and vultures. Fourteen officers of his own regiment, whose last meal on earth he had shared in convivial merriment, my father saw buried together in one grave. Then the band of the regiment played “The Rose Tree” and the men marched away with set faces. Long years afterwards I happened to play that old air on the piano, but my father stopped me, “Do not play that tune, pray! I cannot bear the memories it brings to me.”

After Assaye my father fought at Argaon (or Argaum), a battle which Mr. Turner describes as “even more decisive than the last”; and on December 14th he joined in the terrific storming of the great fortress of Gawiljarh, with which the war in the Deccan terminated. He received medals for Assaye and Argaum, just fifty years after those battles were fought!

Charles Cobbe,
1857.

211After his return from India, my father remained at his mother’s house in Bath till 1809, when he married my dear mother, then living with her guardians close by, at 29, Royal Crescent; and brought her to Newbridge, where they both lived, as I have described, with few and short interruptions till she died in October, 1847, and he in November, 1857. For all that half century he acted nobly the part to which he was called, of landlord, magistrate and head of a family. There was nothing in him of the ideal Irish, fox-hunting, happy-go-lucky, much indebted Squire. There never was a year in his life in which every one of his bills was not settled. His books, piled on his study table, showed the regular payment, week by week, of all his labourers for fifty years. No quarter day passed without every servant in the house receiving his, or her wages. So far was Newbridge from a Castle Rackrent that though much in it of the furniture and decorations belonged to the previous century, everything was kept in perfect order and repair in the house and in the stables, coach-houses and beautiful old garden. Punctuality reigned under the old soldier’s régime; clocks and bells and gongs sounded regularly for prayers and meals; and dinner was served sharply to the moment. I should indeed be at a loss to say in what respect my father betrayed his Anglo-Irish race, if it were not his high spirit.

At last, and very soon after the photograph which I am inserting in this book was taken, the long, good life drew to its end in peace. I have found a letter which I wrote to Harriet St. Leger a day or two after his death, and I will here transcribe part of it, rather than narrate the event afresh.

“My poor father’s sufferings are over. He died on Wednesday evening, without the least pain or struggle, 212having sunk gradually into an unconscious state since Sunday morning. At all events it proved a most merciful close to his long sufferings, for he never seemed even aware of the terrible state into which the poor limbs fell, but became weaker and weaker, and as the mortification advanced, died away as if in the gentlest sleep he had known for many a day. It is all very merciful, I can feel nothing else, though it is very sad to have had no parting words of blessing, such as I am sure he would have given me. All those he loved best were near him. He had Dotie till the last day of his consciousness, and the little thing continually asked afterwards to go to his study, and enquired, ‘Grandpa ‘seep?’ When he had ceased to speak at all comprehensibly, the morning before he died he pointed to her picture, and half smiled when I brought it to him. Poor old father! He is free now from all his miseries—gone home to God after his long, long life of good and honour! Fifty years he has lived as master here. Who but God knows all the kind and generous actions he has done in that half century! To the very last he completed everything, paying his labourers and settling his books on Saturday; and we find all his arrangements made in the most perfect and thoughtful way for everybody. There was a letter left for me. It only contained a £100 note and the words, ‘The last token of the love and affection of a father to his daughter.’... ‘He is now looking so noble and happy, I might say, so handsome; his features seem so glorified by death, that it does one good to go and sit beside him. I never saw Death look so little terrible. Would that the poor form could lie there, ever! The grief will be far worse after to-day, when we shall see it for the last time. Jessie has made an outline of the face as it is now, very like. How wonderful and blessed is this glorifying power of death; taking away the lines of age and weak distension of muscles, and leaving only, as it would seem, the true face of the man as he was beneath all surface weaknesses; the ‘garment by the soul laid by’ smoothed out and folded! My cousins and Jessie and I all feel very much how blessedly 213this face speaks to us; how it is not him, but a token of what he is now. I grieve that I was not more to him, that I did not better win his love and do more to deserve it; but even this sorrow has its comfort. Perhaps he knows now that with all my heart I did feel the deepest tenderness for his sufferings and respect for his great virtues. At all events the wall of creed has fallen down from between our souls for ever, and I believe that was the one great obstacle which I could never overthrow entirely. Forbearing as he proved himself, it was never forgotten. Now all that divided us is over.... It seems all very dream-like just now, long as we have thought of it, and I know the waking will be a terrible pang when all is over and I have left everything round which my heart roots have twined in five and thirty years. But I don’t fear—how can I, when my utmost hopes could not have pointed to an end so happy as God has given to my poor old father? Everything is merciful about it—even to the time when we were all together here, and when I am neither young enough to need protection, or old enough to feel diminished energies....”

I carried out my long formed resolution, of course, and started on my pilgrimage just three weeks after my father’s death. Leaving Newbridge was the worst wrench of my life. The home of my childhood and youth, of which I had been mistress for nineteen years, for every corner of which I had cared, and wherein there was not a room without its tender associations,—it seemed almost impossible to drag myself away. To strip my pretty bedroom of its pictures and books and ornaments, many of them my mother’s gifts, and my mother’s work; to send off my harp to be sold; and make over to my brother my private possessions of ponies and carriage,—(luckily my dear dog was dead,)—and take leave of all the dear old servants and village people, formed a whole series of pangs. I remember feeling a 214distinct regret and smiling at myself for doing so, when I locked for the last time the big, old-fashioned tea-chest out of which I had made the family breakfast for twenty years. Then came the last morning and as I drove out of the gates of Newbridge I felt I was leaving behind me all and everything in the world which I had loved and cherished.

I was going also, it must be said, not only from a family circle to entire solitude, but also from comparative wealth to poverty. Considering the interests of my eldest brother as paramount, and the seriousness of his charge of keeping up the house and estate, my father left me but a very small patrimony; amounting, at the rate of interest then obtainable, to a trifle over £200 a year. For a woman who had always had every possible service rendered to her by a regiment of well-trained servants, and had had £130 a year pocket-money since she left school, it must be confessed that this was a narrow provision. My father intended me to continue to live at Newbridge with my brother and sister-in-law; but such a plan was entirely contrary to my view of what my life should thenceforth become, and I accepted my poverty cheerfully enough, with the help of a little ready money wherewith to start on my travels. I cut off half my hair, being totally unable to grapple with the whole without a maid, and faced the future with the advantage of the great calm which follows any immediate concern with Death. While that Shadow hangs over our heads we perceive but dimly the thorns and pebbles on our road.

A week after leaving Ireland I spent one night with Harriet St. Leger in lodgings which she and her friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson, occupied on the Marina at St. Leonard’s.

When I had gone to my room rather late that evening, I opened my window and looked out for the last time before my exile, on an English scene. There was the line of friendly lamps close by, but beyond it the sea, dark as pitch on that 215December night, was only revealed by the sound of the slow waves breaking sullenly on the beach beneath. It was like a black wall before me; the sea and sky undistinguishable. I thought: “To-morrow I shall go out into that darkness! How like to death is this!”

CHAPTER IX. LONG JOURNEY.

219The journey which I undertook when my home duties ended at the death of my father, would be considered a very moderate excursion in these latter days, but in 1857 it was still accounted somewhat of an enterprise for a “lone woman.” When I told my friends that I was going to Egypt and Jerusalem, they said: “Ah, you will get as far as Rome and Naples, and that will be very interesting; but you will find too many difficulties in the way of going any further,” “When I say” (I replied) “that I am going to Egypt and Jerusalem, I mean that to Egypt and Jerusalem I shall go.” And so, as it proved, a wilful woman had her way; and I came back after a year with the ever-delightful privilege of observing: “I told you so.”

I shall not dream of dragging the reader again over the well-worn ground at the slow pace of a writer of “Impressions de Voyage.” The best of my reminiscences were given to the world, in Fraser’s Magazine, and reprinted in my Cities of the Past, before there was yet a prospect of a railway to Jerusalem except in Martin’s picture of the “End of the World”; or of a “Service d’omnibus” over the wild solitudes of Lebanon, where I struggled ‘mid snows and torrents which nearly whelmed me and my horse in destruction. I rejoice to think that I saw those holy and wonderful lands of Palestine and Egypt while Cook’s tourists were yet unborn, and Cairo had only one small English hotel and one solitary wheel carriage; and the solemn gaze of the Sphinx encountered no Golf-games on the desert sands.

220My proceedings were very much like those of certain birds of the farmyard (associated particularly with Michaelmas), who very rarely are seen to rise on the wing but when they are once incited to do so, are wont to take a very wide circle in their flight before they come back to the barn door!

Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Naples, Messina, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Dead Sea, Jordan, Beyrout, Lebanon, Baalbec, Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Athens, Constantinople, Cape Matapan, Corfu, Trieste, Adelsberg, Venice, Florence, Milan, Lucerne, Geneva, Wiesbaden, Antwerp, London—such was my “swoop,” accomplished in 11 months and at a cost of only £400. To say that I brought home a crop of new ideas would be a small way of indicating the whole harvest of them wherewith I returned laden. There were (I think I may summarise), as the results of such a journey, the following great additions to my mental stock.

First. A totally fresh conception of the glory and beauty of Nature. When crossing the Channel I fell into talk with a charming old lady and told her how I was looking forward to seeing the great pictures and buildings of Italy. “Ah,” she said, “but there is Italian Nature to be seen also. Do not miss it, looking only at works of art. I go to Italy to see it much more than the galleries and churches.” I was very much astonished at this remark, but I came home after some months spent in a villa on Bellosguardo entirely converted to her view. Travellers there are who weary their feet and strain their eyes till they can no longer see or receive impressions from the miles of painted canvas, the regiments of statues, and the streets of palaces and churches wherewith Italy abounds; yet have never spent a day riding over the desolate Campagna with the far off Apennines closing the horizon, or enjoyed nights of paradise, sitting amid the cypresses and the garlanded vines, with the stars overhead, the 221nightingales singing, and the fireflies darting around among the Rose de Maggio. Such travellers may come back to England proud of having verified every line of Murray on the spot, yet they have failed to “see Italy” altogether. Never shall I forget the revelation of loveliness of the Ægean and Ionian seas, of the lower slopes of Lebanon, and of the Acropolis of Athens, seen, as I saw it first, at sunrise. But when my heaviest journeys were done and I paused and rested in Villa Niccolini, with Florence below and the Val d’ Arno before me, I felt as if the beauty of the world, as I then and there saw it, were joy enough for a lifetime. The old lines (I know not whose they are) kept ringing in my ears.—

I shall quote here some verses which I wrote at that time, as they described the scene in which I lived and revelled.

The beauty of Switzerland has at no time touched me as that of Italy has always done. There is something in the sharp, hard atmosphere of Switzerland (and I may add in the sharp, hard characters of the Swiss) which disenchants me in the grandest scenes.

The second thing one learns in a journey like mine is, of course, the wondrous achievements of human Art,—Temples 223and Churches, fountains and obelisks, pyramids and statues and pictures without end. But on this head I need say nothing. Enough has been said and to spare by those far more competent than I to write of it.

Lastly, there is a thing which I, at all events, learned by knocking about the world. It is the enormous amount of pure human good nature which is to be found almost everywhere. I should weary the reader to tell all the little kindnesses done to me by fellow-passengers in the railways and steamers, and by the Captains of the vessels in which I sailed; and of the trouble which strangers took to help me out of my small difficulties. Of course men do not meet—because they do not want,—such services; and women, who travel with men, or even two or three together, seldom invite them. But for viewing human nature en beau, commend me to a long journey by a woman of middle age, of no beauty, and travelling as cheaply as possible, alone.

I believe the Psychical Society has started a theory that when places where crimes have been committed are ever after “haunted” the apparitions are not exactly good, old-fashioned real ghosts, if I may use such an expression, but some sort of atmospheric photographs (the term is my own) left by the parties concerned, or sent telepathically from their present habitat (wherever that may be) to the scene of their earthly suffering or wickedness. The hypothesis, of course, relieves us from the very unpleasant surmise that the actual soul of the victims of assassination and robbery may have nothing better to do in a future life than to stand guard perpetually at the dark and dank corners, cellars, and bottoms of stone staircases, where they were cruelly done to death fifty or a hundred years before; or to loaf like detectives about the spots where their jewelry and cash-boxes (so useful and important to a disembodied spirit!) lie concealed. But the atmospheric photograph or magic-lantern theory, whatever 224truth it may hold, exactly answers to a sense which I should think all my readers must have experienced, as I have done, in certain houses and cities; a sense as if the crimes which had been committed therein have left an indescribable miasma, a lurid, impalpable shadow, like that of the ashes of the Polynesian volcano which darkened the sun for a year; or shall we say, like the unrecognised effluvium which probably caused Mrs. Sleeman, in her tent, to dream she was surrounded by naked murdered men, while 14 corpses were actually lying beneath her bed and were next day disinterred?^[14] Walking once through Holyrood with Dr. John Brown (who had not visited the place for many years), I was quite overcome by this sense of ancient crime, perpetuated as it seemed, almost like a physical phenomenon in those gloomy chambers; and on describing my sensations, Dr. Brown avowed that he experienced a very similar impression. It would almost seem as if moral facts of a certain intensity, begin to throw a cloudy shadow of Evil, as Romist saints were said to exhale an odour of sanctity.

If there be a city in the world where this sense is most vivid, I think it is Rome. I have felt it also in Paris, but Rome is worst. The air (not of the Campagna with all its fevers, but of the city itself) seems foul with the blood and corruption of a thousand years. On the finest spring day, in the grand open spaces of the Piazza del Popolo, San Pietro, and the Forum, it is the same as in the darkest and narrowest streets. No person sensitive to this impression can be genuinely light-hearted and gay in Rome, as we often are even in our own gloomy London. Perhaps this is sheer fancifulness on my part, but I have been many times in Rome, twice for an entire winter, and the same impression never failed to overcome me. On my last visit I nearly died there 225and it was not to be described how earnestly I longed to emerge, as if out of one of Dante’s Giri, “anywhere, anywhere out of” this Rome!

On the occasion of my first journey at Christmas, 1857, I stopped only three weeks in the Eternal City and then went on by sea to Naples. I was ill from the fatigues and anxieties of the previous weeks, and after a few half-dazed visits to the Colosseum, the Vatican, and Shelley’s grave, I found myself unable to leave my solitary fourth-floor room in the Europa. A card was brought to me one day while thus imprisoned, bearing names (unknown to me) of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Apthorp,” and with the singular message: “Was I the Miss Cobbe who had corresponded with Theodore Parker in America?” My first impression was one of alarm. “What! more trouble about my heresies still?” It was, however, quite a different matter. My visitors were a gentleman (a real American gentleman) and his wife, with two ladies who were all among Parker’s intimate friends in America, and to whom he had showed my letters. They came to hold out to me the right hands of fellowship; and friends indeed we became, in such thorough sort that, after seven-and-thirty years I am corresponding with dear Mrs. Apthorp still. She and her sister nursed me through my illness; and thus my solitude in Rome came to an end.

Naples struck me on my first visit, as it has done again and again, as presenting the proof that the Beautiful is not by itself, a root out of which the Good spontaneously grows. If we want to cultivate Purity, Honesty, Veracity, Unselfishness or any other virtue, it is vain to think we shall achieve our end by giving the masses pretty pleasure-grounds and “Palaces of Delight,” or even æsthetic cottages with the best reproductions of Botticelli adorning the walls. Do what we may we can never hope to surround our working men with such beauty as that of the Bay of Naples, nor to show them 226Art to equal the treasures of the Museo Borbonico. And what has come of all this familiar revelling in Beauty for centuries and millenniums to the people of Naples? Only that they resemble more closely in ignorance, in squalor and in degradation the most wretched Irish who dwell in mud cabins amid the bogs, than any other people in Europe.

I had intended remaining for some time to recuperate at Naples and took a cheery little room in a certain Pension Schiassi (now abolished) on the Chiajia. In this Pension I met a number of kindly and interesting people of various nationalities; the most pleasant and cultivated of all being Finns from Helsingfors. It was a great experience to me to enter into some sort of society again, far removed from all my antecedents; no longer the mistress of a large house and dispenser of its hospitality, but a wandering tourist, known to nobody and dressed as plainly as might be. I find I wrote to my old friend, Miss St. Leger, on the subject under date January 21st, 1858, as follows: “I am really cheerful now. Those days in the country (at Cumæ and Capo di Monte) cheered me very much, and I am beginning altogether to look at the future differently. There is one thing I feel really happy about. I see now my actual position towards people, divested of the social advantages I have hitherto held; and I find it a very pleasant one. I don’t think I deceive myself in imagining that people easily like me, and get interested in my ideas, while I find abundance to like and esteem in a large proportion of those I meet.” (Optimism, once more! the reader will say!)

It was not, however, “all beer and skittles” for me at the Schiassi pension. I had, as I have mentioned, taken a pretty little room looking out on the Villa Reale and the Bay and Vesuvius, and had put up the photographs and miniatures I carried with me and my little knick-knacks on the writing-table, and fondly flattered myself I should sit 227and write there peacefully. But I reckoned without my neighbours! It was Sunday when I arrived and settled myself so complacently. On Monday morning, soon after day-break, I was rudely awakened by a dreadful four-handed strumming on a piano, apparently in my very room! On rousing myself, I perceived that a locked door close to my bed obviously opened into an adjoining chamber, and being (after the manner of Italian doors) at least two inches short of the uncarpeted floor, I was to all acoustic intents and purposes actually in the room with this atrocious jangling piano and the two thumping performers! The practising went on for two hours, and when it stopped a masculine voice arose to read the Bible aloud in family devotions. Then, after a brief interval for breakfast, burst out again the intolerable strumming. I fled, and remained out of doors for hours, but when I came back they were at it again! I appealed to the mistress of the house, in vain. Sir Andrew——and his daughters (I will call them the Misses Shocking-strum, their real name concerns nobody now) had been there before me and would no doubt stop long after me, and could not be prevented from playing from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the week. I took a large card and wrote on it this pathetic appeal:—

I thrust this under the ill-fitting door well into the music-room, and waited anxiously for some measure of mercy to be meted to me in consequence. But no! the hateful thumping and crashing went on as before. Then I girded up my loins and went down to the packet office and took a berth in the next steamer for Alexandria.

228After landing at Messina (lovely region!) and at Malta, I embarked in a French screw-steamer, which began to roll before we were well under weigh, and which, when a real Levanter came on three days later, played pitch and toss with us passengers, insomuch that we often needed to lie on mattresses on the floor and hold something to prevent our heads from being knocked to pieces. One day, being fortunately a very good sailor, I scrambled up on deck and beheld a glorious scene. Euroclydon was playing with towering waves of lapis-lazulæ all flecked and veined like a horse’s neck with white foam, and the African sun was shining down cloudless over the turmoil.

There were some French Nuns on board going to a convent in Cairo, where they were to be charitably engaged taking care of girls. The monastic mind is always an interesting study. It brings us back to the days of Bede, and times when miracles (if it be not a bull to say so) were the rule and the ordinary course of nature the exception. People are then constantly seen where they are not, and not seen where they are; and the dead are as “prominent citizens” of this world (as an American would say) as the living. Meanwhile the actual geography and history of the modern world and all that is going on in politics, society, art and literature, is as dark to the good Sister or Brother as if she or he had really (as in Hans Andersen’s story) “walked back into the eleventh century.” My nice French nuns were very kind and instructive to me. They told me of the Virgin’s Tree which we should see at Heliopolis (though they knew nothing of the obelisk there), and they informed me that if anyone looked out on Trinity Sunday exactly at sunrise, he would see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité.”

I could not help asking: “Madame les aura vues?”

229“Pas précisément, Madame. Madame sait qu’à cette saison le soleil se lêve bien tôt.”

“Mais, Madame, pour voir loutes les trois personnes?”

It was no use. The good soul persisted in believing what she liked to believe and took care never to get up and look out on Trinity Sunday morning,—just as ten thousand Englishmen and women, who think themselves much wiser than the poor Nun, carefully avoid looking straight at facts concerning which they do not wish to be set right. St. Thomas’ kind of faith which dares to look and see, and, if it may be to touch, is a much more real faith after all than that which will not venture to open its eyes.

Landing at Alexandria (after being blown off the Egyptian coast nearly as far as Crete) was an epoch in my life. No book, no gallery of pictures, can ever be more interesting or instructive than the first drive through an Eastern city; even such a hybrid one as Alexandria. But all the world knows this now, and I need not dwell on so familiar a topic. The only matter I care to record here is a visit I paid to a subterranean church which had just been opened, and of which I was fortunate enough to hear at the moment. I have never been able to learn anything further concerning it than appears in the following extract from one of my note-books, and I fear the church must long ago have been destroyed, and the frescoes, of course, effaced:

“In certain excavations now making in one of the hills of the Old City—within a few hundred yards of the Mahmoudié Canal—the workmen have come upon a small subterranean church; for whose very high antiquity many arguments may be adduced. The frescoes with which it is adorned are still in tolerable preservation, and appear to belong to the same period of art as those rescued from Pompeii. Though altogether inferior to the better specimens in the Museo Borbonico, there is yet the same simplicity of attitude and drapery; the same breadth of outline and 230effect produced by few touches. It is impossible to confound them for a moment with the stiff and meretricious style of Byzantine painting.

“The form of the church is very peculiar, and I conceive antique. If we suppose a shaft to have been cut into the hill, its base may be considered to form the centre of a cross. To the west, in lieu of nave, are two staircases; one ascending, the other descending to various parts of the hillside. To the east is a small chancel, with depressed elliptical arch and recesses at the back and sides, of the same form. The north transept is a mere apse, supported by rather elegant Ionic pilasters, and having a fan-shaped roof. Opposite this, and in the place of a south transept, is the largest apartment of the whole grotto: a chamber, presenting a singular transition between a modern funeral-vault and an ancient columbarium. The walls are pierced on all sides by deep holes, of the size and shape of coffins placed endwise. There are in all thirty-two of these holes; in which, however, I could find no evidence that they had ever been applied to the purpose of interment. In the corner, between this chamber and the chancel-arch, there is a deep stone cistern sunk in the ground; I presume a font. The frescoes at the end of the chancel are small, and much effaced. In the eastern apse there is a group representing the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. In the front walls of the chancel-arch are two life-size figures; one representing an angel, the other having the name of Christ inscribed over it in Greek letters. This last struck me as peculiarly interesting; from the circumstance that the face bears no resemblance whatever to the one conventionally received among us, in modern times. The eyes, in the Alexandrian fresco, are dark and widely opened; the eyebrows straight and strongly marked; the hair nearly black and gathered in short, thick masses over the ears. I was the more attracted by these peculiarities, as my attention had shortly before been arrested very forcibly by the splendid bronze bust from Herculaneum, in the Museo Borbonico. 231This grand and beautiful head, which Murray calls ‘Speucippus’ and the custodi, ‘Plato in the character of the Indian Bacchus,’ resembles so perfectly the common representations of Christ, that I should be at a loss to define any difference, unless it be that it has, perhaps, more intellectual power than our paintings and sculptures usually convey, and a more massive neck. If this Alexandrian fresco really represent the tradition of the 3rd or 4th century, it becomes a question of some curiosity: whence do we derive our modern idea of Christ’s face?”

Cairo was a great delight to me. I could not afford to stop at Shepheard’s Hotel but took up my abode with some kind Americans I had met in the steamer, in a sort of Pension kept by an Italian named Ronch; in old Cairo, actually on the bank of the Nile; so literally so, that I might have dropped a stone from our balcony into the river, just opposite the Isle of Rhoda. From this place I made two excursions to the Pyramids and had a somewhat appalling experience in the “King’s Chamber” in the vault of Cheops. I had gone rather recklessly to Ghiza without either friend or Dragoman; and allowed the wretched Scheik at the door to send five Arabs into the pyramid with me as guides. They had only two miserable dip candles altogether, and the darkness, dust, heat and noise of the Arabs chanting “Vera goot lady! Backsheeh! Backsheeh! Vera goot lady,” and so on da capo, all in the narrow, steeply-slanting passages, together with the intolerable sense of weight as of a mountain of stone over me, proved trying to my nerves. Then, when we had reached the central vault and I had glanced at the empty sarcophagus, which is all it contains, the five men suddenly stopped their chanting, placed themselves with their backs to the wall in rows, with crossed arms in the attitude of the Osiride pilasters; and one of them in a businesslike tone, demanded: “Backsheesh”! I instantly perceived 232into what a trap I had fallen, and what a fool I had been to come there alone. The idea that they might march out and leave me alone in that awful place, in the darkness, very nearly made me quail. But I knew it was no time to betray alarm, so I replied that I “Intended to pay them outside, but if they wished it I would do so at once.” I took out my purse and gave them three shillings to be divided between the five. They took the money and then returned to their posture against the wall.

“We want Backsheesh!”

I took my courage à deux mains, and said, “If you give me any more trouble the English Consul shall hear of it, and you will get the stick.”

“We want Backsheesh!”

“I’ll have no more of this,” I cried in a very sharp voice, and, turning to the ringleader, who held a candle, I said, “Here, you fellow! Take that candle on in front and let me out. Go!” He went!—and I blessed my stars, and all the stars, when I emerged out of that endless passage at last, and stood safe under the bright Egyptian sun.

I am glad to remember Ghiza as it was in those days before hotels, or even tents, were visible near it; when the solemn Sphinx,—so strangely and affectingly human! stood gazing over the desert sands, and beside it were only the ancient temple, the rifled tombs, and the three great Pyramids. To me in those days it seemed the most impressive Field of Death in the world.

The old Arab Mosques in Cairo also delighted me greatly both for their beauty and as studies of the original early English architecture. Needless to say I was enchanted with the streets and bazaars, and all the dim, strange, lovely pictures they afforded, and the Eastern odours which pervaded them in that bright, light air, wherein my chest grew sound and strong after having been for years oppressed with 233bronchial troubles. One day in my plenitude of enjoyment of health and vigour, I walked alone a long way down the splendid Shoubra avenue of Acacia Lebbex trees with the moving crowd of Arab men and women in all their varied costumes, and trains of camels and asses laden with green trefoil, glittering in the alternate sun and shade with never a cart or carriage to disturb the even currents to and fro. At last I came in sight of the Nile, and in the extreme excitement of the view, hastily concluded that the yellow bank which sloped down beyond the grass must be sand, and that I could actually plunge my hands in the River of Egypt. I ran down the slope some little distance from the avenue, and took a few steps on the supposed yellow sand. It proved to be merely mud, like the banks of the Avon at low tide at Clifton, though of different colour, and in a moment I felt myself sinking indefinitely. Already it was nearly up to my knees, and in a few minutes I should have been (quietly and unperceived by anybody) entombed for the investigation of Egyptologers of future generations. It was a ludicrous position, and even in the peril of it I believe I laughed outright. Any way I happily remembered that I had read years before in a bad French novel, how people saved themselves in quicksands in the Landes by throwing themselves down and so dividing their weight over a much larger surface than the soles of the feet. Instantly I turned back towards the bank, and cast myself along forward, and then by dint of enormous efforts withdrew my feet and struggled back to terra firma, much, I should think, after the mode of locomotion of an Ichthyosaurus or other “dragon of the prime.” Arrived at a place of safety I had next to reflect how I was to walk home into the town in the pickle to which I had reduced myself! Luckily the hot sun of Egypt dried the mud on my homely clothes and enabled me to brush it off as dust in an incredibly quick time. 234Before it had done so, however, a frog of exceptional ugliness mistook me for part of the bank and jumped on my lap. He looked such an ill-made creature that I constructed at once the (non-scientific) hypothesis that he must have been descended from some of the frogs which Pharaoh’s magicians are said to have made in rivalry to Moses; forerunners of those modern pathologists who are just clever enough to give us all sorts of Plagues, but always stop short of curing them.

I was very anxious, of course, to ascend the Nile to Philæ, or at the very least to Thebes; but I was too poor by far to hire a dahabieh for myself alone, and, in those days, excursion steamers were non-existent, or very rare. I did hear of a gentleman who wanted to make up a party and take a boat, but he coolly proposed that I should pay half of the expenses of five people, and I did not view that arrangement in a favourable light. Eventually I turned sorrowfully and disappointed back to Alexandria with a pleasant party of English and American ladies and gentlemen; and after a short passage to Jaffa, we rode up all together in two days to Jerusalem. I had given up riding many years before and taken to driving instead, but there was infinite exhilaration on finding myself again on horseback, on one of the active little, half Arab, Syrian steeds. That wonderful ride through the Jaffa orange groves and the Plain of Sharon with all its flowers, to Lydda and Ramleh, and then, next day, to Jerusalem, was beyond all words interesting. I think no one who has been brought up as we English are, on the double literature of Palestine and England, can visit the Holy Land with other than almost breathless curiosity mingled with a thousand tender associations. What England is to a cultivated American traveller of Washington Irving’s or Lowell’s stamp, that is Palestine to us all. As for me, my religious views made it, I think, rather more than less 235congenial and interesting to me than to many others. I find I wrote of it to my friend from Jerusalem (March 6th, 1858):

“I feel very happy to be here. The land seems worthy to be that in which from earliest history the human soul has highest and oftenest soared up to God. One wants no miraculous story to make such a country a ‘Holy Land;’ nor can such story make it less holy to me, as it does, I think, to some who equally disbelieve it. It seems to me as if Christians must be, and in fact are, overwhelmed and confounded to find themselves in the scene of such events. To me it is all pleasure. I believe that if Christ can see us now like other departed spirits, it is those who revere him as I do, and not those who give to him his Father’s place, whom he can regard most complacently. If I did not feel this it would pain me to be here.”

When I went first into the church of the Holy Sepulchre it happened, on account of some function going on elsewhere, to be unusually free from the crowds of pilgrims. It seemed to me to be a real parable in stone. All the different churches, Greek, Latin, Armenian Maronite, opened into the central Temple; as if to show that every creed has a Door leading to the true Holy Place.

I loved also the little narrow marble shrine in the midst with its small, low door, and the mere plain altar-tomb, with room to kneel beside it and pray,—if we will,—to him who is believed to have rested there for the mystic three days after his crucifixion; or if we will (and as I did), to “his Father and our Father”; in a spot hallowed by the associations of a hundred worshipping generations, and the memory of the holiest of men.

Another day I was able to walk alone nearly all round outside the walls of Jerusalem, beginning at the Jaffa gate and passing round through what was then a desert, but is now, I am told, a populous suburb. I came successively to 236Siloam and to the Valley of Hinnom, and of Jehoshaphat; to the Tombs of the Prophets, and at last to Gethsemane. At the time of my visit, this sacred spot, containing the ruins of an “oil press” (whence its supposed identification), was a small walled garden kept by monks who did their best to spoil its associations. Above it I sat for a long time beside the path up to St. Stephen’s Gate, where tradition places the scene of the great first Christian Martyrdom. The ground is all strewed still, with large stones and boulders, making it easy to conjure up the terrific picture of the kneeling saint and savage crowd, and of Saul standing by watching the scene.

Leaving Jerusalem after a week with the same pleasant English and American companions, and with a due provision of guards and tents and baggage mules, I rode to Bethlehem and Hebron, visiting on the way Abraham’s oak at Mamre, which is a magnificent old terebinth, and the vineyard of Esh-kol, then in a very poor condition of culture. We stopped the first night close to Solomon’s Pools, and I was profane enough to bring my sponges at earliest dawn into Jacob’s Well at the head of the waters, and enjoy a delicious bath. Ere we turned in on the previous evening, a clergyman of our party read to us, sitting under the walls of the old Saracenic castle, the pages in Stanley’s Palestine which describe, with all his vivid truthfulness and historic sentiment, the scene which lay before us; the three great ponds, “built by Solomon, repaired by Pontius Pilate,” which have supplied Jerusalem with water for 3,000 years.

I am much surprised that the problem offered by the contents of the vault beneath the Mosque of Hebron has not long ago excited the intensest curiosity among both Jews and Christians. Here, within small and definite limits, must lie evidence of incalculable weight in favour of or against the 237veracity of the Mosaic record. If the account in Gen. L. be correct, the bones of Jacob were brought out of Egypt and deposited here by Joseph; embalmed in the finest and most durable manner. We are expressly told (Gen. L., 2 and 3) that Joseph ordered the physicians to embalm his father, that “forty days were fulfilled for him, for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed;” and that Joseph went up to Canaan with “all the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt,” (a rather amazing exodus!) and “chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” They finally buried Jacob (v. 13) “in the Cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought.” It was unquestionably, then, a first-class Mummy, covered with wrappers and inscriptions, and enclosed, of course, in a splendidly-painted Mummy-coffin, which was deposited in that unique cave; and the extraordinary sanctity which has attached to the spot as far as tradition reaches back, affords presumption amounting almost to guarantee that there, if anywhere, below the six cenotaphs in the upper chamber, in the vault under the small hole in the floor where the Prince of Wales and Dean Stanley were privileged to look down into the darkness,—lie the relics which would terminate more controversies, and throw more light on the origin of Judaism than can be done by all the Rabbis and Bishops of Europe and Asia together! Why do not the Rothschilds and Hirschs and Montefiores and Goldschmidts put together a modest little subscription of a million or two and buy up Hebron, and so settle once for all whether the Jewish Ulysses were a myth or a man; and whether there were really an Israel of whom they are the “Children?” I have talked to Dean Stanley on the subject, who (as he tells us in his delightful Jewish Church, I., 500) shared all my curiosity, but when I urged the query: “Did he think that the relics of the Patriarchs would be found, if 238we could examine the cave?” he put up his hands in a deprecating attitude, which all who knew and loved him will remember, and said, “Ah! that is the question, indeed!”

Is it possible that the millionaire Jews of Germany, France and England are, after all, like my poor friends the Nuns, who would not get up at sunrise on Trinity Sunday to see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité,”—and that they prefer to believe that the bones of the three Patriarchs are where they ought to be, but would rather not put that confidence to the test?

One of the sights which affected me most in the course of our pilgrimage through Judæa was beheld after a night spent by the ladies of our party in our tent pitched among the sands (and centipedes!) of the desert of the Mar Saba. (Our gentlemen-friends were privileged to sleep in the vast old monastery whence they brought us next morning the most excellent raki.) As we rode out of the little valley of our encampment and down by the convent of Mar Saba, we obtained a complete view of the whole hermit burrow; for such it may properly be considered. Mar Saba is the very ideal of a desert. It lies amid the wilderness of hills, not grand enough to be sublime but only monotonous and hopelessly barren. So white are these hills that at first they appear to be of chalk, but further inspection shows them to be of whitish rock, with hardly a trace of vegetation growing anywhere over it. On the hills there is sometimes an inch of soil over the rock; in the valleys there are torrents of stones over the inch of soil. Between our mid-day halt at Derbinerbeit (the highest land in Judæa), and the evening rest at Mar Saba, our whole march had been in utter solitude; not a village, a tent, a caravan, a human being in sight. Not a tree or bush. Of living creatures hardly a bird to break the dead silence of the world, 239only a large and venomous snake crawling beside our track. Thus, far from human haunts, in the heart of the wilderness, lies Mar Saba. Fit approach to such a shrine! Through the arid, burning rocks a profound and sharply-cut chasm suddenly opens and winds, forming a hideous valley, such as may exist in the unpeopled moon, but which probably has not its equal in our world for rugged and blasted desolation. There is no brook or stream in the depths of the ravine. If a torrent may ever rush down it after the thunderstorms with which the country is often visited, no traces of water remain even in early spring. Barren, burning, glaring rocks alone are to be seen on every side. Far up on the cliff, like a fortress, stand the gloomy, windowless walls of the convent; but along the ravine in an almost inaccessible gorge of the hills, are caves and holes half-way down the precipice,—the dwellings of the hermits. Here, in a den fit for a fox or a hyæna, one poor soul had died just before my visit, after five-and-forty years of self-incarceration. Death had released him, but many more remained; and we could see some of them from the distant road as we passed, sitting at the mouth of their caverns, or walking on the little ledges of rock which they had smoothed for terraces. Their food (such as it is) is sent from the convent and let down from the cliffs at needful intervals. Otherwise they live absolutely alone,—alone in this hideous desolation of nature, with the lurid, blasted desert for their sole share in God’s beautiful universe. We are all, I suppose, accustomed to think of a hermit as our poets have painted him, dwelling serene in

undisturbed by all the ugly and jarring sights and sounds of our grinding civilization; sleeping calmly on his bed of fern, 240feeding on his pulse and cresses, and drinking the water from the brook.

But the hermits of Mar Saba, how different are they from him who assoiled the Ancient Mariner? No holy cloisters of the woods, and sound of chanting brooks, and hymns of morning birds; only this silent, burning waste, this “desolation deified.” It seemed as if some frightful aberration of the religious sentiment could alone lead men to choose for home, temple, prison, tomb, the one spot of earth where no flower springs to tell of God’s tenderness, no soft dew or sweet sound ever falls to preach faith and love.

There are many such hermits still in the Greek Church. I have seen their eyries perched where only vultures should have their nests, on the cliffs of Caramania, and among the caverns of the Cyclades. Anthony and Stylites have indeed left behind them a track of evil glory, along which many a poor wretch still “crawls to heaven along the devil’s trail.” Are not lives wasted like these to be put into the account when we come to estimate the Gesta Christi? Must we not, looking on these and on the ten thousand, thousand hearts broken in monasteries and nunneries all over Europe, admit that historical Christianity has not only done good work in the world, but bad work also: and that, diverging widely from the Spirit of Christ, it has been far from uniformly beneficent?

It was while riding some hours from Mar Saba through the low hills before coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By some chance I 241was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man approaching me, the only one I had seen for several hours since we passed a few black tents eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young shepherd, dressed in the camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged on those Dead Sea plains from whence he was returning. Round his neck, and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had rescued and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if perfectly contented and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual gesture of pointing to heart and head and the “salaam alik!”, (Peace be with you), he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to which he saw my eyes were directed. It was actually the beautiful parable of the gospel acted out before my sight. Every particular was true to the story; the shepherd had doubtless left his “ninety-and-nine in the wilderness,” round the black tents we had seen so far away, and had sought for the lost lamb “till he found it,” where it must quickly have perished without his help, among those blighted plains. Literally, too, “when he had found it, he laid it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”

After this beautiful sight which I have longed ever since for a painter’s power to place on canvas (a better subject a thousand-fold than the cruel “Scape-Goat”), we reached the Dead Sea, and I managed to dip into it, after wading out a very long way in the shallow, bitter, biting water which stung my lips and nostrils, and tasted like a horrible mixture of quinine and salt. From the shore, all strewed with the white skeletons of trees washed down by the river, we made 242our way (mostly galloping) in four hours to the Ford of Jordan; and there I had the privilege of another dip, or rather of seven dips, taken in commemoration of Naaman and to wash off the Dead Sea brine! It is the spot supposed to have witnessed the transit of Joshua and the baptisms of St. John. The following night our tents were pitched among the ruins of Jericho. The wonder is, not that the once flourishing city should be deserted and Herod’s great amphitheatre there a ruinous heap, but that a town was ever built in such an insanitary place. Closed in by the mountains on every side from whence a fresh breeze could blow upon it, and open only to the unwholesome flats of the Dead Sea, the situation is pestilential.

Next day we rode back to Jerusalem through the desolate mountains of the Quarantania, where tradition places the mystic Fast and Temptation of Christ; a dreary, lonely, burning desert. Here, also, is the supposed scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the ruins of a great building, which may have been a Half-way House Inn beside the road, bear out the tradition. I have often reflected that orthodox divines miss half the point of that beautiful story when they omit to mark the fact that the Samaritans were, in Christ’s time, boycotted by the Jews as heretics; and that it was precisely one of these heretics who was made by Jesus the type for all time of genuine philanthropy,—in direct and purposeful contrast to the representatives of Judaic orthodoxy, the Priest and Levite.

The sun on my head during the latter hours of the ride became intolerable; not like English heat, however excessive, but roasting my very brains through all the folds of linen on my hat and of a damp handkerchief within. It was like sitting before a kitchen fire with one’s head in the position proper for a leg of mutton! I felt it was a matter of life and death to escape, and galloped on by myself in advance for 243many miles till suddenly I came, just under Bethany at the base of the Mount of Olives, to a magnificent ancient fountain, with the cool water gushing out, amid the massive old masonry. In a moment I leaped from my equally eager horse, threw off my hat and bared my neck and put my head under the blessed stream. Of course it was a perilous proceeding, but it saved me from a sunstroke.

That evening in Jerusalem I wished good-bye to my pleasant fellow-travellers, who were good enough to pass a vote of thanks to me for my “unvarying pluck and hilarity during the fatigues and dangers of the way!” I started next day for the two days’ ride to Jaffa, accompanied only by a good Italian named Abengo, and a muleteer. There was a small war going on between some of the tribes on the way, and a certain chief named Aboo-Goosh (beneath whose robber’s castle I had been pelted with stones on my way up to Jerusalem) was scouring the country. We passed, in the valley of Ajalon, some wounded men borne home from a battle, but otherwise encountered nothing alarming, and I obtained a great deal of curious information from Abengo, who knew Palestine intimately, and whose wife was a Christian woman of Nazareth. There is no use in repeating now records of a state of things which has been modified, no doubt, essentially in thirty years.

From Jaffa I sailed to Beyrout, and there, with kind help and advice from the Consul, I obtained the services of an old Turk as a Dragoman, and he and I and a muleteer laden with my bed and baggage started to cross Lebanon and make our way to Baalbec and, as I hoped, also to Damascus. The snows were still thick on the higher slopes of Lebanon, and after the excessive heat I had just undergone in Syria, the cold was trying. But the beauty and grandeur of those noble mountains, fringed below with fig and olive, and with their snowy summits rising height beyond height above, was compensation 244for all hardship. By a curious chance, Lebanon was the first mountain range worthy of the name, which I had ever crossed. It was an introduction, of course, to a whole world of impressions and experiences.

I had a good many escapes in the course of my ride; there being nothing to be called a road over much of the way, and such path as there was being covered with snow or melting torrents. My strong little Syrian horse walked and scrambled and stumbled up beds of streams running down in cataracts over the rocks and boulders; and on one occasion he had to bear me down a very steep descent, where we floundered forward, sometimes up to his girths in the snow, in dread of descending with irresistible impetus to the edge of a precipice which yawned at the bottom. We did reach the verge in rather a shaky condition; but the good beast struggled hard to save himself, and turned at the critical moment safe along the edge.

A sad association belongs to my sojourn among the Maronites at Zachly; a large village on the further side of Lebanon, on the slopes of the Haraun. I slept there on my outward way in my tent pitched in an angle of grass outside one of the first houses, and on my return journey I obtained the use of the principal room of the same house from my kind hosts, as the cold outside was too considerable for tent life in comfort. Zachly was a very humble, simple place. The houses were all of mud, with flat roofs made of branches laid across and covered with more mud. A stem of a living tree usually stood in the middle of the house supporting the whole erection, which was divided into two or three chambers. A recess in the wall held piles of mats, and of the hard cushions made of raw cotton, which form both seats, beds, and pillows. The rough, unplaned door, with wooden lock, the window half stuffed up, the abundant population of cocks and hens, cats and dogs and rosy little boys and girls, 245strongly reminded me of Balisk! I was welcomed most kindly after a brief negotiation with Hassan; and the simple women and girls clustered round me with soft words and presents of carrots and daffodils. One old woman having kissed my hands as a beginning, proceeded to put her arms round my neck and embrace me in a most motherly way. To amuse the party, I showed them my travelling bag, luncheon and writing and drawing apparatus, and made them taste my biscuits and smell my toilet vinegar. Screams of “Taib, Taib! Katiyeh!” (good, very good) rewarded my small efforts, and then I made them tell me all their names, which I wrote in my note-book. They were very pretty: Helena, Mareen, Yasmeen, Myrrhi, Maroon, Georgi, Malachee, Yussef, and several others, the last being Salieh, the young village priest, a tall, grand-looking young man with high cylindrical black hat, black robe and flowing brown hair. I made him a respectful salutation at which he seemed pleased. On my second visit to Zachly I attended the vesper service in his little chapel as the sun went down over Lebanon. It was a plain quadrangle of mud walls, brown without and whitewashed within; a flat roof of branches and mortar; a post for support in the centre; a confessional at one side; a little lectern; an altar without crucifix and only decorated by two candlesticks; a jar of fresh daffodils; some poor prints; a blue tea-cup for sacramental plate, and a little cottage-window into which the setting sun was shining softly;—such was the chapel of Zachly. A few men knelt to the left, a few women to the right; in front of the altar was a group of children, also kneeling, and waiting to take their part in the service. At the lectern stood the noble figure of young Papas Salieh, leaning on one of the crutches which in all Eastern churches are provided to relieve the fatigue of the attendants, who, like Abraham, “worship, leaning on the top of a staff.” Beside the Papas stood a ragged but intelligent little acolyte, 246who chanted very well, and on the other side of the lectern an aged peasant, who also took his part. The prayers were, of course, unintelligible to me, being in Arabic; but I recognised in the Gospel the chapter of genealogies in Luke, over whose hard names the priest helped his friend quite unaffectedly. The reading over, Papas Salieh took off his black and red cap, and, kneeling before the altar, commenced another chanted prayer, while the women beside me bowed till they kissed the ground in Eastern prostration, beating their breasts with resounding blows. The group of children made the responses at intervals; and then the priest blessed us, and the simple service was over, having occupied about twenty minutes. While we were departing, the Papas seated himself in the confessional and a man went immediately into the penitents’ place beside him. There was something very affecting to me in this poor little church of clay, with its humble efforts at cleanliness and flowers and music; all built and adorned by the worshippers’ own hands, and served by the young peasant priest, doubtless the son and brother of some of his own flock.

As I have said there are sad associations connected with this visit of mine to Zachly. A very short time afterwards the Druses came down with irresistible force,—massacred the greater number of the unhappy Maronites and burned the village. The spot where I had been so kindly received was left a heap of blackened ruins, and what became of sweet, motherly Helena and her dear little children and good Papas Salieh and the rest, I have never been able to learn.

It took six hours of hard riding in a bitter wind to carry me from Zachly to Baalbec; but anticipation bore me on wings, and to beguile the way I repeated to myself as my good memory permitted, the whole of Moore’s poem of Paradise 247and the Peri, culminating in the scene which the Peri beheld “When o’er the vale of Baalbec winging.” In vain, however, I cross-questioned Hassan (we talked Italian tant bien que mal) about Peris. He had never heard of such beings. But of Djinns in general he knew only too much; and notably that they had built the vast ruins of Baalbec, which no mortal hands could have raised; and that to the present time they haunt them so constantly and in such terrific shape, that it is very perilous for anybody to go there alone and quite impossible to do so after nightfall. I had reason to bless this belief in the Djinns of Baalbec for it left me the undisturbed solitary enjoyment of the mighty enclosure within the Saracenic walls for the best part of two days, unvexed by the inquisitive presence or observation of the population of the Arab village outside.

To pitch my tent among the ruins, however, was more than I could bring Hassan to do by any cajoling, and I consented finally to sleep in a small cabin consisting of a single chamber of which I could lock the door inside. When I prepared for sleep on the hard cotton cushions laid over a stone bench, and with the two unglazed windows admitting volumes of cold air, I was frightened to find I had every symptom of approaching fever. Into what an awful position,—I reflected,—had I put myself, with no one but that old Turk Hassan, and the Arab from whom I had hired this little house for the night, to take care of me should I have a real bad fever, and be kept there between life and death for weeks! Reflecting what I could possibly do to avert the danger, brought on, of course, by cold and fatigue, I took from my bag the half-bottle of Raki (a very pure spirit made from rice) which my travelling friends had brought from the monastery at Mar Saba and had kindly shared with me; and to a large dose of this I was able to add some hot water from a sort of coffee-pot left, by 248good luck, in the yet warm brazier of charcoal in the middle of my room. I drank my Raki-toddy to the last drop, and then slept the sleep of the just,—to awaken quite well the next morning! And if any of my teetotal friends think I did wrong to take it, I beg entirely to differ from them on the subject.

The days which I spent in and around Baalbec were more than repayment for the fatigues and perils of the passage of “Sainted Lebanon;” whose famous Cedars, by the way, I was unable to visit; the region where they stand being at that season too deeply covered with snow. Here is a description I gave of Baalbec to Harriet St. Leger just after my visit:—

“I had two wonderful days indeed in Baalbec. The number of the vast solitary ruins exceeded all my anticipations, and their grandeur impresses one as no remains less completely isolated can do. Imagine a space about that of Newbridge garden surrounded by enormous Saracenic walls with a sweet, bright brook running round it, and then left to entire solitude. A few cattle browse on the short grass, and now and then, I suppose, some one enters by one or other of the different gaps in the wall to look after them; but in the Temple of Jupiter, shut in by its great walls, to which the displacement of a single stone makes now the sole entrance, no one ever enters. The fear of Djinns renders the place even doubly alarming! Among the most awful things in Baalbec are stupendous subterranean tunnels running in various directions under the ruined city. I groped through several of them, they opened out with great doorways into others which, having no light, I would not explore, but which seemed abysses of awe! The stones of all these works are enormous. Those 5 or 6 feet and 12 or 15 feet long are among the smallest. In the temple were some which I could not span with five extensions of my arms, i.e., something like 30 feet, but there are still larger elsewhere among the ruins.”

249The shafts of the columns of the two Temples,—the six left standing of the great Temple of the Sun which

and those of the hypæthral temple of Zeus of which only a few have fallen, are alike miracles of size and perfection of moulding. The fragments of palaces reveal magnificence unparalleled. All these enormous edifices are wrought with such lavish luxuriance of imagination, such perfection of detail in harmony with the luscious Corinthian style which pervades the whole, that the idea of the Arabs that they are the work not of men but of Genii, seemed quite natural. I recalled what Vitruvius (who wrote about the time in which the best of these temples was erected), says of the methods by which, in his day, the largest stones were moved from quarries and lifted to their places, but I failed to comprehend how the colossal work was achieved here.

Passing out of the great ruined gateway I came to vast square and hexagonal courts with walls forming exedræ, loaded with profusion of ornaments; columns, entablatures, niches and seats overhung with carvings of garlands of flowers and the wings of fanciful creatures. Streets, gateways and palaces, hardly distinguishable in their ruin, follow on beyond the courts and portico. I climbed up a shattered stair to the summit of the Saracenic wall and felt a sort of shock to behold the living world below me; the glittering brook, the almond trees in blossom and Anti-Lebanon beyond. Here I caught sight of the well-known exquisite little circular temple with its colonnade of six Corinthian columns, of which the architraves are recurved inwards from column to column. If I am not mistaken a reproduction 250of this lovely little building was set up in Kew Gardens in the last century.

Last of all I returned to the Temple of Zeus—or of Baal as it is sometimes called—to spend there in secure solitude (except for Djinns!) the closing hours of that long, rich day. The large walls are almost perfect; the colonnades of enormous pillars are mostly still standing. From the inner portal with its magnificent lintel half fallen from its place, the view is probably the finest of any fane of the ancient world, and was to me impressive beyond description. Even the spot where the statue of the god has stood can easily be traced. A great stone lying overturned on the pavement was doubtless the pedestal. I remained for hours in this temple; sometimes feebly trying to sketch what I saw, sometimes lost in ponderings on the faiths and worships of the past and present. A hawk, which probably had never before found a human visitor at eventide in that weird place, came swooping over me; then gave a wild shriek and flew away. A little later the moon rose over the walls. The calm and silence and beauty of that scene can never be forgotten.

I was unable to pursue my journey to Damascus as I had designed. The muleteer, with all my baggage, contrived to miss us on the road among the hills in Anti-Lebanon; and, eventually, after another visit to the ruins and to the quarries from whence the vast stones were taken, I rode back to Zachly and thence (a two days’ ride) over Lebanon to Beyrout.

I remained a few days at the hotel which then existed a mile from the town, while I waited for the steamer to take me to Athens, and much enjoyed the lovely scene of rich mulberry and almond gardens beside the shell-strewn strand, with snowy Lebanon behind, towering over the fir-woods into the deep blue sky. The Syrian peasant women are 251sweet, courteous creatures. One day as I sat under a cactus-hedge reading Shelley, a pretty young mother came by, and after interchanging a “Peace be with you,” proceeded unhesitatingly, and without a word of explanation, to deposit her baby,—Mustapha by name,—in my lap. I was very willing to nurse Mustapha, and we made friends at once as easily as his mother had done; and my heart was the better for the encounter!

After I had paid off Hassan and settled my account at the hotel, I found my financial condition exceedingly bad! I had just enough cash remaining to carry me (omitting a few meals) by second-class passage to Athens: which was the nearest place where I had opened a credit from my bankers, or where I had any introductions. There was nothing for it but to take a second-class place on board the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer L’Impératrice; though it was not a pleasant arrangement, seeing that there was no other woman passenger and no stewardess on the ship at all. Nevertheless this was just one of the cases in which knocking about the world brought me favourable experience of human nature. The Captain of the Impératrice, an Italian gentleman, did his utmost, with extreme delicacy and good taste, to make my position comfortable. He ordered his own dinner to be served in the second cabin that he might preside at the table instead of one of his subordinates; and during the day he came often to see that I was well placed and shaded on deck, and to interchange a little pleasant talk, without intrusion.

It is truly one of the silliest of the many silly things in the education of women that we are taught little or nothing about the simplest matters of banking and stock-and-share buying and selling. I, who had always had money in abundance given me straight into my hand, knew absolutely nothing, when my father’s death left me to arrange my affairs, 252how such business is done, how shares are bought and sold, how credits are open at corresponding bankers; how, even, to draw a cheque! It all seemed to me a most perilous matter, and I feared that I might, in those remote regions, come to grief any day by the refusal of some local banker to honour my cheques or by the neglect of my London bankers to bespeak credit for me. My means were so narrow, and I had so little experience of the expenses of living and travelling, that I was greatly exercised as to my small concerns. I brought with me (generally tied by a string round my neck and concealed) a very valuable diamond ring to sell in case I came to real disaster; but it had been constantly worn by my mother; and I felt at Beyrout that, sooner than sell it, I would live on short commons for much more than a week!

One day of our voyage I spent at Cyprus where I admired the ancient church of San Lazzaro, half mosque, half church, and said to be the final grave of Lazarus. I had visited his, supposed, temporary one in Bethany. Another day I landed at Rhodes and was able to see the ruined street which bears over each house the arms of the Knight to whom it belonged. At the upper end of the way are still visible the arch and shattered relics of their church. Writing to Miss St. Leger March 28th, I described my environment thus:

“Behold me seated à la Turque close to a party of Moslem gentlemen who alternately smoke and say their prayers all day long. We are steaming up through the lovely “Isles of Greece,” having left Rhodes this morning and Cos an hour ago. As we pass each wild cape and green shore I take up a certain opera glass with ‘H. S.’ on the top of the box, and wish very much I could see through it the dear, kind eyes that used it once. They would be pleasanter to see than all these scenes, glorious as they are. The sun is going down into the calm blue sea and throwing purple 253lights already on the countless islands through which the vessel winds its way. White sea-gulls follow us and beautiful little quaint-sailed boats appear every now and then round the islands. The peculiar beauty of this famous passage is derived, however, from the bold and varied outline of the islands and adjoining coast of Asia Minor. From little rocks not larger than the ship itself, up to large provinces with extensive towns like Cos, there is an endless variety and boldness of form. Ireland’s Eye magnified to twice the height, is, I should say, the commonest type. In some almost inaccessible cliffs one sees hermitages; in others convents. I shall post this at Smyrna.”

As the Impératrice stopped two or three days in the magnificent harbour of Smyrna, I had good opportunity to land and make my way to the scene of Polycarp’s Martyrdom amid the colossal cypresses which outdo all those of Italy except the quincentenarians in the Giusti garden in Verona. It was Easter, and a ridiculous incident occurred on the Saturday. I was busy writing in the cabin of the Impératrice at mid-day, when, subito! there were explosions in our vessel and in a hundred other vessels in the harbour, again and again and again, as if a battle of Trafalgar were going on all round! I rushed on deck and found the steward standing calm and cheerful amid the terrific noise and smoke, “For God’s sake what has happened?” I cried breathless. “Nothing, Signora, nothing! It is the Royal Salute all the ships are firing, of 21 guns.”

“In honour of whom?” I asked, somewhat less alarmed.

“Iddio, Signora! Gesù Cristo, sicuro! È il momento della Resurrezione, si sà.”

“O, no!” I said, “Not on Saturday. It was on Sunday, you know!”

“Che, che! Dicono forse cosi i Protestanti! Sappiamo noi altri, che era il Sabato.”

254I never got to the bottom of this mystery, but can testify that at Smyrna in 1858 there were many scores of these Royal Salutes (!) on Holy Saturday at noon in honour of the Resurrection.

It was one of the brightest hours of my happy life, that on which I stood on the deck of our ship at sunrise and passed under “Sunium’s marble steep” and knew that I was approaching Athens. As we steamed up the gulf, the red clouds flamed over Parnes and Hymettus and lighted up the hills of Peloponnesus. The bright blue waves were dancing under our prow, and I could see over them far away the “rocky brow which looks o’er sea-born Salamis,” where Xerxes sat on his silver-footed throne on such a morn as this. Above, to our right, over the olive woods with the rising sun behind it, like a crowned hill was the Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon upon it.

Very soon I had landed at the Piræus and had engaged a carriage (there was no railway then) to take me to Athens. The drive was enchanting, between olive groves and vineyards, and with the Temple of Theseus and the buildings on the Acropolis coming into view as I approached Athens, till I was beside myself with delight and excitement. The first thing to do was to drive to the private house of the banker to whom I was recommended, to arouse the poor old gentleman (nothing loath apparently to do business even at seven o’clock) to draw fifty sovereigns, and then to go to the French Hotel, choose a room with a fine view of the Parthenon, and to say to the master: “Send me the very best déjeuner you can provide and a bottle of Samian wine, and let this letter be taken to Mr. Finlay.” That breakfast, with that view, was a feast of the gods after my many abstinencies, though I nearly “dashed down the cup of Samian wine,” not in patriotic despair for Greece, but because it was so abominably 255bad that no poetry could have been made out of it by Anacreon himself. Hardly had I finished my meal, when Mr. Finlay appeared at my door, having hurried with infinite kindness to welcome me, and do honour to the introduction of his cousin, my dear sister-in-law. “I put myself,” said he, “at your orders for the day. We will go wherever you please.”

It would be unfair to inflict on the reader a detailed account of all I saw at Athens under the admirable guidance of Mr. Finlay during a week of intensest enjoyment. Mr. Finlay (it can scarcely yet be forgotten) went out to Greece a few weeks or months before Byron and fought with him and after him, through the War of Independence. After this, having married a beautiful Armenian lady, he bought much land in Eubœa, built himself a handsome house in Athens and lived there for the rest of his life, writing his great History (in five volumes) of Greece under Foreign Domination; making a magnificent collection of coins; and acting for many years as the Times correspondent at Athens. He was not only a highly erudite archæologist, but an enthusiast for the land of his adoption and all its triumphs of art; in short, the best of all possible ciceroni. I was fortunately not wholly unprepared to profit by his learned expositions and delicate observation on the architecture of the glorious ruins, for I had made copies of prints of all at Athens and elsewhere in Greece with ground-plans and restorations and notes of everything I could learn about them, many years before when I was wont to amuse myself with drawing, while my mother read to me. I found that I knew beforehand nearly exactly what remained of the Parthenon and the Erechtheum and the Temple of Victory, the Propylæum on the Acropolis and the Theseium below; and it was of intensest interest to me to learn, under Mr. Finlay’s guidance, precisely where the Elgin Marbles had stood, and to note the extraordinary fact, on which he insisted much,—that there is not 256a single straight line in the whole Parthenon. Everything, down to single stones in the entablatures and friezes, is curved, in some cases, he felt assured, after they had been placed in situ. The extreme entasis of the columns and the great pyramidal inclination of the whole building, were most noticeable when attention was once drawn to them. As we approached the majestic ruins of Adrian’s Temple of Jupiter on the plains below, (that enormous temple which had double rows of columns surrounding it and quadruple rows in front and back, of ten columns each) I exclaimed “Why! there ought to be three columns standing at that far angle!” “Quite true,” said Mr. Finlay, “one of them fell just six weeks ago.”

Since this visit of mine to Athens a vast deal has been done to clear away the remains of the Turkish tower and other barbaric buildings which obstructed and desecrated the summit of the Acropolis; and the fortunate visitor may now see the whole Propylæum and all the spaces open and free, beside examining the very numerous statues and bas reliefs some quaintly archaic, some of the best age and splendidly beautiful, which have been dug out in recent years in Greece.

I envy every visitor to Athens now, but console myself by procuring photographs of all the finds from those excellent artists, Thomaïdes, Brothers.

Mr. Finlay spoke much of Byron in answer to my questions, and described him as a most singular combination of romance and astuteness. The Greeks imagined that a man capable of such enthusiasm as to go to war for their enfranchisement must have a rather soft head as well as warm heart; but they were much mistaken when they tried in their simplicity to exploiter him in matters of finance. There were self-devoted and disinterested patriots, but there were also (as was inevitable), among the insurgents many others who had a sharp eye to their own financial and political schemes 257Byron saw through these men (Mr. Finlay said), with astounding quickness, and never allowed them to guide or get the better of him in any negotiation. About money matters he considered he was inclined to be “close-fisted.” This was an opinion strongly confirmed to me some months later by Walter Savage Landor, who repeatedly remarked that Byron’s behaviour in several occurrences, while in Italy, was far from liberal and that, luxuriously as he chose to live, he was by no means ready to pay freely for his luxury. Shelley on the contrary, though he lived most simply and was always hard pressed for money by William Godwin (who Fanny Kemble delightfully described to me àpropos of Dowden’s Memoirs, as “one of those greatly gifted and greatly borrowing people!”), was punctilious to the last degree in paying his debts and even those of his friends. There was a story of a boat purchased by both Byron and Shelley which I cannot trust my memory to recall accurately as Mr. Landor told it to me, and which I do not exactly recognise in the Memoirs, but which certainly amounted to this,—that Byron left Shelley to pay for their joint purchase, and that Shelley did so, though at the time he was in extreme straits for money. All the impressions, I may here remark, which I gathered at that time in Greece and Italy (1858), where there were yet a few alive who personally knew both these great poets, was in favour of Shelley and against Byron. Talking over them many years afterwards with Mazzini I was startled by the vehemence with which he pronounced his preference for Byron, as the one who had tried to put his sympathy with a struggling nation into practice, and had died in the noble attempt. This was natural enough on the part of the Italian patriot; but I think the vanity and tendency to “pose,” which formed so large a part of Byron’s character had probably more to do with this last acted Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 258than Mazzini, (who had no such foibles) was likely to understand. The following curious glimpse of Byron at Venice before he went to Greece, occurs in an autograph letter in my possession, by Mrs. Hemans to the late Miss Margaret Lloyd. It seems worth quoting here.

“Your affection of Lord Byron will not be much increased by the description I am going to transcribe for you of his appearance and manners abroad. My sister, who is now at Venice, has sent me the following sketch of the Giaour:—‘We were presented at the Governor’s, after which we went to a conversazione at Madlle. Benzoni’s, where we saw Lord Byron; and now my curiosity is gratified, I have no wish ever to see him again. A more wretched, depraved-looking countenance it is impossible to imagine! His hair streaming almost down to his shoulders and his whole appearance slovenly and even dirty. Still there is a something which impels you to look at his face, although it inspires you with aversion, a something entirely different from any expression on any countenance I ever beheld before. His character, I hear, is worse than ever; dreadful it must be, since everyone says he is the most dissipated person in Italy, exceeding even the Italians themselves.’”

Shortly before my visit to Athens an article, or book, by Mr. Trelawney had been published in England, in which that writer asserted that Byron’s lame leg was a most portentous deformity, like the fleshless leg of a Satyr. I mentioned this to Mr. Finlay, who laughed, and said: “That reminds me of what Byron said of Trelawney; ‘If we could but make Trelawney wash his hands and speak the truth, we might make a gentleman of him!’ Of course,” continued Mr. Finlay, “I saw Byron’s legs scores of times, for we bathed 259together daily whenever we were near the sea or a river, and there was nothing wrong with the leg, only an ordinary and not very bad, club-foot.”

Among the interesting facts which Mr. Finlay gave me as the results of his historical researches in Greece was that a school of philosophy continued to be held in the Groves of the Academè (through which we were walking at the moment), for 900 years from the time of Plato. A fine collection of gold and silver coins which he had made, afforded, under his guidance, a sort of running commentary on the history of the Byzantine Empire. There were series of three and four reigns during which the coins became visibly worse and worse, till at last there was no silver in them at all, only base metal of some sort; and then, things having come to the worst, there was a revolution, a new dynasty, and a brand new and pure coinage.

The kindness of this very able man and of his charming wife was not limited to playing cicerone to me. Nothing could exceed their hospitality. The first day I dined at their house a party of agreeable and particularly fashionably dressed Greek ladies and gentlemen were assembled. As we waited for dinner the door opened and a magnificent figure appeared, whom I naturally took for, at least, an Albanian Chief, and prepared myself for an interesting presentation. He wore a short green velvet jacket covered with gold embroidery, a crimson sash, an enormous white muslin kilt (I afterwards learned it contained 60 yards of muslin, and that the washing thereof is a function of the highest responsibility), and leggings of green and gold to match the jacket. One moment this splendid vision stood six feet high in the doorway; the next he bowed profoundly and pronounced the consecrated formula:—

“Madame est servie!”

and we went to dinner, where he waited admirably.

260Some year or two later, after I had published some records of my travels, and sent them to Mr. Finlay, I received from him the following letter:—

“Baron von Schmidthals sent me your letter of the 18th April with the Cities of the Past yesterday; his baggage having been detained at Syria. This post brought me Fraser with a ‘Day at Athens’ with due regularity, and now accept my sincere thanks for both. I am ashamed of my neglect in not thanking you sooner for Fraser, but I did not know your address. I felt grateful for it, having been very, very often tired of ‘Days at Athens!’ It was a treat to meet so pleasant a ‘day,’ and have another pleasant day recalled. Others to whom I lent Fraser, told me the ‘Day,’ was delightful. I had heard of your misfortune but I hoped you had entirely recovered, and I regret to hear that you use crutches still. I, too, am weak and can walk little, but my complaint is old age. The Saturday Review has told me that you have poured some valuable thoughts into the river that flows through ages.

Solomon tried to couch its cataracts in vain. If you lived at Athens you would hardly believe that man can grow wiser by being made to think. It only makes him more wicked here in Greece. But the river of thought must be intended to fertilize the future.

“I wish I could send you some news that would interest or amuse you, but you may recollect that I live like a hermit and come into contact with society chiefly in the matter of politics which I cannot expect to render interesting to you and which is anything but an amusing subject to me; I being one of the Greek landlords on whose head Kings and National Assemblies practise the art of shaving. Our revolution has done some good by clearing away old 261abuses, but the positive gain has been small. England sent us a boy-king, and Denmark with him a Count Sponneck, whom the Greeks, not inaccurately, call his ‘alter NEMO.’ Still, though we are all very much dissatisfied, I fancy sometimes that fate has served Greece better than England, Denmark, or the National Assembly. The evils of this country were augmented by the devotion of the people to power and pelf, but devotion to nullity or its alter ego is a weak sentiment, and an empty treasury turns the devotion to pelf into useful channels.

“I was rather amused yesterday by learning that loyalty to King George has extended the commercial relations of the Greeks with the Turks. Greece has imported some boatloads of myrtle branches to make triumphal arches at Syra where the King was expected yesterday. Queen Amalia disciplined King Otho’s subjects to welcome him in this way. The idea of Greeks being ‘green’ in anything, though it was only loyalty, amused her in those days. I suppose she knows now that they were not so ‘green’ as their myrtles made them look! It is odd, however, to find that their outrageous loyalty succeeded in exterminating myrtle plants in the islands of the Ægean, and that they must now import their emblems of loyalty from the Sultan’s dominions. If a new Venus rise out of the Grecian sea she will have to swim over to the Turkish coast to hide herself in myrtles. There is a new fact for Lord Strangford’s oriental Chaos!

“My wife desires to be most kindly remembered to you.

I left Athens and my kind friends with great regret and embarked at the Piræus for Constantinople, but not before I had managed to secure a luxurious swim in one of the exquisite rocky coves along the coast near the Tomb of Themistocles.

262Stamboul was rather a disappointment to me. The weather was cold and cloudy and unfit to display the beauty of the Golden Horn; and I went about with a valet de place in rather a disheartened way to see the Dolma Batchi Palace and a few other things accessible to me. The Scutari Hospital across the Bosphorus where Miss Nightingale had worked only four years before, of course, greatly attracted my interest. How much do all women owe to that brave heart who led them on so far on the road to their public duties, and who has paid for her marvellous achievements by just forty years of invalidism! Those pages of Kinglake’s History in which he pays tribute to her power, and compares her great administrative triumph in bringing order out of chaos with the miserable failures of the male officials who had brought about the disastrous muddle, ought to be quoted again and again by all the friends of women, and never suffered to drop into oblivion.

Of course the reader will assume that I saw St. Sophia. But I did not do so, and to the last, I fear I shall owe a little grudge to the people whose extraordinary behaviour made me lose my sole opportunity of enjoying that most interesting sight. I told my valet de place to learn what parties of foreigners were going to obtain the needful firmaun for visiting the Mosque and to arrange for me in the usual way to join one of them, paying my share of the expense, which at that time amounted to £5. Some days were lost, and then I learned that there was only one party, consisting of American ladies and gentlemen, who were then intending to visit the place, and that for some reason their courier would not consent to my joining them. I thought it was some stupid imbroglio of servants wanting fees, and having the utmost confidence in American kindness and good manners, I called on the family in question at their hotel and begged they would do me the 263favour to allow me to pay part of the £5, and to enter the doors of St. Sophia with them accordingly; at such time as might suit them. To my amazement the gentleman and ladies looked at each other; and then the gentleman spoke, “O! I leave all that to my courier!” “In that case,” I said, “I wish you good morning.” It was a great bore for me, with my great love for architecture, to fail to see so unique a building, but I could not think of spending £5 on a firmaun myself, and had no choice but to relinquish the hope of entering, and merely walk round the Mosque and peep in where it was possible to do so. I was well cursed in doing this by the old Turks for my presumption!

Nemesis overtook these unmannerly people ere long, for they reached Florence a month after me and found I had naturally told my tale of disappointment to the Brownings, (whom they particularly desired to cultivate), the Somervilles, Trollopes and others who had become my friends; and I believe they heard a good deal of the matter. Mrs. Browning, I know, frankly expressed her astonishment at their behaviour; and Mrs. Somerville would have nothing to say to them. They sent me several messages of conciliation and apology, which of course I ignored. They had done a rude and unkind thing to an unknown and friendless woman. They were ready to make advances to one who had plenty of friends. It was the only case, in all my experience of Americans, in which I have found them wanting in either courtesy or kindness.

I had intended to go from Constantinople viâ the Black Sea and the Danube to Vienna and thence by the railway to Adelsberg and Trieste, but a cold, stormy March morning rendered that excursion far less tempting than a return to the sunny waters of Greece; and, as I had nobody to consult, I simply embarked on a different steamer from the one I had 264designed to take. At Syra (I think) I changed to the most luxurious and delightful vessel on which I have ever sailed—the Austrian Lloyd’s Neptune, Captain Braun. It was splendidly equipped, even to a camera obscura on deck; and every arrangement for luxurious baths and good food was perfect, and the old Captain’s attention and kindness to everyone extreme. I have still the picture of the Neptune, which he drew in my little sketch book for me. There were several very pleasant passengers on board, among others the Marquis of Headfort (nephew of our old neighbour at Newbridge, Mr. Taylor of Ardgillan) and Lady Headfort, who had gone through awful experiences in India, when married to her first husband, Sir William Macnaghten. It was said that when Sir William was cut to pieces, she offered large rewards for the poor relics and received them all, except his head. Months afterwards when she had returned to Calcutta and was expecting some ordinary box of clothes, or the like, she opened a parcel hastily, and was suddenly confronted with a frightful spectacle of her husband’s half-preserved head!

Whether this story be true I cannot say, but Lady Headfort made herself a most agreeable fellow passenger, and we sat up every night till the small hours telling ghost stories. At Corfu I paid a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Emily Kozzaris (née Trench) whom I had known at Newbridge and who welcomed me as a bit of Ireland, fallen on her

I seemed to be en pays de connaissance once more. After two days in Trieste I went up by rail to Adelsberg through the extraordinary district (geologically speaking) of Carniola, where the whole superficial area of the ground is perfectly barren but honey-combed with circular holes of varying 265depths and size and of the shape of inverted truncated cones; the bottoms of each being highly fertile and cultivated like gardens.

The cavern of Adelsberg was to me one of the most fearsome places in the world. I cannot give any accurate description of it for the sense of awe which always seizes me in the darkness and foul air of caverns and tunnels and pyramids, renders me incapable of listening to details of heights and lengths. I wrote my recollections not long afterwards.

“There were long, long galleries, and chambers, and domes succeeding one another, as it seemed, for ever. Sometimes narrow and low, compelling the visitor to bend and climb; sometimes so wide and lofty that the eye vainly sought to pierce the expanse. And through all the endless labyrinth appeared vaguely in the gloom the forms taken by the stalactites, now white as salt, now yellow and stained as if with age,—representing to the fancy all conceivable objects of earth and sea, piled up in this cave as if in some vast lumberhouse of creation. It was Chaos, when yet all things slept in darkness waiting the fiat of existence. It was the final Ruin when all things shall return to everlasting night, and man and all his works grow into stone and lie buried beside the mammoth and the ichthyosaur. Here were temples and tombs, and vast dim faces, and giant forms lying prone and headless, and huge lions sleeping in dark dens, and white ghosts with phantom raiment flickering in the gloom. And through the caverns, amid all the forms of awe and wonder, rolled a river black as midnight; a deep and rapid river which broke here and there over the rocks as in mockery of the sunny waterfalls of the woods, and gleamed for a moment, white and ghastly, then plunged lower under the black arch into

266“It is in this deadly river, which never reflects the light of day, that live those strange fleshy lizards without eyes, and seemingly without natural skin, hideous reptiles which have dwelt in darkness from unknown ages, till the organs of sight are effaced.^[15]

“Over this dismal Styx the traveller passes on further and further into the cavern, through seemingly endless corridors and vast cathedral aisles and halls without number. One of these large spaces is so enormous that it seemed as if St. Peter’s whole church and dome could lie beneath it. The men who were with us scaled the walls, threw coloured lights around and rockets up to the roof and dimly revealed the stupendous expanse; an underground hall, where Eblis and all his peers might hold the councils of hell. Further, on yet, through more corridors, more chambers and aisles and domes, with the couchant lions and the altar-tombs and the ghosts and the great white faces all around; and then into a cavern, more lately found than the rest, where the white and yellow marble took forms of screens and organ pipes and richest Gothic tracery of windows,—the region where the Genius of the Cavern had made his royal Oratory. It was all a great, dim, uneasy dream. Things were, and were not. As in dreams we picture places and identify them with those of waking life in some strange unreal identity, while in every particular they vary from the actual place; and as also in dreams we think we have beheld the same objects over and over again, while we only dream we see them, and go on wandering further and further, seeking for some unknown thing, and finding, not that which we seek, but every other thing in existence, and pass through all manner of narrow doors and impenetrable screens, and men speak to us and we cannot hear them, and show us open graves holding dead corpses whose features we cannot discern, and all the world is dim and dark and full of doubt and dread—even so is the Cavern of Adelsberg.”

267Returning to Trieste I passed on to Venice, the beauty of which I learned (rather slowly perhaps), to feel by degrees as I rowed in my gondola from church to church and from gallery to palace. The Austrians were then masters of the city, and it was no doubt German music which I heard for the first time at the church of the Scalzi, very finely performed. It was not seldom in the usual English style of sacred music; (I dare say it was not strictly sacred music at all, perhaps quite a profane opera!) but, in the mood I was in, it seemed to me to have a great sanctity of its own; to be a Week-day Song of Heaven. This was one of the rare occasions in my life in which music has reached the deeper springs in me, and it affected me very much. I suppose as the daffodils did Wordsworth.

Naturally being again in a town and at a good hotel, I resumed better clothes than I had worn in my rough rides, and they were, of course that year, deep mourning with much crape on them. I imagine it must have been this English mourning apparel which provoked among the colour-loving Venetians a strange display of Heteropathy,—that deep-seated animal instinct of hatred and anger against grief and suffering, the exact reverse of sympathy, which causes brutes and birds to gore and peck and slay their diseased and dying companions and brutal men to trample on their weeping, starving wives. I was walking alone rather sadly, bent down over the shells on the beach of the Lido, comparing them in my mind to the old venuses and pectens and beautiful pholases which I used to collect on my father’s long stretch of sandy shore in Ireland,—when suddenly I found myself assailed with a shower of stones. Looking up, I saw a little crowd of women and boys jeering at me and pelting me with whatever they could pick up. Of course they could not really hurt me, but after an effort or two at remonstrance, I was fain to give up my walk 268and return to my gondola and to Venice. Years afterwards, speaking of this incident to Gibson, he told me he had seen at Venice a much worse scene, for the victim was a poor helpless dog which had somehow got into a position from whence it could not escape, and the miserable, hooting, laughing crowd deliberately stoned it to death. The dog looked from one to another of its persecutors as if appealing for mercy and saying, “What have I done to deserve this?” But there was no mercy in those hard hearts.

Ever since I sat on the spot where St. Stephen was stoned, I have felt that that particular form of death must have been one of the most morally trying and dreadful to the sufferer, and the most utterly destructive of the finer instincts in those who inflicted it. If Jews be, as alleged, more prone to cruelty than other nations, the fact seems to me almost explained by the “set of the brains” of a race accustomed to account it a duty to join in stoning an offender to death and watching pitilessly his agonies when mangled, blinded, deafened and bleeding he lies crushed on the ground.

From Venice I travelled very pleasantly in a returning vettura which I was fortunate enough to engage, by Padua and Ferrara over the Apennines to Florence. One day I walked a long way in front during my vetturino’s dinner-hour, and made friends with some poor peasants who welcomed me to their house and to a share of their meal of Polenta and wine. The Polenta was much inferior to Irish oatmeal stirabout or Scotch porridge; and the black wine was like the coarsest vinegar. I tried in vain, out of good manners to drink it. The lives of these poor contadini are obviously in all ways cruelly hard.

Spending one night in a desolate “ramshackle” inn on the road high up on the Apennines, I sat up late writing a description of the place (as “creepy” as I could make it!) to amuse my mother’s dear old servant “Joney,” who 269possessed a volume of Washington Irving’s stories wherein that of the “Inn at Terracina” had served constantly to excite delightful awe in her breast and in my own as a child. I took my letter next day with me to post in Florence, but alas! found there waiting for me one from my brother announcing that our dear old servant was dead. She had never held up her head after I had left Newbridge, and had cease to drop into her cottage for tea.

At Florence I remained many months (or rather on the hill of Bellosguardo above the city) and made some of the most precious friendships of my life; Mrs. Somerville’s first of all, I also had the privilege to know at that time both Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Adolphus Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Isa Blagden, Miss White (now Madame Villari), and many other very interesting men and women. I shall, however, write a separate chapter combining this and my subsequent visits to Italy.

Late in the summer I travelled with a party through Milan over St. Gothard to Lucerne, and thence to the Pays de Vaud, where I joined a very pleasant couple,—Rev. W. and Mrs. Biedermann,—in taking the Château du Grand Clos, in the Valley of the Rhone; a curious miniature French country house, built some years before by the man who called himself Louis XVII., or Duc de Normandie; and who had collected (as we found) a considerable library of books, all relating to the French Revolution.

From Switzerland I travelled back to England viâ the Rhine with my dear American friends, the Apthorps, who had joined me at Montreux. The perils and fatigues of my eleven months of solitary wanderings were over. I was stronger and more active in body than I had ever been, and so enriched in mind and heart by the things I had seen and the people I had known, that I could afford to smile at the depression and loneliness of my departure.

270As we approached the Black Forest I had a fancy to quit my kind companions for a few days; and leaving them to explore Strasburg, and some other places, I went on to Heidelberg and thence made my way into the beautiful woods. The following lines were written there, September 23rd, 1858:—

CHAPTER X. BRISTOL. REFORMATORIES AND RAGGED SCHOOLS.

275After I had spent two or three weeks once again at my old home after my long journey to visit my eldest brother and his wife, and also had seen my two other dear brothers, then married and settled in England with their children; the time came for me to begin my independent life as I had long planned it. I had taken my year’s pilgrimage as a sort of conclusion to my self-education, and also because, at the beginning of it, I was in no state of health or spirits to throw myself into new work of any kind. Now I was well and strong, and full of hope of being of some little use in the world. I was at a very good age for making a fresh start; just 36; and I had my little independence of £200 a year which, though small, was enough to allow me to work how and where I pleased without need to earn anything. I may boast that I never got into debt in my life; never borrowed money from anybody; never even asked my brother for the advance of a week on the interest on my patrimony.

It had been somewhat of a difficulty to me after my home duties ended at my father’s death, to decide where, with my heretical opinions, I could find a field for any kind of usefulness to my fellow-creatures, but I fortunately heard through Harriet St. Leger and Lady Byron, that Miss Carpenter, of Bristol, was seeking for some lady to help in her Reformatory and Ragged School work. Miss Bathurst, who had joined her for the purpose, had died the previous year. The arrangement was, that we paid Miss Carpenter a moderate sum (30s.) a week for board and lodging in her house adjoining Red Lodge, and she provided us all day long 276with abundant occupation. I had by mere chance read her “Juvenile Delinquents,” and had admired the spirit of the book; but my special attraction to Miss Carpenter was the belief that I should find in her at once a very religious woman, and one so completely outside the pale of orthodoxy that I should be sure to meet from her the sympathy I had never yet been privileged to enjoy; and at all events be able to assist her labours with freedom of conscience.

My first interview with Miss Carpenter (in November, 1858) was in the doorway of my bedroom after my arrival at Red Lodge House; a small house in the same street as Red Lodge. She had been absent from home on business, and hastened upstairs to welcome me. It was rather a critical moment, for I had been asking myself anxiously—“What manner of woman shall I behold?” I knew I should see an able and an excellent person; but it is quite possible for able and excellent women to be far from agreeable companions for a tête-à-tête of years; and nothing short of this had I in contemplation. The first glimpse in that doorway set my fears at rest! The plain and careworn face, the figure which, Dr. Martineau says, had been “columnar” in youth, but which at fifty-two was angular and stooping, were yet all alive with feeling and power. Her large, light blue eyes, with their peculiar trick of showing the white beneath the iris, had an extraordinary faculty of taking possession of the person on whom they were fixed, like those of an amiable Ancient Mariner who only wanted to talk philanthropy, and not to tell stories of weird voyages and murdered albatrosses. There was humour, also, in every line of her face, and a readiness to catch the first gleam of a joke. But the prevailing characteristic of Mary Carpenter, as I came subsequently more perfectly to recognise, was a high and strong Resolution, which made her whole path much like that of a plough in a 277well-drawn furrow, which goes straight on in its own beneficent way, and gently pushes aside into little ridges all intervening people and things.

Long after this first interview, Miss Elliot showed Miss Carpenter’s photograph to the Master of Balliol, without telling him whom it represented. After looking at it carefully, he remarked, “This is the portrait of a person who lives under high moral excitement.” There could not be a truer summary of her habitual state.

Our days were very much alike, and “Sunday shone no Sabbath-day” for us. Our little household consisted of one honest girl (a certain excellent Marianne, who I often see now in her respectable widowhood and who well deserves commemoration) and two little convicted thieves from the Red Lodge. We assembled for prayers very early in the morning; and breakfast, during the winter months, was got over before daylight; Miss Carpenter always remarking brightly as she sat down, “How cheerful!” was the gas. After this there were classes at the different schools, endless arrangements and organisations, the looking-up of little truants from the Ragged Schools, and a good deal of business in the way of writing reports and so on. Altogether, nearly every hour of the day and week was pretty well mapped out, leaving only space for the brief dinner and tea; and at nine or ten o’clock at night, when we met at last, Miss Carpenter was often so exhausted that I have seen her fall asleep with the spoon half-way between her mouth and the cup of gruel which she ate for supper. Her habits were all of the simplest and most self-denying kind. Both by temperament and on principle she was essentially a Stoic. She had no sympathy at all with Asceticism (which is a very different thing, and implies a vivid sense of the attractiveness of luxury), and she strongly condemned fasting, and all such practices on the Zoroastrian principle, that they involve a culpable weakening of powers 278which are intrusted to us for good use. But she was an ingrained Stoic, to whom all the minor comforts of life are simply indifferent, and who can scarcely even recognise the fact that other people take heed of them. She once, with great simplicity, made to me the grave observation that at a country house where she had just passed two or three days, “the ladies and gentlemen all came down dressed for dinner, and evidently thought the meal rather a pleasant part of the day!” For herself (as I often told her) she had no idea of any Feast except that of the Passover, and always ate with her loins girded and her umbrella at hand, ready to rush off to the Red Lodge, if not to the Red Sea. In vain I remonstrated on the unwholesomeness of the practice, and entreated on my own behalf to be allowed time to swallow my food, and also some food (in the shape of vegetables) to swallow, as well as the perpetual, too easily ordered, salt beef and ham. Next day after an appeal of this kind (made serious on my part by threats of gout), good Miss Carpenter greeted me with a complacent smile on my entry into our little dining-room. “You see I have not forgotten your wish for a dish of vegetables!” There, surely enough, on a cheeseplate, stood six little round radishes! Her special chair was a horsehair one with wooden arms, and on the seat she had placed a small square cushion, as hard as a board, likewise covered with horsehair. I took this up one day, and taunted her with the Sybaritism it betrayed; but she replied, with infinite simplicity, “Yes, indeed! I am sorry to say that since my illness I have been obliged to have recourse to these indulgencies (!). I used to try, like St. Paul, to ‘endure hardness.’”

Her standard of conscientious rigour was even, it would appear, applicable to animals. I never saw a more ludicrous little scene than when she one day found my poor dog Hajjin, a splendid grey Pomeranian, lying on the broad of 279her very broad back, luxuriating on the rug before a good fire. After gravely inspecting her for some moments, Miss Carpenter turned solemnly away, observing, in a tone of deep moral disapprobation, “Self-indulgent dog!”

Much of our work lay in a certain Ragged School in a filthy lane named St. James’ Back, now happily swept from the face of the earth. The long line of Lewin’s Mead beyond the chapel was bad enough, especially at nine or ten o’clock of a winter’s night, when half the gas lamps were extinguished, and groups of drunken men and miserable women were to be found shouting, screaming and fighting before the dens of drink and infamy of which the street consisted. Miss Carpenter told me that a short time previously some Bow Street constables had been sent down to this place to ferret out a crime which had been committed there, and that they reported there was not in all London such a nest of wickedness as they had explored. The ordinary Bristol policemen were never to be seen at night in Lewin’s Mead, and it was said they were afraid to show themselves in the place. But St. James’ Back was a shade, I think, lower than Lewin’s Mead; at all events it was further from the upper air of decent life; and in these horrid slums that dauntless woman had bought some tumble-down old buildings and turned them into schools—day-schools for girls and night-schools for boys, all the very sweepings of those wretched streets.

It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently before the large school-gallery in this place, teaching, singing, and praying with the wild street boys, in spite of endless interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles into hats on the table behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out “Amen” in the middle of the prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing, like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes, down from the gallery, round the great schoolroom and down the stairs, out into the 280street. These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour and, what seemed to me more marvellous still, she heeded, apparently, not at all the indescribable abomination of the odours of a tripe-and-trotter shop next door, wherein operations were frequently carried on which, together with the bouquet du peuple of the poor little unkempt scholars, rendered the school of a hot summer’s evening little better than the ill-smelling giro of Dante’s “Inferno.” These trifles, however, scarcely even attracted Mary Carpenter’s attention, fixed as it was on the possibility of “taking hold” (as she used to say) of one little urchin or another, on whom, for the moment her hopes were fixed.

The droll things which daily occurred in these schools, and the wonderful replies received from the scholars to questions testing their information, amused her intensely, and the more unruly were the young scamps, the more, I think, in her secret heart, she liked them, and gloried in taming them. She used to say, “Only to get them to use the school comb is something!” There was the boy who defined Conscience to me as “a thing a gen’elman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.” There was the boy who, sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on “Thankfulness,”—wherein I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as subjects for praise,—was interrogated as to which pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of the year? replied candidly, “Cock-fightin’, ma’am. There’s a pit up by the ‘Black Boy’ as is worth anythink in Brissel!”

The clergy troubled us little. One day an impressive young curate entered and sat silent, sternly critical to note what heresies were being instilled into the minds of his flock. “I am giving a lesson on Palestine,” I said; “I have just been at Jerusalem.” “In what sense?” said the awful young man, darkly discerning some mysticism (of 281the Swedenborgian kind, perhaps) beneath the simple statement. The boys who were dismissed from the school for obstreperous behaviour were a great difficulty to us, usually employing themselves in shouting and hammering at the door. One winter’s night when it was raining heavily, as I was passing through Lewin’s Mead, I was greeted by a chorus of voices, “Cob-web, Cob-web!” emanating from the depths of a black archway. Standing still under my umbrella, and looking down the cavern, I remarked, “Don’t you think I must be a little tougher than a cobweb to come out such a night as this to teach such little scamps as you?”

“Indeed you is, Mum; that’s true! And stouter too!”

“Well, don’t you think you would be more comfortable in that nice warm schoolroom than in this dark, cold place?”

“Yes, ’m, we would.”

“You’ll have to promise to be tremendously good, I can tell you, if I bring you in again. Will you promise?”

Vows of everlasting order and obedience were tendered; and, to Miss Carpenter’s intense amusement, I came into St. James’ Back, followed by a whole troop of little outlaws reduced to temporary subjection. At all events they never shouted “Cob-web” again. Indeed, at all times the events of the day’s work, if they bordered on the ludicrous (as was often the case), provoked her laughter till the tears ran down her cheeks. One night she sat grieving over a piece of ingratitude on the part of one of her teachers, and told me she had given him some invitation for the purpose of conciliating him and “heaping coals of fire on his head.” “It will take another scuttle, my dear friend,” I remarked; and thereupon her tears stopped, and she burst into a hearty fit of laughter. Next evening she said to me dolorously, “I tried that other scuttle, but it was no go!”

282Of course, like every mortal, Mary Carpenter had les défauts de ses qualités. Her absorption in her work always blinded her to the fact that other people might possibly be bored by hearing of it incessantly.

In India, I have been told that a Governor of Madras observed, after her visit, “It is very astonishing; I listened to all Miss Carpenter had to tell me, but when I began to tell her what I knew of this country, she dropped asleep.” Indeed, the poor wearied and over-worked brain, when it had made its effort, generally collapsed, and in two or three minutes, after “holding you with her eye” through a long philanthropic history, Miss Carpenter might be seen to be, to all intents and purposes, asleep.

On one occasion, that most loveable old man, Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, came to pass two or three days at Red Lodge House, and Miss Carpenter was naturally delighted to take him about and show him her schools and explain everything to him. Mr. May listened with great interest for a time, but at last his attention flagged and two or three times he turned to me; “When can we have our talk, which Theodore Parker promised me?” “Oh, by and by,” Miss Carpenter always interposed; till one day, after we had visited St. James’ Back, we arrived all three at the foot of the tremendous stairs, almost like those of the Trinità, which then existed in Bristol, and were called the Christmas Steps. “Now, Mr. May and Miss Cobbe” (said Mary Carpenter, cheerfully), “you can have your talk.” And so we had—till we got to the top, when she resumed the guidance of the conversation. Good jokes were often made of this little weakness, but it had its pathetic side. Never was there a word of real egotism in her eager talk, or the evidence of the slightest wish to magnify her own doings, or to impress her hearers with her immense share in the public benefits she described. It was her deep conviction that to turn one of these poor 283sinners from the errors of its ways, to reach to the roots of the misery and corruption of the “perishing and dangerous classes,” was the most important work which could possibly be undertaken; and she, very naturally, in consequence made it the most prominent, indeed, almost the sole, subject of discourse. I was once in her company at Aubrey House in London, when there happened to be present half-a-dozen people, each one devoted to some special political, religious or moral agitation. Miss Carpenter remarked in a pause in the conversation; “It is a thousand pities that everybody will not join and give the whole of their minds to the great cause of the age, because, if they would, we should carry it undoubtedly.” “What is the great cause of the age?” we simultaneously exclaimed. “Parliamentary Reform?” said our host, Mr. Peter Taylor; “the Abolition of Slavery?” said Miss Remond, a Negress, Mrs. Taylor’s companion; “Teetotalism?” said another; “Woman’s Suffrage?” said another; “The conversion of the world to Theism?” said I. In the midst of the clamour, Miss Carpenter looked serenely round, “Why! the Industrial Schools Bill of course!” Nobody enjoyed the joke, when we all began to laugh, more than the reformer herself.

It was, above all, in the Red Lodge Reformatory that Mary Carpenter’s work was at its highest. The spiritual interest she took in the poor little girls was, beyond words, admirable. When one of them whom she had hoped was really reformed fell back into thievish or other evil ways, her grief was a real vicarious repentance for the little sinner; a Christ-like sentiment infinitely sacred. Nor was she at all blind to the children’s defects, or easily deceived by the usual sham reformations of such institutions. In one of her letters to me she wrote these wise words (July 9th, 1859):—

“I have pointed out in one of my reports why I have more trouble than others (e.g., especially, Catholics). A system of 284steady repression and order would make them sooner good scholars; but then I should not have the least confidence in the real change of their characters. Even with my free system in the Lodge, remember how little we knew of Hill’s and Hawkins’ real characters, until they were in the house? (Her own private house). I do not object to nature being kept under curbs of rule and order for a time, until some principles are sufficiently rooted to be appealed to. But then it must have play, or we cannot possibly tell what amount of reformation has taken place. The Catholics have an enormous artificial help in their religion and priests; but I place no confidence in the slavish obedience they produce and the hypocrisy which I have generally found inseparable from Catholic influence. I would far rather have M. A. M’Intyre coolly say, ‘I know it was wrong’” (a barring and bolting out) “and Anne Crooks in the cell for outrageous conduct, acknowledge the same—‘I know it was wrong, but I am not sorry,’ than any hypocritical and heartless acknowledgments.”

Indeed nobody had a keener eye to detect cant of any kind, or a greater hatred of it. She told me one day of her visit to a celebrated institution, said to be supported semi-miraculously by answers to prayer in the specific shape of cheques. Miss Carpenter said that she asked the matron (or some other official) whether it was supported by voluntary subscriptions? “Oh, dear no! madam,” the woman replied; “Do you not know it is entirely supported by Prayer?” “Oh, indeed,” replied Miss Carpenter. “I dare say, however, when friends have once been moved to send you money, they continue to do so regularly?” “Yes, certainly they do.” “And they mostly send it at the beginning of the year?” “Yes, yes, very regularly.” “Ah, well,” said Miss Carpenter, “when people send me money for Red Lodge under those circumstances, I enter them in my Reports as Annual Subscribers!”

285When our poor children at last left the Reformatory, Mary Carpenter always watched their subsequent career with deep interest, gloried in receiving intelligence that they were behaving honestly and steadily, or deplored their backslidings in the contrary event. In short, her interest was truly in the children themselves, in their very souls; and not (as such philanthropy too often becomes) an interest in her Institution. Those who know most of such work will best understand how wide is the distinction.

But Mary Carpenter was not only the guardian and teacher of the poor young waifs and strays of Bristol when she had caught them in her charity-traps. She was also their unwearied advocate with one Government after another, and with every public man and magistrate whom she could reasonably or unreasonably attack on their behalf. Never was there such a case of the Widow and the Unjust Judge; till at last most English statesmen came to recognise her wisdom, and to yield readily to her pressure, and she was a “power in the State.” As she wrote to me about her Industrial School, so was it in everything else:—

“The magistrates have been lapsing into their usual apathy; so I have got a piece of artillery to help me in the shape of Mr. M. D. Hill.... They have found by painful experience that I cannot be made to rest while justice is not done to these poor children.” (July 6th, 1859.)

And again, some years later, when I had told her I had sat at dinner beside a gentleman who had opposed many of her good projects:—

“I am very sorry you did not see through Mr. ——, and annihilate him! Of course, I shall never rest in this world till the children have their birthrights in this so-called Christian country; but my next mode of attack I have not decided on yet!” (February 13th, 1867.)

286At last my residence under Mary Carpenter’s roof came to a close. My health had broken down two or three times in succession under a régime for which neither habit nor constitution had fitted me, and my kind friend, Dr. Symonds’, peremptory orders necessitated arrangements of meals which Miss Carpenter thought would occasion too much irregularity in her little household, which (it must be remembered) was also a branch of the Reformatory work. I also sadly perceived that I could be of no real comfort or service as an inmate of her house, though I could still help her, and perhaps more effectually, by attending her schools while living alone in the neighbourhood. Her overwrought and nervous temperament could ill bear the strain of a perpetual companionship, or even the idea that any one in her house might expect companionship from her; and if, while I was yet a stranger, she had found some fresh interest in my society, it doubtless ceased when I had been a twelvemonth under her roof, and knew everything which she could tell me about her work and plans. As I often told her (more in earnest than she supposed), I knew she would have been more interested in me had I been either more of a sinner or more of a saint!

And so, a few weeks later, the separation was made in all friendliness, and I went to live alone at Belgrave House, Durdham Down, where I took lodgings, still working pretty regularly at the Red Lodge and Ragged Schools, but gradually engaging more in Workhouse visiting and looking after friendless girls, so that my intercourse with Miss Carpenter became less and less frequent, though always cordial and pleasant.

Years afterwards when I had ceased to reside in the neighbourhood of Bristol, I enjoyed several times the pleasure of receiving visits from Miss Carpenter at my home in London, and hearing her accounts of her Indian travels and 287other interests. In 1877, I went to Clifton to attend an Anti-vivisection meeting, and also one for Woman Suffrage; and at the latter of these I found myself with great pleasure on the same platform with Mary Carpenter. (She was also an Anti-vivisectionist and always signed our Memorials.) Her biographer and nephew, Professor Estlin Carpenter, while fully stating her recognition of the rightfulness of the demand for votes for women and also doing us the great service of printing Mr. Mill’s most admirable letter to her on the subject (Life, p. 493) seems unaware that she ever publicly advocated the cause of political rights for women. But on this occasion, as I have said, she took her place on the platform of the West of England Branch of the Association, at its meeting in the Victoria Rooms; and, in my hearing, either proposed or seconded one of the resolutions demanding the franchise, adding a few words of cordial approval.

Before I returned to London on this occasion I called on Miss Carpenter, bringing with me a young niece. I found her at Red Lodge; and she insisted on my going with her over all our old haunts, and noting what changes and improvements she had made. I was tenderly touched by her great kindness to my young companion and to myself; and by the added softness and gentleness which years had brought to her. She expressed herself as very happy in every way; and, in truth, she seemed to me like one who had reached the Land of Beulah, and for whom there would be henceforth only peace within and around.

A few weeks later I was told that her servant had gone into her bedroom one morning and found her weeping for her brother, Philip Carpenter, of whose death she had just heard. The next morning the woman entered again at the same hour, but Mary Carpenter was lying quite still, in the posture in which she had lain in sleep. Her “six days’ work” was 288done. She had “gone home,” and I doubt not “ta’en her wages.” Here is the last letter she wrote to me:—

“There are some things of which the most clear and unanswerable reasoning could not convince me! One of these is, that a wise, all powerful and loving Father can create an immortal spirit for eternal misery. Perhaps you are wiser than I and more accessible to arguments (though I doubt this), and I send you the enclosed, which I do not want back. Gógurth’s answer to such people is the best I ever heard—‘If you are child of Devil—good; but I am child of God!’

“I was very glad to get a glimpse of you; I do not trouble you with my doings, knowing that you have enough of your own. You may like to see an abstract of my experience.

And here is a Poem which she gave me in MS. the day she wrote it. I do not think it has seen the light.

The teaching work in the Red Lodge and the Ragged Schools, which I continued for a long time after leaving Miss Carpenter’s house, was not, I have thought on calm reflection in after years, very well done by me. I have always lacked imagination enough to realize what are the mental limitations of children of the poorer classes; and in my eagerness to interest them and convey my thoughts, I know I often spoke over their heads, with too rapid utterance and using too many words not included in their small vocabularies. I think my lessons amused and even sometimes delighted them; I was always told they loved them; but they enjoyed them rather I fear like fireworks than instruction! In the Red Lodge there were fifty poor little girls from 10 to 15 years of age who constituted our prisoners. They were regularly committed to the Lodge as to jail, and when Miss Carpenter was absent I had to keep the great door key. They used to sit on their benches in rows opposite to me in the beautiful black oak-panelled room of the Lodge, and read their dreary books, and rejoice (I have no doubt) when I broke in with explanations and illustrations. Their poor faces, often scarred by disease, and ill-shaped heads, were then lifted up with cheerful looks to me, and I ploughed away as best I could, trying to get any ideas into their minds; in accordance with Mary Carpenter’s often repeated assurance that anything whatever which could pass from my thoughts to theirs would be a benefit, as supplying other pabulum than their past familiarity with all things evil. When we had got through one school reading book in this way I begged Miss Carpenter to find me another to afford a few fresh themes for observations, but no; 290she preferred that I should go over the same again. Some of the children had singular histories. There was one little creature named Kitty, towards whom I confess my heart warmed especially, for her leonine disposition! Whenever there was some mischief discovered and the question asked Who was in fault? invariably Kitty’s hand went up: “I did it, ma’am;” and the penalty, even of incarceration in a certain dreaded “cell,” was heroically endured. Kitty had been duly convicted at Sessions at the mature age of ten. Of what high crime and misdemeanour does the reader suppose? Pilfering, perhaps, a pocket handkerchief, or a penny? Not at all! Of nothing less than Horse-stealing! She and her brother, a mite two years younger than herself, were dispatched by their vagabond parents to journey by one road, while they themselves travelled by another, and on the way the children, who were, of course, directed to pick and steal all they could lay hands on, observed an old grey mare feeding in a field near the road and reflecting that a ride on horseback would be preferable to their pilgrimage on foot, they scrambled on the mare’s back and by some means guided her down the road and went off in triumph. The aggrieved farmer to whom the mare belonged, brought the delinquents to justice, and after being tried with all the solemn forms of British law (their heads scarcely visible over the dock), the children were sent respectively to a Boy’s Reformatory, and to Red Lodge. We kept Kitty, of course, till her full term expired when she was 15, and I am afraid Miss Carpenter strained the law a little in detaining her still longer to allow her to gain more discretion before returning to those dreadful tramps, her parents. She herself, indeed, felt the danger as she grew older, and attached herself much to us both. A teacher whom I had imported from Ireland (one of my own village pupils from Donabate) told me that Kitty spoke of us with tears, and that she had seen her one day, when given a stocking of mine whereupon to practise darning, furtively kissing it when she thought no one was observing her. She once said, “God bless Exeter jail! I should never have been here but for that.” But at last, like George Eliot’s Gipsy, the claims of race over-mastered all her other feelings. Kitty left us to rejoin her mother, who had perpetually called to see her; and a month or two later the poor child died of fever, caught in the wretched haunts of her family.

Door in Oak Room, Red Lodge,
Mary Carpenter, Kitty, etc.

291In a visit which I made to Red Lodge two years ago, I was struck by the improved physical aspect of the poor girls in the charge of our successors. The depressed, almost flattened form of head which the experienced eye of Sir Walter Crofton had caught (as I did), as a terrible “Note” of hereditary crime, was no longer visible; nor was the miserable blear-eyed, scrofulous appearance of the faces of many of my old pupils to be seen any more. Thirty years have, I hope and believe, raised even the very lowest stratum of the population of England.

Miss Carpenter’s work in founding the first Reformatory for girl-criminals with the munificent aid of that generous woman Lady Byron, has beyond question, contributed in no mean degree to thinning the ranks of female crime during the last quarter of a century. Issuing from the Red Lodge at the end of their four or five years’ term of confinement and instruction, the girls rarely returned, like poor Kitty, to their parents, but passed first through a probation as Miss Carpenter’s own servants in her private house, under good Marianne and her successors, and then into that humbler sort of domestic service which is best for girls of their class; I mean that wherein the mistress works and takes her meals with the servant. The pride and joy of these girls when they settled into steady usefulness was often a pleasure to witness. Miss Carpenter used to say, 292“When I hear one of them talk of ‘My Kitchen,’ I know it is all right!” Of course many of them eventually married respectably. On the whole I do not think that more than five, or at the outside ten per cent. fell into either crime or vice after leaving Red Lodge, and if we suppose that there have been something like 500 girls in the Reformatory since Lady Byron bought the Red Lodge and dedicated it to that benevolent use, we may fairly estimate, that Mary Carpenter deflected towards goodness the lives of at least four hundred and fifty women, who, if she had not stirred in their interest, would almost inevitably have spent their days in crime or vice, and ended them either in jail or in the “Black Ward” of the workhouse.

There is an epitaph on a good clergyman in one of the old churches of Bristol which I have always thought remarkably fine. It runs thus as far as I remember:—

We do not, in our day (unless we happen to belong to the Salvation Army) talk much about “saving souls” in the old Evangelical sense; and I, at least, hold very strongly, and have even preached to the purpose, that every human soul is “Doomed to be Saved,” destined by irrevocable Divine love and mercy to be sooner or later, in this world or far off worlds to come, brought like the Prodigal to the Father’s feet. But there is a very real sense in which a true philanthropist “saves” his fellow-men from moral evil—the sense in which Plutarch uses the word, and which every theology must accept, and in this sense I unhesitatingly affirm, that Mary Carpenter SAVED four hundred human souls.

293It must be borne in mind also that it was not only in her own special Reformatory that her work was carried on. By advocating in her books and by her active public pleading the modification of the laws touching juvenile crime, she practically originated—in concert with Recorder Hill—the immense improvement which has taken place in the whole treatment of young criminals who, before her time, were simply sent to jail, and there too often stamped with the hallmark of crime for life.

As regards the other part of Miss Carpenter’s work which she permitted me to share,—the Ragged Schools and Streetboys’ Sunday School in St. James’s Back,—I laboured, of course, under the same disadvantage as in the Red Lodge of never clearly foreseeing how much would be understood of my words or ideas; and what would be most decidedly “caviar to the general.” A ludicrous example of this occurred on one occasion. I always anxiously desired to instil into the minds of the children admiration for brave and noble deeds, and therefore told them stories of heroism whenever my subject afforded an opening for one. Having to give a lesson on France, and some boy asking a question about the Guillotine, I narrated, as vivaciously and dramatically as I knew how, the beautiful tale of the Nuns who chanted the Te Deum on the scaffold, till one voice after another was silenced for ever, and the brave Abbess still continued to sing the grand old hymn of Ambrose, till her turn came for death. I fondly hoped that some of my own feelings in describing the scene were communicated to my audience. But such hopes were dashed when, a day or two later, Miss Carpenter came home from her lesson at the school, and said: “My dear friend, what in the name of heaven can you have been teaching those boys? They were all excited about some lesson you had given them. They said you described cutting off a lot of 294heads; and it was ‘chop! and a head fell into the basket; and chop! another head in the basket! They said it was such a nice lesson!’ But whose heads were cut off, or why, none of them remembered,—only chop! and a head fell in the basket!”

I consoled myself, however, for this and many another defeat by the belief that if my lessons did not much instruct their wild pates, their hearts were benefitted in some small measure by being brought under my friendly influence. Miss Carpenter always made the schoolmaster of the Day School attend at our Sunday Night-School, fearing some wild outbreak of the 100 and odd boys and hobbledehoys who formed our congregation. The first Sunday, however, on which the school was given into my charge, I told the schoolmaster he might leave me and go home; and I then stopped alone (we had no assistants) with the little herd. My lessons, I am quite sure, were all the more impressive; and though Miss Carpenter was quite alarmed when she heard what I had done, she consented to my following my own system of confidence, and I never had reason to repent the adoption of it.

In my humble judgment (and I know it was also that of one much better able to judge, Lord Shaftesbury) these elastic and irregular Ragged Schools were far better institutions for the class for whom they were designed than the cast-iron Board Schools of our time. They were specially designed to civilize the children: to tame them enough to induce them, for example, to sit reasonably still on a bench for half-an-hour at a time; to wash their hands and faces; to comb their hair; to forbear from shouting, singing, “turning wheels,” throwing marbles, making faces, or similarly disporting themselves, while in school; after which preliminaries they began to acquire the art of learning lessons. It was not exactly Education in the literary sense, but it was a Training, 295without which as a substructure the “Three R’s” are of little avail,—if we may believe in William of Wykeham’s axiom that “Manners makyth Manne.”

Another, and, as I think, great merit of the Ragged School system was, that decent and self-respecting parents who strove to keep their children from the contamination of the gutter and were willing to pay their penny a week to send them to school, were not obliged, as now, to suffer their boys and girls to associate in the Board Schools with the very lowest and roughest of children fresh from the streets. Nothing has made me more indignant than a report I read some time ago in one of the newspapers of a poor widow who had “seen better days,” being summoned and fined for engaging a non-certified poor governess to teach her little girl, rather than allow the child to attend the Board School and associate with the girls she would meet there. As if all the learning of a person, if he could pour it into a child’s brain, would counterbalance in a young girl’s mind the foul words and ideas familiar to the hapless children of the “perishing and dangerous classes!”

People talk seriously of the physical infection which may be conveyed where many young children are gathered in close contiguity. They would, if they knew more, much more anxiously deprecate the moral contagion which may be introduced into a school by a single girl who has been initiated into the mysteries of a vicious home. On two separate occasions Miss Carpenter and I were startled by what I can only describe as a portentous wave of evil which passed over the entire community of 50 girls in the Red Lodge. In each case it was undeniably traceable to the arrival of new comers who had been sent by mistake of magistrates to our Reformatory when they ought to have gone to a Penitentiary. It was impossible for us to guess how, with all the watchful guardianship of the teachers, these 296unhappy girls had any opportunity for corrupting their companions, but that they did so (temporarily only, as they were immediately discovered and banished) I saw with my own eyes beyond possibility of mistake.

It came to me as part of my work with Miss Carpenter to visit the homes of all the children who attended our Ragged Schools—either Day Schools or Night Schools; nominally to see whether they belonged to the class which should properly benefit by gratuitous education, but also to find out whether I could do anything to amend their condition. Many were the lessons I learned respecting the “short” but by no means “simple” annals of the poor, when I made those visits all over the slums of Bristol.

The shoemakers were a very numerous and a very miserable class among the parents of our pupils. When anything interfered with trade they were at once thrown into complete idleness and destitution. Over and over again I tried to get the poor fellows, when they sat listless and lamenting, to turn to any other kind of labour in their own line; to endeavour, e.g., to make slippers for me, no matter how roughly, or to mend my boots; promising similar orders from friends. Not one would, or could, do anything but sew upper or under leathers, as the case might be! The men sat all day long when there was work, sewing in their stuffy rooms with their wives busy washing or attending to the children, and the whole place in a muddle; but they would converse eagerly and intelligently with me about politics or about other towns and countries, whereas the poor over-worked women would never join in our talk. When I addressed them they at once called my attention to Jenny’s torn frock and Tom’s want of a new cap. One of these shoemakers, in whom I felt rather special interest, turned to me one day, looked me straight in the face, and said: “I want to ask you a question. Why does a lady like you come and sit and 297talk to me?” I thought it a true token of confidence, and was glad I could answer honestly that I had come first to see about his children, but now came because I liked him.

Other cases which came to my knowledge in these rounds were dreadfully sad. In one poor room I found a woman who had been confined only a few days, sitting up in bed doing shopwork, her three or four little children all endeavouring to work likewise for the miserable pay. Her husband was out looking vainly for work. She showed me a sheaf of pawntickets for a large quantity of table and house linen and plated goods. Her husband and she had formerly kept a flourishing inn, but the railway had ruined it, and they had been obliged to give it up and come to live in Bristol, and get such work as they could do—at starvation wages. She was a gentle, delicate, fair woman, who had been lady’s maid in a wealthy family known to me by name. I asked her did she not go out and bring the children to the Downs on a Sunday? “Ah! we tried it once or twice,” she said, “but it was too terrible coming back to this room; we never go now.”

Another case of extreme poverty was less tragic. There was a woman with three children whose husband was a soldier in India, to whom she longingly hoped to be eventually sent out by the military authorities. Meanwhile she was in extreme poverty in Bristol, and so was her friend, a fine young Irish woman. Their sole resource was a neighbour who possessed a pair of good sheets, and was willing to lend them to them by day, provided they were restored for her own use every night! This did not appear a very promising source of income, but the two friends contrived to make it one. They took the sheets of a morning to a pawnbroker who allowed them,—I think it was two shillings, upon them. With this they stocked a basket with oranges, apples, gooseberries, pins and needles, match boxes, 298lace,—anything which could be had for such a price, according to the season. Then one or other of the friends arrayed herself in the solitary bonnet and shawl which they possessed between them, and sallied out for the day to dispose of her wares, while the other remained in their single room to take care of the children. The evening meal was bought and brought home by the outgoing friend with the proceeds of her day’s sales, and then the sheets were redeemed from pawn at the price of a half-penny each day and gratefully restored to the proprietor. This ingenious mode of filling five mouths went on, with a little help, when I came to know of it, in the way of a fresh-filled basket—for a whole winter. I thought it so curious that I described it to dear Harriet St. Leger one day when she was passing through Bristol and spent some hours with me. She was affected almost to tears and pushed into my hand, at the last moment at the Station, all the silver in her purse, to give to the friends. The money amounted to 7s. 6d., and when Harriet was gone I hastened to give it to the poor souls. It proved to be one of the numerous occasions in life in which I have experienced a sort of fatality, as if the chance of doing a bit of good to somebody were offered to us by Providence to take or leave and, if we postpone taking it, the chance is lost. I was tired, and the room inhabited by the poor women was, as it happened, at the other end of Bristol, and I could not indulge myself with a fly, but I reflected that the money now really belonged to them, and I was bound to take it to them without delay. When I reached their room I found I was in the very nick of time. An order had come for the soldier’s wife to present herself at some military office next day with her children, and with a certain “kit” of clothes and utensils for the voyage, and if all were right she would be sent to join her husband’s regiment in India by a vessel to sail immediately. Without the proper outfit she would not have been taken; 299and of course the poor soul had no kit and was in an agony of anxiety. Harriet’s gift, with some trifling addition, happily supplied all that was wanted.

I did not see so much of drunkenness in Bristol as the prominence given to the subject by many philanthropists led me to expect. Of course I came across terrible cases of it now and then, as for example a little boy of ten at our Ragged School who begged Miss Carpenter to let him go home at mid-day, and on enquiry, it proved that he wanted to release his mother, whom he had locked in, dead-drunk, at nine in the morning. I also had a frightful experience of the case of the drunken wife of a poor man dying of agonizing cancer. The doctor who attended him told me that a little brandy was the only thing to help him, and I brought small quantities to him frequently, till, when I was leaving home for three weeks, I thought it best to give a whole bottle to his wife under injunctions to administer it by proper degrees. Happening to pass by the door of the wretched couple a day later, before I started, I saw a small crowd, and asked what had happened? “Mrs. Whale had been drinking and had fallen down stairs and broken her neck and was dead.” Horror-struck I mounted the almost perpendicular stair and found it was so; the poor hapless husband was still alive, and my empty brandy bottle was on the table.

The other great form of vice however was thrust much more often on my notice—the ghastly ruin of the wretched girls who fell into it and the nameless damnation of the hags and Jews who traded on their souls and bodies. The cruelty of the fate of some of the young women was often piteous. Thankful I am that the law for assaults has been made since those days far more stringent and is oftener put in force. There were stories which came to my personal knowledge which would draw tears from many eyes were I to tell them, but the more cruel the wrong done, the more difficult it 300generally proved to induce anybody to undertake to receive the victims into their houses on any terms.

A gentleman whom I met in Italy, who knew Bristol well, told me he had watched a poor young sailor’s destruction under the influence of some of the eighteen hundred miserable women then infesting the city. He had just been paid off and had received £73 for a long service at sea. Mr. Empson first saw him in the fangs of two of the wretched creatures, and next, six weeks later, he found him dying in the Infirmary, having spent every shilling of his money in drink and debauchery. He told Mr. Empson that, after the first week, he had never taken any food at all, but lived only on stimulants.

CHAPTER XI. BRISTOL. THE SICK IN WORKHOUSES.

303My new life on Durdham Down, though solitary, was a very happy one. I had two nice rooms in Belgrave House (then the last house on the road opening on the beautiful Downs from the Redland side), wherein a bright, excellent, pretty widow, Mrs. Stone, kept several suites of lodgings. It is not often, alas! that the relations of lodger and landlady are altogether pleasant, but in my case they were eminently so, and resulted in cordial and permanent mutual regard. My little bedroom opened by a French window on a balcony leading to a small garden, and beyond it I had an immense view of Bristol and the surrounding country, over the smoke of which the rising sun often made Turneresque pictures. My sitting room had a front and a corner view of the delightful Downs as far as “Cook’s Folly” and the Nightingale Valley; and often, over the “Sea Wall,” the setting sun went down in great glory. I walked down every week-day into Bristol (of course I needed more than ever to economise, and even the omnibus fare had to be considered), and went about my various avocations in the schools and workhouse till I could do no more, when I made my way home as cheaply as I could contrive, to dinner. I had my dear dog Hajjin, a lovely mouse-coloured Pomeranian, for companion at all times, and on Sundays we generally treated ourselves to a good ramble over the Downs and beyond them, perhaps as far as Kings’-Weston. The whole district is dear to me still.

The return to fresh air and to something like country life was delightful. It had been, I must avow, an immense 304strain on my resolution to live in Bristol among all the sordid surroundings of Miss Carpenter’s house; and when once in a way in those days I left them and caught a glimpse of the country, the effort to force myself back was a hard one. One soft spring day, I remember, I had gone across the Downs and sat for half an hour under a certain horse-chestnut tree, which was that day in all the exquisite beauty of its young green leaves. I felt this was all I wanted to be happy—merely to live in the beauty and peace of Nature, as of old at Newbridge; and I reflected that, of course, I could do it, at once, by breaking off with Miss Carpenter and giving up my work in hideous Bristol. But, per contra, I had concluded that this work was wanted to be done and that I could do it; and had seriously given myself to it, believing that so I could best do God’s will. Thus there went on in my mind for a little while a very stiff fight, one of those which leave us either stronger or weaker ever after. Now at last, without any effort on my part, the bond which held me to live in Red Lodge House, was loosened, and I was able both to go on with my work in Bristol and also to breathe the fresh air in the morning and to see the sun rise and set, and often to enjoy a healthful run over those beautiful Downs. By degrees, also, I made several friendships in the neighbourhood, some most dear and faithful ones which have lasted ever since; and many people were very kind to me and helped me in various ways in my work. I shall speak of these friends in another chapter.

One of my superstitions has long been that if any particular task seems to us at the first outlook specially against the grain, it will continually happen that in the order of things it comes knocking at our door and practically saying to our consciences: “Are you going to get up and do what is wanted, or sit still and please yourself with something else?” 305In this guise of disagreeability, workhouse visiting first presented itself to me. Miss Carpenter frequently mentioned the workhouse as a place which ought to be looked after; and which she believed sadly wanted voluntary inspection; but the very name conveyed to me such an impression of dreary hopelessness that I shrank from the thought. When St. Paul coupled Hope with Faith and Charity he might have said “these three are one,” for without the Hope of achieving some good (or at least of stopping some evil) it is hard to gird ourselves to any practical exertion for our fellow-creatures. To lift up the criminal and perishing classes of the community and cut off the root of crime and vice by training children in morality and religion, this was a soul-inspiring idea. But to bring a small modicum of cheer to the aged and miserable paupers, who may be supposed generally to be undergoing the inevitable penalties of idle or drunken lives, was far from equally uplifting! However, my first chance-visit to St. Peter’s in Bristol with Miss Elliot, showed me so much to be done, so many claims to sympathy and pity, and the sore lack of somebody, unconnected officially with the place, to meet them, that I at once felt that here I must put in my oar.

The condition of the English workhouses generally at that period (1859) was very different from what it is now. I visited many of them in the following year or two in London and the provincial towns, and this is what I saw. The sick lay on wretched beds, fit only for able-bodied tramps, and were nursed mostly by old pauper women of the very lowest class. The infirm wards were very frequently placed in the worst possible positions. I remember one (in London) which resounded all day long with din from an iron-foundry just beneath, so that one could not hear oneself speak; and another, of which the windows could not be opened in the hottest weather, because carpets were taken to be beaten in 306the court below. The treatment of the pauper children was no less deplorable. They were joyless, spiritless little creatures, without “mothering” (as blessed Mrs. Senior said a few years later), without toys, without the chance of learning anything practical for use in after life, even to the lighting of a fire or cooking a potato. Their poor faces were often scarred by disease and half blinded by ophthalmia. The girls wore the hideous workhouse cotton frocks, not half warm enough to keep them healthy in those bare, draughty wards, and heavy hob-nailed shoes which acted like galley-slaves’ bullets on their feet when they were turned to “play” in a high-walled, sunless yard, which was sometimes, as I have seen, six inches deep in coarse gravel. As to the infants, if they happened to have a good motherly matron it was so far well, though even she (mostly busy elsewhere) could do but little to make the crabbed old pauper nurses kind and patient. But how often, we might ask, were the workhouse matrons of those days really kind-hearted and motherly? Of course they were selected by the gentlemen guardians (there were no ladies then on the Boards) for quite other merits; and as Miss Carpenter once remarked to me from the depth of her experience:—

“There never yet was man so clever but the Matron of an Institution could bamboozle him about every department of her business!”

I have sat in the Infants’ ward when an entire Board of about two dozen gentlemen tramped through it, for what they considered to be “inspection”; and anything more helpless and absurd than those masculine “authorities” appeared as they glanced at the little cots (never daring to open one of them) while the awakened babies screamed at them in chorus, it has seldom been my lot to witness.

On one occasion I visited an enormous workhouse in a provincial town where there were nearly 500 sick and infirm 307patients. The Matron told me she had but lately been appointed to her post. I said, “It is a tremendously heavy charge for you, especially with only these pauper nurses. No doubt you have gone through a course of Hospital training, and know how to direct everything?”

“O, dear. No! Madam!” replied the lady with a toss of her cap-strings; “I never nursed anybody I can assure you, except my ’usband, before I came here. It was misfortune brought me to this!”

How many other Masters and Matrons throughout the country received their appointments with as little fitness for them and simply as favours from influential or easy-going guardians, who may guess?

I had at this time become acquainted with the friend whose comradeship—cemented in the dreary wards of Bristol Workhouse more than 30 years ago—has been ever since one of the great pleasures of my life. All those who know Miss Elliot, daughter of the late Dean of Bristol, will admit that it would be very superfluous, not to say impertinent, to enlarge on the privileges of friendship with her. Miss Elliot was at that time living at the old Deanery close to Bristol Cathedral, and taking part in every good work which was going on in the city and neighbourhood. Among other things she had been teaching regularly for years in Miss Carpenter’s Reformatory, regardless of the prejudice against her unitarianism; and one day she called at Miss Carpenter’s house to ask her what was to be done with Kitty, who had been very naughty. Miss Carpenter asked her to see the lady who had come to work with her; and we met for the first time. Miss Elliot begged me to return her visit, and though nothing was further from my mind at that time than to enter into anything like society, I was tempted by the great attractions of my brilliant young friend and her sister and of the witty and wide-minded Dean, and before long (especially after I went to 308live alone) I enjoyed much intercourse with the delightful household.

Miss Elliot had been in the habit of visiting a poor old woman named Mrs. Buckley, who had formerly lived close to the Deanery and had been removed to the workhouse; and one day she asked me to accompany her on her errand. This being over, I wandered off to the various wards where other poor women, and also the old and invalid men, spent their dreary days, and soon perceived how large a field was open for usefulness in the place.

The first matter which occupied us was the condition of the sick and infirm paupers; first of the women only; later of both men and women. The good Master and Matron admitted us quite freely to the wards, and we saw and knew everything which was going on. St. Peter’s was an exceptional workhouse in many respects. The house was evidently at one time (about A.D. 1600, like Red Lodge) the mansion of some merchant prince of Bristol, erected in the midst of the city. The outer walls are still splendid specimens of old English wood and stonework; and, within, the Board-room exhibits still a magnificent chimney-piece. The larger part of the building, however, has been pulled about and fashioned into large wards, with oak-beamed rafters on the upper floor, and intricate stairs and passages in all directions. Able-bodied paupers and casuals were lodged elsewhere (at Stapleton Workhouse) and were not admitted here. There were only the sick, the aged, the infirm, the insane and epileptic patients and lying-in women.

Here are some notes of the inmates of this place by Miss Elliot:—

“1. An old woman of nearly 80, and as I thought beyond power of understanding me. Once however when I was saying ‘good-bye’ before an absence of some months, I was attracted by her feeble efforts to catch my attention. She 309took my hand and gasped out ‘God bless you; you wont find me when you come back. Thank you for coming.’ I said most truly that I had never been any good to her, and how sorry I was I had never spoken to her. ‘Oh, but I see your face; it is always a great pleasure and seems bright. I was praying for you last night. I don’t sleep much of a night. I thank you for coming.’... 2. A woman between fifty and sixty dying of liver disease. She had been early left a widow, had struggled bravely, and reared her son so well that he became foreman at one of the first printing establishments in the city. His master gave us an excellent character of him. The poor mother unhappily had some illness which long confined her in another hospital, and when she left it her son was dead; dead without her care in his last hours. The worn-out and broken-down mother, too weak and hopeless to work any longer, came to her last place of refuge in the workhouse. There, day by day, we found her sitting on the side of her bed, reading and trying to talk cheerfully, but always breaking down utterly when she came to speak of her son. 3. Opposite to her an old woman of ninety lies, too weak to sit up. One day, not thinking her asleep, I went to her bedside. I shall never forget the start of joy, the eager hand, ‘Oh, Mary, Mary, you are come! Is it you at last?’ ‘Ah, poor dear,’ said the women round her, ‘she most always dreams of Mary. ’Tis her daughter, ladies, in London; she has written to her often, but don’t get any answer.’ The poor old woman made profuse apologies for her mistake, and laid her head wearily on the pillow where she had rested and dreamed, literally for years, of Mary.

“4. Further on is a girl of sixteen, paralyzed hopelessly for life. She had been maid-of-all-work in a family of twelve, and under her fearful drudgery had broken down thus early. ‘Oh, ma’am,’ she said with bursts of agony, ‘I did work; I was always willing to work, if God would let me; I did work while I could, but I shall never get well; Never!’ Alas, she may live as long as the poor cripple who died here last summer, after lying forty-six 310years in the same bed, gazing on the same blank, white wall. 5. The most cheerful woman in the ward is one who can never rise from her bed; but she is a good needlewoman, and is constantly employed in making shrouds. It would seem as if the dismal work gave her an interest in something outside the ward, and she is quite eager when the demand for her manufacture is especially great!

“In the Surgical Ward are some eight or ten patients; all in painful diseases. One is a young girl dying of consumption, complicated with the most awful wounds on her poor limbs. ‘But they don’t hurt so bad,’ she says, ‘as any one would think who looked at them; and it will soon be all over. I was just thinking it was four years to-day since I was brought into the Penitentiary,’ (it was after an attempt to drown herself after a sad life at Aldershot); ‘and now I have been here three years. God has been very good to me, and brought me safe when I didn’t deserve it.’ Over her head stands a print of the Lost Sheep, and she likes to have that parable read to her. Very soon that sweet, fair young face, as innocent as I have ever seen in the world, will bear no more marks of pain. Life’s whole tragedy will have been ended, and she is only just nineteen!”

[A few weeks later, on Easter Sunday morning when the rising sun was shining into the curtainless ward, the few patients who were awake saw this poor girl, who had not been able to raise herself or sit upright for many weeks, suddenly start forward, sitting straight up in bed with her arms lifted and an expression of ecstacy on her face, and something like a cry of joy on her lips. Then she fell back, and all was over. The incident, which was in every way striking and affecting, helped me to recall the conviction (set forth in my Peak in Darien), that the dying do, sometimes, catch a glimpse of blessed friends waiting for them on the threshold.]

“A little way off lies a woman dying in severest sufferings which have lasted long, and may yet last for weeks. Such part of her poor face as may be seen expresses almost angelic patience and submission, and the little she can say 311is all of gratitude to God and man. On the box beside her bed there stands usually a cup with a few flowers, or even leaves or weeds—something to which, in the midst of that sickening disease, she can look for beauty. When we bring her flowers her pleasure is almost too affecting to witness. She says she remembers when she used to climb the hedge rows to gather them in the ‘beautiful country.’”

Among the few ways open to us of relieving the miseries of these sick wards and of the parallel ones on the other side occupied by male sufferers, were the following:—The introduction of a few easy chairs with cushions for those who could sit by the fire in winter, and whose thinly-clothed frames could not bear the benches. Also bed-rests,—long knitted ones, fastened to the lower posts of the bed and passed behind the patient’s back, so as to form a kind of sitting hammock,—very great comforts where there is only one small bolster or pillow and the patient wants to sit up in bed. Occasionally we gave little packets of good tea; workhouse tea at that time being almost too nauseous to drink. We also brought pictures to hang on the walls. These we bought coloured and cheaply framed or varnished. Their effect upon the old women, especially pictures of children, was startling. One poor soul who had been lying opposite the same blank wall for twenty years, when I laid one of the coloured engravings on her bed preparatory to hanging it before her, actually kissed the face of the little child in the picture, and burst into tears.

Further, we brought a canary in a cage to hang in the window. This seems an odd gift, but it was so successful that I believe the good visitors who came after us have maintained a series of canaries ever since our time. The common interest excited by the bird brought friendliness and cheerfulness among the poor old souls, some of whom had kept up “a coolness” for years while living next to one another on their beds! The sleepless ones gloried in the summer-morning-song of Dicky, 312and every poor visitor, daughter or granddaughter, was sure to bring a handful of groundsel to the general rejoicing of Dicky’s friends. Of course, we also brought flowers whenever we could contrive it; or a little summer fruit or winter apples.

Lastly, Books, magazines, and simple papers of various kinds; such as Household Words, Chambers’ Magazine, &c. These were eagerly borrowed and exchanged, especially among the men. Nothing could be more dreary than the lives of those who were not actually suffering from any acute malady but were paralysed or otherwise disabled from work. I remember a ship-steward who had been struck with hemiplegia, and had spent the savings of his life time—no less than £800,—in futile efforts at cure. Another was a once-smart groom whom my friend exhorted to patience and thankfulness. “Yes, Ma’am,” he replied promptly, “I will be very thankful,—when I get out!”

As an example of the kind of way in which every sort of wretchedness drains into a workhouse and of what need there is for someone to watch for it there, I may record how we one day perceived at the far end of a very large ward a figure not at all of the normal workhouse stamp,—an unmistakeable gentleman,—sitting on the side of his bed. With some diffidence we offered him the most recent and least childish of our literature. He accepted the papers graciously, and we learnt from the Master that the poor man had been found on the Downs a few days before with his throat cut; happily not irreparably. He had come from Australia to Europe to dispute some considerable property, and had lost both his lawsuit and the friendship of all his English relatives, and was starving, and totally unable to pay his passage back to his wife and children at the Antipodes. We got up a little subscription, and the good Freemasons, finding him to be a Brother, did the rest, and sent him home across the seas, rejoicing, and with his throat mended!

313But the cases of the incurable poor weighed heavily on us, and as we studied it more, we came to see how exceedingly piteous is their destiny. We found that it is not an accidental misfortune, but a regular descent down the well-worn channels of Poverty, Disease and Death, for men and women to go to one or other of the 270 hospitals for curable patients which then existed in England (there must be many more now), and after a longer or shorter sojourn, to be pronounced “incurable,” destined perhaps to linger for a year or several years, but to die inevitably from Consumption, Cancer or some other of the dreadful maladies which afflict human nature. What then becomes of them? Their homes, if they had any before going into the hospital, are almost sure to be too crowded to receive them back, or too poor to supply them with both support and nursing for months of helplessness. There is no resource for them but the workhouse, and there they sink down, hopeless and miserable; the hospital comforts of good beds and furniture and carefully prepared food and skilled nurses all lost, and only the hard workhouse bed to lie, and die upon. The burst of agony with which many a poor creature has told me: “I am sent here because I am incurable,” remains one of the saddest of my memories.

Miss Elliot’s keen and practical mind turned over the problem of how this misery could be in some degree alleviated. There was no use in trying to get sufficient Hospitals for Incurables opened to meet the want. There were only two at that time in England, and they received (as they do now) a rather different class from those with whom we are concerned; namely, the deformed and permanently diseased. At the lowest rate of £30 a year it would have needed £900,000 a year to house the 30,000 patients whom we should have wished to take from the workhouses. The only possible plan was to improve their 314condition in the workhouses; and this we fondly hoped might be done (without burdening the ratepayers) by our plan, which was as follows:—

That the incurables in workhouses should be avowedly distinguished from other paupers, and separate wards be allowed to them. That into those wards private charity be freely admitted and permitted to introduce, with the sanction of the medical officer, such comforts as would alleviate the sufferings of the inmates, e.g., good spring beds, or air beds; easy-chairs, air-cushions, small refreshments such as good tea and lemons and oranges (often an immense boon to the sick); also snuff, cough lozenges, spectacles, flowers in the window, books and papers; and, above all, kindly visitors.

The plan was approved by a great many experienced men and women; and, as it would not have added a shilling anywhere to the rates, we were very hopeful that it might be generally adopted. Several pamphlets which we wrote, “The Workhouse as a Hospital,” “Destitute Incurables,” and the “Sick in Workhouses,” and “Remarks on Incurables,” were widely circulated. The newspapers were very kind, and leaders or letters giving us a helping hand were inserted in nearly all, except the Saturday Review, which refused even one of its own regular contributors’ requests to introduce the subject. I wrote an article called Workhouse Sketches for Macmillan’s Magazine, dealing with the whole subject, and begged that it might be inserted gratuitously. To my delight the editor, Mr. Masson, wrote to me the following kind letter which I have kept among my pleasant souvenirs:—

“As soon as possible in this part of the month, when there is much to do with the forthcoming number, I have 315read your paper. Having an almost countless number of MSS. in hand, I greatly feared I might, though very reluctantly, be compelled to return it, but the reading of it has so convinced me of the great importance of arousing interest in the subject, and the paper itself is so touching, that I think I ought, with whatever difficulty, to find a place for it....

“In any case accept my best thanks for the opportunity of reading so admirable and powerful an experience; and allow me to express my regret that I had not the pleasure of meeting you at Mrs. Reid’s.

“Should you object to your name appearing in connexion with this paper? It is our usual practice.”

The paper appeared and soon after, to my equal astonishment and delight, came a cheque for £14. It was the first money I had ever earned and when I had cashed the cheque I held the sovereigns in my hand and tossed them with a sense of pride and satisfaction which the gold of the Indies, if gained by inheritance, would not have given me! Naturally I went down straight to St. Peter’s and gave the poor old souls such a tea as had not been known before in the memory of the “oldest inhabitant.”

We also printed, and ourselves directed and posted circulars to the 666 Unions which then existed in England. We received a great many friendly letters in reply, and promises of help from Guardians in carrying out our plan. A certain number of Unions, I think 15, actually adopted it and set it going. We also induced the Social Science people, then very active and influential, to take it up, and papers on it were read at the Congresses in Glasgow and Dublin; the latter 316by myself. The Hon. Sec. (then the young poetess Isa Craig) wrote to me as follows:

“The case of the poor ‘incurables’ is truly heartrending. I cried over the proof of your paper—a queer proceeding on the part of the Sub-editor of the Social Science Transactions, but I hope an earnest of the sympathy your noble appeal shall meet with wherever our volume goes, setting in action the roused sense of humanity and justice to remedy such bitter wrong and misery.

A weightier testimony was that of the late Master of Balliol. The following letters from him on the subject are, I think, very characteristic and charming:—

“I am very much obliged to you for sending me the extract from the newspaper which contains the plan for Destitute Incurables. I entirely agree in the object and greatly like the touching and simple manner in which you have described it.

“The only thing that occurs to me in passing is whether the system of outdoor relief to incurables should not also be extended? Many would still require to be received into the house (I do not wish in any degree to take away from the poor the obligation to support their Incurables outdoors, and it is, perhaps, better to trust to the natural human pity of a cottage than to the better attendance, warmth, &c., 317of a workhouse). But I daresay you are right in sticking to a simple point.

“All the world seems to be divided into Political Economists, Poor Law Commissioners, Guardians, Policemen, and Philanthropists, Enthusiasts, and Christian Socialists. Is there not a large intermediate ground which anyone who can write might occupy, and who could combine a real knowledge of the problems to be solved with the enthusiasm which impels a person to devote their life to solving them?

“The way would be to hide the philanthropy altogether as a weakness of the flesh; and sensible people would then be willing to listen.

“I entirely like the plan and wish it success....

“I am afraid that I am not likely to have an opportunity of making the scheme known. But if you have any other objects in which I can help you I shall think it a great pleasure to do so.

“Remember me most kindly to the Dean and his daughters. I thought they were not going to banish themselves to Cannes. Wherever they are I cannot easily forget them.

“I hope you enjoy Garibaldi’s success. It is one of the very few public events that seem to make life happier.

“I write a line to thank you for the little pamphlet you have sent me which I read and like very much.

“There is no end of good that you may do by writing in that simple and touching style upon social questions.

“But don’t go to war with Political Economy. 1st. Because the P. E.’s are a powerful and dangerous class. 3182nd. Because it is impossible for ladies and gentlemen to fill up the interstices of legislation if they run counter to the common motives of self-interest. 3rd. (You won’t agree to this) Because the P. E.’s have really done more for the labouring classes by their advocacy of free trade, &c., than all the Philanthropists put together.

“I wish that it were possible as a matter of taste to get rid of all philanthropic expressions, ‘missions, &c.,’ which are distasteful to the educated. But I suppose they are necessary for the Collection of Money. And no doubt as a matter of taste there is a good deal that might be corrected in the Political Economists.

“The light of the feelings never teaches the best way of dealing with the world en masse and the dry light never finds its way to the heart either of man or beast.

“You see I want all the humanities combined with Political Economy. Perhaps, it may be replied that such a combination is not possible in human nature.

“Excuse my speculations and believe me in haste,

About the same time that we began to visit the Bristol work house, Miss Louisa Twining bravely undertook a systematic reform of the whole system throughout the country. It was an enormous task, but she had great energy, and a fund of good sense; and with the support of Lord Mount-Temple (then Hon. William Cowper-Temple), Mrs. Tait, and several other excellent and influential persons, she carried out a grand reformation through the length and breadth of the land. Her Workhouse Visiting Society, and the monthly Journal she edited as its organ, brought by degrees good sense and good feeling quietly and unostentatiously to bear on the Boards of Guardians and their officials all over the country, and one abuse after another was disclosed, discussed, condemned, and finally, in most cases abolished. I went up 319for a short visit to London at one time on purpose to learn all I could from General Twining (as I used to call her), and then returned to Bristol. I have been gratified to read in her charming Recollections published last year (1893), that in her well-qualified judgment Miss Elliot’s work and mine was really the beginning of much that has subsequently been done for the sick and for workhouse girls. She says:

“In 1861^[16] began the consideration of ‘Destitute Incurables,’ which was in its results to bring forth such a complete reform in the care of the sick in Workhouses, or at least I am surely justified in considering it one of the good seeds sown, which brought forth fruit in due season. One of the first to press the claims of these helpless ones on the notice of the public, who were, almost universally, utterly ignorant of their existence and their needs, was Frances Power Cobbe, who was then introduced to me; she lived near Bristol, and with her friend Miss Elliot, also of that place, had long visited the workhouse, and become acquainted with the inmates, helping more especially the school children, and befriending the girls after they went to service. This may be said to be one of the first beginnings of all those efforts now so largely developed by more than one society expressly for this object.

“I accompanied Miss Cobbe to the St. Giles’s Schools and to the Strand, West London, and Holborn Unions, and to the Hospital for Incurables at Putney, in aid of her plans.”—Recollections, p. 170.

While our plan for the Incurables was still in progress, I was obliged to spend a winter in Italy for my health, and on my way I went over the Hotel Dieu and the Salpêtrière in Paris, and several hospitals in Italy, to learn how best to treat this class of sufferers. I did not gain much. There were no arrangements that I noticed as better or more humane than 320our own, and in many cases they seemed to be worse. In particular the proximity of infectious with other cases in the Hotel Dieu was a great evil. I was examining the bed of a poor victim of rheumatism when, on looking a few feet across the floor, I beheld the most awful case of small-pox which could be conceived. Both in Paris, Florence and the great San-Spirito Hospital in Rome, the nurses, who in those days all were Sisters of Charity, seemed to me very heartless; proud of their tidy cupboards full of lint and bandages, but very indifferent to their patients. Walking a little in advance of one of them in Florence, I came into a ward where a poor woman was lying in a bed behind the door, in the last “agony.” A label at the foot of her bed bore the inscription “Olio Santo,” showing that her condition had been observed—yet there was no friendly breast on which the poor creature’s head could rest, no hand to wipe the deathsweats from her face. I called hastily to the Nun for help, but she replied with great coolness, “Ci vuole del cotone!” and seemed astonished when I used my own handkerchief. In San-Spirito the doctor who conducted me, and who was personally known to me, told me he would rather have our English pauper nurses than the Sisters. This, however, may have been a choice grounded on other reasons beside humanity to the patients. At the terrible hospital “degli Incurabili,” in the via de’ Greci, Rome, I saw fearful cases of disease (cancer, &c.), receiving so little comfort in the way of diet that the wretched creatures rose all down the wards, literally screaming to me for money to buy food, coffee, and so on. I asked the Sister, “Had they no lady visitors?” “O yes: there was the Princess So and so, and the Countess So and so, saintly ladies, who came once a week or once a month.” “Then do they not provide the things these poor souls want?” “No, Signora, they don’t do that.” “Then, in 321Heaven’s name, what do they come to do for them?” It was some moments before I could be made to understand, “Per pettinarle, Signora!”—To comb their hair! The task was so disgusting that the great ladies came on purpose to perform it as a work of merit; for the good of their own souls!

The saddest sight which I ever beheld, however, I think was not in these Italian hospitals but in the Salpêtrière in Paris. As I was going round the wards with a Sister, I noticed on a bed opposite us a very handsome woman lying with her head a little raised and her marble neck somewhat exposed, while her arms lay rigidly on each side out of the bed-clothes. “What is the matter with that patient?” I asked. Before the Nun could tell me that, (except in her head,) she was completely paralyzed, there came in response to me an unearthly, inarticulate cry like that of an animal in agony; and I understood that the hapless creature was trying to call me. I went and stood over her and her eyes burnt into mine with the hungry eagerness of a woman famishing for sympathy and comfort in her awful affliction. She was a living statue; unable even to speak, much less to move hand or foot; yet still young; not over thirty I should think, and likely to live for years on that bed! The horror of her fate and the piteousness of the appeal in her eyes, and her inarticulate moans and cries, completely broke me down. I poured out all I could think of to say to comfort her, of prayer and patience and eternal hope; and at last was releasing her hand which I had been holding, and on which my tears had been falling fast,—when I felt a thrill run down her poor stiffened arm. It was the uttermost efforts she could make, striving with all her might to return my pressure.

In recent years I have heard of “scientific experiments” conducted by the late Dr. Charcot and a coterie of medical 322men, upon the patients of the Salpêtrière. When I have read of these, I have thought of that paralyzed woman with dread lest she might be yet alive to suffer; and with indignation against the Science which counts cases like these of uttermost human affliction, “interesting” subjects for investigation!

Some years after this time, hearing of the great Asylum designed by Mr. Holloway, I made an effort to bring influence from many quarters to bear on him to induce him to change its destination at that early stage, and make it the much-needed Home for Incurables. Many ladies and gentlemen whose names I hoped would carry weight with him, were kindly willing to write to him on the subject. Among them was the Hon. Mrs. Monsell, then Lady Superior of Clewer. Her letter to me on the subject was so wise that I have preserved it. Mr. Holloway, however, was inexorable. Would to Heaven that some other millionaire, instead of spending tens of thousands on Palaces of Delight and places of public amusement, would take to heart the case of those most wretched of human beings, the Destitute Incurables, who are still sent every year by thousands to die in the workhouses of England and Ireland with scarcely one of the comforts which their miserable condition demands.

“I have read your letter with much interest, and have at once forwarded it to Mrs. Wellesley, asking her to show it to Princess Christian, and also to speak to Mrs. Gladstone.

“I have no doubt that a large sum of money would be better expended on an Incurable than on a Convalescent Hospital. It would be wiser not to congregate so many Convalescents. For Incurables, under good management 323and liberal Christian teaching, it would not signify how many were gathered together, provided the space were large enough for the work.

“By ‘liberal Christian teaching’ I mean, that, while I presume Mr. Holloway would make it a Church of England Institution, Roman Catholics ought to have the comfort of free access from their own teachers.

“An Incurable Hospital without the religious element fairly represented, and the blessing which Religion brings to each individually, would be a miserable desolation. But there should be the most entire freedom of conscience allowed to each, in what, if that great sum were expended, must become a National Institution.

“I earnestly hope Mr. Holloway will take the subject of the needs of Incurables into consideration. In our own Hospital, at St. Andrew’s, and St. Raphael’s, Torquay, we shrink from turning out our dying cases, and yet it does not do to let them die in the wards with convalescent patients. Few can estimate the misery of the incurable cases; and the expense connected with the nursing is so great, it is not easy for private benevolence to provide Incurable Hospitals on a small scale. Besides, they need room for classification. The truth is, an Incurable Hospital is a far more difficult machine to work than a Convalescent; and so the work, if well done, would be far nobler.

In concluding these observations generally on the Sick in Workhouses I should like to offer to humane visitors one definite result of my own experience. “Do not imagine that what will best cheer the poor souls will be your conversation, however well designed to entertain or instruct them. That which will really brighten their dreary lives is, to be made to 324talk themselves, and to enjoy the privilege of a good listener. Draw them out about their old homes in ‘the beautiful country,’ as they always call it; or in whatever town sheltered them in childhood. Ask about their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, everything connected with their early lives, and tell them if possible any late news about the place and people connected therewith by ever so slight a thread. But before all things make THEM talk; and show yourself interested in what they say.”

CHAPTER XII. BRISTOL. WORKHOUSE GIRLS.

327Beside the poor sick and aged people in the Workhouse, the attention of Miss Elliot and myself was much drawn to the girls who were sent out from thence to service on attaining (about) their sixteenth year. On all hands, and notably from Miss Twining and from some excellent Irish philanthropists, we heard the most deplorable reports of the incompetence of the poor children to perform the simplest duties of domestic life, and their consequent dismissal from one place after another till they ended in ruin. It was stated at the time (1862), on good authority, that, on tracing the subsequent history of 80 girls who had been brought up in a single London Workhouse, every one was found to be on the streets! In short these hapless “children of the State,” as my friend Miss Florence Davenport Hill most properly named them, seemed at that time as if they were being trained on purpose to fall into a life of sin; having nothing to keep them out of it,—no friends, no affections, no homes, no training for any kind of useful labour, no habits of self-control or self-guidance.

It was never realized by the men (who, in those days, alone managed our pauper system) that girls cannot be trained en masse to be general servants, nurses, cooks, or anything else. The strict routine, the vast half-furnished wards, the huge utensils and furnaces of a large workhouse, have too little in common with the ways of family life and the furniture of a common kitchen, to furnish any sort of practising ground for household service. The Report of the Royal Commission on 328Education, issued about that time, concluded that Workhouse Schools leave the pauper taint on the children, but “that District and separate schools give an education to the children contained in them which effectually tends to emancipate them from pauperism.” Accordingly, the vast District schools, containing each the children from many Unions, was then in full blast, and the girls were taught extremely well to read, write and cipher; but were neither taught to cook for any ordinary household, or to scour, or sweep, or nurse, or serve the humblest table. What was far more deplorable, they were not, and could not be, taught to love or trust any human being, since no one loved or cared for them; or to exercise even so much self-control as should help them to forbear from stealing lumps of sugar out of the first bowl left in their way. “But,” we may be told, “they received excellent religious instruction!” Let any one try to realize the idea of God which any child can possibly reach who has never been loved; and he will then perhaps rightly estimate the value of such “religious instruction” in a dreary pauper school. I have never quite seen the force of the argument “If a man love not his neighbour whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?” But the converse is very clear. “If a man hath not been beloved by his neighbour or his parents, how shall he believe in the Love of the invisible God?” Religion is a plant which grows and flourishes in an atmosphere of a certain degree of warmth and softness, but not in the Frozen Zone of lovelessness, wherein is no sweetness, no beauty, no tenderness.

How to prevent the girls who left Bristol workhouse from falling into the same gulf as the unhappy ones in London, occupied very much the thoughts of Miss Elliot and her sister (afterwards Mrs. Montague Blackett) and myself, in 1851 and 1860–61. Our friend, Miss Sarah Stephen (daughter 329of Sergeant Stephen, niece of Sir James), then residing in Clifton, had for some time been working successfully a Preventive Mission for the poorer class of girls in Bristol; with a good motherly old woman as her agent to look after them. This naturally helped us to an idea which developed itself into the following plan—

Miss Elliot and her sister, as I have said, resided at that time with their father at the old Bristol Deanery, close to the Cathedral in College Green. This house was known to every one in the city, which was a great advantage at starting. A Sunday afternoon School for workhouse girls only, was opened by the two kind and wise sisters; and soon frequented by a happy little class. The first step in each case (which eventually fell chiefly to my share of the business) was to receive notice from the Workhouse of the address of every girl when sent out to her first service, and thereupon to go at once and call on her new mistress, and ask her permission for the little servant’s attendance at the Deanery Class. As Miss Eliott wrote most truly, in speaking of the need of haste in this preliminary visit—

“There are few times in a girl’s life when kindness is more valued by her, or more necessary to her, than when she is taken from the shelter and routine of school life and plunged suddenly and alone into a new struggling world full of temptations and trials. That this is the turning point in the life of many I feel confident, and I think delay in beginning friendly intercourse most dangerous; they, like other human beings, will seek friends of some kind. We found them very ready to take good ones if the chance were offered, and, as it seemed, grateful for such chance. But good friends failing them, they will most assuredly find bad ones.”—(Workhouse Girls. Notes by M. Elliot, p. 7.)

As a rule the mistresses, who were all of the humbler sort and of course persons of good reputation, seemed to welcome 330my rather intrusive visit and questions, which were, of course, made with every possible courtesy. A little by-play about the insufficient outfit given by the Workhouse, and an offer of small additional adornments for Sundays, was generally well received; and the happy fact of having such an ostensibly and unmistakeably respectable address for the Sunday school, secured many assents which might otherwise have been denied. The mistresses were generally in a state of chronic vexation at their little servants’ stupidity and incompetence; and on this head I could produce great effect by inveighing against the useless Workhouse education. There was often difficulty in getting leave of absence for the girls on Sunday afternoon, but with the patience and good humour of the teachers (who gave their lessons to as many or as few as came to them), there was always something of a class, and the poor girls themselves were most eager to lose no chance of attending.

A little reading of Pilgrim’s Progress and other good books: more explanations and talk; much hymn singing and repeating of hymns learned during the week; and a penny banking account,—such were some of the devices of the kind teachers to reach the hearts of their little pupils. And very effectually they did so, as the 30 letters which they wrote between them to Miss Elliot when she, or they, left Bristol, amply testified. Here is one of these epistles; surely a model of prudence and candour on the occasion of the approaching marriage of the writer! The back-handed compliment to the looks of her betrothed is specially delightful.

“You pointed out one thing in your kind letter, that to be sure that the young man was steady. I have been with him now two years, and I hope I know his failings; and I can say I have never known any one so steady and trustworthy as he is. I might have bettered myself as regards 331the outside looks; but, dear Madam, I think of the future, and what my home would be then; and perhaps if I married a gay man, I should always be unhappy. But John has a kind heart, and all he thinks of is to make others happy; and I hope I shall never have a cause to regret my choice, and I will try and do my best to do my duty, so that one day you may see me comfortable. Dear Madam, I cannot thank you enough for your kindness to me.”

The whole experiment was marvellously successful. Nearly all the poor children seemed to have been improved in various ways as well as certainly made happier by their Sundays at the Deanery, and not one of them, I believe, turned out ill afterwards or fell into any serious trouble. Many of them married respectably. In short it proved to be a good plan, which we have had no hesitation in recommending ever since. Eventually it was taken up by humane ladies in London, and there it slowly developed into the now imposing society with the long name (commonly abbreviated into M.A.B.Y.S.) the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants. Two or three years ago when I attended and spoke at the annual meeting of this large body, with the Lord Mayor of London in the chair and a Bishop to address us, it seemed very astonishing and delightful to Miss Elliot and me that our small beginnings of thirty years before should have swelled to such an assembly!

My experience of the wrongs and perils of young servant girls, acquired during my work as Whipper-in to the Deanery class, remains a painful memory, and supplies strong arguments in favour of extending some such protection to such girls generally. Some cases of oppression and injustice on the part of mistresses (themselves, no doubt, poor and over-strained, and not unnaturally exasperated by their poor little slave’s incompetence) were very cruel. I heard of one case which had occurred 332just before we began our work, wherein the girl had been left in charge of a small shop. A man came in out of the street, and seeing only this helpless child of fifteen behind the counter, laid hands on something (worth sixpence as it proved) and walked off with it without payment. When the mistress returned the girl told her what had happened, whereupon she and her husband stormed and scolded; and eventually turned the girl out of the house! This was at nine o’clock at night, in one of the lowest parts of Bristol, and the unhappy girl had not a shilling in her possession. A murder would scarcely have been more wicked.

Sometimes the mistresses sent their servants away without paying them any wages at all, making up their accounts in a style like this: “I owe you five and sixpence; but you broke my teapot, which was worth three shillings; and you burnt a tablecover worth two, and broke two plates and a saucer, and lost a spoon, and I gave you an old pair of boots, worth at least eighteen-pence, so you owe me half-a-crown; and if you don’t go away quietly I’ll call the police and give you in charge!” The mere name of the police would inevitably terrify the poor little drudge into submission to her oppressor. That the law could ever defend and not punish her would be quite outside her comprehension.

The wretched holes under stairs, or in cellars, or garrets, where these girls were made to sleep, were often most unhealthy; and their exposure to cold, with only the thin workhouse cotton frock, leaving arms and neck bare, was cruel in winter. One day I had an example of this, not easily to be forgotten. I had just received notice that a girl of sixteen had been sent from the workhouse (Bristol or Clifton, I forget which) to a place in St. Philip’s, at the far end of Bristol. It was a snowy day but I walked to the place with the same odd conviction over me of which I have spoken, that I was bound to go at once. When I reached 333the house, I found it was one a little above the usual class for workhouse-girl servants and had an area. The snow was falling fast, and as I knocked I looked down into the area and saw a girl in her cotton dress standing out at a wash-tub;—head, neck and arms all bare, and the snow falling on them with the bitter wind eddying through the area. Presently the door was opened and there stood the girl, in such a condition of bronchitis as I hardly ever saw in my life. When the mistress appeared I told her civilly that I was very sorry, but that the girl was in mortal danger of inflammation of the lungs and must be put to bed immediately. “O, that was entirely out of the question.” “But it must be done,” I said. Eventually after much angry altercation, the woman consented to my fetching a fly, putting the girl into it, driving with her to the Infirmary (for which I had always tickets) and leaving her there in charge of a friendly doctor. Next day when I called to enquire, he told me she could scarcely have lived after another hour of exposure, and that she could recover only by the most stringent and immediate treatment. It was another instance of the verification of my superstition.

Of course we tried to draw attention generally to the need for some supervision of the poor Workhouse girls throughout the country. I wrote and read at a Social Science Congress a paper on “Friendless Girls and How to Help them,” giving a full account of Miss Stephen’s admirable Preventive Mission; and this I had reason to hope, aroused some interest. Several years later Miss Elliot wrote a charming little book with full details about her girls and their letters; “Workhouse Girls; Notes of an attempt to help them,” published by Nisbet. Also we managed to get numerous articles and letters into newspapers touching on Workhouse abuses and needs generally. Miss Elliot having many 334influential friends was able to do a great deal in the way of getting our ideas put before the public. I used to write my papers after coming home in the evening and often late into the night. Sometimes, when I was very anxious that something should go off by the early morning mail, I got out of the side window of my sitting-room at two or three o’clock and walked the half-mile to the solitary post-office near the Black Boy (Pillar posts were undreamed of in those days), and then climbed in at the window again, to sleep soundly!

Some years afterwards I wrote in Fraser’s Magazine and later again republished in my Studies: Ethical and Social, a somewhat elaborate article on the Philosophy of the Poor Laws as I had come to understand it after my experience at Bristol. This paper was so fortunate as to fall in the way of an Australian philanthropic gentleman, President of a Royal Commission to enquire into the question of Pauper legislation in New South Wales. He, (Mr. Windeyer,) approved of several of my suggestions and recommended them in the Report of his Commission, and eventually procured their embodiment in the laws of the Colony.

The following is one of several letters which I received from him on the subject.

“Though personally unknown to you I take the liberty as a warm admirer of your writings, to which I owe so much both of intellectual entertainment and profoundest spiritual comfort, to send you herewith a copy of a Report upon the Public Charities of New South Wales, brought up by a Royal Commission of which I was the President. I may add that the document was written by me; and that my 335brother Commissioners did me the honour of adopting it without any alteration. As the views to which I have endeavoured to give expression have been so eloquently advocated by you, I have ventured to hope that my attempt to give practical expression to them in this Colony may not be without interest to you, as the first effort made in this young country to promulgate sounder and more philosophic views as to the training of pauper children.

“In your large heart the feeling Homo sum will, I think, make room for some kindly sympathy with those who, far off, in a small provincial way, try to rouse the attention and direct the energies of men for the benefit of their kind, and if any good comes of this bit of work, I should like you to know how much I have been sustained amidst much of the opposition which all new ideas encounter, by the convictions which you have so materially aided in building up and confirming. If you care to look further into our inquiry I shall be sending a copy of the evidence to the Misses Hill, whose acquaintance I had the great pleasure of making on their visit to this country, and they doubtless would show it to you if caring to see it, but I have not presumed to bore you with anything further than the Report.

I have since learned with great pleasure from an official Report sent from Australia to a Congress held during the World’s Fair of 1893 at Chicago, that the arrangement has been found perfectly successful, and has been permanently adopted in the Colony.

While earnestly advocating some such friendly care and guardianship of these Workhouse Girls as I have described, I would nevertheless enter here my serious protest against the excessive lengths to which one Society in particular—devoted to the welfare of the humbler class of girls generally—has 336gone of late years in the matter of incessant pleasure-parties for them. I do not think that encouragement to (what is to them) dissipation, conduces to their real welfare or happiness. It is always only too easy for all of us to remove the centre of our interest from the Business of life to its Pleasures. The moment this is done, whether in the case of poor persons or rich, Duty becomes a weariness. Success in our proper work is no longer an object of ambition, and the hours necessarily occupied by it are grudged and curtailed. Amusement usurps the foreground, instead of being kept in the background, of thought. This is the kind of moral dislocation which is even now destroying, in the higher ranks, much of the duty-loving character bequeathed to our Anglo-Saxon race by our Puritan fathers. Ladies and gentlemen do not indeed now “live to eat” like the old epicures, but they live to shoot, to hunt, to play tennis or golf; to give and attend parties of one sort or another; and the result, I think, is to a great degree traceable in the prevailing Pessimism. But bad as excessive Pleasure-seeking and Duty-neglecting is for those who are not compelled to earn their bread, it is absolutely fatal to those who must needs do so. The temptations which lie in the way of a young servant who has acquired a distaste for honest work and a passion for pleasure, require no words of mine to set forth in their terrible colours. Even too much and too exciting reading, and endless letter-writing may render wholesome toil obnoxious. A good maid I once possessed simply observed to me (on hearing that a friend’s servant had read twenty volumes in a fortnight and neglected meanwhile to mend her mistress’s clothes), “I never knew anyone who was so fond of books who did not hate her work!” It is surely no kindness to train people to hate the means by which they can honourably support themselves, and which might, in itself, be interesting and pleasant to them. But incessant tea-parties and concerts and excursions 337are much more calculated to distract and dissipate the minds of girls than even the most exciting story books, and the good folks who would be shocked to supply them with an unintermittent series of novels, do not see the mischief of encouraging the perpetual entertainments now in vogue all over the country. Let us make the girls, first safe; then as happy as we can. But it is an error to imagine that overindulgence in dissipation,—even in the shape of the most respectable tea-parties and excursions,—is the way to make them either safe or happy.

The following is an account which Miss Florence D. Hill has kindly written for me, of the details of her own work on behalf of pauper children which dovetailed with ours for Workhouse girls:—

“I well remember the deep interest with which I learnt from your own lips the simple but effective plan by which you and Miss Elliot and her sister befriended the elder girls from Bristol Workhouse, and heard you read your paper, ‘Friendless Girls, and How to Help Them,’ at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin in 1861. Gradually another benevolent scheme was coming into effect, which not only bestows friends but a home and family affections on the forlorn pauper child, taking it in hand from infancy. The reference in your ‘Philosophy of the Poor Laws’ to Mr. Greig’s Report on Boarding-out as pursued for many years at Edinburgh, caused my cousin, Miss Clark, to make the experiment in South Australia, which has developed into a noble system for dealing under natural conditions with all destitute and erring children in the great Colonies of the South Seas. Meanwhile, at home the evidence of success attained by Mrs. Archer in Wiltshire and her disciples elsewhere, and by other independent workers, in placing orphan and deserted children in the care of foster parents, enabled the late 338Dr. Goodeve, ex-officio Guardian for Clifton, to obtain the adoption of the plan by his Board; his wife becoming President of one of the very first Committees formed to find suitable homes and supervise the children.

After my efforts above detailed on behalf of the little Girl-thieves, the Ragged street boys, the Incurables and other Sick in Workhouses, and finally for Befriending young Servants, there was another undertaking in which both Miss Elliot and I took great interest for some years after we had ceased to live at Bristol. This was the Housing of the poor in large Cities.

Among the many excellent citizens who then and always have done honour to Bristol, there was a Town Councillor, Mr. T. Territ Taylor, a jeweller, carrying on his business in College Green. At a time when a bad fever seemed to have become endemic in the district of St. Jude’s, this gentleman told us that in his opinion it would never be banished till some fresh legislation were obtained for the compulsory destruction of insanitary dwellings, such as abounded in that quarter. We wondered whether it would be possible to interest some influential M.P.’s among our acquaintances in Mr. Taylor’s views, and after many delays and much consultation with them, I wrote an article in Fraser’s Magazine for February, 1866, in which I was able to print a full sketch by Mr. Taylor of his matured project, and to give the reasons which appeared to us to make such legislation as he advocated exceedingly desirable. I said:—

“The supply of lodgings for the indigent classes in the great towns has long failed to equal the demand. Each year the case becomes worse, as population increases, and no tendency arises for capital to be invested in meeting the want....

339“But, it is asked, why does not capital come in here, as everywhere else, and supply a want as soon as it exists? The reason is simple. Property in our poor lodgings is very undesirable for large capitalists. It can be made to pay a high interest only on three conditions:—1st, That the labour of collecting the rents (which is always excessive) shall not be deducted from the returns by agents; 2nd, That very little mercy shall be shown to tenants in distress; 3rd, That small expense be incurred in attempting to keep in repair, paint, or otherwise refresh the houses, which, being inhabited by the roughest of the community, require double outlay to preserve in anything better than a squalid and rack-rent condition.

“Convinced long ago of this fact, philanthropists have for years attempted to mitigate the evil by building, in London and other great towns, model lodging-houses for the Working Classes, and after long remaining a doubtful experiment, a success has been achieved in the case of Mr. Peabody’s, Alderman Waterlow’s, and perhaps some others. But as regards the two great objects we are considering,—the elevation of the Indigent, and the prevention of pestilence,—these schemes only point the way to an enterprise too large for any private funds. All the existing model lodging-houses not only fix their rents above the means of the Indigent class, but actually make it a rule not to admit the persons of whom the class chiefly consists—namely, those who get their living upon the streets. Thus, for the elevation of the Indigent and the purifying of those cesspools of wretchedness, wherein cholera and fever have their source, these model lodging-houses are even professedly unavailing.”—Reprinted in Hours of Work and Play, pp. 46, 47.

Mr. Thomas Hare had, shortly before, set forth in the Times a startlingly magnificent scheme whereby a great Board should raise money, partly from the Rates, to build splendid rows of workmen’s lodging-houses, of which the 340workmen would eventually, in this ingenious plan become freeholders. Mr. Taylor’s plan was much more modest, and involved in fact only one principal point, the grant of compulsory powers to purchase, indispensable where the refusal of one landlord might invalidate, for sanitary purposes, the purification of a district; and the greed of the class would inevitably render the proposed renovation preposterously costly. Mr. Taylor’s Scheme, as drawn up by himself and placed in our hands, was briefly as follows:—

“An Act of Parliament must be obtained to enable Town Councils and Local Boards of Health (or other Boards, as may hereafter be thought best) to purchase, under compulsory powers, the property in overcrowded and pestilential districts within their jurisdiction, and build thereon suitable dwellings for the labouring classes.

“The usual powers must be given to borrow money of the Government at a low rate of interest, on condition of repayment within a specified time, say from 15 to 20 years, as in the case of the County Lunatic Asylums.”

Miss Elliot and I having shown this sketch to our friends, a Bill was drawn up embodying it with some additions; “For the improvement of the Dwellings of the Working Classes,” and was presented to Parliament by Mr. McCullagh Torrens and my cousin John Locke, in 1867. But though both the Governments of Lord Derby and of Lord Russell the latter of whom Miss Elliot had interested personally in the matter were favourable to the Bill, it was not passed till the following Session; when it became law (with considerable modifications); as 31, 32 Vict., Cap. cxxx., “An Act to provide better dwellings for Artisans and Labourers,” 31st July, 1868.

CHAPTER XIII. BRISTOL. FRIENDS.

343What is Chance? How often does that question recur in the course of every history, small or great? My whole course of life was deflected by the mishap of stepping a little awry out of a train at Bath, and miscalculating the height of the platform, which is there unusually low. I had gone to spend a day with a friend, and on my way back to Bristol I thus sprained my ankle. I was at that time forty years of age (a date I now alas! regard as quite the prime of life!), and in splendid health and spirits, fully intending to continue for the rest of my days labouring on the same lines as prospects of usefulness might open. I remember feeling the delight of walking over the springy sward of the Downs and laughing as I said to myself “I do believe I could walk down anybody and perhaps talk down anybody too!” The next week I was a poor cripple on crutches, never to take a step without them for four long years, during which period I grew practically into an old woman, and (unhappily for me) into a very large and heavy one for want of the exercise to which I had been accustomed. The morning after my mishap, finding my ankle much swollen and being in a great hurry to go on with my work, I sent for one of the principal surgeons in Bristol, who bound the limb so tightly that the circulation (always rather feeble) was impeded, and every sort of distressful condition supervened. Of course the surgeon threw the blame on me for attempting to use the leg; but it was very little I could do in this way even if I had tried, without excessive pain; and, after a few weeks, I went to London in the full confidence that I had only to bespeak “the best advice” to 344be speedily cured. I did get what all the world would still consider the “best advice;” but bad was that best. Guineas I could ill spare ran away like water while the great surgeon came and went, doing me no good at all; the evil conditions growing worse daily. I returned back from London and spent some wretched months at Clifton. An artery, I believe, was stopped, and there was danger of inflammation of the joint. At last with infinite regret I gave up the hope of ever recovering such activity as would permit me to carry on my work either in the schools or workhouse. No one who has not known the miseries of lameness, the perpetual contention with ignoble difficulties which it involves, can judge how hard a trial it is to an active mind to become a cripple.

Still believing in my simplicity that great surgeons might remedy every evil, I went again to London to consult the most eminent, and by the mistake of a friend, it chanced that I summoned two very great personages on the same day, though, fortunately, at different hours. The case was, of course, of the simplest; but the two gentlemen gave me precisely opposite advice. One sent me abroad to certain baths, which proved to be the wrong ones for my trouble, and gave me a letter to his friend there, a certain Baron. The moment the Baron-Doctor saw my foot he exclaimed that it ought never to have been allowed to get into the state of swollen veins and arrested circulation in which he found it; astringents and all sorts of measures ought to have been applied. In truth I was in a most miserable condition, for I could not drop the limb for two minutes without the blood running into it till it became like an ink-bottle, when, if I held it up, it became as white as if dead. And all this had been getting worse and worse while I was consulting ten doctors in succession, and chiefly the most eminent in England! The Baron-Doctor first told me that the waters would bring out the gout, and then, when I objected, assured me they should 345not bring it out; after which I relinquished the privilege of his visits and he charged me for an entire course of treatment.

The second great London surgeon told me not to go abroad, but to have a gutta-percha boot made for my leg to keep it stiff. I had the boot made, (with much distress and expense), took it abroad in my trunk, and asked the successor of the Baron-Doctor (who could make the waters give the gout or not as he pleased), “Whether he advised me to wear the wonderful machine?” The good old Frenchman, who was also Mayor of his town, and who did me more good than anybody else, replied cautiously, “If you wish, Madame, to be lame for life you will wear that boot. A great many English come to us here to be unstiffened after having had their joints stiffened by English surgeons’ devices of this sort, but we can do nothing for them. A joint once thoroughly stiff can never be restored.” It may be guessed that the expensive boot was quietly deposited on the nearest heap of rubbish.

After that experience I tried the baths in Savoy and others in Italy. But my lameness seemed permanent. A great Italian Doctor could think of nothing better than to put a few walnut-leaves on my ankle—a process which might perhaps have effected something in fifty years! Only the good and great Nélaton, whom I consulted in Paris, told me he believed I should recover some time; but he could not tell me anything to do to hasten the event. Returned to London I sent for Sir William Fergusson, and that honest man on hearing my story said simply: “And if you had gone to nobody and not bandaged your ankle, but merely bathed it, you would have been well in three weeks.” Thus I learned from the best authority, that I had paid for the folly of consulting an eminent surgeon for a common sprain, by four years of miserable helplessness and by the breaking up of my whole plan of life.

346I must conclude this dismal record by one last trait of medical character. I had determined, after seeing Fergusson, to consult no other doctor; indeed I could ill afford to do so. But a friend conveyed to me a message from a London surgeon of repute (since dead) that he would like to be allowed to treat me gratuitously; having felt much interest in my books. I was simple enough to fall into the trap and to feel grateful for his offer: and I paid him several visits, during which he chatted pleasantly, and once did some trifling thing to relieve my foot. One day I wrote and asked him kindly to advise me by letter about some directions he had given me; whereupon he answered tartly that he “could not correspond; and that I must always attend at his house.” The suspicion dawned on me, and soon reached conviction, that what he wanted was not so much to cure me, as to swell the scanty show of patients in his waiting-room! Of course after this, I speedily retreated; offering many thanks and some small, and as I hoped, acceptable souvenir with inscription to lie on his table. But when I thought this had concluded my relations with Mr. ——, I found I had reckoned without my—doctor! One after another he wrote to me three or four peremptory notes requesting me to send him introductions for himself or his family, to influential friends of mine rather out of his sphere. I would rather have paid him fifty fees than have felt bound to give these introductions.

Finally I ceased to do anything whatever to my unfortunate ankle, except what most of my advisers had forbidden, namely, to walk upon it,—and a year or two afterwards I climbed Cader Idris; walking quietly with my friend to the summit. Sitting there, on the Giants’ Chair we passed an unanimous resolution. It was: “Hang the Doctors!”

I must now set down a few recollections of the many friends and interesting acquaintances whom I met at Bristol. In the first place I may say briefly that all Miss Carpenter’s 347friends (mostly Unitarians) were very kind to me, and that though I did not go out to any sort of entertainment while I lived with her, it was not for lack of hospitable invitations.

The family next to that of the Dean with which I became closely acquainted and to which I owed most, was that of Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, whose labours (summed up in his own Repression of Crime and in his Biography by his daughters) did more, I believe, than those of any other philanthropist beside Mary Carpenter, to improve the treatment of both adult and juvenile crime in England. I am not competent to offer judgment on the many questions of jurisprudence with which he dealt, but I can well testify to the exceeding goodness of his large heart, the massiveness of his grasp of his subjects, and (never-to-be-forgotten) his most delightful humour. He was a man who from unlucky chances never attained a position commensurate with his abilities and his worth, but who was beloved and admired in no ordinary degree by all who came near him. His family of sons and daughters formed a centre of usefulness in the neighbourhood of Bristol as they have since done in London, where Miss Hill is, I believe, now the senior member of the School Board, while her sister, Miss Florence Davenport Hill, has been equally active as a Poor Law Guardian, and most especially as the promoter of the great and farreaching reform in the management of pauper orphans, known as the system of Boarding-out, of which I have spoken in the last chapter. I must not indulge myself by writing at too great length of such friends, but will insert here a few notes I made of Recorder Hill’s wonderfully interesting conversation during a Christmas visit I paid to him at Heath House.

“Dec. 26th. I spent yesterday and last night with my kind friends the Hills at Heath House. In the evening I drew out the Recorder to speak of questions of evidence, and he told me many remarkable anecdotes in his own 348practice at the Bar, of doubtful identity, &c. On one occasion a case was tried three times; and he observed how the certainty of the witnesses, the clearness of details, and unhesitating asseveration of facts which at first had been doubtfully stated, grew in each trial. He said ‘the most dangerous of all witnesses are those who honestly give false witness—a most numerous class.’

“To-day he invited me to walk with him on his terrace and up and down the approach. The snow lay thick on the grass, but the sun shone bright, and I walked for more than an hour and a-half beside the dear old man. He told me how he had by degrees learned to distrust all ideas of Retribution, and to believe in the ‘aggressive power of love and kindness,’ (a phrase Lady Byron had liked); and how at last it struck him that all this was in the new Testament; and that few, except religious Christians, ever aided the great causes of philanthropy. I said, it was quite true, Christ had revealed that religion of love; and that there were unhappily very few who, having intellectually doubted the Christian creed, pressed on further to any clear or fervent religion beyond; but that without religion, i.e., love of God, I hardly believed it possible to work for man. He said he had known nearly all the eminent men of his time in every line, and had somehow got close to them, and had never found one of them really believe Christianity. I said, ‘No; no strong intellect of our day could do so, altogether; but that I thought it was faithless in us to doubt that if we pushed bravely on to whatever seemed truth we should there find all the more reason to love God and man, and never lose any real good of Christianity.’ He agreed, but said, ‘You are a watchmaker, I am a weaver; this is your work, I have a different one,—and I cannot afford to part with the Evangelicals, who are my best helpers. Thus though I wholly disagree with them about Sunday I never publish my difference.’ I said I felt the great danger of pushing uneducated people beyond the bounds of an authoritative creed, and for my own part would think it 349safest that Jowett’s views should prevail for a generation, preparatory to Theism.

“Then we spoke of Immortality, and he expressed himself nobly on the thought that all our differences of rich and poor, wise or ignorant, are lost in comparison of that one fact of our common Immortality. As he said, he felt that waiting a moment jostled in a crowd at a railway station, was a larger point in comparison of his whole life than this life is, to the future. We joined in condemning Emerson and George Eliot’s ideas of the ‘little value’ of ordinary souls. His burst of indignation at her phrase ‘Guano races of men’ was very fine. He said, talking of Reformatories, ‘A century hence,—in 1960,—some people will walk this terrace and talk of the great improvement of the new asylums where hopeless criminals and vicious persons will be permanently consigned. They will not be formally condemned for life, but we shall all know that they will never fulfil the conditions of their release. They will not be made unhappy, but forced to work and kept under strong control; the happiest state for them.’”

Here is a very flattering letter from Mr. Hill written a few years later, on receipt of a copy of my Italics:—

“Although I am kept out of court to-day at the instance of my physician, who threatens me with bronchitis if I do not keep house, yet it has been a day not devoid of much enjoyment. Your charming book which, alas, I have nearly finished, is carrying me through it only too rapidly. What a harvest of observation, thought, reading, and discourse have you brought home from Italy! But I am too much overwhelmed with it to talk much about it, especially in the obfuscated state of my intellect to which I am just now reduced. But I must just tell you how I am amused in 350midst of my admiration, with your humility as regards your sex; said humility being a cloak which, opening a little at one page, discloses a rich garment of pride underneath (vide page 438 towards the bottom). I say no more, only as I don’t mean to give up the follies of youth for the next eight years, that is until I am eighty, I don’t choose to be called ‘venerable.’ One might as well consent to become an Archdeacon at once!

“Your portraits are delightful, some of the originals I know, and the likeness is good, but alas, idealized!

“To call your book a ‘trifling’ work is just as absurd as to call me ‘venerable.’ It deals nobly, fearlessly, and I will add in many parts profoundly, with the greatest questions that can employ human intellect or touch the human heart, and although I do not always agree with you, I always respect your opinions and learn from the arguments by which they are supported. But certainly in the vast majority of instances I do agree with you, and more than agree, which is a cold, unimpressive term.

“That is to say falsest of woman-kind! You have cruelly jilted me. Florry wrote to say you were coming here as you ought to have done long ago. Well, as your countryman, Ossian, or his double, Macpherson, says, ‘Age is dark and unlovely,’ and therefore the rival of the American Giantess turns a broad back upon me. I must submit to my fall....

“Though I take in the Echo, I have not lately seen any article which I could confidently attribute to your pen.

“I have, however, been much gratified with your article on The Devil, the only writing I ever read on the origin of evil which did not appear to me absolutely contemptible. Talking of these matters, Coleridge said to Thelwall (ex 351relatione Thelwall), ‘God has all the power that is, but there is no power over a contradiction expressed or implied.’ Your suggestion that the existence of evil is due to contradiction, is, I have no doubt, very just, but my stupid head is this morning quite unable to put on paper what is foggily floating in my mind, and so I leave it.

“I spent a good part of yesterday morning in reading the Westminster Review of Walt Whitman’s works, which quite laid hold of me.

Another interesting person whom I first came to know at Bristol, (where he visited at the Deanery and at Dr. Symonds’ house,) was the late Master of Balliol. I have already cited some kind letters from him referring to our plans for Incurables and Workhouse Girls. I will be vain enough to quote here, with the permission of the friend to whom they were addressed, some of his remarks about my Intuitive Morals and Broken Lights; and also his opinion of Theodore Parker, which will interest many readers:—

“From Rev. Benjamin Jowett.

“I heard of your friend Miss Cobbe the other day at Fulham.... Pray urge her to go on with her books and try to make them more interesting. (This can only be done by throwing more feeling into them and adapting them more to what other people are thinking and feeling about). I am not speaking of changing her ideas, but the mode of expressing them. The great labour of writing is adapting what you say to others. She has great ability, and there is something really fine and striking in her views of things, so that it is worth while she should consider the form of her writings.”...

“Let me pass to a more interesting subject—Miss Cobbe. Since I wrote to you last I have read the greater part of 352her book” (Intuitive Morals) “which I quite agree with you in thinking full of interest. It shows great power and knowledge of the subject, yet I should fear it would be hardly intelligible to anyone who had not been nourished at some time of their lives on the philosophy of Kant; and also she seems to me to be too exclusive and antagonistic towards other systems—e.g., the Utilitarian. All systems of Philosophy have their place and use, and lay hold on some minds, and therefore though they are not all equally true, it is no use to rail at Bentham and the Utilitarians after the manner of Blackwood’s Magazine. Perhaps, however, Miss Cobbe would retort on me that her attacks on the Utilitarians have their place and their use too; only they were not meant for people who ‘revel in Scepticism’ like me (the Saturday Review says, is it not very Irish of them to say so?) Pray exhort her to write (for it is really worth while) and not to spend her money and time wholly in schemes of philanthropy. For a woman of her ability, writing offers a great field, better in many respects than practical life.”

“A day or two ago I was at Clifton and saw Miss Cobbe, who might be truly described as very ‘jolly.’ I went to a five o’clock tea with her and met various people—an aged physician named Dr. Brabant who about thirty years ago gave up his practice to study Hebrew and became the friend of German Theologians; Miss Blagden, whom you probably know, an amiable lady who has written a novel and is the owner of a little white puppy wearing a scarlet coat; Dr. Goodeve, an Indian Medical Officer; and various others.”...

“Remember me to Miss Cobbe. I hope she gains from you sound notions on Political Economy. I shall always maintain that Philanthropy is intolerable when not based on sound ideas of Political Economy.”

“The articles in the Daily News I did not see. Were they Miss Cobbe’s? I read her paper in Fraser in which the story of the Carnival was extremely well told.”...

“I write to thank you for Miss Cobbe’s pamphlet, which I have read with great pleasure. I think her writing is always good and able. I have never seen Theodore Parker’s works: he was, I imagine, a sort of hero and prophet; but I think I would rather have the Church of England large enough for us all with old memories and feelings, notwithstanding many difficulties and some iniquities, than new systems of Theism.”...

“Miss Cobbe has also kindly sent me a little book called Broken Lights, which appears to me to be extremely good. (I think the title is rather a mistake.) I dare say that you have read the book. The style is excellent, and the moderation and calmness with which the different parties are treated is beyond praise. The only adverse criticism that I should venture to make is that the latter part is too much narrowed to Theodore Parker’s point of view, who was a great man, but too confident, I think, that the world could be held together by spiritual instincts.”

And here are three charming letters from Mr. Jowett to me, one of them in reply to a letter from me from Rome, the others of a later date.

“I write to thank you for the Fraser which I received this morning and have read with great amusement and interest. I think that I should really feel happier living to see the end of the Pope, at least in his present mode of existence.

“I did indeed receive a most capital letter from you with a kind note from Miss Elliot. And ‘I do remember me of 354my faults this day.’ The truth is that being very busy with Plato (do you know the intolerable burden of writing a fat book in two vols.?) I put off answering the letters until I was not quite certain whether the kind writers of them were still at Rome. I thought the Plato would have been out by this time, but this was only one of the numerous delusions in which authors indulge. The notes, however, are really finished, and the Essays will be done in a few months. I suspect you can read Greek, and shall therefore hope to send you a copy.

“I was always inclined to think well of the Romans from their defence of Rome in 1848, and their greatness and strength really does seem to show that they mean to be the centre of a great nation.

“Will you give my very kind regards to the Elliots? I should write to them if I knew exactly where: I hear that the Dean is transformed into a worshipper of the Virgin and of other pictures of the Saints.^[17]

“I shall certainly read your paper on Political Economy. Political Economy seems to me in this imperfect world to be Humanity on a large scale (though not the whole of humanity). And I am always afraid of it being partially supplanted by humanity on the small scale, which relieves one-sixth of the poor whom we see, and pauperizes the mind of five-sixths whom we don’t see.

“I won’t trouble you with any more reflections on such an old subject. Remember me most kindly to the Dean and his daughters. I was going to send him a copy of the Articles against Dr. Williams. But upon second thoughts, I won’t. 355It is such an ungracious, unsavoury matter. I hope that he won’t give up the Prolocutorship, or that, if he does, he will state boldly his reasons for doing so. It is true that neither he nor anyone can do much good there. But the mere fact of a great position in the Church of England being held by a liberal clergyman is of great importance.

“I should have much liked to go to Rome this winter. But I am so entangled, first, with Plato, and, second, with the necessity of getting rid of Plato and writing something on Theology, that I do not feel justified in leaving my work. The vote of last Tuesday deferring indefinitely the endowment of my Professorship makes me feel that life is becoming a serious business to me. Not that I complain; the amount of sympathy and support which I have received has been enough to sustain anyone, if they needed it, (you should have seen an excellent squib written by a young undergraduate). But my friends are sanguine in imagining they will succeed hereafter. Next year it is true that they probably will get a small majority in Congregation. This, however, is of no use, as the other party will always bring up the country clergy in Convocation. I have, therefore, requested Dr. Stanley to take no further steps in the Council on the subject; it seems to me undignified to keep the University squabbling about my income.

“Excuse this long story which is partly suggested by your kind letter. I hope you will enjoy Rome. With sincere regard,

“I write to thank you for your very kind note. I am much more pleased at the rejoicings of my friends than at the result which has been so long delayed as to be almost 356indifferent to me. I used to be annoyed at feeling that I was such a bad example to young men, because they saw, as they were intended to see, that unless they concealed their opinions they would suffer. I hope they will have more cheerful prospects now.

“I trust that some day I shall be able to write something more on Theology. But the Plato has proved an enormous work, having expanded into a sort of translation of the whole of the Dialogues. I believe this will be finished and printed about Christmas, but not before.

“I have been sorry to hear of your continued illness. When I come to London I shall hope to look in upon you in Hereford Square.

“I read a book of Theodore Parker’s the other day—‘Discourses on Religion.’ He was a friend of yours, I believe? I admire his character—a sort of religious Titan. But I thought his philosophy seemed to rest too much on instincts.”

How much Mr. Jowett had to bear from the animosity of his orthodox contemporaries in the Sixties at Oxford was illustrated by the following incident. I was, one day about this time, showing his photograph to a lady, when her son, late from Oxford, came into the room with a dog at his heels. Seeing the photograph, he remarked, “Ah, yes! very like. This dog pinned him in quod one day, and was made so much of afterwards! The Dean of —— especially invited him” (the dog) “to lunch. Jowett complained of me, and I had to send all my dogs out of Oxford!”

The following is a Note which I made of two of his visits to me on Durdham Down:

“Two visits from Mr. Jowett, who each time drank tea with me. He said he felt writing to be a great labour; but 357regularly wrote one page every day. The liberal, benevolent way he spoke of all creeds was delightful. In particular he spoke of the temptation to Pantheism and praised Hegel, whom, he said, he had studied deeply. Advising me kindly to go on writing books, he maintained against me the vast power of books in the world.”

Mr. Jowett was, of course, at all times a most interesting personality, and one whose intercourse was delightful and highly exciting to the intellect. But his excessive shyness, combined with his faculty for saying exceedingly sharp things, must have precluded, I should think, much ease of conversation between him and the majority of his friends. As usually happens in the case of shy people, he exhibited rather less of the characteristic with an acquaintance like myself who was never shy (my mother’s training saved me from that affliction!) and who was not at all afraid of him.

In later years Mr. Jowett obtained for me (in 1876) the signatures of the Heads of every College in Oxford to a Petition which I had myself written, to the House of Lords in favour of Lord Carnarvon’s original Bill for the restriction of Vivisection. At a later date the Master of Balliol declined to support me further in the agitation for the prohibition of the practice; referring me to the assurances of a certain eminent Boanerges of Science as guarantee for the necessity of the practice and the humanity of vivisectors. It is very surprising to me how good and strong men, who would disdain to accept a religious principle or dogma from pope or Council, will take a moral one without hesitation from any doctor or professor of science who may lay down the law for them, and present the facts so as to make the scale turn his way. Where would Protestant divines be, if they squared their theologies with all the historical statements and legends of Romanism? If we construct our ethical judgments upon the statements and 358representations of persons interested in maintaining a practice, what chance is there that they should be sound?

I find, in a letter to a friend (dated May, 1868) the following souvenir of a sermon by Mr. Jowett, delivered in a church near Soho:—

“We went to that sermon on Sunday. It was really very fine and very bold; much better than the report in the Pall Mall Gazette made it. Mr. Albert D—— was there, but few else who looked as if they could understand him. He has a good voice and delivery, and the “cherubic” countenance and appealing eyes suit the pulpit; but he looks at one as I never knew any preacher do. We sat close to him, and it was as if we were in a drawing-room. M. says that all the first part was taken from my Broken Lights; that is,—it was a sketch of existing opinions on the same plan. It was good when he said:

“The High church watchword is: The Church; always and ever the same.

“The Low church watchword is: The Bible only the Religion of Protestants.

“The party of Knowledge has for its principle: ‘The Truth ever and always, and wherever it be found.’

“He gave each their share of praise and blame, saying: ‘the fault of the last party’ (his own, of course) was—that ‘sometimes in the pursuit of Knowledge they forgot Goodness.’”

I heard him preach more than once afterwards in the same gloomy old church. His aspect in his surplice was exceedingly quaint. His face, even in old age, was like that of an innocent, round-faced child; and his short, slender figure, wrapped in the long white garment, irresistibly suggested to me the idea of “an elderly cherub prepared for bed”! Altogether, taking into account his entire career, the Master of Balliol was an unique figure in English life, whom I much rejoice to have known; a modern Melchisedek.

359Here is another memorandum about the same date, respecting another eminent man, interesting in another way:—

“Sept. 25th, 1860. A pleasant evening at Canon Guthrie’s. Introduced to old Lord Lansdowne; a gentle, courteous old man with deep-set, faded grey eyes, and heavy eyebrows; a blue coat and brass buttons! In the course of the evening I was carrying on war in a corner of the room against the Dean of Bristol, Mr. C—— and Margaret Elliot, about Toryism. I argued that if Justice to all were the chief end of Government, the power should be lodged in the hands of the class who best understood Justice; and that the consequence of the opposite course was manifest in America, where the freest government which had ever existed, supported also the most gigantic of all wrongs—Slavery. On this Countess Rothkirch who sat by, clapped her hands with joy; and the Dean came down on me saying, ‘That if power should only be given to those who would use it justly, then the Tories should never have any power at all; for they never used it justly.’ Hearing the laughter at my discomfiture, Lord Lansdowne toddled across the room and sat down beside me saying: ‘What is it all about?’ I cried: ‘Oh Lord Lansdowne! you are the very person in the whole world to help me—I am defending Tory principles!’ He laughed heartily, and said ‘I am afraid I can hardly do that.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘you may be converted at the eleventh hour!’ ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘what a child asked her mother: “Are Tories born wicked, mother, or do they only become so?”’ Margaret said this was really asked by a cousin of her own, one of the Adam family. It ended in much laughter and talking about ‘Transformation,’ and the ‘Semi-attached Couple‘—which Lord Lansdowne said he was just reading. ‘I like novels very much,’ he said, ‘only I take a little time between each of them.’ When I got up to go away the kind old man rose in the most courtly way to shake hands, and paid me a little old-world compliment.”

360This was the eloquent statesman and patron of literature, Henry, third Marquis of Lansdowne, in whose time his house, (Bowood,) was the resort of the finest intellectual society of England. I have a droll letter in my possession referring to this Bowood society, by Sydney Smith, written to Mrs. Kemble, then Mrs. Butler. It has come to me with all her other papers and with seven letters from Lord Lansdowne pressing her to pay him visits. Sydney Smith writes on his invitation to her to come to Combe Fleury; after minute directions about the route:—

“The interval between breakfast and dinner brings you to Combe Fleury. We are the next stage (to Bowood). Lord Lansdowne’s guests commonly come here dilated and disordered with high living.”

In another letter conveying a similar invitation he says, with his usual bitterness and injustice as regards America:

“Be brave my dear lady. Hoist the American flag. Barbarise your manners. Dissyntax your language. Fling a thick mantle over your lively spirits, and become the fust of American women. You will always remain a bright vision in my recollection. Do not forget me. Call me Butler’s Hudibras. Any appellation provided I am not forgotten.”

Among the residents in Clifton and at Stoke Bishop over the Downs I had many kind friends, some of whom helped me essentially in my work by placing tickets for hospitals and money in my hands for the poor. One of these whom I specially recall with gratitude was that ever zealous moral reformer, Mrs. Woolcott Browne, who is still working bravely with her daughter for many good causes in London. I must not write here without permission of the many others whose names have not come before the public, but whose affectionate consideration made my life very pleasant, and whom I ever 361remember with tender regard. Of one excellent couple I may venture to speak,—Dr. and Mrs. Goodeve of Cook’s Folly. Mrs. Goodeve herself told me their singular and beautiful story, and since she and her husband are now both dead, I think I may allow myself to repeat it.

Dr. Goodeve was a young medical man who had just married, and was going out to seek his fortune in India, having no prospects in England. As part of their honeymoon holiday the young couple went to visit Cook’s Folly; then a small, half-ruinous, castellated building, standing in a spot of extraordinary beauty over the Avon, looking down the Bristol Channel. As they were descending the turret-stair and taking, as they thought, a last look on the loveliness of England, the young wife perceived that her husband’s head was bent down in deep depression. She laid her hand on his shoulder and whispered “Never mind, Harry? You shall make a fortune in India and we will come back and buy Cook’s Folly.”

They went to Calcutta and were there most kindly received by a gentleman named Hurry, who edited a newspaper and whose own history had been strange and tragic. Started in his profession by his interest, Dr. Goodeve soon fell into good practice, and by degrees became a very successful physician, the founder (I believe) of the existing Medical College of Calcutta. Going on a shooting party, his face was most terribly shattered by a chance shot which threatened to prove mortal, but Mrs. Goodeve, without help or appliances, alone with him in a tent in a wild district, pulled him back to life. At last they returned to England, wealthy and respected by all, and bringing a splendid collection of Indian furniture and curios. The very week they landed, Cook’s Folly was advertised to be sold! They remembered it well,—went to see it,—bought it—and rebuilded it; making it a most charming and beautiful 362house. A peculiarity of its structure as remodelled by them was, that there was an entire suite of rooms,—a large library overlooking the river Avon, bedroom, bathroom and servant’s room,—all capable of being shut off from the rest of the house, by double doors, so that the occupant might be quite undisturbed. When everything was finished, and splendidly furnished, the Goodeves wrote to Mr. Hurry: “It is time for you to give up your paper and come home. You acted a father’s part to us when we went out first to India. Now come to us, and live as with your son and daughter.”

Mr. Hurry accepted the invitation and found waiting for him and his Indian servant the beautiful suite of rooms built for him, and the tenderest welcome. I saw him often seated by their fireside just as a father might have been. When the time came for him to die, Mrs. Goodeve nursed him with such devoted care, and strained herself so much in lifting and helping him, that her own health was irretrievably injured, and she died not long afterwards.

I could write more of Bristol and Clifton friends, high and low, but must draw this chapter of my life to a close. I went to Bristol an utter stranger, knowing no human being there. I left it after a few years all peopled, as it seemed to me, with kind souls; and without one single remembrance of anything else but kindness received there either from gentle or simple.

CHAPTER XIV. ITALY. 1857–1879.

365I visited Italy six times between the above dates. The reader need not be wearied by reminiscences of such familiar journeyings, which, in my case, were always made quickly through France, (a country which I intensely dislike) and extended pretty evenly over the most beautiful cities of Italy. I spent several seasons in Rome and Florence, and a winter in Pisa; and I visited once, twice or three times, Venice, Bologna, Naples, Perugia, Assisi, Verona, Padua, Genoa, Milan and Turin. The only interest which these wanderings can claim belongs to the people with whom they brought me into contact, and these include a somewhat remarkable list: Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Somerville, Theodore Parker, Walter Savage Landor, Massimo d’ Azeglio, John Gibson, Charlotte Cushman, Count Guido Usedom, Adolphus Trollope and his first wife, Mr. W. W. Story, and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. Of many of these I gave slight sketches in my book, Italics; and must refer to them very briefly here. That book, I may mention, was written principally at Villa Gnecco, a beautiful villa at Nervi on the Riviera di Levante, then rented by my kind friend Count Usedom, the Prussian Ambassador and his English wife. Count Guido Usedom,—now alas! gone over to the majority,—was an extremely cultivated man, who had been at one time Secretary to Bunsen’s Embassy in Rome. He was so good as to undertake what I may call my (Italian) Political Education; instructing me not only of the facts of recent history, but of the dessous des cartes of each event as they were known to the initiated. He placed all his despatches for many years in 366my hands, and explained the policy of each nation concerned; and even taught me the cryptographs then in diplomatic use. His own letters to his King, the late Emperor Wilhelm I., were lively and delightful sketches of Italian affairs; for, as he said, he had discovered that to induce the King to read them they must be both amusing and beautifully transcribed. From him and the Prefects and other influential men who came to visit him at Villa Gnecco, I gained some views of politics not perhaps unworthy of record.

One day I asked him, “Whether it were exactly true that Cavour had told a distinct falsehood in the Chambers about Garibaldi’s invasion of Naples?” Count Usedom replied, “He did; and I do not believe there is a statesman in Europe who would not have done the same when a kingdom was in question.” He obviously thought, (scrupulously conscientious as he was himself) that, to diplomatists in general and their sovereigns, the laws of morality and honour were like ladies’ bracelets, highly ornamental and to be worn habitually, but to be slipped off when any serious work was to be done which required free hands. He said: “People (especially women) often asked me is such a King a good man? Is Napoleon III. a good man? This is nonsense. They are all good men, in so far that they will not do a cruel, or treacherous, or unjust thing without strong reasons for it. That would be not only a crime but a blunder. But when great dynastic interests are concerned, Kings and Emperors and their ministers are neither guided by moral considerations or deterred from following their interests because a life, or many lives, stand in the way.” He adduced Napoleon III.’s Coup d’état as an example. Napoleon was not a man to indulge in any cruel or vindictive sentiment; but neither was he one to forego a step needed for his policy.

The year following these studies under Count Usedom I was living in London, and met Mazzini one evening by special 367invitation alone at the house of Mr. and Mrs. James Stansfeld (I speak of Mr. Stansfeld’s first wife, sister of Madame Venturi). After dinner our hosts left us alone, and Mazzini, whom I had often met before and who was always very good to me, asked me if I would listen to his version of the recent history of Italy, since he thought I had been much misinformed on the subject? Of course I could only express my sense of the honour he did me by the proposal; and then, somewhat to my amazement and amusement, Mazzini descended from his armchair, seated himself opposite me cross-legged on the magnificent white rug before Mrs. Stansfeld’s blazing fire, and proceeded to pour out,—I believe for quite two hours,—the entire story of all that went before and after the siege of Rome, his Triumvirate, and the subsequent risings, plots and battles. If any one could have taken down that wonderful story in shorthand it would possess immense value, and I regret profoundly that I did not at least attempt, when I went home, to write my recollections of it. But I was merely bewildered. Each event which Mazzini named,—sitting so coolly there on the rug at my feet:—“I sent an army here, I ordered a rising there,” appeared under an aspect so entirely different from that which it had borne as represented to me by my political friends in Italy, that I was continually mystified, and asked: “But Signor Mazzini, are you talking of such and such an event?”—“Ma sì, Signora”—and off he would go again with vivid and eloquent explanations and descriptions, which fairly took my breath away. At last (I believe it was near midnight), Mrs. Stansfeld, who had, of course, arranged this effort for my conversion to Italian Republicanism, returned to the drawing-room; and I fear that the truly noble-hearted man who had done me so high a favour, rose disappointed from his lowly rug! He said to me at another time: “You English, who are blessed with loyal sovereigns, 368cannot understand that one of our reasons for being Republicans is, that we cannot trust our Kings and Grand Dukes an inch. They are each one of them a Rè Traditore!” One could quite concede that a constitutional government under a traitor-prince would not hold out any prospect of success; but at all events Victor Emanuel and Umberto have completely exonerated themselves from such suspicions.

To return to Italy and the men I know there. Count Usedom’s reference to Napoleon’s Coup d’état reminds me of the clever saying which I have quoted elsewhere, of a greater diplomatist than he; Cavaliere Massimo d’ Azeglio. Talking with him, as I had the privilege of doing every day for many months at the table d’hôte in the hotel where we both spent a winter in Pisa, I made some remark about the mistake of founding Religion on histories of Miracles. “Ah, les miracles!” exclaimed D’ Azeglio; “je n’en crois rien! Ce sont des coups d’état célestes!” Could the strongest argument against them have been more neatly packed in one simile? A coup d’état is a practical confession that the regular and orderly methods of Government have failed in the hands of the Governor, and that he is driven to have recourse to irregular and lawless methods to compass his ends and vindicate his sovereignty. A coup d’état is like the act of an impatient chess player who, finding himself losing the game while playing fairly, sweeps some pieces from the board to recover his advantage. Is this to be believed of Divine rule of the universe?

D’ Azeglio was one of those men, of whom I have met about a dozen in life, who impressed me as having in their characters elements of real greatness; not being merely clever or gifted, but large-souled. When I knew him he was a fallen Statesman, an almost forgotten Author, a General on the shelf, a Prime Minister reduced to living in a single room at an hotel, without a secretary or even a valet; yet he 369was the cheeriest Italian I ever knew. His spirits never seemed to falter. He was the life of our table every day, and I used to hear him singing continually over his watercolour drawing in his room adjoining mine at the Gran’ Bretagna, on the dull Lung-Arno of Pisa. The fate of Italy, which still hung in suspense, was, however, ever near his heart. One day it was talked over at the table d’hôte, and D’ Azeglio looked grave, and said: “We speak of this man and the other; but it is God who is making Italy!” It was so unusual a sentiment for an Italian gentleman to utter, that it impressed the listeners almost with awe. Another day, talking of Thackeray and the ugliness of his school of novelists, he observed: “It is all right to seek to express Truth. But why do these people always seem to think qu’il n’y a rien de vrai excepté le laid?” The reason,—I might have replied,—is, that it is extremely difficult to depict Beauty, and extremely easy to create Ugliness! Beauty means Proportion, Refinement, Elevation, Simplicity. How much harder it is to convey these truly, than Disproportion, Coarseness, Baseness, Duplicity? Since D’ Azeglio spoke we have gone on creating Ugliness and calling it Truth, till M. Zola has originated a literature in honour of Le Laid, and given us books like L’Assommoir in which it is perfected, almost as Beauty was of old in a statue of Praxiteles or in the Dresden Madonna.

One day that M. d’ Azeglio was doing me the honour of paying me a visit in my room, he narrated to me the following singular little bit of history. It seems that when he was Premier of Sardinia and Lord John Russell of England, the latter sent him through Lord Minto a distinct message,—“that he might safely undertake a certain line of policy, since, if a given contingency arose, England would afford him armed support.” The contingency did occur; but Lord Russell was unable to give the armed support which he had 370promised; “and this,” said D’ Azeglio, “caused my fiasco.” He resigned office, and, I think, then retired from public life; but some years later, being in England, he was invited to Windsor. There he happened to be laid up with a cold, and Lord Russell and Lord Minto, who were also guests at the castle, paid him a visit in his apartments. “Then,” said D’ Azeglio, “I turned on them both, and challenged them to say whether Lord Minto had not conveyed that message to me from Lord Russell, and whether he had not failed to keep his engagement? They did not attempt to deny that it was so.” D’ Azeglio (I understood him to say) had himself sent the Sardinian contingent to fight with our troops and the French in the Crimea, for the express and sole purpose of making Europe recognise that there was a Question d’Italie; (or possibly he spoke of this being the motive of the Minister who did so). Another remark which this charming old man made has remained very clearly on my memory for a reason to be presently explained. He observed, laughing: “People seem to think that Ministers have indefinite time at their disposal, but they have only 24 hours like other men, and they must eat and sleep and rest like the remainder of the human race. When I was Premier I calculated that dividing the subjects which demanded attention and the time I had to bestow on them, there were just three minutes and a-half on an average for ordinary subjects, and eight minutes for important ones! And if that be so in a little State like Piedmont, what must it be in the case of a Prime Minister of England? I cannot think how mortal man can bear the office!”

Many years afterwards I told this to an English Statesman, and he replied—with rather startling gaieté de cœur, considering the responsibilities for Irish murders then resting on his shoulders:—“Quite true, it is all a scuffle and a scramble from morning to night. If you had seen me two hours ago you would have found me listening to a very important 371dispatch read to me by one of my secretaries while I was dictating another, equally important; to another. All a scuffle and a scramble from morning to night!” Count Usedom told me that at one time he had been Minister of War in Prussia, and that he knew a great battle was imminent next day, the Prussian army having just come up with the enemy. He lay awake all night reflecting on the horrors of the ensuing fight; remembering that he had the power to telegraph to the General in command to stop it, and longing with all his soul to do so, but knowing that the act would be treachery to his country. Of this sort of anxiety I strongly suspect some statesmen have never felt a twinge.

It was at Florence in 1860 that I met Theodore Parker for the first time. After the letters of deep sympathy and agreement on religious matters which had passed between us, it was a strange turn of fate which brought him to die in Florence, and me to stand beside his death-bed and his grave. The world has, as is natural, passed on over the road which he did much to open, and his name is scarcely known to the younger generation; but looking back at his work and at his books again after thirty years, and when early enthusiasm has given place to the calm judgment of age, I still feel that Theodore Parker was a very great religious teacher and Confessor,—as Albert Reville wrote of him: “Cet homme fût un Prophète.” That is, he received the truths of what he called “Absolute Religion” at first hand in his own faithful soul, and spoke them out, fearless of consequences, with unequalled straightforwardness. He was not subtle-minded. He did not at all see obliquely round corners, as men like Cardinal Newman always seem to have done; nor estimate the limitations which his broad statements sometimes required. It would have been scarcely possible to have been both the man he was, and also a fine critic and metaphysician. But his was a clear, trumpet voice, to which many a freed and 372rejoicing spirit responded; and if he founded no sect or school, he did better. He infused into the religious life of England and America an element, hardly present before, of natural confidence in the absolute goodness of God independent of theologies. No man did more than he to awaken the Protestant nations from the hideous nightmare of an Eternal Hell, which within my own recollection, hovered over the piety of England. As he was wont himself to say, laughingly, he had “knocked the bottom out of hell!”

I will copy here some Notes of my only interviews with this honoured friend and teacher, to whom I owed so much:

“28th April. Saw Mr. Parker for the first time. He was lying in bed with his back to the light. Mrs. Parker brought me into the room. He took my hand tenderly and said in a low, hurried voice, holding it: ‘After all our wishes to meet, Miss Cobbe, how strange it is we should meet thus.’ I pressed his hand and he turned his eyes, which were trembling painfully and evidently seeing nothing, towards me and said, ‘You must not think you have seen me. This is not me, only the wreck of the man I was.’ Then, after a pause he added: ‘Those who love me most can only wish me a quick passage to the other world. Of course I am not afraid to die (he smiled as he spoke) but there was so much to be done!’ I said: ‘You have given your life to God and His truth as truly as any martyr of old.’ He replied: ‘I do not know; I had great powers committed to me, I have but half used them.’ I gave him a nosegay of roses and lily-of-the-valley. He smiled and touched the lily-of-the-valley, saying it was the sweetest of all flowers. I begged him, if his lodgings were not all he desired, to come to villa Brichieri” [a villa on Bellosguardo, which I then shared with Miss Blagden], “but he said he was most comfortable where he was. Then his mind wandered a little about a bad dream which haunted him, and I left him.”

373“April 29th. I was told on arriving that Mr. Parker had spoken very tenderly of my visit of the day before, but had said, ‘I must not see her often. It makes my heart swell too high. But you (to his wife) must see her every day. Remember there is but one Miss Cobbe in the world.’ Afterwards he told Dr. Appleton that he wanted him to get an inkstand for me as a last gift. [This inkstand I have used ever since.] He received me very kindly, but almost at once his mind wandered, and he spoke of ‘going home immediately.’ He asked what day of the week it was? I said: ‘This is the blessed day; it is Sunday.’ ‘Ah yes!’ he said, ‘It is a blessed day when one has got over the superstition of it. I will try to go to you to-morrow.’ (Of course this was utterly out of the question.) Then he looked at the lily of Florence which I had brought, and told him how I had got it down from one of the old walls for him, and he smiled the same sweet smile as yesterday, and touched the beautiful blue Iris, and soon seemed to sleep.”

I called after this every day, generally twice a day, at the Pension Molini where he lay; but rarely could interchange a word. Parker’s friend, Dr. Appleton of Boston, who was faithfully attending him, sent for another friend, Prof. Desor, and they and the three ladies of the party nursed him, of course, devotedly. On the 10th May I saw him lying breathing quietly, while life ebbed gently. I returned to Bellosguardo and at eight o’clock in the evening Prof. Desor and Dr. Appleton came up to tell me he had passed peacefully away.

Parker had, long before his death, desired that the first eleven verses of the Sermon on the Mount should be read at his funeral. Whether he intended that they should form the only service was not known; but Desor and Appleton arranged that so it should be, and that they should be read by Rev. W. Cunningham, an American Unitarian clergyman who was 374fortunately at the time living near us on Bellosguardo, and who was a man of much feeling and dignity of aspect. The funeral took place on Sunday, the 13th May, at the beautiful old Campo Santo Inglese, outside the walls of Florence, which contains the dust of Mrs. Browning, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and many others dear to English memories. It was the first funeral I had ever attended. The coffin when I arrived, was already lying in the mortuary chapel. My companions placed a wreath of laurels on it, and I added a large bunch of the lily-of-the-valley which he had loved. Then eight Italian pall-bearers took up the coffin and carried it on a side-walk to the grave. When it had been lowered with some difficulty to the last resting-place, my notes say:—

“Dr. Appleton then handed a Bible to Mr. Cunningham. I was standing close to him and heard his voice falter. He read like a man who felt all the holy words he said, and those sacred Blessings came with unspeakable rest to my heart. Then Desor, who had been pale as death, threw in one handful of clay.... The burial ground is exquisitely lovely, a very wilderness of flowers and perfume. Only a few cypresses give it grandeur, not gloom. All Florence was decorated with flags in honour of the anniversary of Piedmontese Constitution. We said to one another: ‘It is a festival for us also—the solemn feast of an Ascension.’”

Of course I visited this grave when I returned to Florence several years afterwards. The cypresses had grown large and dark and somewhat shadowed it. I had the violets, &c., renewed upon it more than once, but I heard later that it had become somewhat dilapidated, and I was glad to join a subscription got up by an American gentleman to erect a new tombstone. I hope it has been done, as he would have desired, with simplicity. I shall never see that grave again.

Two or three years later I edited all the twelve vols. of Parker’s Works for Messrs. Trübner, and wrote a somewhat 375lengthy Preface for them; afterwards reprinted as a separate pamphlet entitled the Religious Demands of the Age. Three Biographies of Parker have appeared; the shortest, published in England by Rev. Peter Dean, being in my opinion the best. The letters which I received from Parker in the years before I saw him are all printed by my permission in Mr. Weiss’ Life, and therefore will not be reproduced here.

That venerable old man, Rev. John J. Tayler, writing to me a few years later, summed up Parker’s character I think as justly as did Mr. Jowett in calling him a “religious Titan.”

“I read lately with much pleasure your Preface to the forthcoming edition of Theodore Parker’s works. I agree cordially with your estimate of his character. His virtues were of the highest type of the hero and the martyr. His faults, such as they were, were such as are incident to every ardent and earnest soul fighting against wickedness and hypocrisy; faults which colder and more worldly natures easily avoid, faults which he shared with some of the best and noblest of our race—a Milton, a Luther, and a Paul. When freedom and justice have achieved some conquests yet to come, his memory will be cherished with deeper reverence and affection than it is, except by a small number, now.

At the time of Parker’s death I was sharing the apartment of my clever and charming friend, Isa Blagden, in Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo. It was a delightful house with a small podere off the road, and with a broad balcony (accommodating any number of chairs) opening from the airy drawing-room, and commanding a splendid view of Florence backed by Fiesole and the Apennines. On the balcony, and in our drawing-rooms, 376assembled regularly every week and often on other occasions, an interesting and varied company. We were both of us poor, but in those days poverty in Florence permitted us to rent 14 well-furnished rooms in a charming villa, and to keep a maid and a man-servant. The latter bought our meals every morning in Florence, cooked and served them; being always clean and respectably dressed. He swept our floors and he opened our doors and announced our company and served our ices and tea with uniform quietness and success. A treasure, indeed, was good old Ansano! Also we were able to engage an open carriage with a pair of horses to do our shopping and pay our visits in Florence as often as we needed. And what does the reader think it cost us to live like this, fire and candles and food for four included? In those halcyon days under the old régime, it was precisely £20 a month! We divided everything exactly and it never exceeded £10 apiece.

Among our most frequent visitors was Mr. Browning. Mrs. Browning was never able to drive so far, but her warm friendship for Miss Blagden was heartily shared by her husband and we saw a great deal of him. Always full of spirits, full of interest in everything from politics to hedge-flowers, cordial and utterly unaffected, he was at all times a charming member of society; but I confess that in those days I had no adequate sense of his greatness as a poet. I could not read his poetry, though he had not then written his most difficult pieces, and his conversation was so playful and light that it never occurred to me that I was wasting precious time chatting frivolously with him when I might have been gaining high thoughts and instruction. There was always a ripple of laughter round the sofa where he used to seat himself, generally beside some lady of the company, towards whom, in his eagerness, he would push nearer and nearer till she frequently rose to avoid falling 377off at the end! When we drove out in parties he would discuss every tree and weed, and get excited about the difference between eglantine and eglatere (if there be any), and between either of them and honeysuckle. He and Isa were always wrangling in an affectionate way over some book or music; (he was a fine performer himself on the piano), and one night when I had left Villa Brichieri and was living at Villa Niccolini at least half-a-mile off, the air, being in some singular condition of sonority, carried their voices between the walls of the two villas so clearly across to me that I actually heard some of the words of their quarrel, and closed my window lest I should be an eavesdropper. I believe it was about Spirit-rapping they were fighting, for which, and the professors of the art, Browning had a horror. I have seen him stamping on the floor in a frenzy of rage at the way some believers and mediums were deceiving Mrs. Browning.

Thirty years afterwards, the last time I ever had the privilege of talking with Robert Browning (it was in Surrey House in London), I referred to these old days and to our friend, long laid in that Campo Santo at Florence. His voice fell and softened, and he said: “Ah, poor, dear Isa!” with deep feeling.

At that time I do not think that any one, certainly no one of the society which surrounded him, thought of Mr. Browning as a great poet, or as an equal one to his wife, whose Aurora Leigh was then a new book. The utter unselfishness and generosity wherewith he gloried in his wife’s fame,—bringing us up constantly good reviews of her poems and eagerly recounting how many editions had been called for,—perhaps helped to blind us, stupid that we were! to his own claims. Never, certainly did the proverb about the “irritabile genus” of Poets prove less true. All through his life, even when the world had found him out, and societies existed for what Mr. Frederic Harrison might justly have called a “culte” of 378Browning, if not a “latria,” he remained the same absolutely unaffected, unassuming, genial English gentleman.

Of Mrs. Browning I never saw much. Sundry visits we paid to each other missed, and when I did find her at home in Casa Guidi we did not fall on congenial themes. I was bubbling over with enthusiasm for her poetry, but had not the audacity to express my admiration, (which, in truth, had been my special reason for visiting Florence;) and she entangled me in erudite discussions about Tuscan and Bolognese schools of painting, concerning which I knew little and, perhaps, cared less. But I am glad I looked into the splendid eyes which lived like coals, in her pain-worn face, and revealed the soul which Robert Browning trusted to meet again on the threshold of eternity.^[18] Was there ever such a testimony as their perfect marriage,—living on as it did in the survivor’s heart for a quarter of a century,—to the possibility of the eternal union of Genius and Love?

I received in later years from Mr. Browning several letters which I may as well insert in this place.

“I return the Petition, for the one good reason, that I have just signed its fellow forwarded to me by Mr. Leslie Stephen. You have heard ‘I take an equal interest with yourself in the effort to suppress Vivisection.’ I dare not so honour my mere wishes and prayers as to put them for a moment beside your noble acts, but this I know, I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two. I return the paper, because I 379shall be probably shut up here for the next week or two, and prevented from seeing my friends, whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not be of the number.”

“I wish I were not irretrievably engaged on Monday afternoon, twice over, as it prevents me from accepting your invitation. By all I hear, Mr. Bishop’s performance must be instructive to those who need it, and amusing to everybody.^[19]

“It is about a week ago since I had to write to the new Editor of the ‘Fortnightly,’ Mr. Escott—and assure him that I was so tied and bound by old promises ‘to give something to this and that Magazine if I gave at all’—that it became impossible I could oblige anybody in even so trifling a matter. It comes of making rash resolutions—but, once made, there is no escape from the consequence—though I rarely have felt this so much of a hardship as now when I am forced to leave a request of yours uncomplied with. For the rest, I shall indeed rejoice if that abominable and stupid cruelty of pigeon-shooting is put a stop to. The other detestable practice, Vivisection, strikes deeper root, I fear; but God bless whoever tugs at it!

381Another of our most frequent visitors at Villa Brichieri was Mr. T. Adolphus Trollope, author of the Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici, “A Decade of Italian Women” and other books. Though not so successful an author as his brilliant brother Anthony, he was an interesting man, whom we much liked. One day he came up and pressed us to go back with him and pay a visit to a guest at his Villino Trollope in the Piazza Maria Antonia,—a lovely house he had built, with a broad verandah behind it, opening on a garden of cypresses and oranges backed by the old crenelated and Iris-decked walls of Florence. He had, he told us, a most interesting person staying with him and Mrs. Trollope;—Mrs. Lewes—who had written Adam Bede, and was then writing Romola. Miss Blagden alone went with him, and was enchanted, like all the world, with George Eliot.

Mr. Trollope told me many curious facts concerning Italian society which, from his long residence, he knew more intimately than almost any other foreigner. He described the marriage settlement of a nobleman which had actually passed through his hands, wherein the intending husband, with wondrous foresight and precaution, deliberately named three or four gentlemen, amongst whom his future wife might choose her cavaliere servente!

We had several other habitués at our villas; Dall’ Ongaro, a poet and ex-priest; Romanelli, the sculptor; and Miss Linda White, now Madame Villari, the charming authoress and hostess of a brilliant salon, wife of the eminent historian who was recently Minister of Education.

Perhaps the most interesting of our visitors, after Mr. Browning, was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She impressed me much, and the criticisms I have read of her “Sunny Memories” and other books have failed to diminish my admiration for her. She was one of the few women, I suppose, who have actually felt Fame, as heroes do who receive national 382Triumphs; and she seemed to be as simple and unpretentious, as little elated as it was possible to be. She had even a trick of looking down as if she had been stared out of countenance; but this was perhaps a part of that singular habit which most Evangelicals of her class exhibited thirty years ago, of shyness in society and inability to converse except with the person seated next them in company. It was the verification after eighteen centuries of the old heathen taunt against the Christians, recorded in the dialogues of Minucius Felix, “In publicam muta, in angulis garrula!” I have recorded elsewhere Mrs. Stowe’s remark when I spoke with grief of the end of Theodore Parker’s work. “Do you think,” she said, suddenly looking up at me with flashing eyes, “that Theodore Parker has no work to do for God now?” I must not repeat again her interesting conversation as we sat on our balcony watching the sun go down over the Val d’ Arno. After much serious talk as to the nearness of the next life, Mrs. Stowe narrated a saying of her boy on which, (as I told her), a good heterodox sermon in my sense might be preached. She taught the child that Anger was sinful, whereupon he asked: “Then why, Mama, does the Bible say so often that God was angry?” She replied motherlike: “You will understand it when you are older.” The boy pondered seriously for awhile and then burst out: “O Mama, I have found it out! God is angry, because God is not a Christian!”

Another of our habitués on my first visit to Florence was Walter Savage Landor. At that time he was, with his dear Pomeranian dog, Giallo, living alone in very ordinary lodgings in Florence, having quarrelled with his family and left his villa in their possession. He had a grand, leonine head with long white hair and beard, and to hear him denouncing his children was to witness a performance of Lear never matched on any stage! He was very kind to me, and we often walked about 383odd nooks of Florence together, while he poured out reminiscences of Byron and Shelley, some of which I have recorded (Chap. IX., p. 257), and of others of the older generation whom he had known, so that I seemed in touch with them all. He was then about 88 years of age, and perhaps his great and cultivated intellect was already failing. Much that he said in wrath and even fury seemed like raving, but he was gentle as a child to us women, and to his dog whom he passionately loved. When I wrote the first Memorial against Prof. Schiff which started the anti-vivisection crusade, Mr. Landor’s name was one of the first appended to it. He added some words to his signature so fierce and contemptuous that I never dared to publish them!

We also saw much of Dr. Grisanowski, a very clever Pole, who afterwards became a prominent advocate of the science-tortured brutes. When I discussed the matter with him he was entirely on the side of Science. After some years he sent me his deeply thought-out pamphlet, with the endorsement “For Miss Cobbe,—who was right when I was wrong;” a very generous retractation. We also received Mr. Frederick Tennyson, (Lord Tennyson’s brother), Madame Venturi, Madame Alberto Mario, the late Lord Justice Bowen, (then a brilliant young man from Oxford,) and many more.

By far the best and dearest of my friends in Florence however, was one who never came up our hill, and who was already then an aged woman—Mrs. Somerville. I had brought a letter of introduction to her, being anxious to see one who had been such an honour to womanhood; but I expected to find her an incarnation of Science, having very little affinity with such a person as I. Instead of this, I found in her the dearest old lady in all the world, who took me to her heart as if I had been a newly-found daughter, and for whom I soon felt such tender affection that sitting beside her on her sofa, (as I mostly did on account of her deafness) 384I could hardly keep myself from caressing her. In a letter to Harriet St. Leger I wrote of her: “She is the very ideal of an old lady, so gentle, cordial and dignified, like my mother; and as fresh, eager and intelligent now, as she can ever have been.” Her religious ideas proved to be exactly like my own; and being no doubt somewhat a-thirst for sympathy on a subject on which she felt profoundly, (her daughters differing from her), she opened her heart to me entirely. Here are a few notes I made after talks with her:—

“Mrs. Somerville thinks no one can be eloquent who has not studied the Bible. We discussed the character of Christ. She agreed to all I said, adding she thought it clear the Apostles never thought he was God, only the image of the perfection of God. She kissed me tenderly when I rose to go and bade me come back at any hour—at three in the morning if I liked!—May 18th. Mrs. Somerville gave me her photograph. She says she always feels a regret thinking of the next life that we shall see no more the flowers of this world. I said we should no doubt see others still fairer. “Ah! yes,” she said, “but our own roses and mignonette! I shall miss them. The dear animals I believe we shall meet. They suffer so often here, they must live again.”—June 3rd. Wished farewell to Mrs. Somerville. She said kissing me with many tears, “We shall meet in Heaven! I shall claim you there.”

I saw Mrs. Somerville again on my other visits to Italy, at Genoa, Spezzia and Naples; of course making it a great object of my plans to be for some weeks near her. In my last journey, in 1879, I saw at Naples the noble monument erected over her grave by her daughter. It represents her (heroic size) reclining on a classic chair,—in somewhat the attitude of the statue of Agrippina in the Vatican.

Mrs. Somerville ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. When I saw her death announced on the posters of 385the newspapers in the streets in London, I hurried as soon as I could recover myself, to ask Dean Stanley to arrange for her interment in the Abbey. The Dean consented freely and with hearty approval to my proposition, and Mrs. Somerville’s nephew, Sir William Fairfax, promised at once to defray all expenses. There was only one thing further needed, and that was the usual formal request from some public body or official persons to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Dean Stanley had immediately written to the Astronomer Royal to suggest that he and the President of the Royal Society, as the representatives of the sciences with which Mrs. Somerville’s fame was connected, should address to him the demand which would authorize his proceeding with the matter. But that gentleman refused to do it—on the ground that he had never read Mrs. Somerville’s books! Whether he had read one in which she took the opposite side from his in the sharp and angry Adams-Le Verrier controversy, it is not for me to say. Any way, jealousy, either scientific or masculine, declined to admit Mary Somerville’s claims to a place in the national Valhalla, wherein so many men neither intellectually nor morally her equals have been welcomed.

From the time of our first meeting till her death in 1872, Mrs. Somerville maintained a close correspondence with me. I have had all her beautifully-written letters bound together, and they form a considerable volume. Of course it was a delight to me to send her everything which might interest her, and among other things I sent her a volume of Theodore Parker’s Prayers; edited by myself. In October, 1863, I spent a long time at Spezzia to enjoy the immense pleasure of her society. I was then a cripple and unable to walk to her house, and wrote of her visits as follows to Miss Elliot:

“Mrs. Somerville comes to me every day. She is looking younger than three years ago and she talked to me for three 386hours yesterday, pouring out such stores of recent science as I never heard before. Then we talked a little heresy, and she thanked me with tears in her eyes for Parker’s Prayers, saying she had found them the greatest comfort and the most perfect expression of religious feeling of any prayers she has known.”

Another time I sent her my Hopes of the Human Race. She wrote, three weeks before her death, “God bless you dearest friend for your irresistible argument for our Immortality! Not that I ever doubted of it, but as I shall soon enter my ninety-third year, your words are an inexpressible comfort.”

Mary Somerville was the living refutation of all the idle, foolish things which have been said of intellectual women. There never existed a more womanly woman. Her Life, edited by her eldest daughter Martha Somerville (her son by her first marriage, Mr. Woronzow Greig, died long before her), has been much read and liked. I reviewed it in the Quarterly (January, 1874), and am tempted to enclose a letter which Martha Somerville (then and always my good friend) wrote about it:

“From Miss Somerville to F. P. C.

“I have this morning received the Quarterly Review and some slips from newspapers. What can I say to express my gratitude to you for the article,—so admirably written; and giving so touching a picture of my Mother,—as you, her best friend (notwithstanding the great difference of age) knew her? Also I received lately the Academy which pleased me much, too. The Memoir has been received far more favourably than I ventured to expect.”

A long time after this, I paid a visit to friends at St. Andrews and stopped from Saturday to Monday, on my way, 387at Burntisland. Writing from thence to Miss Elliot about her own country, and countrymen, I said:—

“I came here to look up the scene of Mrs. Somerville’s childhood, and I have found everything just as she described it;—the Links; the pretty hills and woods full of wild flowers; the rocky bit of shore with boulders full of fossil shells which excited her childish wonder when she wandered about, a beautiful little girl, as she must have been. If ever there were a case of—

it was surely hers. Very naturally I was thinking of her all day and wondering whether she is now studying the flora of Heaven, of which she used to speak, and pursuing Astronomy among the stars; or whether it can be possible these things pass away for ever! I wanted very much to make out where Sir William Fairfax’ house had been, and finally was directed to the schoolmaster who, it was said, knew all about it. I found the good man in a large schoolhouse where he has 600 pupils; and as soon as he learned my name he seized my hand and made great demonstrations; and straightway proceeded to constitute himself my guide to the localities in question. The joke however was this. Hardly were we out of the house before he said, ‘I’ll send you a pamphlet of mine—not about Science, I don’t care for Science, I care for Morals;—and I’ve found out there is only a very little thing to be done, to stop all pauperism and all crime! You are just the person to understand me!’ The idea of this poor schoolmaster in Burntisland compressing that modest programme into a ‘pamphlet’ seems to me deliciously characteristic of Scotland.”

A college for Ladies was opened some years ago at Oxford and named after Mrs. Somerville. I greatly rejoiced at the time at this very fitting tribute to her memory; and induced my 388brother to send his daughter, my dear niece, Frances Conway Cobbe, to the Hall. I ceased to rejoice, however, when I found that a lady bearing a name identified with Vivisection in England was nominated for election as a member of the Council of the College. I entered, (as a Subscriber,) the most vigorous protest I could make against the proposed choice, but, alas! in vain.

One of our visitors at Villa Brichieri was a very pious French lady, who came up to us one day to dinner straight from her devotions in the Duomo, where a Triduo was going on against Renan; and, as it chanced, she began to praise somewhat excessively a lady of rank whose reputation had suffered more than one serious injury. My English friend remarked, smiling, in mitigation of the eulogy:—

“Elle a eue ses petits délassements!”

the answer was deliciously XVIII. Century—

“C’est ce qui m’occupe le moins. Pourvu que cela soit fait avec du bon goût! D’ailleurs on ne parle sérieusement que de deux ou trois. Le Prince de S., par exemple. Encore est il mort celui-là!”

It was during one of my visits to Florence that I saw King Victor Emanuel’s public entry into the city, which had just elected him King. This is how I described the scene to Harriet St. Leger:—

“Happily we had a fine day for the king’s entry on Monday last. It was a glorious sight! The beautiful old city blossomed out in flowers, flags, garlands, hangings and gonfalons beyond all English imagination. In every street there was a triumphal arch, while boulevards of artificial trees loaded with camelias, ran from the railway to the gate and down the via Calzaiuoli. Even the mean little sdrucciolo de’ Pitti was made into one long arbour by twenty green arches sustaining hanging baskets of flowers. The Pitti itself had its rugged old face decked with wreaths. I 389had the good fortune to stand on a balcony commanding a view of the whole procession. Victor Emanuel, riding his charger of Solferino, looked—coarse and fat as he is,—a man and a soldier, and more sympathetic than Kings in general. Cavour has a Luther-like face, which wore a gleam of natural pleasure at his reception. The people were quite mad with joy. They did not cheer as we do, but uttered a sort of deep roar of ecstacy, flinging clouds of flowers under the King’s horse’s feet, and seeming as if they would fling themselves also from their balconies. Our hostess, an Italian lady, went directly into hysterics, and all the party, men and women cried and kissed and laughed in the wildest way. At night there was a marvellous illumination, extending as far as the eye could reach, in every palazzo and cottage down the Val d’ Arno and up the slopes of the Apennines, where bonfires blazed on all the heights.”

In Florence my friends had been principally literary men and women. In Rome they were chiefly artists. Harriet Hosmer, to whom I had letters, was the first I knew. She was in those days the most bewitching sprite the world ever saw. Never have I laughed so helplessly as at the infinite fun of this bright Yankee girl. Even in later years when we perforce grew a little graver, she needed only to begin one of her descriptive stories to make us all young again. I have not seen her now for many years since she has returned to America, nor yet any one in the least like her; and it is vain to hope to convey to any reader the contagion of her merriment. O! what a gift,—beyond rubies, are such spirits! And what fools, what cruel fools, are those who damp them down in children possessed of them!

Of Miss Hosmer’s sculpture I hoped, and every one hoped, great things. Her Zenobia, her Puck, her Sleeping Faun were beautiful creations in a very pure style of art. But she was lured away from sculpture by some invention of her own of a mechanical kind, over which many years of her life 390have been lost. Now I believe she has achieved a fine statue of Isabella of Spain, which has been erected in San Francisco.

Jealous rivals in Rome spread abroad at one time a slanderous story that Harriet Hosmer did not make her own statues. I have in my possession an autograph by her master, Gibson, which he wrote at the time to rebut this falsehood, and which bears all the marks of his quaint style of English composition.

“Finding that my pupil Miss Hosmer’s progress in her art begins to agitate some rivals of the male sex, as proved by the following malicious words printed in the Art journal;—

“‘Zenobia—said to be by Miss Hosmer, but really executed by an Italian workman at Rome’;—

“I feel it is but justice on my part to state that Miss Hosmer became my pupil on her arrival at Rome from America. I soon found that she had uncommon talent. She studied under my own eyes for seven years, modelling from the antique and her own original works from the living models.

“The first report of her Zenobia was that it was the work of Mr. Gibson. Afterwards that it is by a Roman workman. So far it is true that it was built up by my man from her own original small model, according to the practice of our profession; the long study and finishing is by herself, like every other sculptor.

“If Miss Hosmer’s works were the productions of other artists and not her own there would be in my studio two impostors—Miss Hosmer and Myself.

Gibson was himself a most interesting person; an old Greek soul, born by haphazard in a Welsh village. He had wonderfully little (for a Welshman) of anything like what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism in his composition. There was a story current among us of some one telling him of a bet which had been made that another member of our 391society could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer; and it was added that the party defied to repeat it had begun (instead of it) with a doggerel American prayer for children:—

“Ah! you see,” said Gibson, “He did know the Lord’s Prayer after all!”

Once he sat by me on the Pincian and said: “You know I don’t often read the Bible, I have my sculpture to attend to. But I have had to look into it for my bas-relief of the Children coming to Christ, and, do you know, I find that Jesus Christ really said a good thing?”

I smothered my laughter, and said: “O certainly, Mr. Gibson, a great many excellent things.” “Yes!” he said in his slow way. “Yes, he did. There were some people called Pharisees who came and asked him troublesome questions. And he said,—he said,—well, I forget exactly what he said, but ‘Deeds not words,’ was what he meant to say.”

The exquisite grace of Gibson’s statues was all a part of the purity and delicacy of his mind. He was in many respects an unique character; a simple-hearted and single-minded worshipper of Beauty; and if my good friend Lady Eastlake had not thought fit to prune his extraordinarily quaint and original Autobiography, (which I have read in the MS.) to ordinary book form and modernised style, I believe it would have been deemed one of the gems of original literature, like Benvenuto Cellini’s, and the renown of Gibson as a great artist would have been kept alive thereby.

A merry party, of whom Mr. Gibson was usually one, used to meet frequently that winter at the hospitable table of Charlotte Cushman, the actress. She had, then, long retired from the stage, and had a handsome house in the via Gregoriana, in which also lived her friend Miss Stebbins and 392Miss Hosmer. Our dinners of American oysters and wild boar with agro-dolce-sauce, and déjeuners including an awful refection menacing sudden death, called “Woffles,” eaten with molasses (of which woffles I have seen five plates divided between four American ladies!) were extremely hilarious. There was a brightness, freedom and joyousness among these gifted Americans, which was quite delightful to me. Miss Cushman in particular I greatly admired and respected. She had, of course, like all actors, the acquired habit of giving vivid outward expression to every emotion, just as we quiet English ladies are taught from our cradles to repress such signs, and to cultivate a calm demeanour under all emergencies. But this vivacity rendered her all the more interesting. She often read to us Mrs. Browning’s or Lowell’s poetry in a very fine way indeed. Some years after this happy winter a certain celebrated London surgeon pronounced her to be dying of a terrible disease. She wished us farewell courageously, and went back to New England, as we all sadly thought to die there. The next thing we heard of Charlotte Cushman was, that she had returned to the stage and was acting Meg Merrilies to immense and delighted audiences! Next we heard that she had thus earned £5,000, and that she was building a house with her earnings. Finally we learned that the house was finished, and that she was living in it! She did so, and enjoyed it for some years before the end came from other causes than the one threatened by the great London surgeon.

One day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend of Mrs. Somerville, who had particularly desired that she and I should meet,—a Welsh lady, Miss Lloyd, of Hengwrt? I was, of course, very willing indeed to meet a friend of Mrs. Somerville. We happily found Miss Lloyd, busy in her sculptor’s studio 393over a model of her Arab horse, and, on hearing that I was anxious to ride, she kindly offered to mount me if I would join her in her rides on the Campagna. Then began an acquaintance, which was further improved two years later when Miss Lloyd came to meet and help me when I was a cripple, at Aix-les-Bains; and from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived together. Of a friendship like this, which has been to my later life what my mother’s affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to say more.

On my way home through France to Bristol from one of my earlier journeys and before I became crippled, I had the pleasure of making for the first time the acquaintance of Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.

“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note. She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry). I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is charming; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s courtesy. She spoke of you with great warmth of regard; remembered everything you had said, and wanted to know all about your sculpture studies in Rome. I said it had encouraged me to intrude on her to hope I might persuade her to fulfil her promise of stopping with you next winter, and added how very much you wished it, and described the association she would have with you, sketching excursions, bovi, and Thalaba” (Miss Lloyd’s Arab horse). “She said over and over she would not go to Italy without going to see you; and that she hoped to go soon, possibly next winter.... Somehow, from talking of 394Italy we passed to talking of the North, which Mdlle. Bonheur thinks has a deeper poetry than the South, and then to Ireland, where she wishes to go next summer (I hope stopping at my brother’s en passant) and of which country she said such beautiful, dreamy things that even I grew poetic about our ‘Brumes,’—to which she quickly applied the epithet ‘grandiose,’—and our sea, looking, I said, like an angel’s eye with a tear in it. At this simile she was so pleased that we grew quite friends, and I can only hope she will not see that sea on a grey day and think me an impostor! Nothing I liked about her, so much, however, as her interest in Hattie Hosmer, and her delight in hearing about her Zenobia^[20] (triumphans) in the Exhibition; at which report of mine she exclaimed: ‘That is the thing above all others I shall wish to see in London! You know I have seen Miss Hosmer, but I have never seen any of her works, and I do very much desire to do so’.... Her one-eyed friend sat by painting all the time. She is not enticing to look at, but I dare say, not bad. I said I always envied friends whom I caught working together and that I lived alone; to which she replied ‘Je vous plains alors!’ in a tone of conviction, showing that, in her case at all events, friendship was a very pleasant thing. Mdlle. Bonheur showed me three or four fine pictures she is painting, and some prints, but of course I was as stupid as usual in studios and only remarked (as a buffalo might have done,) that Roman bovi were more majestic and like Homeric Junos than those wiry little Scotch short-horns her soul delighteth to honour. But O! she has done a Dog, such a dog! Like Bush in outward dog, but the inner soul of him more profoundly, unutterably wise than tongue may tell! a Dog to be set up and worshipped as Anubis. Certainly Mdlle. Bonheur is a finer artist than Landseer in this, his own line. I wish she would leave the cattle and ‘go to the dogs.’”

395My last journey but one to Italy was taken when I was lame; and, after my sojourn at Aix-les-Bains, I spent the autumn in Florence and the winter in Pisa; where I met Cav. d’ Azeglio as above recorded. Miss Lloyd rejoined me at Genoa in the spring to help me to return to England, as I was still (after four years!) miserably helpless. We returned over Mont Cenis which had no tunnel through it in those days; and, on the very summit, our carriage broke down. We were in a sad dilemma, for I was quite unable to walk a hundred yards; but a train of carts happily coming up and lending us ropes enough to hold our trap together for my use alone, Miss Lloyd ran down the mountain, and at last we found ourselves safe at the bottom.

After another very pleasant visit together to her friend Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur, and many promises on her part to come to us in England (which, alas! she never fulfilled) we made our way to London; and, within a few weeks, Miss Lloyd—one morning before breakfast,—found, and, in an incredibly short time, bought the dear little house in South Kensington which became our home with few interruptions for a quarter of a century; No. 26, Hereford Square. It was at that time almost at the end of London. All up the Gloucester Road between it and the Park were market-gardens; and behind it and alongside of it, where Rosary Gardens and Wetherby Place now stand, there were large fields of grass with abundance of fine old lime trees and elms, and one magnificent walnut tree which ought never to have been cut down. Behind us we had a large piece of ground, which we rented temporarily and called the “Boundless Prairie,” (!) where we gave afternoon tea to our friends under the limes, when they were in bloom. On a part of our garden Miss Lloyd erected a sculptor’s Studio. The House itself, though small, was very pretty and airy; 396every room in it lightsome and pleasant, and somehow capable of containing a good many people. We often had in it as many as 50 or 60 guests. In short, I had once more a home, and a most happy one; and my lonely wanderings were over.

CHAPTER XV. LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES. LITERARY LIFE.

399For some time before I took up my abode in London I had been writing busily for the press. When my active work at Bristol came to an end and I became for four years a cripple, I naturally turned to use my pen, and, finding from my happy experience of Workhouse Sketches in Macmillan’s Magazine that I could make money without much difficulty, I soon obtained almost as many openings as I could profit by to add to my income. I wrote a series of articles for Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Mr. Froude, who had been my brother’s friend at Oxford, and who from that time I had the high privilege to count as mine also. These first papers were sketches of Rome, Cairo, Athens, Jerusalem, etc.; and they were eventually reprinted in a rather successful little volume called Cities of the Past, now long out of print. I also wrote many papers connected with women’s affairs and claims, in both Macmillan and Fraser; and these likewise were reprinted in a volume; Pursuits of Women. Beside writing these longer articles, I acted as “Own Correspondent” to the Daily News in Rome one year, and in Florence another, and sent a great many articles to the Spectator, Economist, Reader, &c. In short I turned out (as a painter would say) a great many Pot-Boilers. These, with my small patrimony, enabled me to bear the expense of travelling and of keeping a maid; a luxury which had become indispensable.

I also at this time edited, as I have mentioned, for Messrs. Trübner, the 12 vols. of Parker’s Works, with a Preface. The arrangement of the great mass of miscellaneous papers 400was very laborious and perplexing, but I think I marshalled the volumes fairly well. I did not perform as fully as I ought to have done my editorial duty of correcting for the press; indeed I did not understand that it fell to my share, or I must have declined to undertake the task. Mr. Trübner paid me £50 for this editing, which I had proposed to do gratuitously.

I had much at heart,—from the time I gave up my practical work among the poor folk at Bristol,—to write again on religious matters, and to help so far as might be possible for me to clear a way through the maze of new controversies which, in those days of Essays and Reviews, Colenso’s Pentateuch and Renan’s Vie de Jésus, were remarkably lively and wide-spread through all classes of society. With this hope, and while spending a summer in my crippled condition at Aix-les-Bains, and on the Diablerêts, I wrote to Harriet St. Leger:—

“I am now striving to write a book about present controversies and the future basis of religious faith. I want to do justice to existing parties, High, Low and Broad, yet to show (as of course I believe) that none of them can really solve the problem; and that the faith of the future must be one not based on a special History, though corroborated by all history.”

The plan of this book—named Broken Lights—is as follows: I discriminate the different sections of thinkers from the point of view of the answers they would respectively give to the supreme question, “What are the ultimate grounds of our faith in God, in Duty and in Immortality?” First, I distinguish between those who hold those grounds to rest on the Traditional Revelation; and those who hold them to be the Original Revelation of the Divine Spirit in each faithful soul. The former are divided again, naturally, into those 401who take their authoritative tradition from a Living Prophet, a Church, or a Book. But in Christian times we have only had a few obscure prophets (Montanus, Joseph Smith, Swedenborg, Brother Prince, Mr. Harris, &c.), and the choice practically lies between resting faith on a Church, or resting it on a Book.

I classify both the parties in the English Church who rest respectively on a Church and on a Book, as Palæologians, the one, the High Church, whose ground of religious faith is: “The Bible authenticated and interpreted by the Church;” and the other the Low Church, whose theory is still the formula of Chillingworth: “The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.”

But it has come to pass that all the distinctive doctrines of Christianity (over and above Theism) which the Traditionalists maintain, are, in these days, more or less opposed to modern sentiment, criticism and science; and among those who adhere to them, one or other attitude as regards this opposition must be taken up. The Palæologian party in both wings insists on the old doctrines more or less crudely and strictly, and would fain bend modern ideas to harmonize with them. Another party, which is generally called the Neologian, endeavours to modify or explain the old doctrines, so as to harmonize them with the ethics and criticism of our generation.

After a somewhat careful study of the positions, merits and failures of the two Palæologian parties, I proceed to define among the Neologians, the First Broad Church (of Maurice and Kingsley), whose programme was: “To harmonize the doctrines of Church and Bible with modern thought.” This end it attempted to reach by new readings and interpretations, consonant with the highest modern sentiment; but it remained of course obvious, that the supposed Divinely-inspired Authorities had failed to convey the sense of these 402interpretations to men’s minds for eighteen centuries; indeed had conveyed the reverse. The old received doctrine of an eternal Hell, for example, was the absolute contradiction of the doctrines of Divine universal love and everlasting Mercy, which the new teachers professed to derive from the same traditional authority. This school emphatically “put the new wine into old bottles;” and the success of the experiment could only be temporary, since it rests on the assumption that God has miraculously taught men in language which they have, for fifty generations, uniformly misinterpreted.

The other branch of the Neologian party I call the Second Broad Church (the party of Stanley and Jowett). It may be considered as forming the Extreme Left of the Revelationists; the furthest from mere Authority and the nearest to Rationalism; just as the High Church party forms the Extreme Right; the nearest to Authority and furthest from Rationalism. I endeavour to define the difference between the First and Second Broad Church parties as follows:—

“The First Broad Church, as we have seen, maintains that the doctrines of the Bible and the Church can be perfectly harmonized with the results of modern thought, by a new, but legitimate exegesis of the Bible and interpretation of Church formulæ. The Second Broad Church seems prepared to admit that, in many cases, they can only be harmonized by the sacrifice of Biblical infallibility. The First Broad Church has recourse (to harmonize them) to various logical processes, but principally to that of diverting the student, at all difficult points, from criticism to edification. The Second Broad Church uses no ambiguity, but frankly avows that when the Bible contradicts Science, the Bible must be in error. The First Broad Church maintains that the Inspiration of the Bible differs in kind as well as in degree, from that of other books. The Second Broad Church appears to hold that it differs in degree, but not in kind.”

403After a considerable discussion on the various doctrines of the nature and limitations of Inspiration, I ask, p. 110, 111:—

“Admit the Inspiration of Prophets and Apostles to have been substantially the same with that always granted to faithful souls;—admit, therefore, the existence of a human element in Revelation, can we still look to that Revelation as the safe foundation for our Religion?”

“To this question the leaders of the Second Broad Church answer unhesitatingly: ‘Yes. It has been an egregious error of modern times to confound the Record of the Revelation with the Revelation itself, and to assume that God’s lessons lose their value because they have been transmitted to us through the natural channels of human reason and conscience. Returning to the true view, we shall only get rid of uncounted difficulties and objections which prevent the reception of Christianity by the most honest minds here in England and in heathen countries.’”

But in conclusion I ask—

“‘What influence can the Second Broad Church exercise on the future religion of the world? What answer will it supply to the doubts of the age, and whereon would it rest our faith in God and Immortality?’ The reply seems to be brief. The Second Broad Church would, like all the other parties in the Church, call on us to rest our faith on History; but in their case, it is History corroborated by consciousness, not opposed thereto. In the next Chapter it will be my effort to show that under no conditions is it probable that History can afford us our ultimate grounds of faith. Meanwhile, it must appear that if any form of Historical faith may escape such a conclusion and approve itself to mankind in time to come, it is that which is proposed by the Second Broad Church, and which it worthily presents,—to the intellect by its learning, and to the religious sentiment by its profound and tender piety.”—Broken Lights, p. 120.

These four parties, two Palæologian and two Neologian, thus examined, included between them all the members of 404the Church of England, and all the Orthodox Dissenters. There remained the Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers and Unitarians, and of each of these the book contains a sketch and criticism; finally concluding with an exposition (so far as I could give it) of Theoretic and of Practical Theism.

The book contains further two Appendices. The first treats of Bishop Colenso’s onslaught on the Pentateuch; then greatly disturbing English orthodoxy. The second Appendix deals with the other most notable book of that period; Renan’s Vie de Jésus. After maintaining that Renan has failed in delineating his principal figure, while he has vastly illuminated his environment, I give with diffidence my own view of Christ, lest Traditionalists should, without contradiction, assume that Renan has given the general Theistic idea of his character. After referring to the measureless importance of the palingenesia of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus, I draw a comparison between the New Birth in the individual soul, and the historically-traceable results of Christ’s life on the human race. (P. 167.)

“Taking the whole ancient world in comparison with the modern, of Heathendom with Christendom, the general character of the two is absolutely analogous to that which in individuals we call Unregenerate and Regenerate. Of course there were thousands of regenerated souls, Hebrew, Greek, Indian, of all nations and languages, before Christ, and of course there are millions unregenerate now. But nevertheless, from this time onward we trace through history a new spirit in the world: a leaven working through the whole mass of souls.”...

The language of the old world was one of self-satisfaction, as its Art was of completeness. On the other hand:

“The language of the new world, coming to us through the thousand tongues of our multiform civilization, is one 405long cry of longing aspiration: ‘Would that I could create the ineffable Beauty! Would that I could discover the eternal and absolute Truth! Would! O, would it were possible to live out the good, the noble, and the holy!’”...

“This great phenomenon of history surely points to some corresponding great event whereby the revolution was accomplished. There must have been a moment when the old order stopped and the new began. Some action must have taken place upon the souls of men which thenceforth started them in a different career, and opened the age of progressive life. When did this moment arrive? What was the primal act of the endless progress? By whom was that age opened?”

“Here we have really ground to go upon. There is no need to establish the authenticity or veracity of special books or harmonize discordant narratives to obtain an answer to our question. The whole voice of human history unconsciously and without premeditation bears its unmistakeable testimony. The turning point between the old world and the new was the beginning of the Christian movement. The action upon human nature which started it on its new course was the teaching and example of Christ. Christ was he who opened the age of endless progress.”

“The view, therefore, which seems to be the best fitting one for our estimate of the character of Christ, is that which regards him as the great Regenerator of Humanity. His coming was to the life of humanity what Regeneration is to the life of the individual. This is not a conclusion doubtfully deduced from questionable biographies; but a broad, plain inference from the universal history of our race. We may dispute all details; but the grand result is beyond criticism. The world has changed, and that change is historically traceable to Christ. The honour, then, which Christ demands of us must be in proportion of our estimate of the value of such Regeneration. He is not merely a Moral Reformer inculcating pure ethics; not merely a Religious Reformer clearing away old theologic errors and teaching 406higher ideas of God. These things he was; but he might, for all we can tell, have been them both as fully, and yet have failed to be what he has actually been to our race. He might have taught the world better ethics and better theology, and yet have failed to infuse into it that new Life which has ever since coursed through its arteries and penetrated its minutest veins.”

Broken Lights proved to be (with the exception of my Duties of Women) the most successful of my books. It went through three English editions, and I believe quite as many in America; but of these last all I knew was the occasional present of a single specimen copy. It was very favourably reviewed, but some of my fellow Theists rather disapproved of the tribute I had paid to Christ (as quoted above); and my good friend, Prof. F. W. Newman, actually wrote a severe pamphlet against me, entitled “Hero-Making Religion.” It did not alter my view. I do not believe that our Religion (the relation of our souls to God) can ever properly rest upon History. Nay I cannot understand how any one who knows the intricacies and obscurities attendant on the verification of any ancient History, should for a moment be content to suppose that God has required of all men to rest their faith in Him on such grounds, or on what others report to them of such grounds. In the case of Christianity, where scholars like Renan and Martineau—profoundly learned in ancient and obsolete tongues, and equipped with the whole arsenal of criticism of modern Germany, France and England,—can differ about the age and authority of the principal piéce de conviction (the Gospel of St. John), it is truly preposterous to suggest that ordinary men and women should form any judgment at all on the matter. The Ideal Christ needs only a good heart to find and love him. The Historical Christ needs the best critic in Europe, a Lightfoot, a Koenen, a 407Martineau, to trace his footsteps on the sands of time. And they differ as regards nearly every one of them!

But though History cannot rightly be Religion or the basis of Religion, there is, and must be, a History of Religion; as there is a history of geometry and astronomy; and of that History of the whole world’s Religion the supreme interest centres in the record of

Yet, as regards my own personal feeling, I must avow that the halo which has gathered round Jesus Christ obscures him to my eyes. I see that he is much more real to many of my friends, both Orthodox and Unitarian, than he can ever be to me. There is nothing, no, not one single sentence or action attributed to him of which (if we open our minds to criticism) we can feel sufficiently certain to base on it any definite conclusion, and this to me envelopes him in a cloud. Each Christian age has indeed, (as I remark in my Dawning Lights), seen a Christ of its own; so that we could imagine students in the future arguing that there must have been “several Christs,” as old scholars held there were several Zoroasters and several Buddhas. Just as Michael Angelo’s Christ was the production of that dark and stormy age when first his awful form loomed out of the shadows of the Sistine, in no less a degree do the portraits of Ecce Homo and the Vie de Jésus belong to our era of sentiment and philanthropy. We have no sun-made photograph of his features; only such wavering image of them as may have rested on the waters of Galilee, rippling in the breeze. I must not however further prolong these reflections on a subject discussed to the best of my poor ability in my more serious books.

After Broken Lights, I wrote the sequel: Dawning Lights just quoted above. In the first I had endeavoured to sketch 408the Conditions and Prospects of religious belief. In the second I speculated on the Results of the changes which were taking place in various articles of that belief. The chapters deal consecutively with Changes in the Method of Theology,—in the Idea of God; in the Idea of Christ; in the Doctrine of Sin, theoretical and practical; in the idea of the Relation of this life to the next; in the idea of the Perfect Life; in the Idea of Happiness; in the Doctrine of Prayer; in the Idea of Death; and in the Doctrine of the eternity of Punishment.

This book also was fairly successful, and went into a second edition.

Somewhere about this time (I have no exact record) I edited a little book called Alone to the Alone, consisting of private prayers for Theists. It contains contributions from fifteen men and women, of Prayers, mostly written for personal use, before the idea of the book had been suggested, under the influence of those occasional deeper insights and more fervent feelings which all religious persons desire to perpetuate. They are all anonymous. In the Preface I say that the result of such a compilation,

“‘Is necessarily altogether imperfect and fragmentary, but in the great solitude where most of us pass our lives as regards our deeper emotions, it may be more helpful to know that other human hearts are feeling as we feel, and thinking as we think, rather than to read far nobler words which come to us only as echoes of the Past.’ The book is ‘designed for the use of those who desire to cultivate the feelings which culminate in Prayer, but who find the rich and beautiful collections of the Churches of Christendom no longer available, either because of the doctrines whose acceptance they imply or of the nature of the requests to which they give utterance. Adequately to replace in a generation, or in several generations, such books, through which the piety of ages has been poured, is wholly beyond hope; and the ambition to do so would betray ignorance of 409the way in which these precious drops are distilled slowly year after year, from the great Incense-tree of humanity.’”

The remainder of the Preface, which is somewhat lengthy, discusses the validity of Prayer for the attainment of spiritual (not physical) benefits. It concludes thus—p. xxxvi.

“And, lastly, if Religion is still to be to mankind in the future what it has been in the past, it must still be a religion of Prayer. Nothing is changed in human nature because it has outgrown some of the errors of the past. The spiritual experience of the saintly souls of old was true and real experience, even when their intellectual creeds were full of mistakes. By the gate through which they entered the paradise of love and peace, even by that same narrow portal of Prayer must we pass into it. No present or future discoveries in science will ever transmute the moral dross in human nature into the pure gold of virtue. No spectrum analysis of the light of the nebulæ will enable us to find God. If we are to be made holy, we must ask the Holy One to sanctify us. If we are to know the infinite joy of Divine Love, we must seek it in Divine communion.”

This book was first published in 1871; one of the years of the rising tide of liberal-religious hope. A third edition was called for in 1881, when the ebb had set in. In a short Preface to this third edition I notice this fact, and say that those hopes were doubtless all too hasty for the slow order of Divine things.

“Nay, it would seem that, far from the immediate aurora of such a morning, the world is destined first to endure a great ‘horror of darkness,’ and to pass through the dreary and disaster-laden experience of a night of materialism and agnosticism. Perhaps it will only be when men have seen with their eyes how the universe appears 410without a thought of God to illumine its dark places, and gauged for themselves where human life will sink without hope of immortality to elevate it, that they will recognise aright the unutterable preciousness of religion. Faith, when restored after such an eclipse, will be prized as it has never been prized heretofore....

“And Faith must return to mankind sooner or later. So sure as God is, so sure must it be that he will not finally leave his creatures, whom he has led upward for thousands of years, to lose sight of him altogether, or to be drowned for ever in the slough of atheism and carnalism. He will doubtless reveal himself afresh to the souls of men in his own time and in his own way,—whether, as of old, through prophet-souls filled with inspiration, or by other methods yet unknown. God is over us, and Heaven is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only Matter in the universe, and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is ‘bound to win’ at last; not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define; but that great fundamental faith,—the needful substructure of every other possible religious faith—the faith in a Righteous and loving God, and in a life for man beyond the tomb.”

The book contains 72 Prayers; half of which refer to the outer and half to the inner life. Among the former, are Noon and Sunset prayers; thanksgivings for the love of friends, and for the beauty of the world; also a Prayer respecting the sufferings of animals from human cruelty. In the second part some of the Prayers are named, “In the Wilderness”; “On the Right Way”; “God afar off”; “Doubt and Faith”; “Fiat Lux”; “Fiat Pax”; “Thanksgiving for Religious Truth”; “For Pardon of a Careless Life”; “For a Devoted Life”; “Joy in God”; “Here and Hereafter.”

411I never expected that more than a very few friends would have cared for this book, and in fact printed it with the intention of almost private circulation; but it has been continuously, though slowly, called for during the 23 years which have elapsed since it was compiled.

I wrote the essays included in the volume “Hopes of the Human Race,” in 1873–1874. This has run through several editions. The long Introduction to this book was written immediately after the publication of Mr. Mill’s Essay on Religion; a most important work of which Miss Taylor had kindly put the proof sheets in my hands, and to which I was eagerly anxious to offer such rejoinder from the side of faith as might be in my power. Whether I succeeded in making an adequate reply in the fifty pages I devoted to the subject, I cannot presume to say. The Pessimist side, taken by Mr. Mill has been gaining ground ever since, but there are symptoms that a reaction is taking place, beginning (of all countries!) in France. I conclude this Preface thus—p. 53.

“But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.”

The book contains two long Essays on the Life after Death contributed originally to the Theological Review. In the first of these, after stating at length the reasons for supposing that human existence ends at death, I ask: “What have we to place against them in the scale of 412Hope?” and I begin by observing that all the usual arguments for immortality involve at the crucial point the assumption that we possess some guarantee that mankind will not be deceived, that Justice will eventually triumph and that human affairs are the concern of a Power whose purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which supplies such warrant to fail, the whole structure raised upon it must fall to the ground. Belief in Immortality is pre-eminently a matter of Faith; a corollary from faith in God. To imagine that we can reach it by any other road is vain. Heaven will always be (as Dr. Martineau has said) “a part of our Religion, not a Branch of our Geography.” But in addressing men and women who believe in God’s Justice and Love, I hope to show that, not by one only but by many convergent lines, Faith uniformly points to a Life after Death; and that if we follow her guidance in any one direction implicitly, we are invariably conducted to the same conclusion. Nay more; we cannot stop short of this conclusion and retain entire faith in any thing beyond the experience of the senses. Every idea of Justice, of Love and of Duty is truncated if we deny to it the extension of eternity; and as for our conception of God himself, I see not how any one who has realised the dread darkness of “the riddle of the painful earth,” can call him “Good” unless he can look forward to the solution of that problem hereafter. The following are channels through which Faith inevitably flows towards Immortality:

1st. The human race longs for Justice. Even “if the Heavens fall,” we feel Justice ought to be done. All literature, from Æschylus and Job to our own time, has for its highest theme the triumph of Justice, or the tragedy of the disappointment of human hope thereof. But where did we obtain this idea? The world has never seen a Reign of Astræa. Injustice and Cruelty prevail largely, even now in 413the world; and as we go back up the stream of time to ruder ages where Might was more completely dominant over Right, the case was worse and worse. Where then, did Man derive his idea that the Power ruling the world,—Zeus, or Jehovah, or Ormusd,—was Just? Not only could no ancestral experience have caused the “set of our brains” towards the expectation of Justice, but experience, under many conditions of society, pointed quite the other way. It is assuredly (if anything can be so reckoned) the Divine spirit in man which causes him to love Justice, and to believe that his Maker is just, for it is inconceivable how he could have arrived at such faith otherwise. But if death be the end of human existence this expectation of justice has been only a miserable delusion. God has created us, poor children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice, but He Himself has disregarded it, on the scale of a disappointed world. After referring to the thousands of cases where the bad have died successful and peacefully, and the good,—like Christ,—have perished in misery and agony, I say “boldly and so much the more reverently: Either Man is Immortal or God is not Just.”

2nd. The second line of thought leading us to belief in Immortality is,—that if there be no future life, there are millions of human beings whose existence has answered no purpose which we can rationally attribute to a wise and merciful God. He is a baffled God, if His creature be extinguished before reaching some end which He may possibly have designed.

3rd. The incompleteness of the noblest part of man offers so strange a contrast to the perfection of the other work of creation that we are drawn to conclude that the human soul is only a bud to blossom out into full flower hereafter. No man has ever in his life reached the plentitude of moral strength and beauty of which his nature gives promise. A 414garden wherein all the buds should perish before blooming, would be more hideous than a desert, and such a garden is God’s world if man dies for ever when we see him no more.

4th. Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all.

“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another’s weal, better to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait the butcher’s knife, than to endure such despair.

“But is there nothing in us which refuses to believe all this nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts? Love itself seems to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an element of infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know not what we mean of “undying affection,” “immortal love.” It is the only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its beautiful tenderness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure 415and ineffable delight, are the rays of God’s Sun of Love reflected in our souls.

“Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side in the vault? If so, let us have done with prating of any Faith in Heaven or Earth. We are mocked by a fiend.”—(Hopes, p. 52.)

5th. A remarkable argument is to be found in Prof. F. W. Newman’s Theism (p. 75). It insists on the fact that many men have certainly loved God and that God must love them in return (else Man were better than God); and we must reasonably infer that those whom God loves are deathless, else would the Divine Blessedness be imperfect, nay, “a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow.”

6th. The extreme variability of the common human belief that the “soul of man never dies” makes it difficult to discern its proper evidential value, still it seems to have the Note of a genuine instinct. It begins early, though (probably) not at the earliest stage of human development. It attains its maximum among the highest races of mankind (the Vedic-Aryan, early Persian and Egyptian). It projects such varied and even contrasted ideals of the other life (e.g., Valhalla and Nirvana) that it cannot well have been borrowed by one race from another but must have sprung up in each indigenously. Finally the instinct begins to falter in ages of self-consciousness and criticism.

7th, lastly. The most perfect and direct faith in Immortality belongs to saintly souls who personally feel that they have entered into relations with the Divine Spirit which can never end. “Faith in God and in our eternal Union with Him,” said one such devout man to me, “are not two dogmas but one.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. Thou wilt guide me by thy counsel and afterwards receive me to Glory.”

“Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect evidence of things not seen. But can their full faith 416supply our lack? Can we see with their eyes and believe on their report? It is only possible in a very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received even some faint gleams of the ‘light which never came from sun or star,’ then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality; for we shall know in what manner such truths come to the soul, and be able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope of His eternal Love. If their experience be a dream all prayer and communion may be dreams likewise.”

In conclusion, while commending to the reader’s consideration what appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after Death, I point to the fact that on the answer to that question must hang the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the Human Race, but of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost vision can extend.

“Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind; but if the summit and crown of the whole work, the being in whose consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect, an undeveloped embryo, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world he deemed a failure also. Now, Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work; successful, that is, provided we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another and far more perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower and picture and temple. And thus to look on man (as by some deep insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a ‘sojourner 417upon earth,’ upon his way to ‘another country, even a heavenly,’ destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close out this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life; if we are to believe we have seen the best development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever obtain while the heavens endure,—then, indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of creation. Everything else,—star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast and insect—has a sort of completeness and perfection. It is fitting in its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is. ‘Every Lion,’ as Parker has said, ‘is a type of all lionhood; but there is no Man who is a type of all Manhood.’ Even the best and greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of manhood—of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthropist, the poet, the friend,—never of the full-orbed man who should be all these together. If each perish at death, then,—as the seeds of all these varied forms of good are in each,—every one is cut off prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely applicable to our small planet; a mere spark thrown off the wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can show; and if a whole race endowed with them should prove such a failure as death-extinguished Mankind would undoubtedly be, there remains no reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress 418of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material universe unrolling itself ‘from out of the primal nebula’s fiery cloud.’ Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but whirling sepulchres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains are worse than failures, if we, even we, poor feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are, shall ever ‘vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past.’”

The second part of this essay discusses the possible conditions of the Life after Death. I cannot summarize it here.

The rest of the volume consists of a sermon which I read at Clerkenwell Unitarian Chapel, in 1873, entitled “Doomed to be Saved.” I describe the disastrous moral consequences to a man in old times who believed himself to have sold his soul to the Evil One, and to have cast himself off from God’s Goodness for ever; and I contrast this with what we ought to feel when we recognize that we are Doomed to be Saved—destined irretrievably to be brought back, in this life or in far future lives, from all our wanderings in remorse and penitence to the feet of God.

The book concludes with an Essay on the Evolution of the Social Sentiment, in which I maintain that the primary human feeling in the savage which still lingers in the Aryan child, is not Sympathy with suffering, but quite an opposite, angry and even cruel sentiment, which I have named Heteropathy; which inspires brutes and birds to kill their wounded or diseased companions. Half-way after this, comes Aversion; and last of all, Sympathy,—slowly extending from the mother’s “pity for the son of her womb,” to the Family, 419the Tribe, the Nation, and the Human Race; and, at last to the Brutes. I conclude thus:

“Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie in the progress of the intellect, or in the conquest of fresh powers over the realms of nature; not in the improvement of laws, or the more harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states; not in the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may, and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future. But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of Man will be the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his selfishness, and the growth within him of the god-like faculty of love and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld around the great White Throne on high.”

Beside these theological works I published more recently two slight volumes on cognate subjects: A Faithless World, and Health and Holiness. I wrote “A Faithless World” (first published in the Contemporary Review) in reply to Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s remark in the Nineteenth Century, No. 88, that “We get on very well without religion” ... “Love, Friendship, Ambition, Science, literature, art, politics, commerce, and a thousand other matters will go equally well as far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state.” I examine this view in detail and conclude that instead of life remaining (in the event of the fall of religion) to most people much what it is at present, there would, on the contrary, be actually nothing which would be left unchanged by such a catastrophe.

I sent a copy of this article when first published, (as I was bound in courtesy to do), to Sir James, whom I had often met, and whose brother and sister were my kind friends. 420He replied in such a manly and generous spirit that I am tempted to give his letter.

“I am much obliged by your note and by the article in the Contemporary, which is perfectly fair in itself and full of kind things about myself personally.

“The subject is too large to write about, and I am only too glad to take both the letter and the article in the spirit in which they were written and ask no further discussion.

“It seems to me very possible that there may be a good deal of truth in what you suggest as to the nature of the difference between the points of view from which we look at these things, but it is not unnatural that I should think you rather exaggerate the amount of suffering and sorrow which is to be found in the world. I may do the opposite.

“However that may be, thank you heartily for both your letter and your article.

“I am sure you will have been grieved to hear of poor Henry Dicey’s death. His life had been practically despaired of for a considerable time.

Several of these books of mine, dealing with religious subjects, were translated into French and published by my French and Swiss fellow-religionists, and also in Danish by friends at Copenhagen. Le Monde Sans Religion; Coup d’œil sur le Monde à Venir; L’Humanité destinée au Salut; La Maison sur le Rivage; Seul avec Dieu (Geneva Cherbuliez, 1881), En Verden uden Tro, &c., &c.

But all the time during the intervals of writing these theological books, I employed myself in studying and writing on various other subjects of temporary or durable interest. 421I contributed a large number of articles to the following periodicals:—

The Quarterly Review (then edited by Sir William Smith).

The Contemporary Review (edited by Mr. Bunting).

Fraser’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Froude).

Cornhill Magazine (edited by Mr. Leslie Stephen).

The Fortnightly Review (edited by Mr. Morley).

Macmillan’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Masson).

The Theological Review (Unitarian Organ, edited by Rev. C. Beard).

The Modern Review (Unitarian, edited by Rev. R. Armstrong).

The New Quarterly Magazine (edited by W. Oswald Crawford).

One collection of these articles was published by Trübner in 1865, entitled Studies New and Old on Ethical and Social Subjects; (1 vol., crown 8vo., pp. 466). This volume begins with an elaborate study of “Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ” (Theological Review, September, 1869), which I have often wished to reprint in a separate form. Also a very long and careful study of the Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians, which brought me the visits and friendships of a very interesting Parsee gentleman, Nowrosjee Furdoonjee, President of the Bombay Parsee Society, and of another Parsee gentleman resident in London. Both expressed their entire approval of my representation of their religion.

These Studies also contain a long paper on the Philosophy of the Poor Laws, which, as I have narrated in a previous chapter, fell into fertile soil on the mind of an Australian gentleman and caused the introduction of some of the reforms I advocated into the Poor Law system of New South Wales.

There were also in this volume articles on “Hades”; on the “Morals of Literature”; and on the “Hierarchy of Art,” which perhaps have some value; but I have 422not of late years cared to press the book, and have not included it in Mr. Fisher Unwin’s Re-issue of 1893 on account of the paper it contains on “The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes.” This article, which appeared first in Fraser’s Magazine, Nov., 1863, was my earliest effort (so far as I know, the first effort of anybody) to work out the very obscure and difficult ethical problem to which it refers, in answer to the demands of Vivisectors. I am not satisfied with the position I took up in this paper. In the thirty years which have elapsed since I wrote it, my thoughts have been greatly exercised on the subject, and I think I see the “Claims of Brutes” more clearly, and find them higher than I did. But, though I believe that I expressed the most advanced opinion of that time on the duty of Man to the lower animals, and of the offence of cruelty towards them, I here enter my caveat against the quotation of this article (as was lately done by a zealous Zoophilist) as if it still represented exactly what I think on the subject after pondering upon it for thirty years, and taking part in the Anti-vivisection crusade for two entire decades.

I have mentioned this matter especially, because it is of some importance to me, and also because I do not find that there is any other opinion which I have ever published in any book or article, on morals or religion, which I now desire to withdraw, or even of which I care to modify the expression. It is a great happiness to me at the end of a long and busy literary life, to feel that I have never written anything of which I repent, or which I wish to unsay.

A collection of minor articles, with several fresh papers of a lighter sort,—an Allegory, The Spectral Rout, &c.—was also published by Trübner in 1867, under the name of Hours of Work and Play.

In 1872 Messrs. Williams & Norgate published a rather large collection of my Essays, under the name of Darwinism 423in Morals and other Essays. The first is a review of the theory of ethics expounded in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I argue that the moral history of mankind (so far as it is known to us) gives no support whatever to Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis that Conscience is the result of certain contingencies in our development, and that it might, at an earlier stage, have been moulded into quite another form, causing Good to appear to us Evil, and Evil Good.

“I think we have a right to say that the suggestions offered by the highest scientific intellects of our time to account for its existence on principles which shall leave it on the level of other instincts, have failed to approve themselves as true to the facts of the case. And I think, therefore, that we are called on to believe still in the validity of our own moral consciousness, even as we believe in the validity of our other faculties; and to rest in the faith (well-nigh universal) of the human race, in a fixed and supreme Law, of which the will of God is the embodiment and Conscience the Divine transcript.”—Darwinism in Morals, p. 32.

In this same volume (included in the re-issue) are essays on Hereditary Piety (a review of Mr. Galton’s Hereditary Genius); one on The Religion of Childhood, on Robertson’s Life; on “A French Theist” (M. Pécaut); and a series of studies on Eastern Religions; including reviews of Mr. Ferguson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (with which Mr. F. was so pleased that he made me a present, of his magnificent book); Bunsen’s God in History, Max Muller’s Chips from a German Workshop, and Mrs. Manning’s Ancient and Mediæval India. Each of these is a careful essay on one or other of the oriental faiths referring to many other books on each subject. Beside these there are in the same volume two articles on Unconscious Cerebration and Dreams, which excited some interest in their day; and seem to me (if I be not misled by 424vanity) to have forestalled a good deal which has been written of late years about the “subliminal” or “subjective” consciousness.

In 1875, Messrs. Ward, Lock & Tyler, for whose New Quarterly Magazine I had written two long articles on Animals in Fable and Art and the Fauna of Fancy, asked my consent to re-publishing them in their Country House Library. To this I gladly agreed, adding my article in the Quarterly Review on the Consciousness of Dogs; and that in the Cornhill: “Dogs whom I have met.” The volume was prettily got up, and published under the name of “False Beasts and True.”

From the close of 1874, when I undertook the Anti-vivisection crusade, my literary activity dwindled down rapidly to small proportions. In the course of eight years I wrote enough magazine articles to fill one volume, published in 1882, and containing essays on Magnanimous Atheism; Pessimism and One of its Professors, and a few other papers, of which the most important,—the Peak in Darien,—gives its name to the book. It is an argument, (with many facts cited in its support,) for believing that the dying, as they are passing the threshold, not seldom become aware of the presence of beloved ones waiting for them in the new state of existence which they are actually entering.

After this book I wrote little for some years, but in 1888 I was asked to contribute an article to the Universal Review on the Scientific Spirit of the Age. I gladly acceded, but the Editor desired to cut down my MS., so I published it as a book with a few other older papers; notably one on the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse; a half-humorous study of the pros and cons of Life in London, and Life in a Country house.

After this, again, I published two editions of a little compilation, the “Friend of Man and His Friends the Poets;” 425a collection (with running commentary) of Poems of all ages and countries relating to Dogs, which were likely, I thought, to aid my poor, four-footed friends’ claims to sympathy and respect.

Of my remaining books, the Duties of Women, and The Modern Rack I shall speak in the chapters which respectively concern my work for Women, and the Anti-vivisection movement.

CHAPTER XVI. MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES JOURNALISM.

429Journalism is, to my thinking, a delightful profession, full of interest, and promise of ever-extending usefulness. During the years in which I was a professional Journalist, when I had occasion to go into a Bank or a lawyer’s office, I always pitied the clerks for their dull, monotonous, ugly work, as compared with mine. If not carried on too long or continuously,—so that the brain begins to churn leaders sleeping or waking (a dreadful state of things into which we may fall),—it is pre-eminently healthy, being so full of variety and calling for so many different mental faculties one after another. Promptitude, clear and quick judgment as to what is, and is not, expedient and decorous to say; a ready memory well stored with illustrations and unworn quotations, a bright and strong style; and, if it can be attained, a playful (not saturnine) humour superadded,—all these qualities and attainments are called for in writing for a daily newspaper; and the practice of them cannot fail to sharpen their edge. To be in touch with the most striking events of the whole world, and enjoy the privilege of giving your opinion on them to 50,000 or 100,000 readers within a few hours, this struck me, when I first recognised that such was my business as a leader-writer, as something for which many prophets and preachers of old would have given a house full of silver and gold. And I was to be paid for accepting it! It is one thing to be a “Vox clamantis in Deserto,” and quite another to speak in Fleet Street, and, without lifting up one’s voice, to reach all at once, as many men as formed the population of ancient Athens, not to say 430that of Jerusalem! But I must not “magnify mine office” too fondly!

From the time of my second journey to Italy I obtained employment, as I have mentioned, as Correspondent to the Daily News, with whose Italian politics I was in sympathy. I also wrote all sorts of miscellaneous papers and descriptions for the Spectator, the Reader, the Inquirer, the Academy, and the Examiner. When in London I was engaged on the staff of the short-lived Day (1867); and much lamented its untimely eclipse, when my friend Mr. Haweis, unkindly “chaffed” me by mourning over it:—

I was paid, however, handsomely for all I had written for it, and a few months later I received an invitation from Mr. Arthur Arnold (since M.P. for Salford) to join his staff on the newly-founded Echo. It was a great experiment on the part of the proprietors, Messrs. Petter & Galpin, to start a half-penny paper. Such a thing did not then exist in England, and the ridicule it encountered, and boycotting from the news-agents who could not make enough profit on it to satisfy themselves, were very serious obstacles to success. Nevertheless Mr. Arnold’s great tact and ability cleared the way, and before many months our circulation, I believe, was very large indeed. My share in the undertaking was soon arranged after a few interviews and experiments. It was agreed that I should go on three mornings every week at ten o’clock, to the office in Catherine Street, Strand, and there in a private room for my own use only, write a leading article on some social subject after arranging with the editor what it should be. I am proud to say that for seven years from that time till I retired, I never once failed to keep my engagement. Of course I took a few weeks’ holiday every year; 431but Mr. Arnold never expected his contributor in vain. Sometimes it was hard work for me; I had a cold, or was otherwise ill, or the snow lay thick and cabs from South Kensington were not to be had. Nevertheless I made my way to my destination punctually; and, when there, I wrote my leader, and as many “Notes” as were allotted to me, and thus proved, I hope, once for all, that a woman may be relied on as a journalist no less than a man. I do not think indeed, that very many masculine journalists could make the same boast of regularity as I have done. My first article appeared in the third number of the Echo, December 10th, 1868, and the last on, or about, March, 1875. Of course at first I found it a little difficult to write exactly what, and how much was wanted, neither more nor less; but practice made this easier. I wrote, of course, on all manner of subjects, politics excepted; but chose in preference those which offered some ethical interest,—or (on the other hand) an opening for a little fun! The reader may see specimens of both, e.g., the papers on the great Divorce Case; Lent in Belgravia; and on Fat People; Sweeping under the Mats, &c., in Re-echoes, a little book compiled from a selection of my Echo articles which Tauchnitz reproduced in his library. A few incidents in my experience in Catherine Street recur to me, and may be worth recording.

Terrible stories of misery and death were continuously cropping up in the reports of Coroners’ Inquests, and I found that if I took these reports as they were published and wrote leading articles on them, we were almost sure next day to receive several letters begging the Editor to forward money (enclosed) to the surviving relations. It became a duty for me to satisfy myself of the veracity of these stories before setting them forth with claims for public sympathy; and in this way I came to see some of the sadder sides of poverty in London. There was one case I distinctly recall, of a poor lady, 432daughter of a country rector, who was found (after having been missed for several days, but not sought for) lying dead, scarcely clothed, on the bare floor of a room in a miserable lodging-house in Drury Lane. I went to the house and found it a filthy coffee-house, frequented by unwashed customers. The mistress, though likewise unwashed, was obviously what is termed “respectable.” She told me that her unhappy lodger was a woman of 40 or 50, perfectly sober and well conducted in every way. She had been a governess in very good families, but had remained unemployed till her clothes grew shabby. She walked all day long over London for many weeks, seeking any kind of work or means of support, and selling by degrees everything she possessed for food. At last she returned to her wretched room in that house into which it was a pain for any lady to enter,—and having begged a last cup of tea from her landlady, telling her she could not pay for it, she locked her door, and was heard of no more. Many days afterwards the busy landlady noticed that she had not seen her going in or out, and finding her door locked, called the police to open it. There was hardly an atom of flesh on the poor worn frame, scarcely clothes for decency, no food, no coals in the grate. “Death from Starvation” was the only possible verdict. When the case had been made public, relatives, obviously belonging to a very good class of society, came hastily and took away the corpse for burial in some family vault. The sight, the sounds, the fetid smells of that sordid lodging-house as endured by that lonely, dying, starving lady, will haunt me while I live.

Another incident (in January, 1869) had a happier conclusion. There was a case in the law Reports one day of a woman named Susannah Palmer, who was sent to Newgate for stabbing her husband. The story was a piteous one as I verified it. Her husband was a savage who had continually beaten her; had turned her 433out of the house at night; brought in a bad woman in her place; and then had deserted her for months, leaving her to support herself and their children. After a time he would suddenly return, take the money she had earned out of her pocket (as he had then a legal right to do), sell up any furniture she possessed; kick and beat her again; and then again desert her. One day she was cutting bread for the children when he struck her, and the knife in her hand cut him; whereupon he gave her in charge for “feloniously wounding”; and she was sent to jail. The Common Sergeant humanely observed as he passed sentence that “Newgate would be ten times better for her than the hell in which she was compelled to live.” It was the old epitaph exemplified:

Having obtained through John Locke (the well-known Member for Southwark, who had married my cousin) a special permit from the Lord Mayor, I saw the poor, pale creature in Newgate and heard her long tale of wrong and misery. The good Ordinary of the jail felt deeply with me for her; and when I had seen the people who employed her as charwoman (barbers and shoemakers in Cowcross Street) and received the best character of her, I felt justified in appealing, in the Echo, for help for her, and also in circulating a little pamphlet on her behalf. Eventually, when Mrs. Palmer left Newgate a few weeks later, it was to take possession, as caretaker for the chaplain, of nice, tidy rooms where she and her children could live in peace, and where her brutal husband could not follow her, since the place belonged legally to the chaplain.

When there was a dearth of interesting news on the mornings of my leader-writing, it was my custom to send for 434a certain newspaper, the organ of the extreme Ritualistic party, and out of this I seldom failed to extract Pabulum for a cheerful article! One day, just after the 29th of September, I found such a record of folly,—vestments, processions, thuribles, and what not, that I proceeded with glee to write a leader on Michaelmas Geese. Next day, to my intense amusement, there was a letter at the office addressed to the author of the article, in which one of the “Geese,” whom I had particularly attacked and who naturally supposed me to be a man, invited me to come and dine with him, and “talk of these matters over a good glass of sherry and a cigar!” The worldly wisdom which induced the excellent clergyman to try and thus “silence my guns” by inducing me to share his salt; and his idea of the irresistible attractions of sherry and cigars to a “poor devil” (as he obviously supposed) of a contributor to a half-penny paper, made a delightful joke. I had the greatest mind in the world to accept the invitation without betraying my sex till I should arrive at his door in the fullest of my feminine finery, and claim his dinner; but I was prudent, and he never knew who was the midge who had assailed him.

The incident reminds me of another journalistic experience not connected with the Echo, which throws some light on certain charges recently discussed about “commissions” given to newspaper writers who puff the goods of tradesmen under the guise of instructing the public in the latest fashions in dress, furniture and bric-à-brac. It was the only case in which any bribe of the kind ever came to my door. Some grandes dames anxious for the health of work-girls, had opened a millinery establishment in Clifford Street on purely philanthropic lines, and begged me to write an appeal in the Times for support for it. After visiting the beautiful, airy workrooms and dormitories, I did this with a clear conscience (of course gratuitously) to 435oblige my friends on the Committee. Next day a smart brougham drove to my door in Hereford Square, and an exquisitely dressed lady got out of it, and sent in her card, “Madame D——.” I was so grossly ignorant of fashionable millinery, that I did not know that my visitor was then at the very apex of that lofty commerce. She remonstrated on my injustice in praising the Clifford Street establishment, when her girls were exactly as well lodged and fed. “Would I not come and see for myself, and then write and say so equally publicly?” I agreed that this would be only fair, and fixed an hour for my inspection; on which she gracefully thanked me and departed, murmuring as she disappeared that she would be happy to present me with “Une jolie toilette!” Poor woman! She had come to the only gentlewoman perhaps in London to whom a “toilette” by Madame D—— offered no attractions at all, and to whom (even if I would have accepted one) it would have been useless, seeing that I never wore anything but the simply-made skirts and jackets of my maid’s manufacture. Of course I visited and justly praised her establishment, as I had promised; and I suppose she long expected me to come and claim her “jolie toilette!”

There was another story of which the memory is in my mind closely associated with a dear young friend,—Miss Letitia Probyn, who helped me ardently in my efforts, very shortly before her untimely death, while bathing, at Hendaye near Arcachon. The case of a woman named Isabel Grant moved us deeply. The poor creature, in a drunken struggle with her husband at supper, had cut him with the bread knife in such manner that he died next day. Her remorse was most genuine and extreme. She was sentenced to be hanged; and just at the same time an Irishman who had murdered his wife under circumstances of exceptional brutality and who had from first to last gloried 436in his crime, was set free after a week’s imprisonment! We got up a Memorial for Isabel Grant, Miss Probyn’s family interest enabling her to obtain many influential signatures; and we contrived that both the cases of exceptional severity to the repentant woman and that of lenity to the unrepentant man, should be set forth in juxtaposition in a score of newspapers. In the end Isabel Grant obtained a commutation of her sentence.

In 1875 the proprietors of the Echo sold the paper to Baron Grant; and Mr. Arnold and I at once resigned our positions as Editor and Contributor. He had created the paper,—I may say even more,—had created first-class, half-penny journalism altogether; and it was deeply regretted that his able and judicious guidance was lost to the Echo. After an interval, the paper was redeemed from the first purchaser’s hands by that generous gentleman, Mr. Passmore Edwards, than whom it could have no better Proprietor.

I wrote on the whole more than 1,000 leading articles, and a vast number of Notes, for the Echo during the seven years in which I worked upon its staff. The contributors who successively occupied the same columns of second leaders on my off-days were willing, (as I believe Mr. Arnold desired), to adopt on the whole the general line of sentiment and principle which my articles maintained; and thus I had the comfort of thinking that, as regarded social ethics, my work had given in some measure the tone to the paper. It was my pulpit, with permission to make in it (what other pulpits lack so sadly!) such jokes as pleased me; and to put forward on hundreds of matters my views of what was right and honourable. We did not profess to be “written by gentlemen for gentlemen.” The saturnine jests, the snarls and the pessimisms of the clubs were not in our way; and we did not affect to be blasés, or to think the whole world was going to the dogs. There were of course subjects on which a 437Liberal like Mr. Arnold and a Tory like myself differed widely; and then I left them untouched, for (I need scarcely say) I never wrote a line in that or any other paper not in fullest accordance with my own opinions and convictions, on any subject small or great. The work, I think, was at all events wholesome and harmless. I hope that it also did, now and then, a little good.

After the sudden and unexpected termination of my connection with the Echo I accepted gladly an engagement, not requiring personal attendance, on the staff of the Standard, and wrote two or three leaders a week for that newspaper, for a considerable time. At last the Vivisection controversy came in the way, when I resigned my post in consequence of the appearance of a pro-vivisecting paragraph. The editor assured me generally of his approval of my crusade, and I wrote a few articles more, but the engagement finally dropped. My time had indeed become too much absorbed by the other work to carry on regular Journalism with the needful vigour.

It may interest women who are entering the profession in which I found such pleasure and profit, to know that as regards “filthy lucre,” I found it more remunerative than writing for the best monthly or quarterly periodicals. I did both at the same period; often sitting down to spend some hours of the afternoon over a “Study of Eastern Religion” or some such subject, when I had gone to the Strand and written my leader and notes in the forenoon. Putting all together and the profits of my books, (which were small enough,) I made by my literary and journalistic work at one time a fair income. This golden epoch ended, however, when I threw myself into the Anti-vivisection movement, after which date I do not think I have ever earned more than £100 a year, and for the last 12 years not £20. I suppose in my whole life I have earned nearly £5,000, rather more 438than my whole patrimony. What my poor father would have felt had he known that his daughter eked out her subsistence by going down in all weathers to write articles for a half-penny newspaper in the Strand, I cannot guess. My brothers happily had no objection to my industry, and the eldest—who drew, as usual with elder sons in our class, more money every year from the family property than I received for life,—kindly paid off my charges on the estate and added £100 a year to the proceeds, so that I was thenceforth, for my moderate wants, fairly well off, especially since I had a friend who shared all expenses of housekeeping with me.

In reviewing my whole literary and journalistic life as I have done in these two chapters, I perceive that I have been from first to last an Essayist; almost pur et simple. I have done very little in any other way than to try to put forward—either at large in a book or in a magazine article, or, lastly, in a newspaper-leader—which was always a miniature essay,—an appeal for some object, an argument for some truth, a vindication of some principle, an exposure of what I conceived to be an absurdity, a wrong, a falsehood, or a cruelty. At first I had exaggerated hopes of success in these endeavours. Books had been a great deal to me in my own solitary life, and I far over-estimated their practical power. When editors and publishers readily accepted my articles and books, and reviewers praised them, I fancied, (though they never sold very freely,) that I was really given the great privilege of moving many hearts. But by degrees as years went on I felt the sorrowful limitation of literary influence. Sometimes I was wild with disappointment and indignation when critics lauded the “style” of my books while they never so much as noticed the purpose for sake of which I had laboured to make them good and strong literature.

439For my own part I have shunned Review-writing; partly (as regarded newspaper criticism) for the rather sordid reason that it involves the double labour of reading and writing for the same pay per column, but generally, and in all cases, because I cannot say,—as dear Fanny Kemble used to remark in a sepulchral voice (quite falsely), “I am nothing if not critical.” On the contrary, I am several other things, and very little critical; and the pain and deadly injury I have seen inflicted by a severe review is a form of cruelty for which I have no predilection. It is necessary, no doubt, in the literary community that there should be warders and executioners at the public command to birch juvenile offenders, and flog garrotters, and hang anarchists; but I never felt any vocation for those disagreeable offices. The few reviews I have ever written have been properly Essays on given subjects, taking some book which I could honestly praise for a peg. As in the old Egyptian Book of the Dead the soul of the deceased protests, among his forty-two abjurations,—“I have not been the cause of others’ tears,”—so, I hope, I may say, I have given no brother or sister of the pen the wound (and often the ruinous loss) of a damaging critique of his or her books. If my writings have given pain to any persons, it can only have been to men whose dead consciences it would be an act of mercy to awaken, and towards whom I feel not the smallest compunction. Briefly I conclude in this book, (doubtless my last), a long and moderately successful literary life, with no serious regrets, but with much thankfulness and rejoicing for all the interest, the pleasure and the warm and precious friendships which the profession of letters has brought to me ever since I entered it,—just forty years ago,—when William Longman accepted my Intuitive Morals.

CHAPTER XVII. MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES. SOCIAL. — POSTSCRIPT, 1898.

443When we had settled down, as we did rapidly, into our pretty little house in South Kensington, we began soon to enjoy many social pleasures of a quiet kind. Into Society (with a big S!), we had no pretensions to enter, but we had many friends, very genuine and delightful ones, ere long; and a great many interesting acquaintances. Happily death has spared not a few of these until now, and, of course, of them I shall not write here; but of some of those who have “gone over to the majority” I shall venture to record my recollections, interspersed in some cases with their letters. I may premise that we were much given to dining out, but not to attending late evening parties; and that in our small way we gave little dinners now and then, and occasionally afternoon and evening parties,—the former held sometimes in summer under the lime trees behind our house. I attribute my long retention of good health to my persistence in going to bed before eleven o’clock, and never accepting late invitations.

I hope I shall be acquitted of the presumption of pretending to offer in the scrappy souvenirs I shall now put together any important contribution to the memoirs of the future. At best, a woman’s knowledge of the eminent men whom she only meets at dinner parties, and perhaps in occasional quiet afternoon visits, is not to be compared to that of their associates in their clubs, in Parliament and in all the work of the world. Nevertheless as all of us, human beings, resemble diamonds in having several distinct facets to our characters, and as we always turn one of these to one 444person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem. The relation too, which a good and kindly man (and such I am happy to say were most of my acquaintances) bears to a woman who is neither his mother, sister, daughter, wife or potential wife, but merely a reasonably intelligent listener and companion of restful hours, is so different from that which he holds to his masculine fellow-workers,—rivals, allies or enemies as they may be,—that it can rarely happen but that she sees him in quite a different light from theirs. Englishmen are not eaten up with Invidia, like Italians and Frenchmen, such as made D’ Azeglio say to me that it was a positive danger to a statesman to win a battle, or gain a diplomatic triumph, so much envy did it excite among his own party. In our country, men, and still more emphatically, women, glory enthusiastically in the successes of their friends, if not of others. But the masculine mind, so far as I have got to the bottom of it, (as George Eliot says, “it is always so superior—what there is of it!”), is not so quick in gathering impressions of character as ours of the softer (and therefore, I suppose, more waxlike) sex; and when fifty men have said their say on a great man I should always wish to hear also what the women who knew him socially had to add to their testimony. In short, dear Fanny Kemble’s “Old Woman’s Gossip” seems to me admissible on the subject of the character and “little ways” of everybody worthy of record.

It was certainly an advantage to us in London to be, as we were, without any kind of ulterior aim or object in meeting our friends and acquaintances, beyond the pleasure of the hour. We never had anything in view in the way of social ambition; not even daughters to bring out! It was not “de l’Art pour l’Art,” but la Société pour la Société, and nothing beyond the amusement of the particular day and 445the interest of the acquaintanceships we had the good fortune to make. We had no rank or dignity of any kind to keep up. I think hardly any of our friends and habitués even knew who we were, from Burke’s point of view! I was really pleased once, after I had been living for years in London, to find at a large dinner-party, where at least half the company were my acquaintances, that not one present suspected that I had any connection with Ireland at all. Our host (a very prominent M.P. at the time) having by chance elicited from me some information on Irish affairs, asked me, “What do you know about Ireland?” “Simply that the first 36 years of my life were spent there,” was my reply; which drew forth a general expression of surprise. The few who had troubled themselves to think who I was, had taken it for granted that I belonged to a family of the same name, minus the final letter, in Oxfordshire. In a country neighbourhood the one prominent fact about me, known and repeated to everyone, would have been that I was the daughter of Charles Cobbe of Newbridge. I was proud to be accepted and, I hope, liked, on the strength of my own talk and books, not on that of my father’s acres.

We did not (of course) live in London all the year round, but came every summer to Wales to enable my friend to look after her estate; and I went every two or three years to Ireland, and more frequently to the houses of my two brothers in England,—Maulden Rectory, in Bedfordshire, and Easton Lyss, near Petersfield,—where they respectively lived, and where both they and their wives were always ready to welcome me affectionately. I also paid occasional visits at two or three country houses, notably Broadlands and Aston Clinton, where I was most kindly invited by the beloved owners; and twice or three times we let our house for a term, and went to live on one occasion in Cheyne Walk, and 446another time at Byfleet. We always fell back, however, on our dear little house in Hereford Square, till we let it finally to our old friend Mrs. Kemble, and left London for good in the spring of 1884.

I think the first real acquaintances we made in London (whether through Mrs. Somerville or otherwise I cannot recall) were Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, and their brother and sister, Col. and Mrs. Lyell. The house, No. 73, Harley Street—in after years noticeable by its bright blue door, (so painted to catch Sir Charles’ fading eyesight on his return from his daily walks), became very dear to us, and I confess to a pang when it was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone after the death of our dear old friends. Like Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Grosvenor Square, pulled down after his death and replaced by a brand new mansion in the latest Londonesque architecture, there was a “bad-dreaminess” about both transformation scenes. The Lyells regularly attended Mr. Martineau’s chapel in Little Portland Street, as we did; and ere long it became a habit for us to adjourn after the service to Harley Street and spend some of the afternoon with our friends, discussing the large supply of mental food which our pastor never failed to lay before us. Those were never-to-be-forgotten Sundays.

Sir Charles Lyell realised to my mind the Man of Science as he was of old; devout, and yet entirely free-thinking in the true sense; filled with admiring, almost adoring love for Nature, and also (all the more for that enthusiasm), simple and fresh-hearted as a child. When a good story had tickled him he would come and tell it to us with infinite relish. I recollect especially his delight in an American boy (I think somehow connected with our friend Mr. Herman Merivale), who, being directed to say his prayers night and morning, replied that he had no objection to do so at night, but thought that “a boy who is worth anything can take care of 447himself by day.”^[21] Another time we had been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression that the doctrine, (which he had then recently adopted), involved always the survival of the best, as well as of the “fittest.” Sir Charles left the room and went downstairs, but suddenly rushed back into the drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: “I’ll explain it to you in one minute! Suppose you had been living in Spain three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well! your sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and that would have been the survival of the fittest; but you would have been burnt at an auto-da-fè, and there would have been an end of you. You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that’s Evolution! Good-bye!” On went his hat, and we heard the hall door close after him before we had done laughing.

Sir Charles’ interest in his own particular science was eager as that of a boy. One day I had a long conversation with him at his brother, Colonel Lyell’s hospitable house, on the subject of the Glacial period. He told me that he was employing regular calculators at Greenwich to make out the results of the ice-cap and how it would affect land and sea; whether it would cause double tides, &c. He said he had pointed out (what no one else had noticed) that the water to form this ice-cap did not come from another planet, but must have been deducted from the rest of the water on 448the globe. Another day I met him at a very imposing private concert in Regent’s Park. The following is my description of our conversation in a letter to my friend, Miss Elliot:—

“Sir Charles sat beside me yesterday at a great musical party at the D.’s, and I asked him, ‘Did he like music?’ He said, ‘Yes! for it allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts.’ And so he evidently did, while they were singing Mendelssohn and Handel! At every interval he turned to me. ‘Agassiz has made a discovery. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. He finds traces of the Glaciers in tropical America.’ (Here intervened a sacred song.) ‘Well, as I was saying, you know 230,000 years ago the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at one of its maximum periods; and we were 11,000,000 miles further from the sun in winter, and the cold of those winters must have been intense; because heat varies, not according to direct ratio, but the squares of the distances.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but then the summers were as much hotter?’ (Sacred song.) ‘No, the summers wern’t! They could not have conquered the cold.’ ‘Then you think that the astronomical 230,000 years corresponded with the glacial period? Is that time enough for all the strata since?’ (Handel.) ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we must go back to the still greater period of the eccentricity of the orbit three million years ago. Then we were 14 millions of miles out of the circular path.’ (Mendelssohn.) ‘Good-bye, dear Sir Charles—I must be off.’

“Another day last week, he came and sat with me for two hours. I would not light candles, and we got very deep into talk. I was greatly comforted and instructed by all he said. I asked him how the modern attacks on the argument from Design in Nature, and Darwin’s views, touched him religiously? He replied, ‘Not at all.’ He thought the proofs in Nature of the Divine Goodness quite triumphant; and that he watched with secret pleasure even sceptical men of science whenever they forget their 449theories, instinctively using phrases, all implying designing wisdom.”

I remember on another occasion Sir Charles telling me with much glee of two eminent Agnostic friends of ours who had been discussing some question for a long time, when one said to the other, “You are getting very teleological!” To which the friend responded, “I can’t help it!”

At another of his much prized visits to me (April 19th, 1866) he spoke earnestly of the future life, and made this memorable remark of which I took a note: “The further I advance in science, the less the mere physical difficulties in believing in immortality disturb me. I have learned to think nothing too amazing to be within the order of Nature.”

The great inequalities in the conditions of men and the sufferings of many seemed to be his strongest reasons for believing in another life. He added: “Aristotle says that every creature has its instincts given by its Creator, and each instinct leads to its good. Now the belief in immortality is an instinct tending to good.”

After the death of his beloved wife—the truest “helpmeet” ever man possessed—he became even more absorbed in the problem of a future existence, and very frequently came and talked with me on the subject. The last time I had a real conversation with him was not long before his death, when we met one sweet autumn day by chance in Regent’s Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens. We sat down under a tree and had a long discussion of the validity of religious faith. I think his argument culminated in this position:—

“The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to err, are true in the main, and point to real objects. The religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger; and is, to-day, more developed among the 450highest races than ever it was before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great truth.”

Here is another glimpse of him from a letter:—

“After service I went to Harley Street, Sir Charles, I thought, looking better than for a long time. He thinks the caves of Aurignac can never be used as evidence; the witnesses were all tampered with from the first. He saw a skeleton found at Mentone 15 feet deep, which he thinks of the same age as the Gibraltar caves. The legs were distinctly platycnemic, and there was also a curious process on the front of the shoulder—like the breast of a chicken. The skull was full-sized and good. I asked him how he accounted for the fact that with the best will in the world we could not find the least difference between the most ancient skulls and our own? He said the theory had been suggested that all the first growth went to brain, so that very early men acquired large brains, as was necessary. This is not very Darwinian, is it?”

It is the destiny of all books of Science to be soon superseded and superannuated, while those of Literature may live for all time. I suppose Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology has undergone, or will undergo, this fate ere long; but the magnanimity and candour which made him, in issuing the 10th edition of that book, abjure all his previous arguments against Evolution and candidly own himself Darwin’s convert, was an evidence of genuine loyalty to truth which I trust can never be quite forgotten. He was, as Prof. Huxley called him, the “greatest Geologist of his day,”—the man “who found Geology an infant science feebly contending for a few scattered truths, and left it a giant, grasping all the ages of the past.” But to my memory he will always be something more than an eminent man of Science. He was the type of what such men ought to be; with the simplicity, humility and gentleness which should be 451characteristic of the true student of Nature. Of the priestlike arrogance of some representatives of the modern scientific spirit he had not a taint. In one of his last letters to me, he said:

“I am told that the same philosophy which is opposed to a belief in a future state undertakes to prove that every one of our acts and thoughts are the necessary result of antecedent events, and conditions and that there can be no such thing as Free-will in man. I am quite content that both doctrines should stand on the same foundation; for as I cannot help being convinced that I have the power of exerting Free-will, however great a mystery the possibility of this may be, so the continuance of a spiritual life may be true, however inexplicable or incapable of proof.

“I am told by some that if any of our traditionary beliefs make us happier and lead us to estimate humanity more highly, we ought to be careful not to endeavour to establish any scientific truths which would lessen and lower our estimate of Man’s place in Nature; in short, we should do nothing to disturb any man’s faith, if it be a delusion which increases his happiness.

“But I hope and believe that the discovery and propagation of every truth, and the dispelling of every error tends to improve and better the condition of man, though the act of reforming old opinions causes so much pain and misery.”

It will give me pleasure if these few reminiscences of my honoured friend send fresh readers to his excellent and spirited biography by his sister-in-law Mrs. Lyell, Lady Lyell’s sister, who was also his brother, Colonel Lyell’s wife; the mother of Sir Leonard Lyell, M.P.

I saw a great deal of Dr. Colenso during the years he spent in England; I think about 1864–5. He lived near us in a small house in Sussex Place, Glo’ster Road (not Sussex Place, Onslow Square), where his large family of sons and 452daughters practised the piano below stairs and produced detonations with chemicals above, while visitors called incessantly, interrupting his arduous and anxious studies! He was in all senses an iron-grey man. Iron-grey hair, pale, strong face, fine but somewhat rigid figure, a powerful, strong-willed, resolute man, if ever there were one, and an honest one also, if such there have been on earth. His friend, Sir George W. Cox, who I may venture to call mine also, has, in his admirable biography, printed the three most important letters which the Bishop of Natal wrote to me, and I can add nothing to Sir George’s just estimate of the character of this modern Confessor. I will give here, however, another letter I received from him at the very beginning of our intercourse, when I had only met him once (at Dr. Carpenter’s table); and also a record in a letter to a friend of a tête-à-tête conversation with him, further on. I have always thought that he made a mistake in returning to Natal, and that his true place would have been at the head of a Christian-Theistic Church in London:—

“I thank you sincerely for your letter, and for the volume which you have sent me. I have read the preface with the deepest interest—and heartily respond to every word which you have written in it. A friend at the Cape had lent me a German edition of De Wette, which I had consulted carefully. But, about a fortnight ago, a lady, till then a stranger to me, sent me a copy of Parker’s Edition. I value it most highly for the sake both of the Author’s and Editor’s share in it. But the criticism of the present day goes, if I am not mistaken, considerably beyond even De Wette’s, in clearing up the question of the Age and Authorship of the different parts of the Pentateuch. I shall carefully consider the Tables of Elohistic and Jehovistic portions, as given in 453De Wette; but, in many important respects, my conclusions will be found to differ from his, and, as I think, upon certain grounds. De W. leant too much to the judgment of Stäbelin.

“The above, however, is the only one of Th. Parker’s works, which has yet come into my hands, till the arrival of your book this morning. When I repeat that every word of your Preface went to my very heart—and that many of them drew the tears from my eyes and the prayer from my heart that God would grant me grace to be in any degree a follower of the noble brother whose life you have sketched, and whose feet have already trodden the path, which now lies open before me—you will believe that I shall not leave long the rest of the volume unread. But, whatever I may find there, your Preface will give comfort and support to thousands, if only they can be brought to read it. Would it not be possible to have it printed separate, as a cheap Tract? It would have the effect of recommending the book itself, and Parker’s works, generally, to multitudes, who might otherwise not have them brought under their notice effectively? I think if largely circulated it might help materially the progress of the great work, in which I am now engaged.

“You will allow me, I hope, to have the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with you, by making a call upon you before long—and may I bring with me Mrs. Colenso, who will be very glad to see you?

“Please accept a copy of my ‘Romans,’ which Macmillan will send you. The spirit of it will remain, I trust, abiding, though much of the letter must now be changed.”

Writing of Dr. Colenso to a friend in February, 1865, I said:—

“I never felt for him so much as last night. We came to talk on what we felt at standing so much alone; and he 454said that when the extent of his discoveries burst on him he felt as if he had received a paralyzing electric shock. A London clergyman wrote to him the other day to give him solemn warning that he had led one of his parishioners to destruction and drunkenness. Colenso answered him, that ‘it was not he who led men to doubt of God and duty, but those teachers who made them rest their faith on God and Duty on a foundation of falsehood which every new wave of thought was sweeping away.’ The clergyman seems to have been immensely dumbfounded by this reply.”

Another most interesting man whom I met at Dr. Carpenter’s table was Charles Kingsley.

One day, while I was still a miserable cripple, I went to dine in Regent’s Park and came rather late into a drawing-room full of company, supported by what my maid called my “best crutches!” The servant did not know me, and announced “Miss Cobble.” I corrected her loudly enough for the guests to hear, in that moment of pause: “No! Miss Hobble!” There was of course a laugh, and from the little crowd rushed forward to greet me with both hands extended, a tall, slender, stooping figure with that well-known face so full of feeling and tenderness—Charles Kingsley. “At last, Miss Cobbe, at last we meet,” he said, and a moment later gave me his arm to dinner. This greeting touched me, for we had exchanged, as theological opponents, some tolerably sharp blows for years before, but his large, noble nature harboured no spark of resentment. We talked all dinner-time and a good deal in the evening, and then he offered to escort me home to South Kensington—a proposal which I greedily accepted, but, somehow, when he found that I had a brougham, and was not going in miscellaneous vehicles (in my best evening toggery!) from one end of London to the other at night, he retracted, and 455could not be induced to come with me. We met, however, not unfrequently afterwards, and I always felt much attracted to him; as did, I may mention, my friend’s little fox terrier, who, travelling one day with her mistress in the Underground, spied Kingsley entering the carriage, and incontinently leaving her usual safe retreat under the seat made straight to him, and without invitation, leaped on his knee and began gently kissing his face! The dog never did the same or anything like it to any one else in her life before or afterwards. Of course, my friend apologised to Mr. Kingsley, but he only said in his deep voice, “Dogs always do that to me,”—and coaxed the little beast kindly, till they left the train.

The last time I saw Canon Kingsley was one day late in the autumn some months before he died. Somebody who, I thought, he would like to meet was coming to dine with me at short notice, and I went to Westminster in the hope of catching him and persuading him to come without losing time by sending notes. The evening was closing, and it was growing very dark in the cloisters, where I was seeking his door, when I saw a tall man, strangely bent, coming towards me, evidently seeing neither me nor anything else, and absorbed in some most painful thought. His whole attitude and countenance expressed grief amounting to despair. So terrible was it that I felt it an intrusion on a sacred privacy to have seen it; and would fain have hidden myself, but this was impossible where we were standing at the moment. When he saw me he woke out of his reverie with a start, pulled himself together, shook hands, and begged me to come into his house; which of course I did not do. He had an engagement which prevented him from meeting my guest (I think it must have been Keshub Chunder Sen), and I took myself off as quickly as possible. I have often wondered 456what dreadful thought was occupying his mind when I caught sight of him that day in the gloomy old cloisters of Westminster in the autumn twilight.

The quotation made a few pages back of Sir Charles Lyell’s observations on belief in Immortality reminds me that I repeated them soon after he had made them, to another great man whom it was my privilege to know—John Stuart Mill. We were spending an afternoon with him and Miss Helen Taylor at Blackheath; and a quiet conversation between Mr. Mill and myself having reached this subject, I told him of what Sir C. Lyell had said. In a moment the quick blood suffused his cheeks and something very like tears were in his eyes. The question, it was plain, touched his very heart. This wonderful sensitiveness of a man generally supposed to be “dry” and devoted to the driest studies, struck me, I think, more than anything about him. His special characteristic was extreme delicacy of feeling; and this showed itself, singularly enough, for a man advanced in life, in transparency of skin, and changes of colour and expression as rapid as those in a mountain lake when the clouds shift over it. When Watts painted his fine portrait of him, he failed to notice this peculiarity of his thin and delicate skin, and gave him the common thick, muddy complexion of elderly Englishmen. The result is that the èthos of the face is missing—just as in the case of the portrait of Dr. Martineau he is represented with weak, sloping shoulders and narrow chest. The look of power which essentially belongs to him is not to be seen. I remarked when I saw this picture first exhibited: “I should never have ‘sat under’ that Dr. Martineau!” Mill and I, of course, met in deep sympathy on the Woman question; and he did me the honour to present me with a copy of his “Subjection of Women” on its publication. He tried to make me write and speak more on the subject of Women’s Claims, and used jestingly to say that 457my laugh was worth—I forget how much!—to the cause. I insert a letter from him showing the minute care he took about matters hardly worthy of his attention.

“I have lately received communication from the American publisher Putnam, requesting me to write for their Magazine, and I understand that they would be very glad if you would write anything for them, more especially on the Women question, on which the Magazine (a new one) has shown liberal tendencies from the first. The communications I have received have been through Mrs. Hooker, sister of Mrs. Stowe and Dr. Ward Beecher, and herself the author of two excellent articles in the Magazine on the suffrage question, by which we had been much struck before we knew the authorship. I enclose Mrs. Hooker’s last letter to me, and I send by post copies of Mrs. Hooker’s articles and some old numbers of the Magazine, the only ones we have here; and I shall be very happy if I should be the medium of inducing you to write on this question for the American public.

“My daughter desires to be kindly remembered, and I am,

“P.S.—May I ask you to be so kind as to forward Mrs. Hooker’s letter to Mrs. P. A. Taylor, as she will see by it that Mrs. Hooker has no objection to put her name to a reprint of her articles.”

There never was a more unassuming philosopher than Mr. Mill, just as there never was a more unassuming poet than Mr. Browning. All the world knows how Mr. Mill strove to give to his wife the chief credit of his works; and, after her death, his attitude towards her daughter, who was indeed a 458daughter also to him, was beautiful to witness, and a fine exemplification of his own theories of the rightful position of women. He was, however, equally unpretentious as regarded men. Talking one day about the difficulty of doing mental work when disturbed by street music, and of poor Mr. Babbage’s frenzy on the subject, Mr. Mill said it did not much interfere with him. I told him how intensely Mr. Spencer objected to disturbance. “Ah yes; of course! writing Spencer’s works one must want quiet!” As if nothing of the kind were needed for such trivial books as his own System of Logic, or Political Economy! He really was quite unconscious of the irony of his remark. I have been told that he would allow his cat to interfere sadly with his literary occupation when she preferred to lie on his table, or sometimes on his neck,—a trait like that of Newton and his “Diamond.” This extreme gentleness is ever, surely a note of the highest order of men.

Here are extracts from letters concerning Mr. Mill, which I wrote to Miss Elliot in August, 1869. I believe I had been to Brighton and met Mr. Mill there.

“We talked of many grave things, and in everything his love of right and his immense underlying faith impressed me more than I can describe. I asked him what he thought of coming changes, and he entirely agreed with me about their danger, but thought that the mischief they will entail must be but temporary. He thought the loss of Reverence unspeakably deplorable, but an inevitable feature of an age of such rapid transition that the son does actually outrun the father. He added that he thought even the most sceptical of men generally had an inner altar to the Unseen Perfection while waiting for the true one to be revealed to them. In a word the ‘dry old philosopher’ showed himself to me as an enthusiast in faith and love. The way in which he seemed to have thought out every great question and to express his own so modestly and simply, and yet in 459such clear-cut outlines, was most impressive. I felt (what one so seldom does!) the delightful sense of being in communication with a mind deeper than one would reach the end of, even after a lifetime of intercourse. I never felt the same, so strongly, except towards Mr. Martineau; and though the forms of his creed and philosophy are, I think, infinitely truer than those of Mill (not to speak of the feelings one has for the man whose prayers one follows), I think it is more in form than in spirit that the two men are distinguished. The one has only an ‘inner,’ the other has an outward ‘altar;’ but both kneel at them.”

A month or two earlier in the same year I wrote to the same friend:—

“Last night I sat beside Mr. Mill at dinner and enjoyed myself exceedingly. He is looking old and worn, and the nervous twitchings of his face are painful to see, but he is so thoroughly genial and gentlemanly, and laughs so heartily at one’s little jokes, and keeps up an argument with so much play and good humour, that I never enjoyed my dinner-neighbourhood more. Mr. Fawcett was objurgating some M.P. for taking office, and said: ‘When I see Tories rejoice, I know it must be an injury to the Liberal Cause.’ ‘Do you never, then, feel a qualm,’ I said, ‘all you Liberal gentlemen, when you see the priests rejoice at what you have just done in Ireland? Do you reflect whether that is likely to be an injury to the Liberal Cause?’ The observation somehow fell like a bomb; (the entire company, as I remember, were Radicals, our host being Mr. P. A. Taylor). For two minutes there was a dead silence. Then Mrs. Taylor said: ‘Ah, Miss Cobbe is a bitter Conservative!’ ‘Not a bitter one,’ said Mr. Mill. ‘Miss Cobbe is a Conservative. I am sorry for it; but Miss Cobbe is never bitter.’”

It has been a constant subject of regret to me that Mr. Mill’s intention (communicated to me by Miss Taylor) of spending the ensuing summer holiday in Wales, on purpose 460to be near us, was frustrated by his illness and death. How much pleasure and instruction I should have derived from his near neighbourhood there is no need to say.

A friend of Mr. Mill for whom I had great regard was Prof. Cairnes. He underwent treatment at Aix-les-Bains at the same time as I; and we used to while away our long hours by interminable discussions, principally concerning ethics, a subject on which Mr. Cairnes took the Utilitarian side, and I, of course, that of the school of Independent Morality (i.e., of Morality based on other grounds than Utility). He was an ardent disciple of Mill, but his extreme candour caused him to admit frankly that the “mystic extension” of the idea of Usefulness into Right, was unaccountable, or at least unaccounted for; and that when we had proved an act to be pre-eminently useful and likely to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” there yet remained the question for each of us, “Why should I perform that useful action, if it cost me a moment’s pain?” To find the answer (he admitted) we must fall back on an inward “Categoric imperative,” “ought;” and having done so, (I argued,) we must thenceforth admit that the basis of Morality rests on something beside Utility. All these controversies are rather bygone now, since we have been confronted with “hereditary sets of the brain.” I think it was in these discussions with Prof. Cairnes that I struck out what several friends (among others Lord Arthur Russell) considered an “unanswerable” argument against the Utilitarian philosophy; it ran thus:

“Mr. Mill has nobly said, that,—if an Almighty Tyrant were to order him to worship him and threaten to send him to hell if he refused, then, sooner than worship that unjust God, ‘to Hell would I go!’ Mr. Mill, of course, desired every man to do what he himself thought right; therefore it is conceivable that, in the given contingency, we might 461behold the apostle of the Utilitarian philosophy conducting the whole human race to eternal perdition, for the sake of,—shall we say the ‘Greatest Happiness of the Greatest number?’”

Prof. Cairnes did great public service both to England and America at the time of the war of Secession by his wise and able writing on the subject. In a small way I tried to help the same cause by joining Mrs. P. A. Taylor’s Committee formed to promote and express English sympathy with the North; and wrote several little pamphlets, “The Red Flag in John Bull’s Eyes”; “Rejoinder to Mrs. Stowe,” &c. This common interest increased, of course, my regard for Mr. Cairnes, and it was with real sorrow I saw him slowly sink under the terrible disease, (a sort of general ossification of the joints) of which he died. I have said he sank under it, but assuredly it was only his piteously stiffened body which did so, for I never saw a grander triumph of mind over matter than was shown by the courage and cheerfulness wherewith he bore as dreadful a fate as that of any old martyr. I shall never forget the impression of the nobility of the human Soul rising over its tenement of clay, which he made upon me, on the occasion of my last visit to him at Blackheath.

Another man, much of the character and calibre of Prof. Cairnes, whom I likewise had the privilege to know well, was Prof. Sheldon Amos. He also, alas! died in the prime of life; to the loss and grief of the friends of every generous movement.

The following is a memorandum of the first occasion on which I met Mr. John Bright:—

“February 28th, 1866. Dined at Mr. S.’s, M.P. Sat between Bright and Mr. Buxton. Bright so exquisitely clean and with such a sweet voice! His hands alone are coarse. Great discussion, in which Mr. B. completely took the lead; the other gentlemen present seeming to hang on 462his words as I never saw Englishmen do on those of one another. Talking of Ireland he said he would, if he ever had the power, force all the English Companies and great English landlords to sell their estates there; the land to be cut up into small farms. I asked, did he believe in small farming in 1866, and in Celtic capitalists ready to purchase farms? He then told us how he picked up much information travelling through Ireland on cars, from the drivers, (as if every Irish car-driver did not recognise him in a moment from Punch’s caricatures!) and how, especially, he visited the only small farm he had heard of where the occupier was a freeholder; and how it was exceedingly prosperous. I asked where this was? He said ‘in a place called the Barony of Forth.’ Of course I explained that Forth and Bargy in Wexford have been for four hundred years isolated English, (or rather Welsh) colonies, and afford no sort of sample of Irish farming. Bright’s way of speaking was dogmatic, but full of genial fun and quiet little bits of wit. He spoke with great feeling of the wrongs and miseries of the poor, but seemed to enjoy in full the delusion that it only depended on rich people being ready to sacrifice themselves, to remove them all to-morrow.

“I ventured to ask him why he laboured so hard to get votes for working carpenters and bricklayers, and never stirred a finger to ask them for women, who possessed already the property qualification? He said: ‘Much was to be said for women,’ but then went on maundering about our proper sphere, and ‘would they go into Parliament?’”

Again another time I sat beside him (I know not at whose hospitable table), and he told me a most affecting story of a poor crippled woman in a miserable cottage near Llandudno, where he usually spent his holidays. He had got into the habit of visiting this poor creature, who could not stir from her bed, but lay there all day long alone, her husband being out at work as a labourer. Sometimes a neighbour would look in and give her food, but unless one 463did so, she was entirely helpless. Her only comforter was her dog, a fine collie, who lay beside her on the floor, ran in and out, licked her poor useless hands, and showed his affection in a hundred ways. Bright grew fond of the dog, and the dog always welcomed him each year with gambols and joy. One summer he came to the cottage, and the hapless cripple lay on her pallet still, but the dog did not come out to him as usual, and his first question to the woman was: “Where is your collie?” The answer was that her husband had drowned the dog to save the expense of feeding it.

Bright’s voice broke when he came to the end of this story, and we said very little more to each other during that dinner.

Another day I was speaking to Mr. Bright of the extraordinary canard which had appeared in the Times the day before announcing (quite falsely) that Lord Russell, then Premier, had resigned. “What on earth,” I asked, “can have induced the Times to publish such intelligence?” (As it happened, it inconvenienced Lord Russell very much.) “I will tell you,” said Bright; “I am sure it is because Delane is angry that Lady Russell has not asked him to dinner. He expected to go to the Russells’ as he did to the Palmerstons’, and get his news at first hand!” A day or two later I met Lord Russell, and told him what Mr. Bright had said was the reason of the mischievous trick Mr. Delane had played him. Lord Russell chuckled a great deal and said, rubbing his hands in his characteristic way: “I believe it is! I do believe it is!”

My beautiful cousin, Laura, one of my father’s wards, had married (from Newbridge in old days) Mr. John Locke, Q.C., who was for a long time M.P. for Southwark. Their house, 63, Eaton Place, was always most cordially opened to me, and beside Mr. Locke, who was generally brimful of political 464news, I met at their table many clever barristers and M.P.’s. Among the latter was Mr. Ayrton, against whom a virulent set was made by the scientific clique, in consequence of his endeavours, on behalf of the public, to open Kew Gardens earlier in the day. He was rather saturnine, but an incorruptible, unbending sort of man, for whom I felt respect. Another habitué was Mr. Warren, author of Ten Thousand a Year. He was a little ugly fellow, but full of fire and fun, retorting right and left against the Liberals present. Sergeant Gazelee, a worn-looking man, with keen eyes, one day answered him fairly. There was an amusing discussion whether the Tories could match in ability the men of the opposite party? Warren brought up an array of clever Conservatives, but then pretended to throw up the sponge, exclaiming in a dolorous voice, “but then you Liberals have got—Whalley!”

Beside my cousin Mrs. Locke and her good and able husband, I had the pleasure for many years of constantly seeing in London her two younger sisters, Sophia and Eliza Cobbe, who were my father’s favourite wards and have been from their childhood, when they were always under my charge in their holidays, till now in our old age, almost like younger sisters to me. They were of course rarely absent from the Eaton Place festivities.

There was a considerable difference between dinner parties in the Sixties and those of thirty years later. They lasted longer at the earlier date; a greater number of dishes were served at each course, and much more wine was taken. I cannot but think that there must be a certain declension in the general vitality of our race of late years for, I think, few of us, young or old, would be inclined to share equally now in those banquets of long ago which always lasted two hours and sometimes three. There were scarcely any teetotalers, men or women, at the time I speak of, in the circles to which 465I belonged; and the butlers, who went round incessantly with half-a-dozen kinds of wine, and (after dinner) liqueurs, were not, as now, continually interrupted in their courses by “No wine, thank you! Have you Appolinaris or Seltzer?” I never saw anyone the worse for the sherry and the milkpunch and the hock or chablis, and champagne and claret; but certainly there was generally a little more gaiety of a well-bred sort towards the end of the long meals. My cousins kept a particularly good cook and good cellar, and their guests—especially some who hailed from the City—certainly enjoyed at their table other “feasts” beside those of reason. And so I must confess did I, in those days of good appetite after a long day’s literary work; and I sincerely pitied Dean Stanley, who had no sense of taste, and scarcely knew the flavour of anything which he put in his mouth. When the company was not quite up to his mark, the tedium of the dinners which he attended must have been dreadful to him; whereas, in my case, I could always,—provided the menu was good,—entertain myself satisfactorily with my plate and knife and fork. The same great surgeon who had treated my sprained ankle so unsuccessfully, told me with solemn warning when we were taking our house in Hereford Square, that, if I lived in South Kensington and went to dinner parties, I should be a regular victim to gout. As it happened I lived in South Kensington for just twenty years, and went out, I should think to some two thousand dinners, great and small, and I never had the gout at all, but, on the contrary, by my own guidance, got rid of the tendency before I left London. There has certainly been a perceptible diminution in the animal spirits of men and women in the last thirty years, if not of their vital powers. Of course there was always, among well-bred people a certain average of spirits in society, neither boisterous nor yet depressed; and the better the company the softer the general “susurro” 466of the conversation. I could have recognized blindfold certain drawing-rooms wherein a mixed congregation assembled, by the strident, high note which pervaded the crowded room. But the ripple of gentle laughter in good company has decidedly fallen some notes since the Sixties.

I am led to these reflections by remembering among my cousin’s guests that admirable man—Mr. Fawcett. He was always, not merely fairly cheerful, but more gay and apparently light-hearted than those around him who were possessed of their eyesight. The last time I met him was at the house of Madame Bodichon in Blandford Square, and we three were all the company. One would have thought a blind statesman alone with two elderly women, would not have been much exhilarated; but he seemed actually bursting with boyish spirits; pouring out fun, and laughing with all his heart. Certainly his devoted wife (in my humble opinion the ablest woman of this day), succeeded in cheering his darkened lot quite perfectly.

Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett were the third couple who in this century have afforded a study for Mr. Francis Galton of “Hereditary Genius.” The first were Shelley and his Mary (who again was the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft). Their son, the late Sir Percy Shelley, was a very kindly and pleasant gentleman, with good taste for private theatricals, but not a genius. The second were Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They also have left a son, of whose gifts as a painter I do not presume to judge. The third were Mr. Fawcett and Millicent Garrett, who, though not claiming the brilliant genius of the others, were each, as all the world knows, very highly endowed persons. Their daughter, Miss Philippa Garrett Fawcett,—the Senior Wrangler, de jure,—has at all events vindicated Mr. Galton’s theories.

467Many of us, in those days of the Sixties, were deeply interested in the efforts of women to enter the medical profession in spite of the bitter opposition which they encountered. Miss Elizabeth Garrett, Mrs. Fawcett’s sister, occupied a particularly prominent place in our eyes, succeeding as she did in obtaining her medical degree in Paris, and afterwards a seat on the London School Board, which last was quite a new kind of elevation for women. While still occupying the foreground of our ambition for our sex, Miss Garrett resolved to make (what has proved, I believe, to be) a happy and well assorted marriage, which put an end, necessarily, to her further projects of public work. I sent her, with my cordial good wishes, the following verses:—

Some years after this I brought from Rome as a present for my much valued friend and lady-Doctor, Mrs. Hoggan, M.D. (widow of Dr. George Hoggan), a large photograph of the statue in the Vatican of Minerva Medica. Under it I wrote these lines:—

The first dinner-party I ever attended in London, before I went to live in town, was at Mr. Bagehot’s house. I sat beside 469Mr. Richard Hutton, who has been ever since my good friend, and opposite us there sat a gentleman who at once attracted my attention. He had a strong dark face, a low forehead and hair parted in the middle, the large loose mouth of an orator and a manner quite unique; as if he were gently looking down on the follies of mortality from the superior altitudes of Olympos, or perhaps of Parnassus. “Do you know who that is sitting opposite to us?” said Mr. Hutton. I looked at him again, and replied: “I never saw him before, and I have never seen his picture, but I feel in my inner consciousness that it can only be Mr. Matthew Arnold;” and Mr. Arnold, of course, it was,—with an air which made me think him (what he was not) an intellectual coxcomb. He wrote, about that time or soon afterwards, some dreadfully derisive things of my Theism; not on account, apparently, of its intrinsic demerits, but because of what he conceived to be its upstart character. We are all familiar with a certain tone of lofty superiority common to Roman Catholics and Anglicans in dealing with Dissenters of all classes; the tone, no doubt, in which the priests of On talked of Moses when he led the Israelitish schism in the wilderness. It comes naturally to everybody who stands serenely on “the old paths,” and watches those who walk below, or strive to fray new ways through the jungle of poor human thoughts. But when Mr. Arnold had himself slipped off the old road so far as to have liquefied the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed into a “Stream of Tendency;” and compared the doctrine of the Trinity to a story of “Three Lord Shaftesburys;” and reduced the Object of Worship to the lowest possible denomination as “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness;” he must, I think, have come to feel that it was scarcely his affair to treat other people’s heresies as new-fangled, and lacking in the sanctities of tradition. As one after another of his brilliant essays appeared, and it became 470manifest that his own creed grew continually thinner, more exiguous, and less and less substantial, I was reminded of an old sporting story which my father told of a town-bred gentleman, the “Mr. Briggs” of those days, who for the first time shot a cock-pheasant, and after greatly admiring it laid it down on the grass. A keeper took up the bird and stroked it, pretending to wonder at its size, and presently shifted it aside and substituted a partridge, which he likewise stroked and admired, till he had an opportunity of again changing it for a snipe. At this crisis “Mr. Briggs” broke in furiously, bidding the keeper to stop stroking his bird: “Be hanged to you! If you go on like that, you’ll rub it down to a wren!” The creed of many persons in these days seems to be undergoing the process of being patted and praised, while all the time it is being rubbed down to a wren!

But whatever hard things Mr. Arnold said of me, I liked and admired him, and he was always personally most kind to me. He had of all men I have ever known the truest insight,—the true Poet’s insight,—into the feelings and characters of animals, especially of dogs. His poem, Geist’s Grave, is to me the most affecting description of the death of an animal in the range of literature. Indeed, the subject of Death itself, whether of beasts or of men, viewed from the same standpoint of hopelessness, has never, I think, been more tenderly touched. How deeply true to every heart is the thought expressed in the stanzas, which remind us that in all the vastness of the universe and of endless time there is not, and never will be, another being like the one who is dead! That being (some of us believe) may revive and live for ever, but another who will “restore its little self” will never be.

We knew dear Geist, I am glad to say. When Miss Lloyd and I came to live at Byfleet Mr. Arnold and his most charming wife,—then living three miles off at Cobham,—kindly permitted us to see a good deal of them, and we were deeply interested in poor Geist’s last illness. He was a black dachshund, not a handsome dog, but possessed of something which in certain dogs and (those dogs only) seems to be the canine analogue of a human soul. As to Mr. Arnold’s poem on his other dog, Kaiser, who is there that enjoys a gleam of humour and dog-love can fail to be enchanted with such a perfect picture of a dog,—not a dog of the sentimental kind, but one—

Does not every one feel how true is the likeness of a happy loving dog to sunshine in a house?

I met Mr. Arnold one day in William and Norgate’s bookshop, and he inquired after my dog, and when I told him the poor beast had “gone where the good dogs go,” he said, with real feeling, “And you have not replaced her? No! of course you could not.” I asked his leave to give a copy of “Geist’s Grave” for a collection of poems on animals made for the purpose of humane propaganda, and he gave it very cordially. I was, however, deeply disappointed when 472he returned the following reply to my application for his signature to our first Memorial inviting the R.S.P.C.A. to undertake legislation for the restriction of vivisection. I do not clearly understand what he meant by disliking “the English way of employing for public ends private Societies and Memorials to them.” The R.S.P.C.A. is scarcely a “private society;” and, if it were so, I see no harm in “employing it for public ends,” instead of leaving everything to Government to do; or to leave undone.

“Your letter was directed to Oxford, a place with which I have now no connection, and it reaches me too late for signing your Memorial, but I should in any case have declined signing it, strongly as your cause speaks to my feelings; because, first, I greatly dislike the English way of employing, for public ends, private societies and Memorials to them; secondly, the signatures you will profit by, in this case, are not those of literary people, who will at once be disposed of as a set of unpractical sentimentalists. To yourself this objection does not apply, because you are distinguished not in letters only, but also as a lover and student of animals. I hope if you read my paper in the Contemporary, you observe how I apologise for calling them the lower animals, and how thoroughly I admit that they think and love.

In my first journey to Italy on my way to Palestine I made acquaintance with R. W. Mackay, the author of that enormously learned, but, perhaps, not very well digested book, the Progress of the Intellect. I afterwards renewed acquaintance with him and his nice wife in their house in Hamilton Terrace. Mr. Mackay was somewhat of an invalid and a nervous man, much absorbed in his studies. I have 473heard it said that he was the original of George Elliot’s Mr. Casaubon. At all events Mrs. Lewes had met him, and taken a strong prejudice against him. That prejudice I think was unjust. He was a very honest and real student, and a modest one, not a pretender like Mr. Casaubon. His books contain an amazing mass of knowledge, (presented, perhaps, in rather a crude state) respecting all the great religious doctrines of the world. I had once felt that both his books and talk were hard and steel-cold, and that his religion, though dogmatically the same as mine, was all lodged in his intellect. One day, however, when he called on me and we took a drive and walk in the Park together, I learned to my surprise that he entirely felt with me that the one direct way of reaching truth about religion was Prayer, and all the rest mere corroboration of what may so be learned. To have come round to this seemed to me a great evidence of intellectual sincerity.

I forget now what particular point we had been discussing when he wrote me the following curious bit of erudition:—

“Dixit Rabbi Simeon Ben Lakis,—Nomina angelorum et mensium ascenderunt in domum Israelis ex Babylone.”

“This occurs in the treatise Rosh Haschanah, which is part of the Mischna.

“The Mischna (the earliest part of the Talmud) is said to have been completed in the 3rd century, under the auspices of Rabbi Judah the Holy, and his disciples.

“I send the above as promised, The professed aversion of the Jews for foreign customs seems strangely at variance with their practice, as seen, e.g., in their names for the divisions of the heavenly hosts; the words ‘Legion and Sistra (castra) are evidently taken from the Roman army. Four Chief Spirits or Archangels are occasionally mentioned, as in Pirke Eliezer and Henoch, cf. 48, 1. Others make their number seven, as Tobit 12, 5; Revel. 2, 4–3, 1–4, 5. The angelic doings are partly copied from the 474usages of the Jewish Temple, hence the Jerusalem Targum renders Exod. 14, 24. ‘It happened in the morning watch, the hour when the heavenly host sing praises before God’—comp.: Luke 2, 13,—and the same reason is applied by the Targumist for the sudden exit of the angel in Genes. 32, 26. One may perhaps, however, be induced to ask whether (as in the case of Euthyphron in the Platonic dialogue) a better cause for departure might not be found in the inconvenience of remaining!

“Though I have Haug’s version of the Gathas, I am far from able to decipher the grounds of difference between him and Spiegel. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites, a volume entitled Erân by Dr. Spiegel contains, among other Essays, one entitled Avesta and Veda, or the relation of Iran and India, and another Avesta and Genesis, or the relation of Iran to the Semites. Weber’s Morische Skizzen also contains interesting matter on similar subjects. We were speaking about the magical significance of names. See as to this Origen against Celsus, 1–24; Diod. Sicul, 1–22; Iamblicus de Myst, 2, 4, 5.

“Socrates himself appears superstitiously apprehensive about the use of divine names in the Philebus 1, 2 and the Cratylus 400e. The suppression of it among the Jews, (for instance in the Septuagint, where Κυριος is substituted for Jehovah, and Sirach, Ch. 23, 9) express the same feeling.

“We were talking of the original religion of Persia. You, of course, recollect the passage on this subject in the first book of Herodotus, Ch. 131, and Strabo 15, see 13, p. 732 Casaub. The practice of prohibiting selfish prayer mentioned in the next following chapter in Herodotus, is remarkable.

“I hope that in the above rigmarole a grain of useful matter may be found. Mrs. Mackay is, I am glad to say, better to-day.

475Another early acquaintance of mine in London was Lady Byron, the widow of the poet. I called on her one day, having received from her a kind note begging me to do so as she was unable to leave her house to come to me. She had been exceedingly kind in procuring for me valuable letters of introduction from Sir Moses Montefiore and others, which had been very useful to me in my long wanderings.

Lady Byron was short in stature and, when I saw her, deadly pale; but with a dignity which some of our friends called “royal,” albeit without the smallest affectation or assumption. She talked to me eagerly about all manner of good works wherein she was interested; notably concerning Miss Carpenter’s Reformatory, to which she had practically subscribed £1,000 by buying Red Lodge and making it over for such use. During the larger part of the time of my visit she stood on the rug with her back to the fire and the power and will revealed in her attitude and conversation were very impressive. I bore in mind all the odious things Byron had said of her:

Also the sneers at her (very genuine) humour:

I thought that for a man to hold up such a woman as this, and that woman his wife, on the prongs of ridicule for public laughter was enough to make him detestable.

A lady whom I met long afterwards told me, (I made a note of it Nov. 13th, 1869) that she had been stopping, at the time of Lady Byron’s separation, at a very small seaside place in Norfolk. Lady Byron came there on a visit to Mrs. Francis 476Cunningham, née Gurney, as more retired than Kirkby Mallory. She had then been separated about six weeks or two months. She was (Mrs. B. said) singularly pleasing and healthful looking, rather than pretty. She was grave and reticent rather than depressed in spirits; and gave her friends to understand that there was something she could not explain to them about her separation. Mrs. B. heard her say that Lord Byron always slept with pistols under his pillow, and on one occasion had threatened to shoot her in the middle of the night. There was much singing of duets going on in the two families, but Lady Byron refused to take any part in it.

Miss Carpenter, who was entirely captivated by her, received from her some charge amounting to literary executorship; but after one or two furtive delvings into the trunks full of papers (since, I believe, stored in Hoare’s bank), she gave up in despair. She told me that the papers were in the most extraordinary confusion; letters both of the most trivial and of the most serious and compromising kind, household accounts, poems, and tradesmen’s bills, were all mixed together in hopeless disorder and dust. As is well known, Byron’s famous verses:

were written on the back of a butcher’s bill—unpaid like most of the rest. Miss Carpenter vouched for this fact.

Lady Byron was at one time greatly attracted by Fanny Kemble. Among Mrs. Kemble’s papers in my possession are seven letters from Lady Byron to her. Here is one of them worth presenting:

“The note you wrote to me before you left Brighton made me revert to a train of thought which had been for some time in my mind. I alluded once to “your Future.” I submit to be considered a Visionary, yet some of my 477decided visions have come to pass in the course of years let me tell you my Vision about you—That you are to be something to the People; that your strong sympathy with them (though you will not let them touch the hem of your garment) will bring your talents to bear upon their welfare; that the way is open to you, after your personal objects are fulfilled. My mind is so full of this, that though the time has not arrived for putting it in practice, I cannot help telling you of it. I am neither Democratic nor Aristocratic. I do not see those distinctions in looking at Humanity, but I feel most strongly that for every advantage we have received we are bound to offer something to those who do not possess it. Happy they who have gifts to place at the feet of their less favoured fellow-Christians!

“I cannot believe that a relation so truthful as yours and mine will be merely casual. Time will show. I might not have an opportunity of saying this in a visit.

It is an unsolved mystery to me why such a woman did not definitely adopt one of either of two courses. The first (and far the best) would, of course, have been to bury her husband’s misdeeds in absolute silence and oblivion, carefully destroying all papers relating to the tragedy of their joint lives. Or, if she had not strength for this, to write exactly what she thought ought to be known by posterity concerning him, and put her account in safe hands with all the needful pièces justificatives before she died. That she did not adopt either one course or the other must be a source of permanent regret to all who recognized her great merits and honoured them as they deserved.

Among our neighbours in South Kensington, whom we were privileged to know were many delightful people, who 478are still, I am happy to say, living and taking active part in the world. Among them were Mr. Froude, Mr. and Mrs. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Brookfield, Mrs. Simpson, and Mrs. Richmond Ritchie. But of several others, alas! “the place that knew them knows them no more.” Of these last were Mr. and Mrs. Herman Merivale, Sir Henry Maine, Mrs. Dicey, Lady Monteagle (who had written some of Wordsworth’s poems to his dictation as his amanuensis), and my dear old friend Mrs. de Morgan.

Sir Henry Maine’s interest in the claims of women and his strong statements on the subject, made me regard him with much gratitude. I asked him once a question about St. Paul’s citizenship, to which he was good enough to write so full and interesting a reply that I quote it here in extenso:—

“There is no question that for a considerable time before the concession of the Roman citizenship to the whole empire, quite at all events, B.C. 89 or 90,—it could be obtained in various ways by individuals who possessed a lower franchise in virtue of their place of birth or who were even foreigners. The legal writer, Ulpian, mentions several of these modes of acquiring it; and Pliny, more than once solicits the citizenship for protégés of his own. There is no authority for supposing that it could be directly purchased (at least legally), but it could be obtained by various processes which came to the same thing as paying directly, e.g., building a ship of a certain burden to carry corn to Rome.

“I suspect that St. Paul’s ancestor obtained the citizenship by serving in some petty magistracy. The coins of Tarsus are said to show that its citizens in the reign of Augustus, enjoyed one or other of the lower Roman franchises; and this would facilitate the acquisition by individuals of the full Roman citizenship.

479“The Roman citizenship was necessarily hereditary. The children of the person who became a Roman citizen came at once under his Patria Potestas, and each of them acquired the capacity for becoming some day a Roman Paterfamilias.

“St. Paul, as a Roman citizen, lived under the Roman Law of Persons, but he remained under the local Law of Property. His allusions to the Patria Potestas and to the Roman Law of Wills and guardianship (which was like the Patria Potestas), are quite unmistakeable, and more numerous than is commonly supposed. In the obscure passage, for example, about women having power over the head, “Power” and “Head” are technical terms from the Roman Law.

George Borrow who, if he were not a gipsy by blood ought to have been one, was, for some years, our near neighbour in Hereford Square. My friend was amused by his quaint stories and his (real or sham) enthusiasm for Wales, and cultivated his acquaintance. I never liked him, thinking him more or less of a hypocrite. His missions, recorded in the “Bible in Spain,” and his translations of the scriptures into the out-of-the-way tongues, for which he had a gift, were by no means consonant with his real opinions concerning the veracity of the said Bible. Dr. Martineau once told me that he and Borrow had been schoolfellows at Norwich some sixty years before. Borrow had persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers’ tills, and then the party set forth to join some smugglers on the coast. By degrees the truants all fell out of line and were picked up, tired and hungry along the road, and brought back to Norwich school where condign chastisement awaited them. George Borrow it seems received his large share horsed on James Martineau’s back! The early connection between the two old men as I knew them, was 480irresistibly comic to my mind. Somehow when I asked Mr. Borrow once to come and meet some friends at our house he accepted our invitation as usual, but, on finding that Dr. Martineau was to be of the party, hastily withdrew his acceptance on a transparent excuse; nor did he ever after attend our little assemblies without first ascertaining that Dr. Martineau would not be present!

I take the following from some old letters to my friend referring to him:

“Mr. Borrow says his wife is very ill and anxious to keep the peace with C. (a litigious neighbour). Poor old B. was very sad at first, but I cheered him and sent him off quite brisk last night. He talked all about the Fathers again, arguing that their quotations went to prove that it was not our gospels they had in their hands. I knew most of it before, but it was admirably done. I talked a little theology to him in a serious way (finding him talk of his ‘horrors’) and he abounded in my sense of the non-existence of Hell, and of the presence and action on the soul of a Spirit, rewarding and punishing. He would not say ‘God;’ but repeated over and over that he spoke not from books but from his own personal experience.”

Some time later—after his wife’s death:

“Poor old Borrow is in a sad state. I hope he is starting in a day or two for Scotland. I sent C. with a note begging him to come and eat the Welsh mutton you sent me to-day, and he sent back word, ‘Yes.’ Then, an hour afterwards, he arrived, and in a most agitated manner said he had come to say ‘he would rather not. He would not trouble anyone with his sorrows.’ I made him sit down, and talked as gently to him as possible, saying: ‘It won’t be a trouble Mr. Borrow, it will be a pleasure to me’. But it was all of no use. He was so cross, so rude, I had the greatest difficulty in talking to him. I asked about his servant, and he said I could not help him. I asked him about Bowring, and he said: ‘Don’t speak of it.’ [It was some dispute with Sir John Bowring, who 481was an acquaintance of mine, and with whom I offered to mediate.] ‘I asked him would he look at the photos of the Siamese,’ and he said: ‘Don’t show them to me!’ So, in despair, as he sat silent, I told him I had been at a pleasant dinner-party the night before, and had met Mr. L——, who told me of certain curious books of mediæval history. ‘Did he know them?’ ‘No, and he dare said Mr. L—— did not, either! Who was Mr. L——?’ I described that obscure individual, [one of the foremost writers of the day], and added that he was immensely liked by everybody. Whereupon Borrow repeated at least 12 times, ‘Immensely liked! As if a man could be immensely liked!’ quite insultingly. To make a diversion (I was very patient with him as he was in trouble) ‘I said I had just come home from the Lyell’s and had heard—.’... But there was no time to say what I had heard! Mr. Borrow asked: ‘Is that old Lyle I met here once, the man who stands at the door (of some den or other) and bets?’ I explained who Sir Charles was, (of course he knew very well), but he went on and on, till I said gravely: ‘I don’t think you will meet those sort of people here, Mr. Borrow. We don’t associate with blacklegs, exactly.’”

Here is an extract from another letter:

“Borrow also came, and I said something about the imperfect education of women, and he said it was right they should be ignorant, and that no man could endure a clever wife. I laughed at him openly, and told him some men knew better. What did he think of the Brownings? ‘Oh, he had heard the name; he did not know anything of them. Since Scott, he read no modern writer; Scott was greater than Homer! What he liked were curious, old, erudite books about mediæval and northern things.’ I said I knew little of such literature, and preferred the writers of our own age, but indeed I was no great student at all. Thereupon he evidently wanted to astonish me; and, talking of Ireland, said, ‘Ah, yes; a most curious, mixed race. First there 482were the Firbolgs,—the old enchanters, who raised mists.’... ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Borrow,’ I asked, ‘it was the Tuatha-de-Danaan who did that? Keatinge expressly says that they conquered the Firbolgs by that means.’ (Mr. B., somewhat out of countenance), ‘Oh! Aye! Keatinge is the authority; a most extraordinary writer.’ ‘Well, I should call him the Geoffrey of Monmouth of Ireland.’ (Mr. B., changing the venue), ‘I delight in Norse-stories; they are far grander than the Greek. There is the story of Olaf the Saint of Norway. Can anything be grander? What a noble character!’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘what do you think of his putting all those poor Druids on the Skerry of Shrieks and leaving them to be drowned by the tide?’ (Thereupon Mr. B. looked at me askant out of his gipsy eyes, as if he thought me an example of the evils of female education!) ‘Well! well! I forgot about the Skerry of Shrieks. Then there is the story of Beowulf the Saxon going out to sea in his burning ship to die.’ ‘Oh, Mr. Borrow! that isn’t a Saxon story at all. It is in the Heimskringla! It is told of Hakon of Norway.’ Then, I asked him about the gipsies and their language, and if they were certainly Aryans? He didn’t know (or pretended not to know) what Aryans were; and altogether displayed a miraculous mixture of odd knowledge and more odd ignorance. Whether the latter were real or assumed, I know not!”

With the leading men of Science in the Sixties we had the honour of a good deal of intercourse. Through Dr. W. B. Carpenter (who, as Miss Carpenter’s brother, I had met often) and the two ever hospitable families of Lyell, we came to know many of them. Sir William Grove was also a particular friend of my friend Mrs. Grey. He and Lady Grove and their daughter, Mrs. Hall, (Imogen), were all charming people, and we had many pleasant dinners with them. Professor Tyndall was, of course, one of the principal members of that scientific coterie, and in those days we saw a good deal of him. He was very friendly 483as were also Mr. and Mrs. Francis Galton. Mr. Galton’s speculations seemed always to me exceedingly original and interesting, and I delighted in reviewing them. The beginning of the Anti-vivisection controversy, however, put an end to all these relations, so that since 1876, I have seen few of the circle. It is curious to recall how nearly we joined hands on some theological questions before this gulf of a great ethical difference opened before us. Some readers may recall a curious controversy raised by Prof. Tyndall on the subject of the efficacy of prayer for physical benefits. Having read what he wrote on it, I sent him my own little book, Dawning Lights, which vindicates the efficacy of prayer, for spiritual benefits only. The following was his reply, to which I will append another kindly note referring to a request I had proffered on behalf of Mrs. Somerville.

“Our minds—that is yours and mine—sound the same note as regards the economy of nature. With clearness and precision you have stated the question. In fact, had I known that you had written upon the subject I might have copied your words and put my name to them.

“I intend to keep your book, but I have desired my publisher to send you a book of mine in exchange—this is fair, is it not?

“Your book so far as I have read it is full of strength. Of course I could not have written it all. Your images are too concrete and your personification of the mystery of mysteries too intense for me. But as long as you are tolerant of others—which you are—the shape into which you mould the power of your soul must be determined by yourself alone.

“I would do anything I could for your sake and irrespectively of the interest of your subject.

“Had I Faraday’s own letter, I could decipher at once what he meant, for I was intimately acquainted with his course of thought during the later years of his life. It would however be running a great risk to attempt to supply this hiatus without seeing his letter.

“I should think it refers to the influence of time on magnetic action. About the date referred to he was speculating and trying to prove experimentally whether magnetism required time to pass through space.

In a letter of mine to a friend written after meeting Prof. Tyndall at dinner at Edgbaston during the Congress of the British Association in Birmingham, after mentioning M. Vambéry and some others, I said; “The one I liked best was Prof. Tyndall, with whom I had quite an ‘awful’ talk alone about the bearing of Science on Religion. He said in words like a fine poem, that Knowledge seemed to him ‘like an instrument on which we went up, note after note, and octave after octave; but at last there came a note which our ears could not hear, and which was silent for us. And at the other end of the scale there was another silent note.’”

Many years after this, there appeared an article in the Pall Mall Gazette which I felt sure was by Prof. Tyndall, in which it was calmly stated that the scientific intellect had settled the controversy between Pantheism and Theism, and that the said Scientific Intellect “permitted us to believe in an order of Development,” and would “allow the religious instincts and the language of Religion to gather round that 485idea;” but that the notion of a “Great Director” can by no means be suffered by the same Scientific Intellect.

I wrote a reply, begging to be informed when and where the controversy between Pantheism and Theism had been settled, as the statement, dropped so coolly in a single paragraph, was, to say the least, startling; and I concluded by saying, “We may be driven into the howling wilderness of a Godless world by the fiery swords of these new Cherubim of Knowledge; but at least we will not shrink away into it before their innuendoes!”

I have also lost in quitting this circle, the privilege of often meeting Mr. Herbert Spencer; though he has never (to his honour be it remembered!) pronounced a word in favour of painful experiments on animals.

With the great naturalist who has revolutionized modern science I had rather frequent intercourse till the same sad barrier of a great difference of moral opinion arose between us. Mr. Charles Darwin’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, was, for a time tenant here at Hengwrt; and afterwards took a house named Caer-Deon in this neighbourhood, where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Darwin and their boys also spent part of the summer. As it chanced, we also took a cottage that summer close by Caer-deon and naturally saw our neighbours daily. I had known Mr. Darwin previously, in London, and had also met his most amiable brother, Mr. Erasmus Darwin, at the house of my kind old friend Mrs. Reid, the foundress of Bedford Square College. The first thing we heard concerning the illustrious arrivals was the report, that one of the sons had had “a fall off a Philosopher;” word substituted by the ingenious Welsh mind for “velocipede” (as bicycles were then called) under an easily understood confusion between the rider and the machine he rode!

Next,—the Welsh parson of the little church close by, having fondly calculated that Mr. Darwin would 486certainly hasten to attend his services, prepared for him a sermon which should slay this scientific Goliath and spread dismay through the ranks of the sceptical host. He told his congregation that there were in these days persons, puffed up by science, falsely so called, and deluded by the pride of reason, who had actually been so audacious as to question the story of the six days Creation as detailed in Sacred Scripture. But let them note how idle were these sceptical questionings! Did they not see that the events recorded happened before there was any man existing to record them, and that, therefore, Moses must have learned them from God himself, since there was no one else to tell him?

Alas! the philosopher, I fear, never went to be converted (as he surely must have been) by this ingenious Welsh parson, and we were for a long time merry over his logic. Mr. Darwin was never in good health, I believe, after his Beagle experience of sea sickness, and he was glad to use a peaceful and beautiful old pony of my friend’s, yclept Geraint, which she placed at his disposal. His gentleness to this beast and incessant efforts to keep off the flies from his head, and his fondness for his dog Polly (concerning whose cleverness and breeding he indulged in delusions which Matthew Arnold’s better dog-lore would have swiftly dissipated), were very pleasing traits in his character.

In writing at this time to a friend I said:—

“I am glad you like Mill’s book. Mr. Charles Darwin, with whom I am enchanted, is greatly excited about it, but says that Mill could learn some things from physical science; and that it is in the struggle for existence and (especially) for the possession of women that men acquire their vigour and courage. Also he intensely agrees with what I say in my review of Mill about inherited qualities being more important than education, on which alone Mill 487insists. All this the philosopher told me yesterday, standing on a path 60 feet above me and carrying on an animated dialogue from our respective standpoints!”

Mr. Darwin was walking on the footpath down from Caer-Deon among the purple heather which clothes our mountains so royally; and impenetrable brambles lay between him above and me on the road below; so we exchanged our remarks at the top of our voices, being too eager to think of the absurdity of the situation, till my friend coming along the road heard with amazement words flying in the air which assuredly those “valleys and rocks never heard” before, or since! When we drive past that spot, as we often do now, we sigh as we look at the “Philosopher’s Path,” and wish (O, how one wishes!) that he could come back and tell us what he has learned since!

At this time Mr. Darwin was writing his Descent of Man, and he told me that he was going to introduce some new view of the nature of the Moral Sense. I said: “Of course you have studied Kant’s Grundlegung der Sitten?” No; he had not read Kant, and did not care to do so. I ventured to urge him to study him, and observed that one could hardly see one’s way in ethical speculation without some understanding of his philosophy. My own knowledge of it was too imperfect to talk of it to him, but I could lend him a very good translation. He declined my book, but I nevertheless packed it up with the next parcel I sent him.

On returning the volume he wrote to me:—

“It was very good of you to send me nolens volens Kant, together with the other book. I have been extremely glad to look through the former. It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points. Though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into 488his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind.”

There was irony, and perhaps not a little pride in his reference to himself as a “degraded wretch looking through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind”! Between the two great Schools of thinkers,—those who study from the Inside (of human consciousness), and those who study from the Outside,—there has always existed mutual animosity and contempt. For my own part, while fully admitting that the former needed to have their conclusions enlarged and tested by outside experience, I must always hold that they were on a truer line than the (exclusively) physico-scientific philosophers. Man’s consciousness is not only a fact in the world but the greatest of facts; and to overlook it and take our lessons from beasts and insects is to repeat the old jest of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. A philosophy founded solely on the consciousness of man, may; and, very likely, will, be imperfect; and certainly it will be incomplete. But a philosophy which begins with inorganic matter and the lower animals, and only includes the outward facts of anthropology, regardless of human consciousness,—must be worse than imperfect and incomplete. It resembles a treatise on the Solar System which should omit to notice the Sun.

I mentioned to him in a letter, that we had found some seeds of Tropæolum, very carefully gathered from brilliant and multicoloured varieties, all revert in a single year to plain scarlet. He replied:—“You and Miss Lloyd need not have your faith in inheritance shaken with respect to Tropæolum until you have prevented for six or seven generations any crossing between the varieties in the same garden. I have lately found the very shade of colour is transmitted of a most fluctuating garden variety if the flowers are carefully self-fertilized during six or seven generations.”

489The Descent of Man of which Mr. Darwin was kind enough to give me a copy before publication, inspired me with the deadliest alarm. His new theory therein set forth, respecting the nature and origin of conscience, seemed to me then, and still seems to me, of absolutely fatal import. I wrote the strongest answer to it in my power at once, and published in the Theological Review, April, 1871 (reprinted in my Darwinism in Morals, 1872). Of course I sent my review to Down House. Here is a generous message which I received in reply:—

“Mr. Darwin is reading the Review with the greatest interest and attention and feels so much the kind way you speak of him and the praise you give him, that it will make him bear your severity, when he reaches that part of the review.”

Referring to an article of mine in the Quarterly Review (Oct., 1872) on the Consciousness of Dogs, Mr. Darwin wrote to me, Nov. 28th, 1872:—

“I have been greatly interested by your article in the Quarterly. It seems to me the best analysis of the mind of an animal which I have ever read, and I agree with you on most points. I have been particularly glad to read what you say about the reasoning power of dogs, and about that rather vague matter, their self-consciousness. I dare say however that you would prefer criticism to admiration.

“I regret that you quote J. so often: I made enquiries about one case (which quite broke down) from a man who certainly ought to know Mr. J. well; and I was cautioned that he had not written in a scientific spirit. I regret also that you quote old writers. It may be very illiberal, but their statements go for nothing with me and I suspect with many others. It passes my powers of belief that dogs ever commit suicide. Assuming the statements to be true, I should think it more probable that they were distraught, and did not know what they were doing; nor am I able to credit about fetishes.

490“One of the most interesting subjects in your article seems to me to be about the moral sense. Since publishing the Descent of Man I have got to believe rather more than I did in dogs having what may be called a conscience. When an honourable dog has committed an undiscovered offence he certainly seems ashamed (and this is the term naturally and often used) rather than afraid to meet his master. My dog, the beloved and beautiful Polly, is at such times extremely affectionate towards me; and this leads me to mention a little anecdote. When I was a very little boy, I had committed some offence, so that my conscience troubled me, and when I met my father, I lavished so much affection on him, that he at once asked me what I had done, and told me to confess. I was so utterly confounded at his suspecting anything, that I remember the scene clearly to the present day, and it seems to me that Polly’s frame of mind on such occasions is much the same as was mine, for I was not then at all afraid of my father.”

In a letter to a friend (Nov., 1869) I say:—

“We lunched with Mr. Charles Darwin at Mr. Erasmus D——’s house on Sunday. He told us that a German man of science, (I think Carl Vogt), the other day gave a lecture, in which he treated the Mass as the last relic of that Cannibalism which gradually took to eating only the heart, or eyes of a man to acquire his courage. Whereupon the whole audience rose and cheered the lecturer enthusiastically! Mr. Darwin remarked how much more decency there was in speaking on such subjects in England.”

This pleasant intercourse with an illustrious man was, like many other pleasant things, brought to a close for me in 1875 by the beginning of the Anti-vivisection crusade. Mr. Darwin eventually became the centre of an adoring clique of vivisectors who (as his Biography shows) plied him incessantly with encouragement to uphold their practice, till 491the deplorable spectacle was exhibited of a man who would not allow a fly to bite a pony’s neck, standing forth before all Europe (in his celebrated letter to Prof. Holmgren of Sweden) as the advocate of Vivisection.

We had many interesting foreign visitors in Hereford Square. I have mentioned the two Parsee gentlemen who came to thank me for having made (as they considered) a just estimate of their religion in my article “The Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians.” The elder of them, Mr. Nowrozjee Furdoonjee, was President of the Parsee Society of Bombay; but resided much in England, and had an astonishing knowledge of English and American theological and philosophic literature. He asked me one day to recommend him the best modern books on ethics. My small library contained a good many, but he not only knew every one I possessed, but almost all others which I named as worthy of his attention. We talked very freely on religious matters and with a good deal of sympathy. I pressed him one day with the question, “Do you really believe in Ahriman?” “Of course I do!” “What! In a real personal Evil Being, who is as much a person as Ormusd?” “O no! I did not mean that! I believe in Evil existing in the world;”—and obviously in nothing more!

My chief Eastern visitors, however (and they were so numerous that my artist-minded friend was wont to call them my “Bronzes”), were the Brahmos of Bengal, and one or two of the same faith from Bombay. There were very remarkable young men at that date, members of the “Church of the One God;” nearly all of them having risen from the gross idolatry in which they had been educated into a purer Theistic faith, not without encountering considerable family and social persecution. Their leader, Keshub Chunder Sen 492at any other age of the world, would have taken his place with such prophets as Nanuk (the founder of the Sikh religion) and Gautama; or with the mediæval Saints like St. Augustine and St. Patrick, who converted nations. He was, I think, the most devout man with whose mind I ever came in contact. When he left my drawing-room after long conversations on the highest themes,—sometimes held alone together, sometimes with the company of my dear friend William Henry Channing—the impression left on me was one never-to-be-forgotten. I wrote of one such interview at the time to my friend as follows (April 28, 1870):

“Keshub came and sat with me the other evening, and I was profoundly impressed, not by his intellect but by his goodness. He seems really to live in God, and the single-mindedness of the man seemed to me utterly un-English; much more like Christ! He said some very profound things, and seemed to feel that the joy of prayer was quite the greatest thing in life. He said, ‘I don’t know anything about the future, but I only know that when I pray I feel that my union with God is eternal. In our faith the belief in God and in Immortality are not two doctrines but one.’ He also said that we must believe in intercessory prayer, else the more we lived in Prayer the more selfish we should grow. He told me much of the beginning of his own religious life, and, wonderful to say, his words would have described that of my own! He said, indeed, that he had often laid down my books when reading them in India, and said to himself: ‘How can this English woman have felt all this just as I?’”

In his outward man Keshub Chunder Sen was the ideal of a great teacher. He had a tall, manly figure, always clothed in a long black robe of some light cloth like a French soutane, a very handsome square face with powerful jaw; the complexion and eyes of a southern Italian; and all the Eastern gentle dignity of manner. He and his friend 493Mozoomdar and several others of his party spoke English quite perfectly; making long addresses and delivering extempore sermons in our language without error of any kind, or a single betrayal of foreign accent. Keshub in particular, was decidedly eloquent in English. I gathered many influential men to meet him and they were impressed by him as much as I was.

The career of this very remarkable man was cut short a few years after his return from England by an early death. I believe he had taken to ascetic practices, fasting and watching; against which I had most urgently warned him, seeing his tendency towards them. I had argued with him that, not only were they totally foreign to the spirit of simple Theism, but dangerous to a man who, living habitually in the highest realms of human emotion, needed all the more for that reason that the physical basis of his life should be absolutely sound and strong, and not subject to the variabilities and possible hallucinations attendant on abstinence. My friendly counsels were of no avail. Keshub became, I believe, somewhat too near a “Yogi” (if I rightly understand that word) and was almost worshipped by his congregation of Brahmos. The marriage of his daughter—who has since visited England—to the Maharajah of Coosh Behar, involved very painful discussions about the legal age of the bride and the ceremonies of a Hindoo marriage, which were insisted on by the bridegroom’s mother; and the last year or two of Keshub’s life were, I fear, darkened by the secessions from his church which followed an event otherwise gratifying.

Oddly enough this Indian Saint was the only Eastern it has ever been my chance to meet who could enjoy a joke thoroughly, like one of ourselves. He came to me in Hereford Square one day bursting with uncontrollable laughter at his own adventures. Lord Lawrence, when Governor-General of India, had been particularly friendly to 494him and had bidden him come and see him when he should arrive in England. Keshub’s friends had found a lodging for him in Regent’s Park, and having resolved to go and pay his respects to Lord Lawrence at once, he sent for a four-wheeled cab, and simply told the cabman to drive to that nobleman’s house; fondly imagining that all London must know it, as Calcutta knew Government House. The cabman set off without the remotest idea where to go; and after driving hither and thither about town for three hours, set his fare down again at the door of his lodgings; told him he could not find Lord Lawrence; and charged him fourteen shillings! Poor Keshub paid the scandalous charge, and then referred to an old letter to find Lord Lawrence’s address, “Queen’s Gate.” Oh, that was quite right! No doubt the late Governor-General naturally lived close to the Queen! “Drive to Queen’s Gate.” The new cabman drove straight enough to “Queen’s Gate”; but about 185 houses appeared in a row, and there was nothing to indicate which of them belonged to Lord Lawrence; not even a solitary sentinel walking before the door! After knocking at many doors in vain, the cabman had an inspiration! “We will try if the nearest butcher knows which house it is;” and so they turned into Gloucester Road, and the excellent butcher there did know which number in Queen’s Gate belonged to Lord Lawrence, and Keshub was received and warmly welcomed. But that he should have to seek out a butcher’s shop (in his Eastern eyes the most degraded of shops) to learn where he could find a man whom he had last seen as Viceroy of India, was, to his thinking, exquisitely ridiculous.

Ex-Governors-General and their wives must certainly find some difficulty in descending all at once so many steps from the altitude of the viceregal thrones of our great dependencies to the level of private citizens, scarcely to be noticed more than others in society, and dwelling in ordinary 495London houses unmarked by the “guard of honour” of even a single policeman!

At a later date I had other Oriental visitors, one a gentleman who had made a translation of the Bhagvat-Gita, and who brought his wife and children to England, and to my tea-table. The wife wore a lovely, delicate lilac robe wrapped about her in the most graceful folds, but the effect was somewhat marred by the vulgar English side-spring boots, (very short in the leg), which the poor soul had found needful for use in London! The children sat opposite me at the tea-table, silently devouring my cakes and bon-bons; staring at me with their large black eyes, veritable wells of mistrust and hatred, such as only Eastern eyes can speak! I like dark men and women very well, but when the little ones are in question, I must confess that a child is scarcely a child to me unless it be a little Saxon, with golden hair and those innocent blue eyes which make one think of forget-me-nots in a brook. Where is the heart which can help growing soft at sight of one of these little creatures toddling in the spring grass picking daisies and cowslips, or laughing with sheer ecstacy in the joy of existence? A dark child may be ten times as handsome, but it has no pretension, to my mind, to pull one’s heart-strings in the same way as a blonde babykins.

A Hindoo lady, Ramabai, for whom I have deep respect, came to me before I left London and impressed me most favourably. She, and a few other Hindoo women who are striving to secure education and freedom for their sisters, will be honoured hereafter more than John Howard, for he strove only to mitigate the too severe punishment of criminals and delinquents; they are labouring to relieve the quite equally dreadful lot of millions of innocent women. An 496American Missionary, Mr. Dall, long resident in India, told me that thousands of these unhappy beings never put their feet to the earth or go a step from the house of their husbands (to which they are carried from their father’s Zenana at 9 or 10 years old) till they were borne away as corpses! All life for them has been one long imprisonment; its sole interest and concern the passions of the baser sort of love and jealousy! While writing these pages I have come across the following frightful testimony by the great traveller Mrs. Bishop (née Isabella Bird) to the truth of the above observation concerning the dreadful condition of the women of India:—

“I have lived in Zenanas and harems, and have seen the daily life of the secluded women, and I can speak from bitter experience of what their lives are; the intellect dwarfed, so that the woman of twenty or thirty years of age is more like a child of eight intellectually, while all the worst passions of human nature are stimulated and developed in a fearful degree; jealousy, envy, murderous hate, intrigue, running to such an extent that in some countries I have hardly ever been in a woman’s house or near a woman’s tent without being asked for drugs with which to disfigure the favourite wife, to take away her life, or to take away the life of the favourite wife’s infant son. This request has been made of me nearly two hundred times.”

(Quoted by Lady Henry Somerset in the Woman’s Signal, April 12th, 1894).

I had the pleasure also of visits from several French and Belgian gentlemen who were good enough to call on me. Several were Protestant pastors of the École Moderne; M. Fontanés, M. Th. Bost, and M. Leblois being among them. I had long kept up a correspondence with M. Felix Pécaut, author of a beautiful book “Le Christ et la Conscience,” of whom Dean Stanley told me that he (who knew 497him well) believed him to be “the most pious of living men.” I never had the happiness to meet him, but seeing, some twenty years later, in a Report by Mr. Matthew Arnold on French Training Schools, enthusiastic praise of M. Pécaut’s school for female teachers, at Fontenaye-aux-Roses, near Paris, I sent it to my old friend, and we exchanged a mental handshake across time and space.

An illustrious neighbour of ours, in South Kensington sometimes came to see me. Here is a lively complimentary letter from him:—

“From M. le Sénateur Victor Schœlcher to Miss Cobbe.

“Je ne vous ai pas oubliée, on ne vous oublie pas quand on a eu l’honneur et le plaisir de vous connaître. Moi je suis accablé d’ouvrage et je ne fais pas la moitié de ce que je voudrais faire. Je ne manque pas toutefois de lire votre Zoophile Français qui aidera puissamment notre Ligue à combattre les abus de la Vivisection. Tous ceux qui ont quelque sentiment d’humanité écouteront votre voix en faveur des pauvres animaux et vous aideront de toutes leur forces à les protéger contre un genre d’étude veritablement barbare. Quand à moi, l’activité, la persévérance et le talent que vous montrez dans votre œuvre de charité m’inspirent le plus vif et le plus respectueux intérêt.

“Ne croyez pas ceux qui tentent de vous décourager en prétendant que votre journal est une substance trop aride pour attacher le lecteur Français. Je le sais; il est convenu en Angleterre que les Français sont un peuple léger. Mais c’est là un vieux préjugé que ne gardent pas les Anglais instruits. Soyez bien assuré que vos efforts ne seront pas plus peine perdue dans mon noble pays que dans le votre. Notre Société Protectrice des Animaux a quarante ans d’existence.

“À mon prochain voyage à Londres je m’empresserai d’aller vous faire visite pour retrouver le plaisir que j’ai 498gouté dans votre conversation et pour vous répéter, Dear Miss Power Cobbe, that I am your’s most respectfully and faithfully,

“Permettez moi de vous prier de me rappeler au souvenir de Madame la Doctoresse, et de M. le Dr. Hoggan.”

It was M. Schœlcher who effected in 1848 the abolition of Negro Slavery in the French Colonies. He was a charming companion and a most excellent man. I interceded once with him to make interest with the proper authorities in France for the relaxation of the extremely severe penalties which Louise Michel had incurred by one of her extravagances. To my surprise, I learned from him that I had gone to head-quarters, since the matter would mainly rest in his hands. He was Vice-President,—practically President—of the Department of Prisons in France. He repeated with indulgence, “Mais, Madame, elle est folle! elle est parfaitement folle, et très dangereuse.” I quite agreed, but still thought she was well-meaning, and that her sentence was excessive. He promised that when the first year of her imprisonment was over (with which, he said, they made it a rule never to interfere so as not to insult the judges,) he would see what could be done to let her off by degrees. He observed, with more earnestness than I should have expected from one of his political school, how wrong, dangerous and wicked it was to go about with a black flag at the head of a mob. Still he agreed with my view that the length of Louise Michel’s sentence was unjustly great. Eventually the penalty was actually commuted; I conclude through the intervention of M. Schœlcher.

M. Schœlcher was the most attractive Frenchman I ever met. At the time I knew him, he was old and feeble and had a miserable cough; but he was most emphatically a gentleman, a tender, even soft-hearted man; and a brilliantly agreeable 499talker. He had made a magnificent collection of 9,000 engravings, and told me he was going to present it to the Beaux Arts in Paris. While sitting talking in my drawing-room his eye constantly turned to a particularly fine cast which I possess of the Psyche of Praxiteles, made expressly for Harriet Hosmer and given by her to me in Rome. When he rose to leave me, he stood under the lovely creature and worshipped her as she deserves!

We had also many delightful American visitors, whose visits gave me so much pleasure and profit that I easily forgave one or two others who provoked Fanny Kemble’s remark that “if the engineers would lay on Miss P. or Mr. H. the Alps would be bored through without any trouble!” Most of my American friendly visitors are, I rejoice to say, still living, so I will only name them with an expression of my great esteem for all and affection for several of them. Among them were Col. Higginson, Mr. George Curtis, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Livermore, Mr. and Mrs. Loring-Brace, Rev. J. Freeman Clarke, Rev. W. Alger, Dr. O. W. Holmes, Mr. Peabody, Miss Harriet Hosmer, Mr. Hazard, Mrs. Lockwood, and my dearly beloved friends, W. H. Channing, Mrs. Apthorp, Mrs. Wister, Miss Schuyler and Miss Georgina Schuyler. Sometimes American ladies would come to me as perfect strangers with a letter from some mutual friend, and would take me by storm and after a couple of hours’ conversation we parted as if we had known and loved each other for years. There is something to my mind unique in the attractiveness of American women, when they are, as usual, attractive; but they are like the famous little girl with the “curl in the middle of her forehead,”—

The wholesome horror felt by us, Londoners, of outstaying our welcome when visiting acquaintances, and of trespassing 500too long at any hour, seems to be an unknown sentiment to some Americans, and also to some Australian ladies; and for my own part I fear that being bored is a kind of martyrdom which I can never endure in a Christian spirit, or without beginning to regard the man or woman who bores me with most uncharitable sentiments. My young Hindoo visitors drove me distracted till I discovered that they imagined a visit to me to be an audience, and that it was for me to dismiss them!

I met Longfellow during his last visit to England at the house of Mr. Wynne-Finch. His large, leonine head, surmounted at that date by a nimbus of white hair, was very striking indeed. I saw him standing a few moments alone, and ventured to introduce myself as a friend of his friends, the Apthorps, of Boston, and when I gave my name he took both my hands and pressed them with delightful cordiality. We talked for a good while, but I cannot recall any particular remark he may have made.

Mr. Wynne-Finch was stepfather of Alice L’Estrange, who, before her marriage with Laurence Oliphant was for a long time our most assiduous and affectionate visitor, having taken a young girl’s engouement for us two elderly women. Never was there a more bewitching young creature, so sweetly affectionate, so clever and brilliant in every way. It was quite dazzling to see such youth and brightness flitting about us. An old letter of hers to my friend which I chance to have fallen on is alive still with her playfulness and tenderness. It begins thus:—

“O yes! I know! It isn’t so very long since I heard last, and I am in London, which I am enjoying, and am busy in a thousand little messy things which amuse me, and I was with Miss Cobbe on Tuesday which was bliss absolute, and above all I heard about you from her (beside all the talk on 501that forbidden subject,—it is so disagreeable of us, isn’t it?). I felt that ingratitude for mercies received which characterises our race so strong in me that I want a sight of your writing, as that is all I can get just now,” &c., &c.

Alice was of an extremely sceptical turn of mind (which made her subsequent fanaticism the more inexplicable), and for months before she fell in with Mr. Oliphant in Paris I had been labouring with all my strength to lead her simply to believe in God. She did not see her way to such faith at all, though she was docile enough to read the many books I gave her, and to come with us and her stepfather to hear Dr. Martineau’s sermons. She incessantly discussed theological questions, but always from the point of view of the evil in creation, and, as she used to say pathetically, of “the insufferableness of the suffering of others.” She argued that the misery of the world was so great that a good God if He could not relieve it, ought to hurl it to destruction. In vain I argued that there is a higher end of creation than Happiness, to be wrought out through trial and pain. She would never admit the loftier conception of God’s purposes as they appeared to me, and was to all intents and purposes an Atheist when she said good-bye to me, before a short trip to Paris. She came back in a month or six weeks, not merely a believer in the ordinary orthodox creed, but inspired with the zeal of an energumène for the doctrines, very much over and above orthodoxy, of Mr. Harris! Our gentle, caressing, modest young friend was entirely transformed. She stood upright and walked up and down our rooms, talking with vehemence about Mr. Harris’ doctrines, and the necessity for adopting his views, obeying his guidance, and going immediately to live on the shores of Lake Erie! The transfiguration was, I suppose, au fond, one of the many miracles of the little god with the bow and arrows and Mr. Oliphant was certainly not unconcerned 502therein. But still there was no adequate explanation of this change, or of the boasting (difficult to hear with patience from a clever and sceptical woman) of the famous “method” of obtaining fresh supplies of Divine spirit, by the process of holding one’s breath for some minutes—according to Mr. Harris’ pneumatology! The whole thing was infinitely distressing, even revolting to us; and we sympathised much with her stepfather (my friend’s old friend) who had loved her like a father, and was driven wild by the insolent pretentions of Mr. Harris to stop the marriage, of which all London had heard, unless his monstrous demands were previously obeyed! At last Alice walked by herself one morning to her Bank, and ordered her whole fortune to be transferred to Mr. Harris; and this without the simplest settlement or security for her future support! After this heroic proceeding, the Prophet of Lake Erie graciously consented, (in a way,) to her marriage; and England saw her and Mr. Oliphant no more for many years. What that very helpless and self-indulgent young creature must have gone through in her solitary cottage on Lake Erie, and subsequently in her poor little school in California, can scarcely be guessed. When she returned to England she wrote to us from Hunstanton Hall, (her brother’s house), offering to come and see us, but we felt that it would cause us more pain than pleasure to meet her again, and, in a kindly way, we declined the proposal. Since her sad death, and that of Mr. Oliphant, an American friend of mine, Dr. Leffingwell, travelling in Syria, wrote me a letter from her house at Haifa. He found her books still on the shelves where she had left them; and the first he took down was Parker’s Discourse of Religion inscribed “From Frances Power Cobbe to Alice L’Estrange.”

A less tragic souvenir of poor Alice occurs to me as I write. It is so good an illustration of the difference between English and French politeness that I must record it.

503Alice was going over to Paris alone, and as I happened to know that a distinguished and very agreeable old French gentleman of my acquaintance was crossing by the same train, I wrote and begged him to look after her on the way. He replied in the kindest and most graceful manner as follows:—

“Vraiment vous me comblez de toutes les manières. Après l’aimable accueil que vous avez bien voulu me faire, vous songez encore à mes ennuis de voyage seul, et vous voulez bien me procurer la société la plus agréable. Agréez en tous mes remercîments, quoique je ne puisse m’empêcher de songer que s’il avait moins neigé sur la montagne (comme disent les Orientaux) vous seriez moins confiante. Je serai trop heureux de me mettre au service de votre amie.

“Agréez, chère Mademoiselle, les hommages respectueux de votre,

They met at Charing Cross, and no man could be more charming than M. le Baron de T. made himself in the train and on the boat. But on arrival at Boulogne it appeared that Alice’s luggage had either gone astray or been stopped by the custom-house people; and she was in a difficulty, the train for Paris being ready to start, and the French officials paying no attention to her entreaty that her trunks should be delivered and put into the van to take with her. Of course the appearance by her side of a French gentleman with the Legion d’Honneur in his buttonhole would have probably decided the case in her favour at once. But M. de T. had not the least idea of losing his train and getting into an imbroglio for sake of a damsel in distress,—so, with many assurances that he was quite désolé to lose the enchanting pleasure of her society up to Paris, he got into his 504carriage and was quickly carried out of sight. Meanwhile a rather ordinary-looking Englishman who had noted Miss L’Estrange’s awkward situation, went up to her and asked in a gruff fashion; what was the matter? When he was informed, he let his train go off and ran hither and thither about the station, till at last the luggage was found and restored to its owner. Then, when Alice strove naturally, to thank him, he simply raised his hat,—said, it was of “no consequence,” and disappeared to trouble her no more.

“Which, therefore, was neighbour to him that fell among thieves?”

So many recollections of Mr. Gladstone have been published since his death that it seems hardly worth while to record mine. I saw him only at intervals and never had the honour of any intimate acquaintance with him; but one or two glimpses of him may perhaps amuse my readers as exhibiting his astonishing versatility.

I first met him, some time in the Sixties, in North Wales when he came from Hawarden to visit at a house where I was spending a few days, and joined me in walking to the summit of Penmaen-bach. He talked, I need not say, delightfully all the way as we sauntered up, but I remember only his sympathetic rejoinder to my dislike of mules for such mountain expeditions,—that he had felt quite remorseful on concluding some tour (I think in the Pyrenees), for hating so much a beast to which he had often owed his life!

505Some years after this pleasant climb, I was surprised and, of course, much flattered to receive from him the following note. I know not who was the friend who sent him my pamphlet. It had not occurred to me to do so.

“I do not know whom I have to thank for sending me your” (word illegible) “article on Vivisection, but the obligation is great, for I seldom read a paper possessed with such a spirit of nobleness from first to last.

“It is long since we met on the slopes of Penmaen-bach. Do you ever go out to breakfast, and could we persuade you to be so kind as to come to us on Thursday, March 9, at ten?

The breakfast in Carlton Gardens was a very interesting one. Before it began Mr. Gladstone took me into his library, and we talked for a considerable time on the subject of Vivisection. At the close of our conversation, finding him apparently agreeing very cordially with me, I asked, if he would not join the Victoria Street Society which I had then recently founded? He replied that he would rather not do so; but that if ever he returned to office, he would help me to the best of his power. This promise, I may here say, was given very seriously after making the observation that he was no longer (at that time) in the position of influence he had occupied in previous years; but he obviously anticipated his return to power,—which actually followed not long afterwards. He repeated this promise of help to me four times in conversation and once on one of his famous post-cards; and again in writing to Lord Shaftesbury in reply to a Memorial which the latter presented to him, signed by 100 of the foremost names, as regarded intellect and character, in England. 506Always Mr. Gladstone repeated the same assurance: “All his sympathies were” with us. Here is the letter on the card, dated April 1st, 1877, in reply to my request that he would write a few words to be read by Lord Shaftesbury at one of our Meetings. It ran as follows:—

“You are already aware that my sympathies and prepossessions are greatly with you, nor do I wish this to be a secret, but I am overwhelmed with occupations, and I cannot overtake my arrears, and my letters have been so constantly put before the world (often, of course, without warrant) that I cannot, I am afraid, appear in the form of an epistle ad hoc, more than I can in person.

(Half the words in his apology for not writing would of course have more than sufficed for the letter desired.)

Naturally, after all this, I looked to Mr. Gladstone as a most powerful friend of the Anti-vivisection cause; and though I had no sympathy with his religious views, and thought his policy very dangerous, I counted on him as a man who, since his suffrage had been obtained in a great moral question, was sure to give it his support in fitting time and place. The sequel showed how delusive was my trust.

To return to the breakfast in Carlton Gardens. There sat down with us, to my amusement, a gentleman with whom I had already made acquaintance, an ex-priest of some distinction, Rev. Rudolph Suffield, who had recently quitted the Church of Rome but retained enough of priestly looks and manners to be rather antipathetic to me. Mr. Gladstone ingeniously picked Mr. Suffield’s brains for half-an-hour, eliciting all manner of information on Romish doctrines and practice, till the conversation drifted to Pascal’s Provinciales, I expressed 507my admiration for the book, and recalled Gibbon’s droll confession that he, whom Byron styled “The Lord of irony, that master spell,” had learned the sanglant sarcasm of his XV. and XVI. chapters from the pious author of the Pensées. Mr. Gladstone eagerly interposed with some fine criticisms, and ended with the amazing remark: “I have read all the Jesuit answers to Pascal (!) to ascertain whether he had misquoted Suarez and Escobar and the rest, and I found that he had not done so. You may take my word for it.”

From this theological discussion there was a diversion when a gentleman on the other side of the breakfast table handed across to Mr. Gladstone certain drawings of the legs of horses. They proved to be sketches of several pairs in the Panathenaic frieze and were produced to settle the highly interesting question (to Mr. Gladstone) whether Greek horses ever trotted, or only walked, cantered, and ambled. I forget how the drawings were supposed finally to settle the controversy, but I made him laugh by telling him that a party of the servants of one of my Irish friends having paid a visit to the Elgin Gallery, the lady’s maid told her mistress next morning that they had been puzzled to understand why all those men without legs or arms had been stuck up on the wall? At last the butler had suggested that they were “intended to commemorate the railway accidents.”

From that time I met Mr. Gladstone occasionally at the houses of friends, and was, of course, like all the world, charmed with his winning manners and brilliant talk, though never, that I can recall, struck by any thought expressed by him which could be called a “great” one, or which lifted up one’s spirit. It seemed more as if half a dozen splendidly cultivated and brilliant intellects—but all of medium height—had been incarnated in one vivacious body, than a single Mind of colossal altitude. The religious element in him was in almost feverish activity, but it always appeared to me that it 508was not on the greatest things of Religion that his attention fastened. It was on its fringe, rather than on its robe.

That Mr. Gladstone was a sincerely pious man I do not question. But his piety was of the Sacerdotal rather than of the Puritan type. The “single eye” was never his. If it had been, he would not have employed the tortuous and ambiguous oratory which so often left his friends and foes to interpret his utterances in opposite senses. Neither did he appear—at all events to his more distant observers—to feel adequately the tremendous responsibility to God and man which rested on the well-nigh omnipotent Prime Minister of England, during the years when it was rare to open a newspaper without reading of some military disaster like the death of Gordon, or of some Agrarian murder like the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and of a score of hapless Irish landlords—calamities which his policy had failed to prevent if it had not directly occasioned. The gaiety of spirits and the animation of interest respecting a hundred trivial topics which Mr. Gladstone exhibited unfailingly through that fearfully anxious period, approached perhaps sometimes too nearly to levity to accord with our older ideal of a devout mind loaded with the weight “almost not to be borne” of world-wide cares.

The differences between Church and dissent occupied Mr. Gladstone, I fancy, very much at all times. One day he remarked to me—as if it were a valuable new light on the subject—that an eminent Nonconformist had just told him that the Dissenters generally “did not object either to the Doctrine or the Discipline of the Church of England, but that they found no warrant in Scripture for the existence of a State Church.” Mr. Gladstone looked as if he were seeking an answer to this objection to conformity. I replied that I wondered they did not see that the whole Old Testament might be taken as the history of a Divinely appointed State 509Church. Mr. Gladstone lifted his marvellous, eagle-like eyes with a quick glance which might be held to signify “That’s an idea!” When the little incident was told soon after to Dean Stanley he rubbed his hands and laughingly said, “This may put off disestablishment yet awhile!”

As a member of society Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knows, was inexhaustibly interesting. I once heard him after a small dinner party criticise and describe with astonishing vividness and minuteness the sermons of at least twenty popular preachers. At last I ventured to interpose with some impatience and say: “But, Mr. Gladstone, you have not mentioned the greatest of them all, my pastor, Dr. Martineau?” He paused, and then said, weighing his words, carefully: “Dr. Martineau is unquestionably the greatest of living thinkers.”

Speaking of the Jews, he once afforded the company at a dinner table a lively and interesting sketch of the ubiquity of the race all over the globe, except in Scotland. The Scotch, he said, knew as well as they the value of bawbees! There was a general laugh, and some one remarked: “Why, then, are there so few in Ireland?” Mr. Gladstone answered that he supposed the Irish were too poor to afford them fair pasture. I said: “Perhaps so, now, but when you, Mr. Gladstone, have given the Irish farmers fixity of tenure, so that they can give security for loans, we shall see the Jews flocking over to Ireland.” This observation was made in 1879; and in the intervening twenty years I am informed that the Jews have settled down in Ireland like sea-gulls on the land after a storm. The old “Gombeen man” has been ousted all over the country, and a whole Jew quarter, (near the Circular Road) and a new synagogue in Dublin, have verified my prophecy.

At last the day came when the sympathy of which Mr. Gladstone had so often assured Lord Shaftesbury and 510myself, was to be put to the simplest test. Mr. Reid (now Sir Robert Reid) was to introduce our Bill for the Prohibition of Vivisection into Parliament (April 4th, 1883). I wrote to Mr. Gladstone a short note imploring him to lift his hand to help us; and if it were impossible for him to speak in the House in our favour, at least to let his friends know that he wished well to our Bill. I do not remember the words of that note. I know that it was a cry from my very heart to the man who held it in his power to save the poor brutes from their tortures for ever; to do what I was spending my life’s last years in vainly trying to accomplish.

He received the note; I had a formal acknowledgment of it. But Mr. Gladstone did nothing. He left us to the tender mercies of Sir William Harcourt, whose audacious (and mendacious) contradiction of Mr. George Russell, our seconder, I have detailed elsewhere.^[23] From that day I never met, nor ever desired to meet, Mr. Gladstone again.

A friend whom I greatly admired and valued, and whose intercourse I enjoyed during all my residence in London, from first to last, was Mr. Froude. He died just after the 511first edition of this book (of which I had of course sent him a copy) was published; and I was told it supplied welcome amusement to him in his last days.

The world, I think, has never done quite justice to Mr. Froude; albeit, when he was gone the newspapers spoke of him as “the last of the giants.” He always seemed to me to belong to the loftier race, of whom there were then not a few living; and though his unhappy Nemesis of Faith (for which I make no defence whatever) and his Carlyle drew on him endless blame, and his splendid History equally endless cavil and criticism, his greatness was to my apprehension something apart from his books. His Essays,—especially the magnificent one on Job—give, I think, a better idea of the man than was derivable from any other source, except personal intimacy. “He touched nothing which he did not” enlarge, if not “adorn.” Subjects expanded when talked of easily, and even lightly, with him. There was a background of space always above and behind him. Though he had no little cause for it, he was not bitter. I never saw him angry or heard him express resentment, except once when his benevolent efforts had failed to obtain from Mr. Gladstone’s Government a pension for a poverty-stricken, meritorious woman of letters, while far less deserving persons received the bounty. But when he let the Marah waters of Mr. Carlyle’s private reflexions loose on the world their bitterness seemed to communicate itself to all the readers of the book. Even the silver pen of Mrs. Oliphant for once was dipped in gall; and it was she, if I mistake not, who in her wrath devised the ferocious adjective “Froudacious” to convey her rage and scorn. As for myself, when that book appeared I frankly told Mr. Froude that I rejoiced, because I had always deprecated Mr. Carlyle’s influence, and I thought this revelation of him would do much to destroy it. Mr. Froude laughed good-humouredly, 512but naturally showed a little consternation. His sentiment about the Saturday Reviewers, who at that time buzzed round his writings and stung him every week, was much that of a St. Bernard or a Newfoundland towards a pack of snarling terriers. One day a clergyman very well known in London, wrote to me after one of our little parties to beg that I would do him the favour, when next Mr. Froude was coming to me, to invite him also, and permit him to bring his particular friend Mr. X, who greatly desired to meet his brother historian. I was very willing to oblige the clergyman in question, and before long we had a gathering at our house of forty or fifty people, among whom were Mr. Froude and Mr. X. I knew that the moment for the introduction had arrived, but of course I was not going to take the liberty of presenting any stranger to Mr. Froude without asking his consent. That consent was not so readily granted as I had anticipated. “Who? Mr. X? Let me look at him first.” “There he is,” I said, pointing to a small figure half hidden in a group of ladies and gentlemen. “That is he, is it?” said Mr. Froude. “Oh, No! No! Don’t introduce him to me. He has the Saturday Review written all over his face!” There was nothing to do but to laugh, and presently, when my clerical friend came up and urged me to fulfil my promise and make the introduction, to hurry down on some excuse into the tea room and never reappear till the disappointed Mr. X had departed.

I have kept 34 letters received from Mr. Froude during the years in which I had the good fortune to contribute to Fraser’s Magazine when he was the Editor, and later, when, as friends and neighbours in South Kensington, we had the usual little interchange of message and invitations. Among these, to me precious, letters there are some passages which I shall venture to copy, assured that his representatives cannot possibly object to my doing so. I may first as an 513introduction of myself, quote one in a letter to my eldest brother, who had invited him to stay at Newbridge during one of his visits to Ireland. Mr. Froude wrote to him:—

“I knew your brother Henry intimately 30 years ago, and your sister is one of the most valued friends of my later life.”

His affection for Carlyle spoke in this eager refutation of some idle story in the newspapers:

“There is hardly a single word in it which is not untrue. Ruskin is as much attached to Mr. Carlyle as ever. There is not one of his friends to whom he is not growing dearer as he approaches the end of his time, nor has the wonderful beauty and noble tenderness of his character been ever more conspicuous. The only difference visible in him from what he was in past years is that his wife’s death has broken his heart. He is gentler and more forbearing to human weakness. He feels that his own work is finished, and he is waiting hopefully till it please God to take him away.”

Here is evidence of his deep enjoyment of Nature. He writes, October 31st, from Dereen, Kenmare:—

“I return to London most reluctantly at the end of the week. The summer refuses to leave us, and while you are shivering in the North wind we retain here the still blue cloudlessness of August. This morning is the loveliest I ever saw here. The woods swarm with blackbirds and thrushes, the ‘autumn note not all unlike to that of spring.’ I am so bewitched with the place that (having finished my History) I mean to spend the winter here and try to throw the story of the last Desmond into a novel.”

In reply to a request that he would attend an Anti-vivisection meeting at Lord Shaftesbury’s house, he wrote:—

“Vivisection is a hateful illustration of the consequences of the silent supersession of Morality by Utilitarianism. 514Until men can be brought back to the old lines, neither this nor any other evil tendency can be really stemmed. Till the world learns again to hate what is in itself evil, in spite of alleged advantages to be derived from it, it will never consent to violent legal restrictions.”

His last letter from Oxford is pleasant to recall:—

“I am strangely placed here. The Dons were shy of me when I first came, but all is well now, and the undergraduates seem really interested in what I have to tell them. I am quite free, and tell them precisely what I think.”

I do not think that Mr. Froude was otherwise than a happy man. He was particularly so as regarded his feminine surroundings, and a most genial and indulgent husband and father. He had also intense enjoyment both of Nature and of the great field of Literature into which he delved so zealously. He once told me that he had visited every spot, except the Tower of London (!) where the great scenes of his History took place, and had ransacked every library in Europe likely to contain materials for his work; not omitting the record chambers of the Inquisition at Simancas, where he spent many shuddering days which he vividly described to me. He also greatly enjoyed his long voyages and visits to the West Indies and to New Zealand; and especially the one he made to America. He admired almost everything, I think, in America; and more than once remarked to me (in reference particularly to the subject of mixed education in which I was interested): “The young men are so nice! What might be difficult here, is easy there. You have no idea what nice fellows they are.” There was, however, certainly something in Mr. Froude’s handsome and noble physiognomy which conveyed the idea of mournfulness. His eyes were wells of darkness on which, by some singularity, the light never seemed to fall either in life 515or when represented in a photograph; and his laugh, which was not infrequent, was mirthless. I never heard a laugh which it was so hard to echo, so little contagious.

The last time I ever saw Mr. Froude was at the house of our common friend, Miss Elliot, where he was always to be found at his best. Her other visitors had departed and we three old friends sat on in the late and quiet Sunday afternoon, talking of serious things, and at last of our hopes and beliefs respecting a future life. Mr. Froude startled us somewhat by saying he did not wish to live again. He felt that his life had been enough, and would be well content not to awake when it was over. “But,” said he, in conclusion, with sudden vigour, “I believe there is another life, you know! I am quite sure there is.” The clearness and emphasis of this conviction were parallel to those he had used before to me in talking of the probable extension of Atheism in coming years. “But, as there IS a God,” said Mr. Froude, “Religion can never die.”

CHAPTER XVIII. MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES. SOCIAL

519I must not write here any personal sketch however slight of my revered friend Dr. Martineau, since he is still,—God be thanked for it!—living, and writing as profoundly and vigorously as ever, in his venerable age of 89. But the weekly sermons which I had the privilege of hearing from his lips for many years, down to 1872, beside several courses of his Lectures on the Gospels and on Ethical Philosophy which I attended, formed so very important, I might say, vital a part of my “Life” in London, that I cannot omit some account of them in my story.

Little Portland Street Chapel is a building of very moderate dimensions, with no pretensions whatever to ecclesiastical finery; whether of architecture, or upholstery, or art of any kind. But it was, I always thought, a fitting, simple place for serious people to meet to think in; not to gaze round them in curiosity or admiration, or to be intoxicated with colours, lights, incense and music; as would seem to be the intention of the administrators of a neighbouring fane! Our services, I suppose, would have been pronounced cold, bare and dull by an habitué of a Ritualistic or Romanist church; but for my own part I should prefer even to be “cold,” (which we were not) rather than allow my religious feelings to be excited through the gratification of my æsthetic sense.

On this matter, however, each one must speak and choose for himself. For me I was perfectly satisfied with my seat in the gallery in that simple chapel, where I could well hear the noblest sermons and see the preacher of whom they always seemed a part; his “Word” in the old sense; not 520(like many other men’s sermons) things quite apart from the speaker, as we know him in his home and in the street. Of all the men with whom I have ever been acquainted the one who most impressed me with the sense,—shall I call it of congruity? or homogeneity?—of being, in short, the same all through, was he to whom I listened on those happy Sundays.

They were very varied Sermons which Dr. Martineau preached. The general effect, I used to think, was not that of receiving Lessons from a Teacher, but of being invited to accompany a Guide on a mountain-walk. From the upper regions of thought where he led us, we were able,—nay, compelled,—to look down on our daily cares and duties from a loftier point of view; and thence to return to them with fresh feelings and resolutions. Sometimes these ascents were very steep and difficult; and I have ventured to tell him that the richness of his metaphors and similes, beautiful and original as they always were, made it harder to climb after him, and that we sometimes wanted him to hold out to us a shepherd’s crook, rather than a jewelled crozier! But the exercise, if laborious, was to the last degree mentally healthful, and morally strengthening. There was a great variety also, in these wonderful sermons. To hear one of them only, a listener would come away deeming the preacher par éminence a profound and most discriminating Critic. To hear another, he would consider him a Philosopher, occupied entirely with the vastest problems of Science and Theology. Again another would leave the impression of a Poet, as great in his prose as the author of In Memoriam in verse. And lastly and above all, there was always the man filled with devout feeling, who, by his very presence and voice communicated reverence and the sense of the nearness of an all-seeing God.

I could write many pages concerning these Sunday experiences; but I shall do better, I think, if I give my 521readers, who have never heard them, some small samples of what I carried away from time to time of them, as noted down in letters to my friend. Here are a few of them:

“Mr. Martineau preached of aiming at perfection. At the end he drew a picture of a soul which has made such struggles but has failed. Then he supposed what must be the feeling of such a soul entering on the future life, its regrets; and then inquired what influence being lifted above the things of sense, the nearness to God and holiness would have on it? Would it then arise? Yes! and the Father would say, ‘This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found for evermore.’ I cannot tell you how beautiful it was, how true in the sense of those deepest intuitions which I hold to be certainly true because they bear with them the sense of being absolutely highest, the echo of a higher harmony than belongs to our poor minds. He seemed, for a moment, to be talking in the old conventional way about repentance when too late; and then burst out in faith and hope, so far transcending all such ideas that one felt it came from another source.”

“Mr. Martineau gave us a magnificent sermon on Sunday. I was in great luck not to miss it. One point was this. Our moral judgments are always founded on what we suppose to be the inward motive of the actor, not on the mere external act itself, which may be mischievous or beneficent in the highest degree, without, properly-speaking, affecting our purely ethical judgment—e.g., an unintentional homicide. Now, if, (as our opponents affirm) our Moral Sense came to us ab extra, merely as the current opinion which society has attached to injurious or beneficial actions, then we should not thus decide our judgment by the internal, but by the external and visible part of the act, by which alone society is hurt or benefitted. The fact that our moral judgment regards internal things exclusively, is evidence that it springs from an internal source; and that we judge another, because we are compelled to judge ourselves in the same way.”

522Here is a Note I took after hearing another Sermon:—

“‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’

“There are two ways of looking at Sin common in our time. One is to proclaim it so infinitely black that God cannot forgive it except by a method of Atonement itself the height of injustice. The other is to treat it as so venial that God may be counted on as certain to pass it over at the first moment of regret; and all the threats of conscience may be looked on as those of a nurse to a refractory child, threats which are never to be executed. The first of these views seems to honour God most, but really dishonours Him, by representing Him as governing the world on a principle abhorrent to reason and justice. The second can never commend itself save to the most shallow minds who make religion a thing of words, and treat sin and repentance as trivial things, instead of the most awful. How shall we solve the mystery? It is equally unjust for God to treat the guilty as if they were innocent, and the penitent as if they were impenitent. Each fact has to be taken into account, and the most important practical consequences follow from the view we take of the matter. First we must never lose hold of the truth, that, as Cause and Effect are never severed in the natural world, and the whole order of nature would fall to ruin were God ever to interfere with them, so likewise Guilt and Pain are, in His Providence, indissolubly linked; and the order of the moral world would be destroyed were they to be divided. But beside the realm of Law, in which the Divine penalties are unalterable, there is the free world of Spirit wherein our repentance avails. When we can say to God, ‘Put me to grief—I have deserved it. Only restore me Thy love,’ the great woe is gone. We shall be the weaker evermore for our fall, but we shall be restored.”

523The following remarks were in a letter to Miss Elliot:—

“I wish I could write a résumé of a Sermon which Mr. Martineau preached last Sunday. Just think how many sermons some people would make of this one sentence of his text (speaking of the longing for Rest):—‘If Duty become laborious, do it more fervently. If Love become a source of care and pain, love more nobly and more tenderly. If Doubts disturb and torture, face them with more earnest thought and deeper study!’

“This was not a peroration, but just one phrase of a discourse full of other such things.

“It seems to me that the spontaneous response of our inner souls to such ideas is just the same proof of their truth as the shock we feel in our nerves when a lecturer has delivered a current of electricity proves his lesson to be true.”

“While you were enjoying your Cathedral, I was enjoying Little Portland Street Chapel, having bravely tramped through miles of snow on the way, and been rewarded. Mr. Martineau said we were always taunted with only having a negative creed, and were often foolish enough to deny it. But all Reformation is a negation of error and return to the three pure articles of faith—God, Duty, Immortality.... The distinction was admirably drawn between extent of creed and intensity of faith.”

On February 5th, 1871, Mr. Martineau preached:—

“Philosophers might and do say that all Religion is only a projection of Man himself on Nature, lending to Nature his own feelings, brightened by a supreme Love or shadowed by infinite displeasure. Does this disprove Religion? Is there no reliance to be placed on the faculties which connect us with the Infinite? We have two sets of faculties: our Senses, which reveal the outer world; and a deeper series, giving us Poetry, Love, Religion. Should we say that these last are more false than the others? They are true all round. In fact, these 524are truest. Imagination is true. Affection is true. Do men say that Affection is blind? No! It is the only thing which truly sees. Love alone really perceives. The cynic draws over the world a roof of dark and narrow thoughts and suspicions, and then complains of the close, unhealthy air. Memory again is more than mere Recollection. It has the true artist-power of seizing the points which determine the character and reconstructing the image without details. Suppose there be a God. By what faculties could we know Him save by those which now tell us of Him. And why should they deceive us?”

Alas! the exercise of preaching every Sunday became too great for Dr. Martineau to encounter after 1872, and, by his physician’s orders, those noble sermons came to an end.

Beside Dr. Martineau, I had the privilege of friendship with three eminent Unitarian Ministers, now alas! all departed—Rev. Charles Beard, of Liverpool, for a long time editor of the Theological Review; the venerable and beloved John James Tayler; and Rev. William Henry Channing, to whom I was gratefully attached, both on account of religious sympathies, and of his ardent adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, which he told me he had at first regarded as somewhat of a “fad” of mine, but came to recognise as a moral crusade of deep significance. Among living friends of the same body, I am happy to number Rev. Philip Wicksteed, the successor of Dr. Martineau in Portland Street and the exceedingly able President of University Hall, Gordon Square,—an institution, in the foundation of which I gladly took part on the invitation of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

A man in whose books I had felt great interest in my old studies at Newbridge, and whose intercourse was a real pleasure to me in London, was Mr. W. R. Greg. I intensely respected the courage which moved him, in those early days of the Fifties, to publish such a book as the Creed of 525Christendom. He was then a young man, entering public life with the natural ambitions which his great abilities justified, and the avowal of such exorbitant heresies (nothing short of pure Theism) as the book contained, was enough at that date to spoil any man’s career. He was a layman, too, and man of the world, “Que Diable allait il faire, writing on theology at all?” That book remains to this day a most valuable manual of arguments and evidences against the Creed of Christendom; set forth in a grave and reverent spirit and in a clear and manly style. His Enigmas of Life had, I believe, a larger literary success. The world had moved much nearer to his standpoint; and the Enigmas concern the most interesting subjects. We had a little friendly controversy over one passage in the essay, Elsewhere. Mr. Greg had laid it down that, hereafter, Love must retreat from the discovery of the sinfulness of the beloved; and that both saint and sinner will accept as inevitable an eternal separation (Enigmas, 1st Edit., p. 263). To this I demurred strenuously in my Hopes of the Human Race (p. 132–6). I said, “The poor self-condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance,—such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not,—even assuming his guilt to be black as night,—only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above? If God can love us, is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And, in the second place, the higher the virtuous 526soul may have risen in the spiritual world, the more it must have acquired the god-like Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the god-like Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.

In the next edition of his Enigmas (the 7th), after the issue of my book, Mr. Greg wrote a most generous recantation of his former view. He said:—

“The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a nature—its capacity for strong and deep attachment—must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness.”

Later on he asks:—

“How can the blessed enjoy anything to be called Happiness if the bad are writhing in hopeless anguish?” “Obviously only in one way. By ceasing to love, that is, by renouncing the best and purest part of their nature.... Or, to put it in still bolder language, ‘How,—given a hell of torment and despair for millions of his friends and fellow men—can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad, and without being miraculously changed for the worse?’”

The following flattering letters are unluckily all which I have kept of Mr. Greg’s writing:—

“I have been solacing myself this morning, after a month of harrowing toil, with your paper in the last Theological, and I want to tell you how much it has gratified me.

527“I don’t mean your appreciative cordiality towards myself, nor your criticisms on a portion of my speculations, which, however (though I fancy you have rather misread me), I will refer to again and try to profit by. I daresay you are mainly right, the more so as I see Mr. Thom in the same number remonstrates in an identical tone.

“That your paper is, I think, not only beautiful in thought and much of it original, but singularly full of rich suggestions, and one of the most real contributions to a further conception of a possible future that I have met with for long. It is real thought—not like most of mine, mere sentiment and imagination.

“I don’t know if you are still in town, or have began the villegiatura you spoke of when I last saw you, but I daresay this note will be forwarded.

“When did No. 1 appear?

“I particularly like your remark about self-reprobation, p. 456, and from 463 onward. By the way, do you know Isaac Taylor’s ‘Physical Theory of Another Life?’ It is very curious and interesting.

“I have just finished an Introduction (about 100 pp.) to a new edition of “The Creed of Christendom,” which will be published in the autumn, and it contains some thoughts very analogous to yours.”

“I have read your Town and Country Mouse with much pleasure. I should have enjoyed your Paper still more if I had not felt that it was suggested by your intention to cut London, and the desire to put as good a face upon that regrettable design as you could. However you have stated the case with remarkable fairness. I, who am a passionate lover of nature, who have never lived in Town, and should 528pine away if I attempted it, still feel in the decline of years the increasing necessity of creeping towards the world rather than retiring from it. I feel, as one grows old, the want of external stimulus to stave off stagnation. The vividness of youthful thought is needed, I think, to support solitude.

“I retired to Westmoreland for 15 years in the middle of life when I was much worn, and it did me good: but I was glad to come back to active life, and I think my present location—Wimbledon Common for a cottage, within 5 miles of London, and coming in five days a week—is perfection.

“I daresay you may be right; but all your friends will miss you much—I not the least.

Mr. Greg’s allusion to my Town and Country Mouse reminds me of a letter which was sent me by some unknown reader on the publication of that article. It repeats a famous story worth recording as told thus by an ear-witness who, though anonymous is obviously worthy of credit.

“Will Miss Cobbe kindly pardon the liberty taken by a reader of her delightful ‘Town and Country Mouse’ in venturing to substitute the true version of Sir George Lewis’ too famous dictum?

“In the hearing of the writer he was asked (by one of his subordinates in the Government) as they were getting into the train, returning to town,

“‘Well! How do you like life in Herefordshire?’

“‘Ah! It would be very tolerable, if it were not for the Amusements’—was his reply.

“Miss Cobbe has high Authority for the mis-quotation: for the Times invariably commits it; and the present writer has again and again intended to correct it, and failed to execute the intention.

529“If they are pleasures, they are pleasures; and the paradox is absurd, instead of amusing; but the oppressive stupidity of many of the ‘Amusements’ (to the Author of ‘Influence of Authority,’ &c.!) may well call up in the mind the sort of amiable cynicism, which was a feature of his own character.

“On arriving late and unexpectedly at home for a fortnight’s Rest, he found his own study occupied by two young ladies (sisters) as a Bedroom—it being the night of Lady Theresa’s Ball! With his exquisite good nature he simply set about finding some other roost; and all the complaint he ever made was that, which has become perhaps not too famous!”

At the time of the Franco-Prussian war, as will be remembered by everyone living at the time in London, the cleavage between the sympathisers with the two contending countries was almost as sharp as it had previously been during the American War between the partizans of the North and of the South. Dean Stanley was one of our friends who took warmly the side of the Germans, and I naturally sent him a letter I had received from a Frenchman whom we both respected, remonstrating rather bitterly against the attitude of England. The Dean, in returning M. P.’s letter wrote as follows^[24]:—

“Although you kindly excuse me from doing so, I cannot but express, and almost, wish that you could convey to M. P. the melancholy interest with which we have read his 530letter. Interesting of course it is but to us—I know not whether to you—it is deeply sad to see a man like M. P. so thoroughly blind to the true situation of his country. Not a word of repentance for the aggressive and unjust war! not a word of acknowledgment that, had the French, as they wished, invaded Germany, they would have entered Berlin and seized the Rhenish provinces without remorse or compunction!—not a spark of appreciation of the moral superiority by which the Germans achieved their successes! I do not doubt that excesses may have been committed by the German troops; but I feel sure that they have been exceeded by those of the French, and would have been yet more had the French entered Germany.

“And how very superfluous to attack us for having done just the same as in 1848! Our sad crime was not to have prevented the war by remonstrating with the French Emperor and people in July, 1870, and of that poor P. takes no account! Alas! for France!

The following is a rather important note as recording the Dean’s sentiments as regarded Cardinal Newman. I cannot recall what was the paper which I had sent him to which he alludes. I think I had spoken to him of my friendship with Francis Newman, and of the information given me by the latter that he could never remember his brother putting his hand to a single cause of benevolence or moral reform. I had asked him to solicit his support with that of Cardinal Manning (already obtained) to the cause for which I was then beginning to work,—on behalf of animals.

“I return this with many thanks. I think you must have sent it to me, partly as a rebuke for having so nearly 531sailed in the same boat of ignorance and inhumanity with Dr. Newman.

“I have just finished, with a mixture of weariness and nausea, his letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Even the fierce innuendoes and deadly thrusts at Manning cannot reconcile me to such a mass of cobwebs and evasions. When the sum of the theological teaching of the two brothers is weighed, will not ‘the Soul’ of Francis be found to counterbalance, as a contribution to true, solid, catholic (even in any sense of the word) Christianity, all the writings of John Henry?

“I have sent my paper on Vestments to the Contemporary.

“Read it in the light of his old letter to B. Ullathorne, published in (illegible).”

The papers on “Vestments,” to which Dean Stanley alludes, had interested and amused me much when he read it at Sion College, and I had urged him to send it to one of the Reviews. Here is a report of that evening’s proceedings which I sent next day to my friend Miss Elliot.

“I do so much wish you had been with us last night at Sion College. Dean Stanley was more delightful than ever. He read a splendid paper, full of learning, wit, and sense on Ecclesiastical Vestments. In the course of it, he said, referring to the position of the altar, &c., that on this subject he had nothing to add to the remarks of his friend, the Dean of Bristol, ‘whose authority on all matters connected with English ecclesiastical history was universally admitted to be the best.’ After the reading of his paper, which lasted an hour and a quarter, that odious Dr. L—— got up, and in his mincing brogue attacked Dean Stanley very rudely. Then they called on Martineau, and he made a charming speech, beginning by saying he had nothing to do with vestments, having received no ordination, and might for his 532part repeat the poem “Nothing to Wear!” Then he went on to say that if the Church were ever to regain the Nonconformists, it would certainly not be by proceeding in the sacerdotal direction. He was much cheered. Rev. H. White made, I thought, one of the best speeches of the evening. Altogether, it was exceedingly amusing.”

On the occasion of the interment of Sir Charles Lyell in Westminster Abbey, I sent the Dean, by his request, some hints respecting Sir Charles’ views and character, and received the following reply:

“Your letter is invaluable to me. Long as was my acquaintance with Sir Charles Lyell, and kind as he was to me, I never knew him intimately, and therefore most of what you tell me was new. The last time he spoke to me was in urging me with the greatest earnestness to ask Colenso to preach. Can you tell me one small point? Had he a turn for music? I must refer back to the last funeral (when I could not preach) of Sir Sterndale Bennett, and it would be a convenience for me to know this, Yes or No.

“You will come (if you come to the sermon) and any friends,—thro’ the Deanery at 2.45 on Sunday.

Some time after this I sent him one of my theological articles on the Life after Death. He acknowledged it thus kindly:—

“Many thanks. Your writing on this subject is to me more nearly to the truth—at least more nearly to my hopes and desires—than almost any others which are now floating around us.

533This next letter again referred to one of my books—and to Cardinal Newman:—

“Many thanks for your book. You will see by my letter last night that I had already made good progress in it; as borrowed from the Library. I shall much value it.

Do not trouble yourself about Newman’s letter. I am much more anxious that the public should see it than that I should. I am amazed at the impression made upon me by the “Characteristics” of Newman. Most of the selections I had read before; but the net result is of a farrago of fanciful, disingenuous nonentities; all except the personal reminiscences.

One day I had been calling on him at the Deanery, and said to him, after describing my office in Victoria Street and our frequent Committee meetings there: “Now Mr. Dean, do you think it right and as it ought to be, that I should sit at that table as Hon. Sec. with Lord Shaftesbury on my right, and Cardinal Manning on my left,—and that you should not sit opposite to complete the “Reunion of Christendom?” He laughed heartily, agreed he certainly ought to be there, and promised to come. But time failed, and only his honoured name graced our lists.

The following is the last letter I have preserved of Dean Stanley’s writing. It is needless to say how much pleasure it gave me:—

“I have just finished re-reading with real admiration and consolation your “Hopes of the Human Race.” May I ask these questions: 1. Is it in, or coming into, a second edition? If the latter, is it too much to suggest that the note on 534p. 3 could, if not omitted, be modified? I appreciate the motive for its insertion, but it makes the lending and recommending of the book difficult. 2. Who is ‘one of the greatest men of Science’—p. 20? 3. Where is there an authentic appearance of the Pope’s reply to Odo Russell—p. 107?

I afterwards learned from Dean Stanley, one day when I was visiting him at the Deanery after his wife’s death, that he had read these Essays to Lady Augusta in the last weeks of her life, finding them, as he told me, the most satisfactory treatment of the subject he had met; and that after her death he read them over again. He gave me with much feeling a sad photograph of her as a dying woman, after telling me this. Mr. Motley the historian of the Netherlands, having also lost his wife not long afterwards, spoke to Dean Stanley of his desire for some book on the subject which would meet his doubts, and Dean Stanley gave him this one of mine.

Dean Stanley, it is needless to say, was the most welcome of guests in every house which he entered. There was something in his high-mindedness, I can use no other term, his sense of the glory of England, his love of his church (on extremely Erastian principles!) as the National Religion, his unfailing courtesy, his unaffected enjoyment of drollery and gossip, and his almost youthful excitement about each important subject which cropped up, which made him delightful to everyone in turn. There was no man in London I think whom it gave me such pleasure to meet “in the sixties and seventies” as the “Great Dean”; and he was uniformly most kind to me. The last occasion, I think, on which I saw him in full spirits was at a house where the pleasantest people were constantly to be found,—that of Mr. and Mrs. 535Simpson, in Cornwall Gardens. Renan and his wife were there, and I was so favoured as to be seated next to Renan; Dean Stanley being on the other side of our tactful hostess. The Dean had been showing Renan over the Abbey in the morning, and they were both in the gayest mood, but I remember Dean Stanley speaking to Renan with indescribable and concentrated indignation of the avowal Mr. Gladstone had recently made that the Clerkenwell explosion had caused him to determine on the disestablishment of the Irish Church.

I have found an old letter to my friend describing this dinner:—

“I had a most amusing evening yesterday. Kind Mrs. Simpson made me sit beside Renan; and Dean Stanley was across the corner, so we made, with nice Mrs. W. R. G. and Mr. M., a very jolly little party at our end of the table. The Dean began with grace, rather sotto voce, with a blink at Renan, who kept on never minding. His (Renan’s) looks are even worse than his picture leads one to expect. His face is exactly like a hog, so stupendously broad across the ears and jowl! But he is very gentlemanly in manner, very winning and full of fun and finesse. We had to talk French with him, but the Dean’s French was so much worse than mine that I felt quite at ease, and rattled away about the Triduos at Florence (to appease the wrath of Heaven on account of his Vie de Jésus), and had some private jokes with him about his malice in calling the Publicans of the Gospels ‘douaniers,’ and the ass a ‘baudet!’ He said he did it on purpose; and that when he was last in Italy numbers of poor people came to him, and asked him for the lucky number for the lotteries, because they thought he was so near the Devil he must know! I gave him your message about the Hengwrt MSS., and he apologised for having written about the ‘mesquines’ considerations which had caused them to be locked up, [to wit, that several leaves of the Red Book of Hergest had been stolen by too enthusiastic Welsh scholars!] and solemnly vowed to alter the passage 536in the next edition, and thanked you for the promise of obtaining leave for him to see them.

“I also talked to M. Renan of his Essay on the Poésie de la Race Celtique, and made him laugh at his own assertion that Irishmen had such a longing for ‘the Infinite’ that when they could not attain to it otherwise they sought it through a strong liquor ‘qui s’appelle le Whiskey.’”

Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s delightful volume on Renan has opened to my mind many fresh reasons for admiring the great French scholar, whose works I had falsely imagined I had known pretty well before reading it. But when all is said, the impression he has left on me (and I should think on most other people) is one of disappointment and short-falling.

M. Renan has written of himself the well-known and often laughed-at boast: “Seul dans mon siècle j’ai pu comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise!” I do not know about his comprehension of St. Francis, though I should think it a very great tour de force for the brilliant French academician and critic to throw himself into that typical mediæval mind! But as regarded the former Person I should say that of all the tens of thousands who have studied and written about him during these last nineteen centuries, Renan was in some respects the least able to “comprehend” him. The man who could describe the story of the Prodigal as a “délicieuse parabole,” is as far out of Christ’s latitude as the pole from the equator. One abhors æsthetics when things too sacred to be measured by their standard are commended in their name. Renan seems to me to have been for practical purposes a Pantheist without a glimmer of that sense of moral and personal relation to God which was the supreme characteristic of Christ. When he translates Christ’s pity for the Magdalenes as jealousy “pour la gloire de son Père dans ces belles créatures;” and introduces the 537term “femmes d’une vie équivoque” as a rendering for “sinners,” he strikes a note so false that no praise lavished afterwards can restore harmony.

The late Lord Houghton was one of the men of note who I met occasionally at the houses of friends. I had known him in Italy and he was always kind to me and invited me to his Christmas parties at Frystone, which were said to be delightful, but to which I did not go. For a poet he had an extraordinarily rough exterior and blunt manner. One day we had a regular set-to argument lasting a long time. He attacked the order of things with the usual pessimist observations on all the evil in the world, and implied that I had no reasonable right to my faith. I answered as best I could, with some earnestness, and he finally concluded the discussion by remarking with concentrated contempt: “You might almost as well be a Christian!” Next day I went to Westminster Abbey and was sitting in the Dean’s pew, when, to my amusement Lord Houghton came in just below, with a party of ladies and took a seat exactly opposite me. He behaved of course with edifying propriety, but I could not help reflecting with a smile on our argument of the night before, and wondering how many members of that and similar congregations who were naturally counted by outsiders as faithful supporters of the orthodox creed, were as little so, au fond, as either Lord Houghton or I.

With Carlyle, though I saw him very frequently, I never interchanged more than a few banal words of civility. When his biography appeared, I was, (as I frankly told the illustrious biographer) exceedingly glad that I had never given him the chance of attaching one of his pungent epigrams to my poor person. I had been introduced to him by a lady at whose house he happened to call one afternoon when I was sitting with her, and where he showed himself (as it seems to me the roughest men invariably do in the society of amiable 538Countesses),—extremely apprivoisé. Also I continually met him out walking with one or other of his great historian friends, who were also mine, but I avoided trespassing on their good nature; or addressing him when he walked up and down alone daily before our door in Cheyne Walk,—till one day when he had been very ill, I ventured to express my satisfaction in seeing him out of doors again. He then answered me kindly. I never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men who knew him personally, and therefore had means which I did not possess, of estimating him aright. To me his books and himself represented an anomalous sort of human Fruit. The original stock was a hard and thorny Scotch peasant-character, with a splendid intellect superadded. The graft was not wholly successful. A flavour of the old acrid sloe was always perceptible in the plum.

The following letter was received by Dr. Hoggan in reply to a letter to Mr. Carlyle concerning Vivisection:

“Mr. Carlyle has received your letter, and has read it carefully. He bids me say, that ever since he was a boy when he read the account of Majendie’s atrocities, he has never thought of the practice of vivisecting animals but with horror. I may mention that I have heard him speak of it in the strongest terms of disgust long before there was any speech about public agitation on the subject. He believes that the reports about the good results said to be obtained from the practice of vivisection to be immensely exaggerated; with the exception of certain experiments by Harvey and certain others by Sir Charles Bell, he is not aware of any conspicuous good that has resulted from it. But even supposing the good results to be much greater than Mr. Carlyle believes they are, and apart too from the shocking pain inflicted on the helpless animals operated upon, he would still think the practice so brutalising to the 539operators that he would earnestly wish the law on the subject to be altered, so as to make Vivisection even in Institutions like that with which you are connected a most rare occurrence, and when practised by private individuals an indictable offence.

“You are not sure that the operators on living animals ‘can be counted on your fingers.’ Mr. Carlyle with an equal share of certainty believes Vivisection and other kindred experiments on living animals to be much more largely practised, and that they are by no means uncommonly undertaken by doctors’ apprentices and ‘other miserable persons.’

“You are mistaken if you look upon the Times as a mirror of virtue; on this very subject when it at first began to be publicly discussed last winter, it printed a letter from ... which your letter itself would prove to be altogether composed of falsehoods.

“With Mr. Carlyle’s compliments and good wishes,

Mr. Carlyle supported our Anti-vivisection Society from the outset, for which I was very grateful to him; but having promised to join our first important deputation to the Home Office, to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission, he failed at the last moment to put in an appearance, having learned that Cardinal Manning was to be also present. I was told that he said he would not appear in public with the Cardinal, who was, he thought, “the chief emissary of Beelzebub in England!” When this was repeated to me, my remark was:—“Infidels is riz! Time was, when Cardinals would not appear in public with infidels!”

Nothing has surprised me more in reading the memoirs and letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle than the small interest 540either of them seems to have felt in the great subjects which formed the life-work of their many illustrious visitors. While humbler folk who touched the same circles were vehemently attracted, or else repelled, by the political, philosophical and theological theories and labours of such men as Mazzini, Mill, Colenso, Jowett, Martineau and Darwin, and every conversation and almost every letter contained new facts, or animated discussions regarding them, the Carlyles received visits from these great men continually, with (it would seem) little or no interest in their aims or views one way or the other, in approval or disapproval; and wrote and talked much more seriously about the delinquencies of their own maidservants, and the great and never-to-be-sufficiently-appealed-against cock and hen nuisance.

I had known Cardinal Manning in Rome about 1861 or 1863 when he was “Monsignor Manning,” and went a little into English society, resplendent in a beautiful violet robe. He was very busy in those days making converts among English young ladies, and one with whom we were acquainted, the daughter of a celebrated authoress, fell into his net. He had, at all times, a gentle way of ridiculing English doings and prejudices which was no doubt telling. One of the stories he told me was of an Italian sacristan asking him “what was the Red Prayer Book which all the English tourists carried about and read so devoutly in the churches?” (of course Murray’s Hand-books).^[25]

541A few years afterwards when he had returned to England as Archbishop of Westminster, I met him pretty frequently at Miss Stanley’s house in Grosvenor Crescent. He there attacked me cheerfully one evening: “Miss Cobbe I have found out something against you. I have discovered that Voltaire was part-owner of a Slave-ship!”

“I beg you to believe,” said I, “that I have no responsibility whatever respecting Voltaire! But I would ask your Grace, whether it be not true that Las Casas, the saintly Dominican, founded Negro Slavery in America?” A Church of England friend coming up and laughing, I discharged a second barrel: “And was not the Protestant Saint, Newton of Olney,—much worse than all,—the Captain of a Slave-ship?”^[26]

One evening at this pleasant house I was standing on the rug in one of the rooms talking to Mr. Matthew Arnold and two or three other acquaintances of the same set. The Archbishop, on entering shook hands with each of us, and we were all talking in the usual easy, sub-humorous, London way when a tall military-looking man, a Major G., came in, and seeing Manning, walked straight up to him, went down on one knee and kissed his ring! A bomb falling amongst us would scarcely have been more startling; and Manning, Englishman as he was to the backbone under his fine Roman feathers, was obviously disconcerted, though dignified as ever.

In a letter to a friend dated Feb. 19th, 1867, I find I said:

“I had an amusing conversation with Archbishop Manning the other night at Miss Stanley’s. He was most good-humoured, coming up to me as I was talking to Sir C. Trevelyan, about Rome, and saying ‘I am glad you think of going to Rome next winter, Miss Cobbe. It proves you expect the Pope to be firmly established there still.’ We had rather a 542long talk about Passaglia who he says has recanted,—[a fact I heard strongly contradicted later.] Mr. J. (now Sir H. J.) came behind him in the midst of our talk and almost pitched the Archbishop on me, with such a push as I never saw given in a drawing-room! The Dean and Lady Augusta came in later, and she asked eagerly: ‘Where was Manning?’ having never seen him. He had gone away, so I told her of the enthusiastic meeting which had afforded a spectacle to us all an hour before, between him and Archdeacon Denison. It was quite a scene of ecclesiastical reconciliation; a ‘Reunion of Christendom!’ (They had been told each that the other was in the adjoining room, and Archdeacon Denison literally rushed with both hands outspread to meet the Cardinal, whom he had not seen since his conversion.)”

In later years, I received at least half-a-dozen notes from time to time from his Eminence asking for details of our Anti-vivisection work, and exhibiting his anxiety to master the facts on which he proposed to speak at our Meetings. Here are some of these notes:—

“I should be much obliged if you would send me some recent facts or utterances of the Mantegazza kind, for the meeting at Lord Shaftesbury’s. I have for a long time lost all reckoning from overwork, and need to be posted up.

“I can assure you that my slowness in answering your letter has not arisen from any diminution of care on Vivisection. 543I was never better able to understand it, for I have been for nearly three weeks in pain day and night from neuralgia in the right arm, which makes writing difficult.

“I have not seen Mr. Holt’s Bill, and I do not know what it aims at.

“Before I can say anything, I wish to be fully informed. The Bill of last year does not content me.

“But we must take care not to weaken what we have gained. I hope to stay here over Sunday, and should be much obliged if you could desire someone to send me a copy of Mr. Holt’s Bill.

“Has sufficient organised effort been made to enforce Mr. Cross’s Act?

“I will attend the meeting of the 26th unless hindered by some unforeseen necessity, but I must ask you to send me a brief. I am so driven by work that for some time I have fallen behind your proceedings. Send me one or two points marked and I will read them up.

“My mind is more than ever fixed on this subject.

“For the last three weeks I have been kept to the house by one of my yearly colds; but if possible I will be present at the Meeting of the Society. If I should be unable to be there I will write a letter.

544“I clearly see that the proposed Physiological and Pathological Institute would be centre and sanction of ever advancing Vivisection.

“I hope you are recovering health and strength by your rest in the country?

“My last days have been so full that I have not been able to write. I thank you for your letter, and for the contents of it. The highest counsel is always the safest and best, cost us what it may. We may take the cost as the test of its rectitude.

“I hope you will go on writing against this inflation of vain glory calling itself Science.

At no less than seven of our annual Meetings (at one of which he presided) did Cardinal Manning make speeches. All these I have myself reprinted in an ornamental pamphlet to be obtained at 20, Victoria Street. The reasons for his adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, were, I am sure, mainly moral and humane; but I think an incident which occurred in Rome not long before our campaign began may have impressed on his mind a regret that the Catholic Church had hitherto done nothing on behalf of the lower animals, and a desire to take part himself in a humane crusade and so rectify its position before the Protestant world.

Pope Pio IX. had been addressed by the English in Rome through Lord Ampthill, (then Mr. Odo Russell, our representative there)—with a request for permission to found a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome; where, (as all 545the world knows) it was almost as deplorably needed as at Naples. After a considerable delay, the formal reply through the proper Office, was sent to Mr. Russell refusing the (indispensable) permission. The document conveying this refusal expressly stated that “a Society for such a purpose could not be sanctioned in Rome. Man owed duties to his fellow men; but he owed no duties to the lower animals therefore, though such societies might exist in Protestant countries they could not be allowed to be established in Rome.”

The late Lord Arthur Russell, coming back from Italy to England just after this event, told me of it with great detail, and assured me that he had seen the Papal document in his brother’s possession; and that if I chose to publish the matter in England, he would guarantee the truth of the story at any time. I did very much choose to publish it, thinking it was a thing which ought to be proclaimed on the housetops; and I repeated it in seven or eight different publications, ranging from the Quarterly Review to the Echo. Soon after this, if I remember rightly, began the Anti-vivisection movement, and almost immediately when the Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection (afterwards called the Victoria Street Society) was founded, by Dr. Hoggan and myself, Cardinal Manning gave us his name and active support. He took part in our first Deputation to the Home Office, and spoke at our first meeting, which was held on the 10th June, 1876, at the Westminster Palace Hotel. On that occasion, when it came to the Cardinal’s turn to speak, he began at once to say that “Much misapprehension existed as to the attitude of his Church on the subject of duty to animals.” [As he said this, with his usual clear, calm, deliberate enunciation, he looked me straight in the face and I looked at him!] He proceeded to say: “It was true that man owed no duty 546directly to the brutes, but he owed it to God, whose creatures they are, to treat them mercifully.”

This was, I considered a very good way of reconciling adhesion to the Pope’s doctrine, with humane principles; and I greatly rejoiced that such a mezzo-termine could be put forward on authority. Of course in my private opinion the Cardinal’s ethics were theoretically untenable, seeing that if it were possible to conceive of such a thing as a creature made by a man, (as people in the thirteenth century believed that Arnaldus de Villa-Nova had made a living man), or even such a thing as a creature made by the Devil,—that most wretched being would still have a right to be spared pain if he were sensitive to pain; and would assuredly be a proper object of measureless compassion. That a dog or horse is a creature of God; that its love and service to us come of God’s gracious provisions for us; that the animal is unoffending to its Creator, while we are suppliants for forgiveness for our offences; all these are true and tender reasons for additional kindness and care for these our dumb fellow-creatures. But they are not (as the Cardinal’s argument would seem to imply) the only reasons for showing mercy towards them.

Nevertheless it was a great step,—I may say an historical event,—that a principle practically including universal humanity to the lower animals, should have been enunciated publicly and formally by a “Prince of the Church” of Rome. That Cardinal Manning was not only the first great Roman prelate to lay down any such principle, but that he far outran many of his contemporaries and co-religionists in so doing, has become painfully manifest this year (1894) from the numerous letters from priests which have appeared in the Tablet and Catholic Times, bearing a very different complexion. Cardinal Manning repeated almost verbatim the same explanation of his own standpoint in his speech on 547March 9th, 1887, when he occupied the chair at our Annual Meeting. He said:

“It is perfectly true that obligations and duties are between moral persons, and therefore the lower animals are not susceptible of those moral obligations which we owe to one another; but we owe a seven-fold obligation to the Creator of those animals. Our obligation and moral duty is to Him who made them, and, if we wish to know the limit and the broad outline of our obligation, I say at once it is His Nature and His perfections; and, among those perfections, one is most profoundly that of eternal mercy. (Hear, hear.) And, therefore, although a poor mule or a poor horse is not indeed a moral person, yet the Lord and Maker of that mule and that horse is the highest law-giver, and His Nature is a law to Himself. And, in giving a dominion over His creatures to man, He gave them subject to the condition that they should be used in conformity to His own perfections, which is His own law, and, therefore, our law.”

On the first occasion a generous Roman Catholic nobleman present gave me £20 to have the Cardinal’s speech translated into Italian and widely circulated in Italy.

I have good reason to believe that when Cardinal Manning went to Rome after the election of Leo XIII., he spoke earnestly to his Holiness on the subject of cruelty to animals generally in Italy, and especially concerning Vivisection, and that he understood the Pope to agree with him and sanction his attitude. I learned this from a private source, but his Eminence referred to it quite unmistakeably in his speech at Lord Shaftesbury’s house on the 21st June, 1882, as follows:—

“I am somewhat concerned to say it, but I know that an impression has been made that those whom I represent look, if not with approbation, at least with great indulgence, at the practice of Vivisection. I grieve to say that abroad there are a great many (whom I beg to say I do not 548represent) who do favour the practice; but this I do protest, that there is not a religious instinct in nature, nor a religion of nature, nor is there a word in revelation, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament, nor is there to be found in the great theology which I do represent, no, nor in any Act of the Church of which I am a member; no, nor in the lives and utterances of any one of those great servants of that Church who stand as examples, nor is there an authoritative utterance anywhere to be found in favour of Vivisection. There may be the chatter, the prating, and the talk of those who know nothing about it. And I know what I have stated to be the fact, for some years ago I took a step known to our excellent secretary, and brought the subject under the notice and authority where alone I could bring it. And those before whom it was laid soon proved to have been profoundly ignorant of the outlines of the alphabet even of Vivisection. They believed entirely that the practice of surgery and the science of anatomy owed everything to the discoveries of vivisectors. They were filled to the full with every false impression, but when the facts were made known to them, they experienced a revulsion of feeling.”

Cardinal Manning also, (as I happen likewise to know) made a great effort about 1878 or 1879, to induce the then General of the Franciscans, to support the Anti-vivisection movement for love of St. Francis, and his tenderness to animals. In this attempt, however, Cardinal Manning must have been entirely unsuccessful, as no modern Franciscan that ever I have heard of, has stirred a finger on behalf of animals anywhere, or given his name to any Society for protecting them, either from vulgar or from scientific cruelty. Knowing this, I confess to feeling some impatience when the name of St. Francis and his amiable fondness for birds and beasts is perpetually flaunted whenever the lack of common humanity to animals visible in Catholic countries happens to be mentioned. It is a very small matter that a Saint, six 549hundred years ago, sang with nightingales and fed wolves, if the monks of his own Order and the priests of the Church which has canonised him, never warn their flocks that to torment God’s creatures is even a venial sin, and when forced to notice barbarous cruelties to a brute, invariably reply, “Non è Cristiano,” as if all claims to compassion were dismissed by that consideration!

The answer of the General of the Franciscans to Cardinal Manning’s touching appeal was,—“that he had consulted his doctor and that his doctor assured him that no such thing as Vivisection was ever practised in Italy!”

I was kindly permitted to call at Archbishop’s House and see Cardinal Manning several times; and I find the following little record of one of my first visits in a letter to my friend, written the same, or next day:—

“I had a very interesting interview with the Cardinal. I was shown into a vast, dreary dining-room quite monastic in its whitey-brown walls, poverty-stricken furniture, crucifix, and pictures of half-a-dozen Bishops who did not exhibit the ‘Beauty of Holiness.’ The Cardinal received me most kindly, and said he was so glad to see me, and that he was much better in health after a long illness. He is not much changed. It was droll to sit talking tête-à-tête with a man with a pink octagon on his venerable head, and various little scraps of scarlet showing here and there to remind one that ‘Grattez’ the English gentleman and you will find the Roman Cardinal! He told me, really with effusion, that his heart was in our work; and he promised to go to the Meeting to-morrow.... I told him we all wished him to take the chair. He said it would be much better for a layman like Lord Coleridge to do so. I said, ‘I don’t think you know the place you hold in English, (I paused and added avec intention,) Protestant estimation’! He laughed very good-humouredly and said: ‘I think I do, very well.’”

550At the Meeting on the following day when he did take the chair, I had opportunities as Hon. Sec., of which I did not fail to avail myself, of a little quiet conversation with his Eminence before the proceedings.

I spoke of the moral results of Darwinism on the character and remarked how paralyzing was the idea that Conscience was merely an hereditary instinct fixed in the brain by the interests of the tribe, and in no sense the voice of God in the heart or His law graven on the “fleshly tablets.” He abounded in my sense, and augured immeasurable evils from the general adoption of such a philosophy. I asked him what was the Catholic doctrine of the origin of Souls? He answered, promptly and emphatically: “O, that each one is a distinct creation of God.”

The last day on which His Eminence attended a Committee Meeting in Victoria Street I had a little conversation with him as usual, after business was over; and reminded him that on every occasion when he had previously attended, we had had our beloved President, Lord Shaftesbury present. “Shall I tell your Eminence,” I asked, “what Mrs. F.” (now Lady B.) “told me Lord Shaftesbury said to her shortly before he died, about our Committees here? He said that ‘if our Society had done nothing else but bring you and him together, and make you sit and work at the same table for the same object, it would have been well worth while to have founded it!’” “Did Lord Shaftesbury say that?” said the Cardinal, with a moisture in his eyes, “Did he say that? I loved Lord Shaftesbury!”

And these, I reflected, were the men whom narrow bigots of both creeds, looked on as the very chiefs of opposing camps and bitter enemies! The one rejoiced at an excuse for meeting the other in friendly co-operation! The other said as his last word: “I loved him!”

551I was greatly touched by this little scene, and going straight from it to the house of the friend who had told me of Lord Shaftesbury’s remark, I naturally described it to her and to Mr. Lowell, who was taking tea with us. “Ah, yes!” Lady B. said,—“I remember it well, and I could show you the very tree in the park where we were sitting when Lord Shaftesbury made that remark. But” (she added) “why did you not tell the Cardinal that he included you? What Lord Shaftesbury said was, that ‘the Society had brought the Cardinal and you and himself to work together.’” Mr. Lowell was interested in all this, and the evidence it afforded of the width of mind of the great philanthropist, so often supposed to be “a narrow Evangelical.”

Alas! he also has “gone over to the majority.” I met him often and liked him (as every one did) extremely. Though in so many ways different, he had some of Mr. Gladstone’s peculiar power of making every conversation wherein he took part interesting; of turning it off dusty roads into pleasant paths. He had not in the smallest degree that tiresome habit of giving information instead of conveying impressions, which makes some worthy people so unspeakably fatiguing as companions. I had once the privilege of sitting between him and Lord Tennyson when they carried on an animated conversation, and I could see how much the great Poet was delighted with the lesser one; who was also a large-hearted Statesman; a silver link between two great nations.

I shall account it one of the chief honours which have fallen to my lot that Tennyson asked leave, through his son, to pay me a visit. Needless to say I accepted the offer with gratitude and, fortunately, I was at home, in our little house in Cheyne Walk, when he called on me. He sat for a long time over my fire, and talked of poetry; of the share melodious words ought to have in it; of the hatefulness of 552scientific cruelty, against which he was going to write again; and of the new and dangerous phases of thought then apparent. Much that he said on the latter subject was, I think, crystallised in his Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later. After he had risen to go and I had followed him to the stairs, I returned to my room and said from my heart, “Thank God!” The great poem which had been so much to me for half a lifetime, was not spoiled; the Man and the Poet were one. Nothing that I had now seen and heard of him in the flesh jarred with what I had known of him in the spirit.

After this first visit I had the pleasure of meeting Lord Tennyson several times and of making Lady Tennyson’s charming acquaintance; the present Lord Tennyson being exceedingly kind and friendly to me in welcoming me to their house. On one occasion when I met Lord Tennyson at the house of a mutual friend, he told me, (with an innocent surprise which I could not but find diverting,) that a certain great Professor had been positively angry and rude to him about his lines in the Children’s Hospital concerning those who “carve the living hound”! I tried to explain to him the fury of the whole clique at the discovery that the consciences of the rest of mankind has considerably outstepped theirs in the matter of humanity and that while they fancied themselves, (in his words,) “the heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of Time,” it was really in the Dark Ages, as regarded humane sentiment,—or at least one or two centuries past,—in which they lingered; practising the Art of Torture on beasts, as men did on men in the sixteenth century. I also tried to explain to him that his ideal of a Vivisector with red face and coarse hands was quite wrong, and as false as the representation of Lady Macbeth as a tall and masculine woman. Lady Macbeth must have been small, thin and concentrated, not a big, bony, conscientious Scotch woman; and 553Vivisectors (some of them at all events) are polished and handsome gentlemen, with peculiarly delicate fingers (for drawing out nerves, &c., as Cyon describes).

Lord Tennyson from the very first beginning of our Anti-vivisection movement, in 1874, to the hour of his death, never once failed to append his name to every successive Memorial and Petition,—and they were many,—which I, and my successors, sent to him; and he accepted and held our Hon. Membership and afterwards the Vice-Presidency of our Society from first to last.

The last time I saw Lord Tennyson was one day in London after I had taken luncheon at his house. When I rose to leave the table, and he shook hands with me at the door as we were parting, as we supposed, for that season; he said to me: “Good-Bye, Miss Cobbe—Fight the good Fight. Go on! Fight the good Fight.” I saw him no more; but I shall do his bidding, please God, to the end.

I shall insert here two letters which I received from Lord Tennyson which, though trifling in themselves, I prize as testimonies of his sympathy and goodwill. I am fortunately able to add to them two papers of some real interest,—the contemporary estimate of Tennyson’s first poems by his friends, the Kembles; and the announcement of the death of Arthur Hallam by his friend John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble. They have come into my possession with a vast mass of family and other papers given me by Mrs. Kemble several years ago, and belong to a series of letters, marvellously long and closely written, by John Kemble, during and after his romantic expedition to Spain along with the future Archbishop Trench and the other young enthusiasts of 1830. The way in which John Mitchell Kemble speaks of his friend Alfred Tennyson’s Poems is satisfactory, but much more so is the beautiful testimony he renders to the character of Hallam. It is touching, and uplifting too, to 554read the rather singular words “of a holier heart,” applied to the subject of “In Memoriam,” by his young companion.

“I have subscribed my name, and I hope that it may be of some use to your cause.

“My wife is grateful to you for remembrance of her, and

“I thank you for your essay, which I found very interesting, though perhaps somewhat too vehement to serve your purpose. Have you seen that terrible book by a Swiss (reviewed in the Spectator) Ayez Pitié? Pray pardon my not answering you before. I am so harried with letters and poems from all parts of the world, that my friends often have to wait for an answer.

“I am sorry to say that I shall not be in London the 21st, so that I cannot be present at your meeting. Many thanks for asking me. My father has been suffering from a bad attack of gout, and does not feel inclined to write more about Vivisection. You have, as you know, his warmest good wishes in all your great struggle. When 555are we to see you again? Can you not pay us a visit at Haslemere this summer?

Extract from letter from John M. Kemble to Fanny Kemble. No date. In packet of 1830–1833:—

“I am very glad that you like Tennyson’s Poems; if you had any poetry in you, you could not help it; for the general system of criticism, and the notion that a poet is to be appreciated by everybody, if he be a poet, are mighty fallacies. It was only the High Priest who was privileged to enter the Holy of Holies; and so it is with that other Holy of Holies, no less sacred and replete with divinity, a great poet’s mind: therein no vulgar foot may tread. To meet this objection, it is often said that all men appreciate, &c., &c., Shakespeare and Milton, &c. To this I answer by a direct denial. Not one man in a hundred thousand cares three straws for Milton; and though from being a dramatic Poet Shakespeare must be better understood, I believe I may say that not one in a hundred thousand feels all that is to be felt in him. There is no man who has done so much as Tennyson to express poetical feeling by sound; Titian has done as much with colours. Indeed, I believe no poet to have lived since Milton, so perfect in his form, except Göthe. In this matter, Shelley and Keats and Byron, even Wordsworth, have been found wanting. Coleridge expresses the greatest admiration for Charles Tennyson’s sonnets; we have sent him Alfred’s poems, which, I am sure, will delight him.”

Extract from letter from John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble:—

“It is with feelings of inexpressible pain that I announce to you the death of poor Arthur Hallam, who expired 556suddenly from an attack of apoplexy at Vienna, on the 15th of last month. Though this was always feared by us as likely to occur, the shock has been a bitter one to bear: and most of all so to the Tennysons, whose sister Emily he was to have married. I have not yet had the courage to write to Alfred. This is a loss which will most assuredly be felt by this age, for if ever man was born for great things he was. Never was a more powerful intellect joined to a purer and holier heart; and the whole illuminated with the richest imagination, the most sparkling yet the kindest wit. One cannot lament for him that he is gone to a far better life, but we weep over his coffin and wonder that we cannot be consoled. The Roman epitaph on two young children: Sibi met ipsis dolorem abstulerunt, suis reliquere (from themselves they took away pain, to their friends they left it!) is always present to my mind, and somehow the miserable feeling of loneliness comes over one even though one knows that the dead are happier than the living. His poor father was with him only. They had been travelling together in Hungary and were on their return to England; but there had been nothing whatever to announce the fatal termination of their journey; indeed, bating fatigue, Arthur had been unusually well. Our other friends, though all mourning for him as if he had been our brother, are well.”

In my chapter on Italy I have written some pages concerning Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and printed two or three kind letters from him to me. It is a great privilege, I now feel, to have known, even in such slight measure these two great poets. But what an unspeakable blessing and honour it has been for England all through the Victorian Age to have for her representatives and teachers in the high realm of poetry, two such men as Tennyson and Browning; men of immaculate honour, blameless and beautiful lives, and lofty and pure inspiration! Not one word which either has ever 557published need be blotted out by any recording angel, and, widely different as they were, their high doctrine was the same. The one tells us that “good” will be “the final goal of ill”; the other that—

I have had also the good fortune to find other English poets ready to sympathise with me on the subject of Vivisection. Sir Henry Taylor wrote many letters to me upon it and called my attention to his own lines which go so deep into the philosophy of the question, and which I have since quoted so often;

Here is one of his notes to me:—

“I return your papers that they may not be wasted. I wish you all the success you deserve, which is all you can desire. But I can do nothing. My hands are full here, and my pockets are empty.

“Two months ago I succeeded in forming a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty in this place.

“We have ordered prosecutions every week since, and have obtained convictions in every case. And these local operations are all that I can undertake or assist.

He was also actively interested in an effort to improve the method of slaughtering cattle by using a mask with a fixed hole in the centre, through which a long nail may be easily 558driven, straight through the exact suture of the skull to the brain, causing instant death. Sir Henry specially approved the masks for this purpose, made, I believe, under his own direction at Bournemouth, by Mr. Mendon, a saddler at Lansdowne.

Mr. Lewis Morris has also written some beautiful and striking poems touching on the subject of scientific cruelty, and I have reason to hope that a younger man, who many of us look upon as the poet of the future in England, Mr. William Watson, is entirely on the same side. In short, if the Priests of Science are against us, the Prophets of Humanity, the Poets, are with us in this controversy, almost to a man.

It will be seen that we had Politicians, Historians, and thinkers of various parties among our friends in London; but there were no Novelists except that very agreeable woman Miss Jewsbury and the two Misses Betham Edwards. Mr. Anthony Trollope I knew but slightly. I had also some acquaintance with a very popular novelist, then a young man, who was introduced in the full flush of his success to Mr. Carlyle, whereon the “Sage of Chelsea” greeted him with the encouraging question, “Well, Mr. —— when do you intend to begin to do something sairious?”

With Mr. Wilkie Collins I exchanged several friendly letters concerning some information he wanted for one of his books. The following letter from him exhibits the “Sairius” spirit, at all events (as Mr. Carlyle might admit), in which he set about spinning the elaborate web of his exciting tales.

“I most sincerely thank you for your kind letter and for the pamphlets which preceded it. The ‘Address’ seems 559to me to possess the very rare merit of forcible statement combined with a moderation of judgment which sets a valuable example, not only to our enemies, but to some of our friends. As to the ‘Portrait,’ I feel such a strong universal interest in it that I must not venture on criticism. You have given me exactly what I most wanted for the purpose that I have in view—and you have spared me time and trouble in the best and kindest of ways. If I require further help, you shall see that I am gratefully sensible of the help that has been already given.

“I am writing to a very large public both at home and abroad; and it is quite needless (when I am writing to you) to dwell on the importance of producing the right impression by means which keep clear of terrifying and revolting the ordinary reader. I shall leave the detestable cruelties of the laboratory to be merely inferred, and, in tracing the moral influence of those cruelties on the nature of the man who practices them, and the result as to his social relations with the persons about him, I shall be careful to present him to the reader as a man not infinitely wicked and cruel, and to show the efforts made by his better instincts to resist the inevitable hardening of the heart, the fatal stupefying of all the finer sensibilities, produced by the deliberately merciless occupations of his life. If I can succeed in making him, in some degree, an object of compassion as well as of horror, my experience of readers of fiction tells me that the right effect will be produced by the right means.

Of another order of acquaintances was that excellent man Mr. James Spedding; also Mr. Babbage, (in whose horror of street music I devoutly sympathised); and Mr. James Fergusson the architect, in whose books and ideas generally I found great interest. He avowed to me his opinion that the ancient Jews were never builders of stone edifices, and that all the relics of stone buildings in Palestine were the work 560either of Tyrians or of the Idumean Herod, or of other non-Jewish rulers. His conversation was always most instructive to me, and I rejoiced when I had the opportunity of writing a long review (for Fraser I think) of his Tree and Serpent Worship; with which he was so well pleased that he made me a present of the magnificent volume, of which I believe only a hundred copies were printed. Mr. Fergusson taught me to see that the whole civilization of a country has depended historically on the stones with which it happens naturally to be furnished. If these stones be large and hard and durable like those of Egypt, we find grand, everlasting monuments and statues made of them. If they be delicate and beautiful like Pentelic marble, we have the Parthenon. If they be plain limestone or freestone as in our northern climes, richness of form and detail take the place of greater simplicity, and we have the great cathedrals of England, France and Germany. Where there is no good stone, only brick, we may have fine mansions, but not great temples, and where there is neither clay for bricks, nor good stone for building, the natives can erect no durable edifices, and consequently have no places to be adorned with statues and paintings and all the arts which go with them. I do not know whether I do justice to Mr. Fergusson in giving this résumé of his lesson, but it is my recollection of it, and to my thinking worth recording.

One of the friends of whom we saw most in London was Sir William Boxall, whose exquisite artistic taste was specially congenial to my friend, and his varied conversation and love of his poor, dear, old dog “Garry,” to me. After Lord Coleridge’s charming obituary of him nothing need be added in the way of tribute to his character and gifts, or to the refined feeling which inspired him always. I may add, however (what the Lord Chief Justice naturally would not say on his own account), namely, that Boxall, in 561his latter years of weakness and almost constant confinement to the house, frequently told us when we went to visit him how Lord Coleridge had found time from all his labours to come frequently to sit with him and cheer him; and after a whole day spent in the hot Law Courts would dine on his old friend’s chops, and spend the evening in his dingy rooms in Welbeck Street. Here is a letter from Sir William which I happen to have preserved. It refers to an article I had written in the Echo on the death of Landseer:—

“Your sympathetic notice of my old friend Landseer and his friends has delighted me—a grain of such feeling is worth a newspaper load of worn-out criticism. I thank you very sincerely for it.

“I should have called upon you, but I have been shut up with the cold which threatened me when I last saw you.

“There is no hope of my getting to Dolgelly. It will be a great escape for Miss Lloyd, for I am utterly worn out.”

I find that the most common opinion about Lord Shaftesbury is, that he was an excellent and most disinterested man, who did a vast amount of good in his time among the poor, and in the factories and on behalf of the climbing-boy sweeps, but that he was somewhat narrowminded; and dry, if not stern in character. Perhaps some would add that his extreme Evangelicalism had in it a tinge of Calvinistic bigotry. I shared very much such ideas about him till one day in 1875, when I had gone to Stanhope Street to consult Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, my unfailing helpers and advisers, about some matter connected with Lord Henniker’s Bill then before Parliament,—for the restriction 562of Vivisection. After explaining my difficulty, Lady Mount-Temple said, “We must consult Lord Shaftesbury about this matter. Come with me now to his house.” I yielded to my kind friend, but not without hesitation, fearing that Lord Shaftesbury would, in the first place, be too much absorbed in his great philanthropic undertakings to spare attention to the wrongs of the brutes; and, in the second, that his religious views were too strict to allow him to co-operate with such a heretic as I, even if (as I was assured) he would tolerate my intrusion. How widely astray from the truth I was as regarded his sentiments in both ways, the sequel proved. He had already, it appeared, taken great interest in the Anti-vivisection controversy then beginning, and entered into it with all the warmth of his heart; not as something taking him off from service to mankind, but as apart of his philanthropy. He always emphatically endorsed my view; that, if we could save Vivisectors from persisting in the sin of Cruelty, we should be doing them a moral service greater than to save them from becoming pickpockets or drunkards. He also felt what I may call passionate pity for the tortured brutes. He loved dogs, and always had a large beautiful Collie lying under his writing-table; and was full of tenderness to his daughters’ Siamese cat, and spoke of all animals with intimate knowledge and sympathy. As to my heresies, though he knew of them from the first, they never interfered with his kindness and consideration for me, which were such as I can never remember without emotion.

I shall speak in its place in another chapter of the share he took as leader and champion of our party in all the subsequent events connected with the Anti-vivisection agitation. I wish here only to give, (if it may be possible for me), some small idea to the reader of what that good man really was, and to remove some of the absurd misconceptions current 563concerning him. For example. He was no bigot as to Sabbatarian observances. I told him once that I belonged to the Society for opening Museums on Sundays. He said: “I think you are mistaken—the working men do not wish it. See! I have here the result of a large enquiry among their Trades Unions and clubs. Nearly all of them deprecate the change. But I am on this point not at all of the same opinion as most of my friends. I have told them (and they have often been a little shocked at it), that I think if a lawyer has a brief for a case on Monday and has had no time to study it on Saturday, he is quite justified in reading it up on Sunday after church.”

Neither did he share the very common bigotry of teetotalism. He said to me, “The teetotallers have added an Eleventh Commandment, and think more of it than of all the rest.” Again, when (as is well known) Lord Palmerston left the choice of Bishops for many years practically in his hands (I believe that seven owed their sees to him), and he, of course, selected Evangelical clergymen who would uphold what he considered to be vital religious truth, he was yet able to concur heartily in the appointment of Arthur Stanley to the Deanery of Westminster. He told me that Lord Palmerston had written to him before inviting Dr. Stanley, and said that he would not do it if he, (Lord Shaftesbury) disapproved; and that he had answered that he was well aware that Dr. Stanley’s theological views differed widely from his own, but that he was an admirable man and a gentleman, with special suitability for this post and a claim to some such high office; and that he cordially approved Lord Palmerston’s choice. I do not suppose that Dean Stanley ever knew of this possible veto in Lord Shaftesbury’s hands, but he entertained the profoundest respect for him, and expressed it in the little poem which he wrote about him (of which Lord Shaftesbury gave me an MS. copy), which 564appears in Dean Stanley’s biography. He compares the aged philanthropist to “a great rock’s shadow in a weary land.”

It was a charge against Howard and some other great philanthropists that, while exhibiting the enthusiasm of humanity on the largest scale they failed to show it on a small one, and were scantily kind to those immediately around them. Nothing could be less true of Lord Shaftesbury. While the direction of a score of great charitable undertakings rested on him, and his study was flooded with reports, Bills before Parliament and letters by the hundred,—he would remember to perform all sorts of little kindnesses to individuals having no special claim on him; and never by any chance did he omit an act of courtesy. No more perfectly high-bred gentleman ever graced the old school; and no young man, I may add, ever had a fresher or warmer heart. Indeed, I know not where I should look among old or young for such ready and full response of feeling to each call for pity, for sympathy, for indignation, and, I may add, for the enjoyment of humour, the least gleam of which caught his eye a moment. He was always particularly tickled with the absurdities involved in the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, and whenever a clergyman or a bishop did anything he much disapproved, he was sure to stigmatize it from that point of view. One day he was giving me a rather long account of some Deputation which had waited on him and endeavoured to bully him. As he described the scene: “There they stood in a crowd in the room, and I said to them; Gentlemen! I’ll see you.”... (Good Heavens! I thought: Where did he say he would see them?)—“I’ll see you at the bottom of the Red Sea before I’ll do it!” The revulsion was so ludicrous and the allusion to the “Red Sea” instead of “another place,” so characteristic, that I broke 565into a peal of laughter which, when explained, made him also laugh heartily. Another day I remember his great amusement at a story not reported, I believe, in the Times, but told me by an M.P. who was present in the House when Sir P. O. had outdone Sir Boyle Roche. He spoke of “the ingratitude of the Irish to Mr. Gladstone who had broken down the bridges which divided them from England!”

A lady whose reputation was less unblemished than might have been wished, and of whom I fought very shy in consequence, went to call on him about some business. When I saw him next he told me of her visit, and said, “When she left my study, I said to myself; ‘there goes a dashing Cyprian!’” One needed to go back a century to recall this droll old phrase. More than once he repeated, chuckling with amusement, the speech of an old beggar woman to whom he had refused alms, and who called after him, “You withered specimen of bygone philanthropy!” On another occasion when he was in the Chair at a small meeting, one of the speakers persisted in expressing over and over again his conviction that the venerable Chairman could not be expected to live long. Lord Shaftesbury turned aside to me and said sotto voce, “I declare he’s telling me I’m going to die immediately!” “There he is saying it again! Was there ever such a man?” Nobody was more awake than he to the “dodges” of interested people trying to make capital out of his religious party. A most ridiculous instance of this he described to me with great glee. At the time of the excitement (now long forgotten) about the Madiai family, Barnum actually called upon him (Lord Shaftesbury) and entreated him to allow of the Madiai being taken over to be exhibited in New York! “It would be such an affecting sight,” said Barnum, “to see real Christian Martyrs!”

As an instance of his thoughtfulness, I may mention that having one day just received a ticket for the Private View of 566the Academy, he offered it to me and I accepted it gladly, observing that since the recent death of Boxall I feared we should not have one given to us, and that my friend would be pleased to use it. “O, I am so glad!” said Lord Shaftesbury; and from that day every year till he died he never once failed to send her, addressed by himself, his tickets for each of the two annual exhibitions. When one thinks of how men who do not do in a year as much as he did in a week, would have scoffed at the idea of taking such trouble, one may estimate the good nature which prompted this over-worked man to remember such a trifle, unfailingly.

The most touching interview I ever had with him, was one of the last, in his study in Grosvenor Square, not long before his death. Our conversation had fallen on the woes and wrongs of seduced girls and ruined women; and he told me many facts which he had learned by personal investigation and visits to dreadful haunts in London. He described all he saw and heard with a compassion for the victims and yet a horror of vice and impurity, which somehow made me think of Christ and the Woman taken in adultery. After a few moments’ silence, during which we were both rather overcome, he said, “When I feel age creeping on me, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong to say it, but I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it.” No words can describe how this simple expression revealed to me the man, in his inmost spirit. He had long passed the stage of moral effort which does good as a duty, and had ascended to that wherein even the enjoyment of Heaven itself, (which of course, his creed taught him to expect immediately after death) had less attractions for him than the labour of mitigating the sorrows of earth.

I possess 280 letters and notes from Lord Shaftesbury written to me during the ten years which elapsed from 1875, when I first saw him, till his last illness in 1885. Many of 567them are merely brief notes, giving me information or advice about my work as Hon. Sec. of the Victoria Street Society, of which he was President. But many are long and interesting letters. The editor of his excellent Biography probably did not know I possessed these letters, nor did I know he was preparing Lord Shaftesbury’s Life or I should have placed them at his disposal. I can only here quote a few as characteristic, or otherwise specially interesting to me.

“Your letter is very cheering. We were right to make the experiment. We were right to test the man and the law: Cross, and his administration of it. Both have failed us, and we are bound in duty, I think, to leap over all limitations, and go in for the total abolition of this vile and cruel form of Idolatry; for idolatry it is, and, like all idolatry, brutal, degrading, and deceptive....

“May God prosper us! These ill-used and tortured animals are as much His Creatures as we are, and to say the truth, I had, in some instances, rather be the animal tortured than the man who tortured it. I should believe myself to have higher hopes, and a happier future.

“I have sent your letter to Judas of X——. I find no fault in it, but that of too much courtesy to one so lost to every consideration of feeling and truth.

“Did you know him, as I know him, you would find it difficult to restrain your pen and your tongue.”...

“Some good will come out of the discussion.

568“I have unmistakable evidence that many were deeply impressed, but adhesion to political leaders is a higher law with most Politicians than obedience to the law of truth.

“What do you think now of the Doctrine of ‘Apostolic Succession’?

“Would St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John have made such a speech as that of my Lord of P——?

“You do that Bishop too much honour. He is not worth notice.

“It is frightful to see that the open champions of Vivisection are not Bradlaugh and Mrs. B. but Bishops, ‘Fathers in God,’ and ‘Pastors’ of the People!

“We shall soon have Bradlaugh and his company claiming the Apostolical Succession; and if that succession be founded on truth, mercy, and love, with as good a right as Dr. G., Dr. M. or D.D. anything else.

“Your letter has crushed (if such a hard substance can be crushed) his Lordship of C....

The next letter is in acknowledgment of the following verses which I had sent to him on his Eightieth Birthday. They were repeated by the late Chamberlain of the City of London, Sir Benjamin Scott, in his oration on the presentation of the Freedom of the City to Lord Shaftesbury. I print the letter, (though all too kind in its expression about my poor 569verses,) on account of the deeply interesting review of his own life which it contains:—

“Had I not known your handwriting, I should never have guessed, either that you were the writer of the verses, or that I was the subject of them.

“Had I judged them simply by their ability and force, I might have ascribed them to the true Author; but it required the envelope, and the ominous word ‘eighty,’ to justify me in applying them to myself.

“They both touched and gratified me, but I will tell you the origin of my public career, which you have been so kind as to commend. It arose while I was a boy at Harrow School, about, I should think, fourteen years of age—an event occurred (the details of which I may give you some other day), which brought painfully before me the scorn and neglect manifested towards the Poor and helpless. I was deeply affected; but, for many years afterwards, I acted only on feeling and sentiment. As I advanced in life, all this grew up to a sense of duty; and I was convinced that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me, to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who had none to help them.

“I entered Parliament in 1826, and I commenced operations in 1828, with an effort to ameliorate the conditions of lunatics, and then I passed on in a succession of attempts to grapple with other evils, and such has been my trade for more than half a century.

“Do not think for a moment that I claim any merit. If there be any doctrine that I dislike and fear more than another, it is the ‘Doctrine of Works.’ Whatever I have done has been given to me; what I have done I was enabled to do; and all happy results (if any there be) must be credited, not to the servant, but to the great Master, who led and sustained him.

571“My course, however, has raised up for me many enemies, and very few friends, but among those friends I hope that you may be numbered.

I sent him another little souvenir two years later:—

The next letter refers to my Lectures on the Duties of Women which I had just delivered.

“... I admire your Lectures. But do you not try to make, ‘the sex’ a little too pugnacious? And why do you give ‘truth’ to the men, and deny it to the women?

“If you mean by ‘truth’ abstinence from fibs, I think that the females are as good as the males. But if you mean steadiness of friendship, adherence to principles, conscientiously 572not superficially entertained, and sincerity in a good cause, why, the women are far superior.

“... Your lecture on Vivisection was admirable—we must be ‘mealy mouthed’ no longer.

“Shall you and I have a conversation on your lectures and the ‘Duties of Women’? We shall not, I believe, have much difference of opinion; perhaps none. I approve them heartily, but there are one or two expressions which, though intelligible to myself, would be greatly misconstrued by a certain portion of Englishmen.

“I could give you instances by the hundred of the wonderful success that, by a merciful Providence, has followed with our Ragged children, male and female.^[27] In fact, though after long intervals we have lost sight of a good many, we have very few cases, indeed, of the failure of our hopes and efforts.

“In thirty years we took off the streets of London, and sent to service, or provided with means of honest livelihood more than two hundred and twenty thousand ‘waifs and strays.’

“I have had a very friendly letter from Gladstone; but on reference to him for permission to publish it, he seems unwilling to assent.

“Our testimony, thank God, is cumulative for good. We may hope, and we must pray, for better things.

573“I send you Gladstone’s letter. Pray return it to me, and take care that it does not appear in print.^[28]

“I am glad that you liked the ‘Dinner.’ It was, I think, a success in showing civility to foreign friends.

Lord Shaftesbury made the following remarks about the Future State of Animals, in a very sympathizing reply to a letter I had written to him in which I mentioned to him that my dog had died:—

“I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so manifested, by dogs especially, is an emanation from the Divine essence, and, as such, it can, or rather it will never be extinguished.”^[29]

“You must not suppose that because I did not answer your letter, at the moment, I am indifferent to you or your correspondence.

574“Far from it, but when I have little to do, being almost confined to the house, I have much to write, and to get through my work, I must frequently be relieved by a recumbent posture.

“Nevertheless, by God’s mercy, I am certainly better; and I think that were we blessed with some warm, genial, weather, I should recover more rapidly.

“Bryan^[30] is a good man, he is able, diligent, zealous and has an excellent judgment. I have not been able to attend his Committee, but his reports to me show attention and good sense.

“I have left, as perhaps you have seen, the Lunacy Commission. It was at the close of 56 years of service that I did so. I dare say that you have had time to read my letter of resignation in the Times of the 8th.

“I am very glad that Miss Lloyd is determined to print those lines. They are very beautiful; and you must be sure to send a copy to Miss Marsh. She admires them as much as I do.

“The thought of Calvary^[31] is the strength that has governed all the sentiments and actions of my manhood and later life; and you can well believe that I greatly rejoice to find that one, whom I prize so highly, has kindred sympathies....

“May God prosper you.

575The most remarkable woman I have known, not excepting Mrs. Somerville (described in my chapter on Italy), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs. Beecher Stowe, was, beyond any doubt or question, my dear friend, Fanny Kemble. I have told of the droll circumstances of our first meeting at Newbridge in the early Fifties. From that time till her death in 1892, her brilliant, iridescent genius, her wit, her spirit, her tenderness, the immense “go” and momentum of her whole nature, were sources of endless pleasure to me. When I was lame, I used to feel that for days after talking with her I could almost dispense with my crutches, so much did she, literally, lift me up!

Mrs. Kemble paid us several visits here in Wales, and was perhaps even more delightful in our quiet country quarters than in London. She would sit out for many hours at a time in our beautiful old garden, which she said was to her “an idyll;” and talk of all things in heaven and earth; touching in turn every note in the gamut of emotion from sorrowful to joyous. One summer she came to us early, and thus sat daily under a great cherry tree “in the midst of the garden,” which was at the time a mass of odorous and snowy blossoms. Alas! the blossoms have returned and are blooming as I write;—but the friend sleeps under the sod in Kensal Green.

Mr. Henry James’ obituary article and Mr. Bentley’s generous-hearted letter concerning her in the Times—in rebuke of the mean and grudging notice of her which that paper had published,—seem to me to have been by far the most truthful sketches which appeared of the “grand old lioness;” as Thackeray called her. Everybody could admire, and most people a little feared her; but it needed to come very close to her and brush past her formidable thorns of irony and sarcasm, to know and love her, as she most truly deserved to be loved.

576There is always something startling and perhaps the reverse of attractive to those of us who have been brought up in the usual English way to repress our emotions, in women who have been trained reversely by histrionic life, to give all possible outwardness and vividness of expression to those same emotions. It is only when we get below both the extreme demonstrativeness on one hand, and the conventional reserve and self-restraint on the other, and meet on common ground of deep sympathies, that real friendship is established; a friendship which in my case was at once an honour and a delight.

Mrs. Kemble in her generous affection made a present to me of the MSS. of her Memoirs, which subsequently I induced her to take back, and publish herself, as her “Old Woman’s Gossip,” her Records of a Girlhood and Records of Later Life. Beside these, which, as I have said, I returned to her one after another, she gave me, and I still possess, an immense packet of her own old letters to her beloved H. S. (Harriet St. Leger) and others; and the materials of five large and thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her, extending over more than 50 years. They include whole correspondences with W. Donne, Edward Fitzgerald, Henry Greville, Mrs. Jameson, John Mitchell Kemble, George Combe, and several others; and besides these there are either one or half-a-dozen letters from almost every man and woman of eminence in England in her time. Mr. Bentley has very liberally purchased from me for publication about 100 letters from Edward Fitzgerald to Mrs. Kemble. The rest of the Mrs. Kemble’s correspondence I have, as I have mentioned, bound together in five volumes, and I do not intend to publish them. Had any of Mrs. Kemble’s “Records” remained inedited at the time of her death I should have undertaken, (as she no doubt intended me to do) the task of writing her biography. The work was, however, so fully done by herself in her long series of volumes that there was 577neither need nor room for more. I am happy to add, in conclusion, that in the arrangements I have made regarding my dear old friend’s literary remains, I have the consent and approval of her daughters.

I knew Mrs. Gaskell a little, but not enough to harmonize in my mind the woman I saw in the flesh with the books I liked so well as Mary Barton and Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras. Of Mrs. Stowe’s delightful conversation on the terrace of our villa on Bellosguardo, I have written my recollections, and recorded the glimpses I had of Mrs. Browning. I have also described Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur; our sculptor and painter friends, from the latter of whom I have just (1898) received the kindest letters and her impressive photograph; and Mary Carpenter, my leader and fellow-worker at Bristol. I must not speak here of the affection and admiration I entertain for my dear, living friend Anna Swanwick, the translator of Æschylus and Faust; and for Louisa Lee Schuyler, one of the leaders in the organization of relief in the great Civil War of America and who founded and carried to its present marvellous extent of power and usefulness the State Charities Aid Association of New York. Again, I have known in England Mdme. Bodichon (who furnished Girton with its first thousand pounds); Mrs. Josephine Butler; Mrs. Webster the classic poetess; and Mrs. Emily Pfeiffer, another poetess and very beautiful woman at whose house I once witnessed an interesting scene,—a large party of ladies and gentlemen dressed in the attire of Athenians of the Periclean age. Miss Swanwick and I, who were alone permitted to attend in English costume, were immensely impressed by the ennobling effect of the classic dress, not only on young and graceful people, but on those who were quite the reverse.

I never saw Harriet Martineau; but was so desirous of doing it that I intended to make a journey to Ambleside for 578the purpose, and with that view begged our mutual friend, the late Mrs. Hensleigh Wedgwood, to ask leave to introduce me to her. It was an unfortunate moment, and I only received the following kind message:—

“I need not say how happy I should have been to become acquainted with Miss Cobbe; but the time is past and I am only fit for old friends who can excuse my shortcomings. I have lost ground so much of late that the case is clear. I must give up all hopes of so great a pleasure. Will you say this to her and ask her to receive my kind and thankful regards, I venture to send on the grounds of our common friendships?”

Of my living, beloved and honoured friends, Mrs. William Grey, Lady Mount-Temple, Miss Shirreff, Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Caroline Stephen, Miss Julia Wedgwood, Lady Battersea, and Miss Florence Davenport Hill, I must not here speak. I have had the pleasure also of meeting that very fine woman-worker Miss Octavia Hill.

George Eliot I did not know, nor, as I have just said, did I ever meet Harriet Martineau. But with those two great exceptions I think I may boast of having come into contact with nearly all the more gifted Englishwomen of the Victorian era; and thus when I speak, as I shall do in the next chapter, of my efforts to put the claims of my sex fairly before the world, I may boast of writing with practical personal knowledge of what women are and can be, both as to character and ability.

The decade which began in 1880 brought me many sorrows. The first was the death of my second brother, Thomas Cobbe, of Easton Lyss. I loved him much for his own sweet and affectionate nature; and much, too, for the love of our mother which he shared especially with me. I was also warmly attached to his beautiful and good Scotch wife, who survived 579him only a few years; and to his dear children, who were my pets in infancy and have been almost like my own daughters ever since. My brother ought to have been a very successful and brilliant barrister, but his life was broken by the faults of others, and when in advanced years he wrote, with immense patience and research, a really valuable History of the Norman Kings (thought to be so by such competent judges as Mr. William Longman, and the Historical Society of Normandy, which asked leave to translate it), the book was practically killed by a cruel and most unfair review which attributed to him mistakes which he had not made, and refused to publish his refutation of the charge. If this review were written (as we could not but surmise) by an eminent historian, now dead, whose own book my brother had, very unwisely, ignored, I can only say it was a malicious and spiteful deed. My brother’s ambition was not strong enough to carry him over such a disappointment, and he never attempted to write again for the press, but spent his later years in the solitary study of his favourite old chronicles and his Shakespeare. A little later my eldest brother also died, leaving no children. I must be thankful at my age that the youngest, the Rector of Maulden, though five years older than I, still survives in health and vigour, rejoicing in his happy home and family of affectionate daughters. I trust yet to welcome him into the brotherhood of the pen when his great monograph on Luton Church, Historical and Descriptive, sees the light this year.

I lost also in this same decade, my earliest friend Harriet St. Leger; and a younger, very dear one, Emily Shaen. Mrs. Shaen and her admirable husband had been much drawn to me by religious sympathies; and I regarded her with more heartfelt respect, I might say reverence, than I can well express. She endured twenty years of seclusion and 580suffering, with the spirit at once of a saint and of a philosopher. Had her health enabled her to take her natural place in the world, I have always felt assured she would have been recognised as one of the ablest as well as one of the best women of the day, and more than the equal of her two gifted sisters; Catharine and Susanna Winkworth. The friendship between us was of the closest kind. I often said that I went to church to her sick-room. In her last days, when utterly crushed by incessant suffering and by the death of her beloved husband and her favourite son, she bore in whispers, to me, (she could scarcely speak for mortal weakness,) this testimony to our common faith: “I sent for you,—to tell you,—I am more sure than ever that God is Good.”

All these deaths and the heart-wearing Anti-vivisection work combined with my own increasing years to make my life in London less and less a source of enjoyment and more of strain than I could bear. In 1884 Miss Lloyd, with my entire concurrence, let our dear little house in Hereford Square to our friend, Mrs. Kemble, and we left London altogether and came to live in Wales.

CHAPTER XIX. CLAIMS OF WOMEN.

583It was not till I was actively engaged in the work of Mary Carpenter at Bristol, and had begun to desire earnestly various changes of law relating to young criminals and paupers, that I became an advocate of “Women’s Rights.” It was good old Rev. Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, New York, who, when paying us a visit, pressed on my attention the question: “Why should you not have a vote? Why should not women be enabled to influence the making of the laws in which they have as great an interest as men?”

My experience probably explains largely the indifference of thousands of women, not deficient in intelligence, in England and America to the possession of political rights. They have much anxiety to fulfil their home duties, and the notion of undertaking others, requiring (as they fully understand) conscientious enquiry and reflection, rather alarms than attracts them. But the time comes to every woman worth her salt to take ardent interest in some question which touches legislation. Then she begins to ask herself, as Mr. May asked me; “Why should the fact of being a woman, close to me the use of the plain, direct means, of helping to achieve some large public good or stopping some evil?” The timid, the indolent, the conventional will here retreat, and try to believe that it concerns men only to right the wrongs of the world in some more effectual way than by single-handed personal efforts in special cases. Others again,—and of their number was I—become deeply impressed with the need of woman’s 584voice in public affairs, and thenceforth attach themselves to the “Woman’s Cause” more or less earnestly. For my own part I confess I have been chiefly moved by reflection on the sufferings and wrongs borne by women, in great measure owing to the deconsideration they endure consequent on their political and civil disabilities. Whilst I and other happily circumstanced women, have had no immediate wrongs of our own to gall us, we should still have been very poor creatures had we not felt bitterly those of our less fortunate sisters, the robbed and trampled wives, the mothers whose children were torn from them at the bidding of a dead or living father, the daughters kept in ignorance and poverty while their brothers were educated in costly schools and fitted for honourable professions. Such wrongs as these have inspired me with the persistent resolution to do everything in my power to protect the property, the persons and the parental rights of women.

I do not think that this resolve has any necessary connection with theories concerning the equality of the sexes; and I am sure that a great deal of our force has been wasted on fruitless discussions such as: “Why has there never been a female Shakespeare?” A Celt claiming equal representation with a Saxon, or any representation at all, might just as fairly be challenged to explain why there has never been a Celtic Shakespeare, or a Celtic Tennyson? My own opinion is, that women en masse are by no means the intellectual equals of men en masse;—and whether this inequality arise from irremediable causes or from alterable circumstances of education and heredity, is not worth debating. If the nation had established an intellectual test for political equality, and admission to the franchise were confined to persons passing a given Standard; well and good. Then, no doubt, there would be (as things now stand) fifty per cent. of men who would win votes, and perhaps only thirty per cent. of women. So much may be 585freely admitted. But then that thirty per cent. of females would obtain political rights; and those who failed, would be debarred by a natural and real, not an arbitrary inferiority. Such a state of things would not present such ludicrous injustice as that which obtains,—for example,—in a parish not a hundred miles from my present abode. There is in the village in question a man universally known therein as “The Idiot;” a poor slouching, squinting fellow, who yet rents a house and can do rough field work, though he can scarcely speak intelligibly. He has a vote, of course. The owner of his house and of half the parish, who holds also the advowson of the living, is a lady who has travelled widely, understands three or four languages, and studies the political news of Europe daily in the columns of the Times. That lady, equally of course, has no vote, no power whatever to keep the representation of her county out of the hands of the demagogues naturally admired by the Idiot and his compeers. Under the regulations which create inequalities of this kind is it not rather absurd to insist perpetually, (as is the practise of our opponents,) on the intellectual inferiority of women,—as if it were really in question?

I hold, however, that whatever be our real mental rank,—to be tested thoroughly only in future generations, under changed conditions of training and heredity,—we women are the equivalents, though not the equals, of men. And to refuse a share in the law-making of a nation to the most law-abiding half of it; to exclude on all largest questions the votes of the most conscientious, temperate, religious and (above all) most merciful and tender-hearted moiety, is a mistake which cannot fail, and has not failed, to entail great evil and loss.

I wrote, as I have mentioned in Chapter XV., a great many articles, (chiefly in Fraser and Macmillan,) on women’s concerns about the years 1861–2–3: “What shall we do with our Old Maids?”; “Female Charity, Lay and 586Monastic;” “Women in Italy in 1862;” “The Education of Women;” “Social Science Congress and Women’s Part in them;” and, later, “The Fitness of Women for the Ministry of Religion.” These made me known to many women who were fighting in the woman’s cause; Miss Bessie Parkes (now Madame Belloc), Madame Bodichon, Mrs. Grey, Miss Shirreff, Mrs. Peter Taylor, Miss Becker, and others; and when Committees were formed for promoting Woman Suffrage, I was invited to join them. I did so; and frequently attended the meetings, though not regularly. We had several Members of Parliament and other gentlemen (notably Mr. Frederick Hill, brother of my old friend Recorder Hill and of Sir Rowland), who generally helped our deliberations; and many able women, among others Mrs. Augusta Webster, the poetess; and Lady Anna Gore Langton, an exceedingly sensible woman, who also held Drawing-Room Suffrage Meetings (at which I spoke) in her house. We had for secretary Miss Lydia Becker; a woman of singular political ability, for whom I had a sincere respect. Her premature death has been an incalculable loss to the women of England. She gave me the impression of one of those ill-fated people whose outward persons do not represent their inward selves. I am sure she had a large element of softness and sensitiveness in her nature, unsuspected by most of those with whom she laboured. She was a most courageous and straightforward woman, with a single eye to the great political work which she had undertaken, and which I think no one has understood so well as she.

After Miss Becker’s lamented death the great schism between Unionists and Home Rulers extended far enough to split even our Committee, (which was avowedly of no party,) into two bodies. I naturally followed my fellow-Unionist, Mrs. Fawcett when she re-organized the moiety of the Society and established an office for it in College Street, Westminster. Believing her to 587be quite the ablest woman-economist and politician in England, I entertain the hope that she may at last carry a Woman Suffrage Bill and live to see qualified single women recording their votes at Parliamentary elections. When that time arrives every one will scoff at the objections which have so long closed the “right of way,” to us of the “weaker sex.”

Beside the Committee of the Society for Woman Suffrage, I also joined for a time the Committee which,—long afterwards,—effected the splendid achievement of procuring the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act; the greatest step gained up to the present time for women in England. I can claim no part of that real honour, which is due in greatest measure to Mrs. Jacob Bright.

The question of granting University Degrees to women, was opened as far back as 1862. In that year I read, in the Guildhall in London at the Social Science Congress, a paper, pleading for the privilege. Dean Milman, who occupied the Chair, was very kind in praising my crude address, and enjoyed the little jokes wherewith it was sprinkled; but next morning every daily paper in London laughed at my demand, and for a week or two I was the butt of universal ridicule. Nevertheless, just 17 years afterwards, I was invited to join a Deputation headed by Lady Stanley of Alderley, to thank Lord Granville for having (as President of London University) conceded those degrees to women, precisely as I had demanded! I took occasion at the close of the pleasant interview, to present him with one of the very few remaining copies of my original and much ridiculed appeal.

From this time I wrote and spoke not unfrequently on behalf of women’s political and civil claims. One article of mine in Fraser, 1868, was reprinted more than once. It was headed “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors;” and enquired “Whether the classification should be counted 588sound?” I hope that the discussion it involved on the laws relating to the property of married women was of some service in helping on the great measure of justice afterwards granted.

Another paper of mine, circulated by the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, for whom I wrote it, was entitled “Our Policy.” It was, in effect, an address to women concerning the best way to secure the suffrage. I began this pamphlet by the following remarks:—

“There is an instructive story, told by Herodotus, of an African nation which went to war with the South Wind. The wind had greatly annoyed these Psyllians by drying up their cisterns, so they organised a campaign and set off to attack the enemy at head-quarters—somewhere, I presume, about the Sahara. The army was admirably equipped with all the military engines of those days; swords and spears, darts and javelins, battering rams and catapults. It happened that the South Wind did not, however, suffer much from these weapons, but got up one fine morning and blew!—The sands of the desert have lain for a great many ages over those unfortunate Psyllians; and, as Herodotus placidly concludes the story, ‘The Nasamones possess the territory of those who thus perished.’

“It seems to me that we, women, who have been fighting for the Suffrage with logical arguments—syllogisms, analogies, demonstrations, and reductions-to-the-absurd of our antagonists’ position, in short, all the weapons of ratiocinative warfare—have been behaving very much like those poor Psyllians, who imagined that darts, and swords, and catapults would avail against the Simoom. The obvious fact is, that it is Sentiment we have to contend against, not Reason; Feeling and Prepossession, not intellectual Conviction. Had Logic been the only obstacle in our way, we should long ago have been polling our votes for Parliamentary as well as for Municipal and School Board 589elections. To those who hold that Property is the thing intended to be represented by the Constitution of England, we have shown that we possess such property. To those who say that Tax-paying and Representation should go together, we have pointed to the tax-gatherers’ papers, which, alas! lie on our hall-tables wholly irrespective of the touching fact that we belong to the ‘protected sex.’ Where Intelligence, Education, and freedom from crime are considered enough to confer rights of citizenship, we have remarked that we are quite ready to challenge rivalry in such particulars with those Illiterates for whose exercise of political functions our Senate has taken such exemplary care. Finally, to the ever-recurring charge that we cannot fight, and therefore ought not to vote, we have replied that the logic of the exclusion will be manifest when all the men too weak, too short, or too old for the military standard be likewise disfranchised, and when the actual soldiers of our army are accorded the suffrage.

“But it is Sentiment, not Logic, against which we have to struggle; and we shall best do so, I think, by endeavouring to understand and make full allowance for it; and then by steady working, shoulder to shoulder so as to conquer, or rather win it over to our side.”

In 1876, May 13th, I made a rather long and elaborate speech on the subject of women’s suffrage in a meeting in St. George’s Hall, at which Mr. Russell Gurney, the Recorder of London, took the chair. John Bright had spoken against our Bill in the House, and though I had not intended to speak at our meeting, I was spurred by indignation to reply to him. In this address I spoke chiefly of the wrongs of mothers whose children are taken from them at the will of a living or dead father. I ended by saying:—

“I advocate Woman Suffrage as the natural and needful constitutional means of protection for the rights of the 590weaker half of the nation. I do this as a woman pleading for women. But I do it also, and none the less confidently, as a citizen, and for the sake of the whole community, because it is my conviction that such a measure is no less expedient for men than just for women; and that it will redound in coming years ever more and more to the happiness, the virtue and the honour of our country.”

Several years after this, I wrote a letter which was printed in the (American) Woman’s Tribune, May 1st, 1884. It expresses so exactly what I feel still on the subject that I shall redeem it if possible from oblivion. The following are the passages for which I should like to ask the reader’s attention:

“If I may presume to offer an old woman’s counsel to the younger workers in our cause, it would be that they should adopt the point of view—that it is before all things our Duty to obtain the franchise. If we undertake the work in this spirit, and with the object of using the power it confers, whenever we gain it, for the promotion of justice and mercy and the kingdom of God upon earth, we shall carry on all our agitation in a corresponding manner, firmly and bravely, and also calmly and with generous good temper. And when our opponents come to understand that this is the motive underlying our efforts, they, on their part, will cease to feel bitterly and scornfully toward us, even when they think we are altogether mistaken.

“That people MAY conscientiously consider that we are mistaken in asking for woman suffrage, is another point which it surely behoves us to carry in mind.

“We naturally think almost exclusively of many advantages which would follow to our sex and to both sexes from the entrance of woman into political life. But that there are some ‘lions in the way,’ and rather formidable lions, too, ought not to be forgotten.

“For myself, I would far rather that women should remain without political rights to the end of time than that 591they should lose those qualities which we comprise in the word ‘womanliness;’ and I think nearly every one of the leaders of our party in America and in England agrees with me in this feeling.

“The idea that the possession of political rights will destroy ‘womanliness,’ absurd as it may seem to us, is very deeply rooted in the minds of men; and when they oppose our demands, it is only just to give them credit for doing so on grounds which we should recognize as valid, if their premises were true. It is not so much that our opponents (at least the better part of them) despise women, as that they really prize what women now are in the home and in society so highly that they cannot bear to risk losing it by any serious change in their condition. These fears are futile and faithless, but there is nothing in them to affront us. To remove them, we must not use violent words, for every such violent word confirms their fears; but, on the contrary, show the world that while the revolutions wrought by men have been full of bitterness and rancour, and stormy passions, if not of bloodshed, we women will at least strive to accomplish our great emancipation calmly and by persuasion and reason.”

I was honoured about this time by several friendly advances from American ladies and gentlemen interested like myself in woman’s advancement. The astronomer, Prof. Maria Mitchell, wrote me a charming letter, which I exceedingly regret should have been lost, as I felt particular interest in her great achievements. I had the pleasure of receiving Mrs. Julia Ward Howe in Hereford Square, and also Mrs. Livermore, whose speech at one of our Suffrage Meetings realised my highest ideal of a woman’s public address. Her noble face and figure like that of a Roman Matron, her sweet manners and playful humour without a scintilla of bitterness in it,—as if she were a mother remonstrating with a foolish, school-boy son,—were all delightful to me.

592Col. J. W. Higginson, who has been so good a friend and adviser to women, also came to see me, and gave me some bright hours of conversation on his wonderful experiences in the war, during which he commanded a coloured regiment, which fought valiantly under his leadership. Finally I had the privilege of being elected a member of the famous Sorosis Club of New York, and of receiving the following very pleasant letter conveying the gift of a pretty gold and enamel brooch, the badge of the Sisterhood.

“The ladies of Sorosis—The Woman’s Club of New York—beg your acceptance of the accompanying Pin, the insignia of their organization, which they send by the hand of their foreign correspondent, Mrs. Laura Curtis Ballard.

“Trifling as is this testimonial in itself, they feel that if you knew the genuine appreciation of you and your work that goes with it—the gratitude with which each one regards you as a faithful worker for women—you would not consider it unworthy your acceptance. With best wishes for your continued health, which in your case means continued usefulness,

The part of my work for women, however, to which I look back with most satisfaction was that in which I laboured to obtain protection for unhappy wives, beaten, mangled, mutilated or trampled on by brutal husbands. One day in 1878 I was by chance reading a newspaper in which a whole series of frightful cases of this kind were recorded, 593here and there, among the ordinary news of the time. I got up out of my armchair, half dazed, and said to myself: “I will never rest till I have tried what I can do to stop this.”

I thought anxiously what was the sort of remedy I ought to endeavour to put forward. A Parliamentary Blue Book had been printed in 1875 entitled: “Reports on the State of the law relating to Brutal Assaults,” and the following is a summary of the results. There was a large consensus of opinion that the law as it now stands is insufficient for its purpose. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Mr. Justice Lush, Mr. Justice Mellor, Chief Baron Kelly, Barons Bramwell, Pigott and Pollock, all expressed the same judgment (pp. 7–19). The following gave their opinion in favour of flogging offenders in cases of brutal assaults. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Mr. Justices Blackburn, Mellor, Lush, Quain, Archibald, Brett, Grove, Chief Baron Kelly, Barons Bramwell, Pigott, Pollock, Charles, and Amphlett. Only Lord Coleridge and Lord Denman hesitated, and Mr. Justice Keating opposed flogging. Of Chairmen of Quarter Sessions 64 (out of 68, whose answers were sent to the Home Office,) and the Recorders of 41 towns, were in favour of flogging. After all this testimony of the opinions of experts (collected of course at the public expense), three years elapsed during which absolutely nothing was done to make any practical use of it! During the interval, scores of Bills, interesting to the represented sex, passed through Parliament; but this question on which the lives of women literally hung, was never mooted! Something like 5,000 women, judging by the published judicial statistics, were in those years “brutally assaulted;” i.e., not merely struck, but maimed, blinded, burned, trampled on by strong men in heavy shoes, and, in many cases, murdered outright; and thousands of children were brought up to witness scenes which (as Colonel Leigh said) “infernalise a whole generation.” 594Where lay the fault? Scarcely with the Government, or even with Parliament, but with the simple fact that, under our present constitution, Women, having no votes, can only exceptionally and through favour, bring pressure to bear to force attention even to the most crying of injustices under which they suffer. The Home Office must attend first to the claims of those who can bring pressure to bear on it; and Members of Parliament must bring in the measures pressed by their constituents; and thus the unrepresented must go to the wall.

The cases of cruelty of which I obtained statistics, furnished to me mainly by the kindness of Miss A. Shore, almost surpassed belief. It appeared that about 1,500 cases of aggravated (over and above ordinary) assaults on wives took place every year in England; on an average about four a day. Many of them were of truly incredible savagery; and the victims were, in the vast majority of cases, not drunken viragos (who usually escape violence or give as good as they receive), but poor, pale, shrinking creatures, who strove to earn bread for their children and to keep together their miserable homes; and whose very tears and pallor were reproaches which provoked the heteropathy and cruelty of their tyrants.

After much reflection I came to the conclusion that in spite of all the authority in favour of flogging the delinquents, it was not expedient on the women’s behalf that they should be so punished, since after they had undergone such chastisement, however well merited, the ruffians would inevitably return more brutalised and infuriated than ever; and again have their wives at their mercy. The only thing really effective, I considered, was to give the wife the power of separating herself and her children from her tyrant. Of course in the upper ranks, where people could afford to pay for a suit in the Divorce Court, the law had for some years opened to the assaulted wife this door of escape. But among the working 595classes, where the assaults were ten-fold as numerous and twenty times more cruel, no legal means whatever existed of escaping from the husband returning after punishment to beat and torture his wife again. I thought the thing to be desired was the extension of the privilege of rich women to their poorer sisters, to be effected by an Act of Parliament which should give a wife whose husband had been convicted of an aggravated assault on her, the power to obtain a Separation Order under Summary Jurisdiction.

Mr. Alfred Hill, J.P., of Birmingham, son of my old friend Recorder Hill, most kindly interested himself in my project, and drafted a Bill to be presented to Parliament embodying my wishes. Meanwhile; I set about writing an article setting forth the extent of the evil, the failure of the measures hitherto taken in various Acts of Parliament, and, finally, the remedy I proposed. This article my friend Mr. Percy Bunting was good enough to publish in the Contemporary Review in the spring of 1878. I also wrote an article in Truth on Wife Torture, afterwards reprinted. Meanwhile, I had obtained the most cordial assistance from Mr. Frederick Pennington and Mr. Hopwood, both of whom were then in Parliament, and it was agreed that I should beg Mr. Russell Gurney to take charge of the Bill which these gentlemen would support. I went accordingly, armed with the draft Bill, to the Recorder’s house in Kensington Palace Gardens, and, as I anxiously desired to find him at home, I ventured to call as early as 10.30. Mr. Gurney read the draft Bill carefully, and entirely approved it. “Then,” I said, “you will take charge of it, I earnestly hope?” “No,” said Mr. Gurney, “I cannot do that; I am too old and over-worked to undertake all the watching and labour which may be necessary; but I will put my name on the back of it, with pleasure.”

I knew, of course, that his name would give the measure great importance and also help me to find some other M.P. 596to take charge of it, so I could not but thank him gratefully. At that moment of our interview, his charming wife entered the room leading a little boy; I believe his nephew. Naturally I apologized to Mrs. Gurney for my presence at that unholy hour of the morning; and said, “I came to Mr. Gurney in my anxiety, as the Friend of Women.” Mr. Gurney, hearing me, put his hands on the little lad’s shoulder and said to him, “Do you hear that, my boy? I hope that when you are an old man, as I am, some lady like Miss Cobbe may call you the Friend of Women!”

At last, the Bill embodying precisely the purport of that drawn up for me by Mr. Hill, and subsequently published in the Contemporary Review, was read a first time, the names of Mr. Herschell (now Lord Herschell) and Sir Henry Holland (afterwards Lord Knutsford) being on the back of it. Every arrangement was made for the second Reading; and for avoiding the opposition which we expected to meet from a party which seems always to think that by calling certain unions “Holy” a Church can sanctify that which has become a bond of savage cruelty on one side, and soul-degrading slavery on the other. Just at this crisis, Lord Penzance, who was bringing a Bill into the House of Lords to remedy some defects concerning the costs of the intervention of the Queen’s Proctor in Matrimonial causes, introduced into it a clause dealing with the case of the assaulted wives, and giving them precisely the benefit contemplated in our Bill and in my article; namely, that of Separation Orders to be granted by the same magistrates who have convicted the husband of aggravated assaults upon them. That Lord Penzance had seen our Bill, then before the Lower House, (it was ordered to be printed February 14th) and had had his attention called to the subject, either by it, or by my article in the Contemporary Review, I have taken as probable, but have no exact knowledge. I went at once to call on him 597and thank him from my heart for undertaking to do this great service of mercy to women; and also to pray him to consider certain points about the custody of the children of such assaulted wives. Lord Penzance received me with the utmost kindness and likewise gave favourable consideration to a letter or two which I ventured to address to him. It is needless to say that his advocacy of the measure carried it through the House of Lords without opposition. I believe that in speaking for it he said that if any noble Lord needed proof of the grievous want of such protection for wives they would find it in my article, which he held in his hand.

There was still, we feared, an ordeal to go through in the House of Commons; but the fates and hours were propitious, and the Bill, coming in late one night as already passed by the House of Lords and with Lord Penzance’s great name on it,—escaped opposition and was accepted without debate. By the 27th May, 1878, it had become the law of the land, and has since taken its place as Chapter 19 of the 41st Vict. An Act to amend the Matrimonial Causes Acts. The following are the clauses which concern the assaulted Wives:—

4. If a husband shall be convicted summarily or otherwise of an aggravated assault within the meaning of the statute twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth Victoria, chapter one hundred, section forty-three, upon his wife, the Court or magistrate before whom he shall be so convicted may, if satisfied that the future safety of the wife is in peril, order that the wife shall be no longer bound to cohabit with her husband; and such order shall have the force and effect in all respects of a decree of judicial separation on the ground of cruelty; and such order may further provide,

1. That the husband shall pay to his wife such weekly sum as the Court or magistrate may consider to be in accordance with his means, and with any means which the wife may have for her support, and the payment of any sum of money so ordered shall be 598enforceable and enforced against the husband in the same manner as the payment of money is enforced under an order of affiliation; and the Court or magistrate by whom any such order for payment of money shall be made shall have power from time to time to vary the same on the application of either the husband or the wife, upon proof that the means of the husband or wife have been altered in amount since the original order or any subsequent order varying it shall have been made.

2. That the legal custody of any children of the marriage under the age of ten years shall, in the discretion of the Court or magistrate, be given to the wife.

At first the magistrates were very chary of granting the Separation Orders. One London Police Magistrate had said that the House of Commons would never put such power in the hands of one of the body, and he was, I suppose, proportionately startled when just six weeks later, it actually lay in his own. By degrees, however, the practice of granting the Orders on proper occasions became common, and appears now to be almost a matter of course. I hope that at least a hundred poor souls each year thus obtain release from their tormentors, and probably the deterrent effect of witnessing such manumission of ill-treated slaves may have still more largely served to protect women from the violence of brutal husbands.

Six years after the Act had passed in 1884, I received a letter from a very energetic and prominent woman-worker with whom I had a slight acquaintance, in which the following passages occur. I quote them here (though with some hesitation on the score of vanity) for they have comforted me much and deeply, and will do so to my life’s end.

“On Wednesday last I was two hours with a widow,—of O——, near W——; one of those persons who make a country so good, brave, loving and hardworking! For 33 599long years she lived with a fiend of a husband, and suffered furious blows, kicks, and attacks with ropes, hot water, and crockery; was hurled down cellar-steps, &c., starved and insulted. All the time, up early and at work managing a large shop and superintending 35 girls....

“I wish you could have been there to hear her tell me that ‘the law was altered now,’ and how her niece had got a separation for brutal treatment; and (best of all) ‘her two bairns’ (children). As for the 8s. a week ordered,—the wife never ‘bothers after that.’ ‘The Lord has stopped that villain’s ways, and she wants no more.’ I could not help crying, as I looked at the exquisitely clean person and home,—the determined face, and thought of the diabolical horrors this good, clever woman had gone through. I told her how you had got the law altered—and she kept saying ‘She’s a lady—she’s a lady. Bring her to O——, Missis! and we’ll percession her down t’ street!’...

“You have love and gratitude from our hearts, I assure you; we live wider lives and better for your presence. I have ventured to write freely on a subject some would find wearisome, but your heart is big and will sympathise; and I am always longing for you to know the active result of your achieved work. This! that poor battered, bruised women are relieved—are safer—and bless you, and so do I, from a full heart.

If I could hear before I die that I had been able to do as much for tortured brutes, I should say “Nunc Dimittis,” and wish no more.

Some time after this (I have kept no copy or record of date) I delivered a Lecture, which was a good deal noticed at the time, on the Little Health of Ladies. It was an exposure of the evils resulting to families from the state of semi-invalidism in which so many women live, usually gently lapped therein 600by interested advisers. I exhorted women to do, as a duty to God and man, everything possible to avoid falling into this wretched condition, with the self-indulgence and neglect of home and social duties leading to it or consequent on it. I did not then know as much as I subsequently learned of the inner history of a great deal of this misery, or I might have added to my warning some remarkable denunciations by honourable doctors of the practices of their colleagues.^[32]

A singular incident followed the publication of this address in one of the Magazines.

There was a lady, whose husband was a wealthy manufacturer in the North of England, who came to London once or twice a year, and for several years called on me; 601having much sympathy with my various interests. She appeared to be a confirmed invalid, crawling with great difficulty out of her carriage into our dining-room, and lying on a sofa during her visits. One day I was told she had come, and I was hastening to receive her downstairs, when a tall, elegant woman, whom I scarcely recognized, walked firmly and lightly, into my drawing-room, and greeted me cordially with laughter in her eyes at my astonishment.

“So glad to see you so well!” I exclaimed, “but what has happened to you?”

“It is you who have effected the cure!” she answered.

“Good gracious! How?”

“Why, I read your Little Health of Ladies, and I resolved to set my doctor at naught and go about like other people. And you see how well I am! There was really nothing the matter with me but want of exercise!”

I saw her several times afterwards in good health; and once she brought me a beautiful gold bracelet with clasp of diamonds set in black enamel, which she had had made for me, and which she forced me to accept as a token of her gratitude. I am fond of wearing it still.

Another incident strongly confirmed my belief in the source of much of the evil and misery arising from the Little Health of Ladies. Travelling one day from Brighton I fell into conversation with a nice-looking, well-bred woman the only other occupant of the railway carriage. Speaking of the salubrity of Brighton, she said, “I am sure I have reason enough to bless it. I was for fourteen years a miserable invalid on my sofa in London; my doctor telling me I must never go out or move. At last I said to my husband, ‘It is better to die than to go on thus;’ and, in defiance of our Doctor, he brought me away to Brighton, and there I soon grew, as you see, quite strong; and—and,—I must tell you, I have a little baby, and my husband is so happy!”

602That clever Gynæcologist lost, I daresay, a hundred, or perhaps two hundred, a year by the escape of his patient from his assiduous visitations; but the lady gained health and happiness; her husband his wife’s companionship; and both of them a child! How much of the miseries and ill-health, and, in many cases, death of women (of the poorer classes especially) lies at the door of medical practitioners and operators, too fond by half of the knife, is known to those who have read the recent articles and correspondence respecting the Women’s Hospitals and “Human Vivisection” therein in the Daily Chronicle (May, 1894) and in the Homœopathic World for June.

Quite apart from the doctors, however, a great deal of the sickliness of women is undoubtedly due to wretched fashions of tight-lacing, and wearing long and heavy skirts, and tight, thin boots, which render free exercise of their limbs impossible. Nothing makes me really despair of my sex, except looking at fashion-plates; or seeing (what is much worse still, being wicked, as well as foolish) the adornments so many women use of dead birds, stuck on their empty heads and heartless breasts. These things are a disgrace to women for which I have often felt they deserve to be despised and swept aside by men as soulless creatures unworthy of freedom. But alas! it is precisely the women who adopt these idiotic fashions in dress, and wear (abominable cruelty!) Egrets as ornaments, who are not despised but admired by men, who reserve their indifference and contempt for their homely and sensible sisters. Men in these respects are as silly as the fish in the river caught by a gaudy artificial fly on a hook, or enticed into a net by a scrap of scarlet cloth, and a glittering morsel of brass. I often wonder whether women are generally, as little capable of forming a discriminating judgment of men?

603Lastly, there is a cause of female ill-health which always impresses me with profoundest pity, and which has never, I think, been fairly brought to the front as the origin of a large part of feminine feebleness. I mean the common want, among women who earn their livelihood, of sufficiently brain-nourishing and stimulating food. Let any man, the strongest in the land in body and mind, subsist for one week on tea without milk, and bread and butter, and at the end of that time, he will, I venture to predict, have lost half his superiority. His nervous excitability and cheerfulness may remain, or even be enhanced, but the faculty of largely grasping and strongly dealing with the subjects presented to him, and of doing thorough and complete work, nay even the desire of such perfection and finish, will have abated; and the fatal slovenliness of women’s work will probably have begun to show itself. The physical conditions under which the human spirit can alone (in this life) carry out its purpose and attain its maximum of vigour, are more or less lacking to half the women even in our country; and almost completely wanting to the poor prisoners of the Zenanas of India and the cripples of China. Exercise in the open air, wholesome and sufficient food, plenty of sleep at night,—every one of these sine qua non elements of real Health of Mind, as well as of Body, are out of reach of one woman out of every two; yet we remark, curiously, on the inferiority of their work! It is a vicious circle in which they are caught. They take lower wages because they can live more cheaply than men; and they necessarily live on those low wages too poorly to do anything but poor work;—and again their wages are paltry because their work is so poor!

I confess, however, that—on the other hand—the spectacle of feminine feebleness and futility when (as continually happens) it is exhibited without the smallest excuse from inadequate food supply, is indescribably irritating, nay, to me, humiliating 604and exasperating. Watch (for example of what I mean by “feminine futility”) a woman asked to open a just-arrived box, or a bottle of champagne or of soda-water. She has been given a cold-chisel for opening the box, and a hammer; but they are invariably “astray” when required, or she does not think it worth while to fetch them from up or downstairs, so she kneels down before the box and begins by fumbling with her fingers at the knots in the cord. After five minutes’ efforts and broken nails, she gives this up in despair, and “thinks she must cut it.” But how? She never by any chance has a knife in her pocket; so she first tries her scissors, which she does keep there, but which, being always quite blunt, fail to sever the rope; and then she fetches a dinner-knife, and gives one cut,—when the feminine passion for economy suggests to her that she can save the rest of the cord by pushing it (with immense effort) an inch or two along the box, first at one side and then at the other. Then she hopes by breaking open the top of the box at one end only, to get out the contents without dealing further with the recalcitrant rope; and she endeavours to pull it open where the nails seem least firm. Alas! those nails will never yield to her weak hands; so her scissors are in requisition again, and being inserted and used as a wedge, immediately break off at the points, and are hastily withdrawn with an exclamation of agonising regret for the blunt, but precious, instrument. Something must be thrust in, however, to prize open the box. The cold-chisel and hammer having been at last sought, but sought in vain, the kitchen cleaver, covered with the fat of the last joint it has cut, is brought into play; or, happy thought! she knows where her master keeps a fine sharp chisel, and this is pushed in,—of course against a nail which breaks the edge and makes it useless for ever. The poker serves sufficiently well as a hammer to knock in the chisel, or the cleaver, and to bang up the protruding lid of the box; 605and at last one plank of the top is loosened, and she tears it off triumphantly, with a cry of rejoicing: “There! Now, we shall get at everything in the box!” The goods, however, stubbornly refuse to be extricated through the hole on any terms; and eventually all the planks have to be successively broken up, and the long-cared-for cord (for the preservation of which so much trouble has been undergone) is cut into little pieces of a foot or two in length, each attached to a hopelessly entangled knot, while the box itself is entirely wrecked.

The case of the soda-water, or champagne bottle is worse again; so much so that experience warns the wise to forbear from calling for effervescent drinks where parlour-maids prevail. The preliminary ineffectual attempt to loosen the wires with the fingers (the proper pliers being, of course, missing); the resort to a steel carving-fork to open them, and, in default of the steel fork, to a silver one, which is, of course, bent immediately; the endeavour to cut the hempen cord with the bread knife with the result of blunting that tool against the wire; the struggle to cause the cork to fly by wobbling it with the right hand, while clasping the neck of the bottle till it and the contents are hot in the left; then (on the failure of this bold attempt) the cutting off the head of the cork with a carving knife, and at the same time a small slice of the operator’s hand, which, of course, bleeds profusely; the consequent hasty transference of the bottle and the job to a second attendant; the hurried search of the same in the side-table drawer for the corkscrew; her rush to the kitchen to fetch that instrument where it has been nefariously borrowed and where the point of the screw has been broken off; the difficult (and crooked) insertion of the broken screw into the cork; the repeated frantic tugs at the bottle, held tight between the knees, finally the climax, when the cork 606bursts out and the champagne along with it, up in the reddening face and over the white muslin apron of the poor anxious woman, who hurries nervously to wipe it off, and then pours the small quantity of liquor which remains bubbling over the glasses, till the table-cloth is swamped;—such in brief is Feminine Futility, as exhibited in the drawing of corks! Luckily it is possible to find parlour-maids who know how to use, and will keep at hand, both cold-chisels and corkscrews. But they are exceptions. The normal woman, in the presence of a nailed-down box or a champagne bottle, behaves as I have depicted from careful study; and the irritation she produces in me is past words, especially if a man be waiting for his beverage and observing the spectacle of the helplessness of my sex. If “Man” be “a tool-making animal,” I am afraid that “Woman” is a “tool-breaking” one. I think every girl, as well as every boy, ought to be given a month’s training in a carpenter’s shop to teach her how to strike a nail straight; what is the difference between the proper insertion and extraction of nails and of screws; why chisels should not be employed as screw-drivers; how far preferable for making holes are gimlets to hairpins or the points of scissors; and, finally, the general superiority of glue over paste or gum for sticking wooden furniture when broken by her besom of destruction!

My dear friend Emily Shaen wrote an excellent tract which I should like to see republished, urging that it is absurd to go on talking of the House being the proper sphere of a woman, while we neglect to teach her the very rudiments of a Hausfrau’s duties, and leave her to find them all out, at her husband’s expense, when she marries. The nature of gas and of gasometers, and how not to cause explosions nor be cheated in the bill; the arrangements of water-works in houses, pipes, drains, cisterns, ball-cocks and all the rest, for hot and cold water; the choice of properly morticed, not 607merely glued, furniture; what constitutes a good kitchen range, and how coal should be economised in it; how to choose fresh meat, &c., such should be her lessons. To this might be usefully added an inkling of the laws relating to masters and servants, debts, bills, &c., &c., and of the elementary arrangements of banking and investing money. It was once discovered at my school that a very clever young lady, who could speak four languages and play two instruments well, could not read the clock! I think there are many grown up women, well-educated according to the ordinary standard of their class, whose ignorance concerning the simplest matters of household duty is not a whit less absurd.

In 1881—I prepared and delivered to an audience of about 150 ladies, in the Westminster Palace Hotel, a course of six Lectures on the Duties of Women. My dear friend, Miss Anna Swanwick took the chair for me on these occasions, and performed her part with such tact and geniality as to give me every advantage. My auditors were very attentive and sympathetic, and altogether the task was made very pleasant to me. I repeated the course again at Clifton the same year, Mrs. Beddoe, the wife of Dr. John Beddoe the anthropologist who was then living at that place, most obligingly lending me her large drawing-rooms.

These Lectures when printed, went through three editions in England and, I think, eight in America, the last being brought out by Miss Willard, who adopted the little book as the first of a series on women’s concerns, published by her vast and wonderful organisation, the W.C.T.U.

My object in giving these Lectures was to impress women as strongly as might be in my power, with the unspeakable importance of adding to our claims for just Rights of all kinds, the adoption of the highest standard of Duty; and the strict preservation amongst us of all womanly virtues, while adding to them those others to the growth of which our 608conditions have hitherto been unfavourable,—namely, Truth and Courage. I desired also to discuss the new views current amongst us respecting filial and conjugal “obedience;” the proper attitude to be held towards (unrepentant) vice, and many other topics. Finally I wished to place the efforts to obtain political freedom on what I deem to be their proper ground. I ask:

“What ought we to do at present, as concerns all public work wherein it is possible for us to obtain a share?

“The question seems to answer itself in its mere statement. We are bound to do all we can to promote the virtue and happiness of our fellow-men and women, and therefore we must accept and seize every instrument of power, every vote, every influence which we can obtain, to enable us to promote virtue and happiness.

“... Why are we not to wish and strive to be allowed to place our hands on that vast machinery whereby, in a constitutional realm, the great work of the world is carried on, and which achieves by its enormous power, ten-fold either the good or the harm which any individual can reach; which may be turned to good or turned to harm according to the hands which touch it? In almost every case it is only by legislation that the roots of great evils can be reached at all, and that the social diseases of pauperism, vice and crime can be brought within hope of cure.

“You will judge from these remarks the ground on which, as a matter of duty, I place the demand for woman’s political emancipation. I think we are bound to seek it, in the first place, as a means,—a very great means,—of fulfilling our Social Duty, of contributing to the virtue and happiness of mankind, and advancing the Kingdom of God. There are many other reasons, viewed from the point of Expediency; but this is the view from that of Duty. We know too well that men who possess political rights do not always, or often, regard them in this fashion; but this is no reason why we should not do so. We also know that the 609individual power of one vote at any election seems rarely to effect any appreciable difference; but this also need not trouble us, for, little or great, if we can obtain any influence at all, we ought to seek for it, and the multiplication of the votes of women bent on securing conscientious candidates, would soon make it not only appreciable, but weighty. Nay, further, the direct influence of a vote is but a small part of the power which the possession of the political franchise confers. Its indirect influence is far more important. In a government like ours, where the basis of representation is so immensely extensive the whole business of legislation is carried on by pressure—the pressure of each represented class and party to get its grievances redressed, to make its interests prevail.... It is one of the sore grievances of women that, not possessing representation, the measures which concern them are for ever postponed to the bills promoted by the represented classes (e.g., the Married Woman’s Property Bill, was, if I mistake not, six times set down for reading in one Session in vain, the House being counted out on every occasion).

“Thus, in asking for the Parliamentary Franchise, we are asking, as I understand it, for the power to influence legislation generally; and in every other kind of franchise, municipal, parochial, or otherwise, for similar power to bring our sense of justice and righteousness to bear on public affairs....

“What is this, after all, my friends, but Public Spirit; in one shape called Patriotism, in another Philanthropy; the extension of our sympathies beyond the narrow bounds of our homes, and disinterested enthusiasm for every good and sacred cause? As I said at first, all the world has recognised from the earliest times how good and noble and wholesome a thing it is for men to have their breasts filled with such public spirit; and we look upon them when they exhibit it as glorified thereby. Do you think it is not equally an ennobling thing for a woman’s soul to be likewise filled with these large and generous and unselfish emotions?”

610I draw the Lectures to a conclusion thus:—

“None of us, I am sure, realise how blessed a thing we might make of our lives if we would but give ourselves, heart and soul, to fulfil all the obligations, personal, social and religious which rest upon us; to gain the strength—

to live, in purity and truth and courage, a life of love to God and to man; striving to make every spot where we dwell, every region to which our influence can extend God’s Kingdom, where His Will shall be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”

Some time after the delivery of these addresses when the Primrose League was in full activity I wrote at the request of the Committee of the Women’s Suffrage Association a circular-letter to the “Dames” (of whom I am one) begging them to endeavour to make the granting of votes to women a “plank” in their platform. I received many friendly letters in reply—but the men who influenced the League, apparently finding that they could make the Dames do their political work for them without votes, discouraged all movement in the desired direction, and I do not suppose that anything was gained by my attempt.

My last effort on behalf of women was to read a paper on Women’s Duty to Women at the Conference of Women workers held at Birmingham in Nov., 1890. This address was received with such exceeding kindness and sympathy by my audience that the little event has left very tender recollections which I am glad to carry with me.

I will record here two paragraphs which I should like to leave as my last appeal on behalf of my sex.

“It may be an open question whether any individual woman suffers more severely in body or mind than any 611individual man. There are some who say that all our passions matched with theirs

A sentiment, which I am happy to tell you, Lord Tennyson has angrily disclaimed as his own, declaring that he only ‘put it into the mouth of an impatient fool.’ But that our whole sex together suffers more physical pain, more want, more grief, than the other, is not, I think, open to doubt. Even if we put aside the poor Chinese women maimed from infancy, the Hindoo women against whose cruel wrongs their noble countryman, Malabari, has just been pleading so eloquently in London,—if we put these and all the other prisoners of Eastern Harems, and miserable wives of African and Australian savages out of question, and think only of the comparatively free and happy women of Christendom, how much more liable to suffering, if not always actually condemned to suffer, is the life of women! ‘To be weak is to be miserable,’ and we are weak; always comparatively to our companions, and weak often, absolutely, and in reference to the wants we must supply, the duties we must perform. Now, it seems to me that just in proportion as any one is possessed of strength of mind or of body, or of wealth or influence, so far it behoves him, or her, to turn with sympathy and tender helpfulness to the weakest and most forlorn of God’s creatures, whether it be man or woman or child, or even brute. The weight of the claim is in exact ratio of the feebleness and helplessness and misery of the claimant.

“Thus, then, I would sum up the counsels which I am presuming to offer to you. You will all remember the famous line of Terence, at which the old Roman audience rose in a tumult of applause: ‘I am a Man—nothing human is alien to me.’ I would have each of you add to this in an emphatic way. ‘Mulier sum. Nihil muliebre a me alienum puto.’ ‘I am a woman. Nothing concerning the interests of women is alien to me.’ Take the sorrows, the wants, the 612dangers (above all the dangers) of our sisters closely to heart, and, without ceasing to interest yourself in charities having men and boys for their objects, recognise that your earlier care should be for the weakest, the poorest, those whose dangers are worst of all—for, (after all) ruin can only drive a Man to the workhouse; it may drive a woman to perdition! Think of all the weak, the helpless, the wronged women and little children, and the harmless brutes; and save and shield them as best you can; even as the mother-bird will shelter and fight for her little helpless fledgelings. This is the natural field of feminine courage. Then, when you have found your work, whatever it be, give yourself to it with all your heart, and make the resolution in God’s sight never to go to your rest leaving a stone unturned which may help your aims. Half-and-half charity does very little good to the objects; and is a miserable, slovenly affair for the workers. And when the end comes and the night closes in, the long, last night of earth, when no man can work any more in this world, your milk-and-water, half-hearted charities will bring no memories of comfort to you. They are not so many ‘good works’ which you can place on the credit side of your account, in the mean, commercial spirit taught by some of the churches. Nay, rather they are only solemn evidences that you knew your duty, knew you might do good, and did it not, or did it half-heartedly! What a thought for those last days when we know ourselves to be going home to God, God—whom at bottom after all, we have loved and shall love for ever;—that we might have served Him here, might have blessed his creatures, might have done His will on earth as it is done in Heaven, but we have let the glorious chance slip by us for ever.”

CHAPTER XX. CLAIMS OF BRUTES.

615Readers who have reached this twentieth Chapter of my Life will smile (as I have often done of late years) at the ascription to me in sundry not very friendly publications, of exclusive sympathy for animals and total indifference to human interests. I have seen myself frequently described as a woman “who would sacrifice any number of men, women and children, sooner than that a few rabbits should be inconvenienced.” Many good people apparently suppose me to represent a personal survival of Totemism in England; and to worship Dogs and Cats, while ready to consign the human race generally to destruction.

The foregoing pages, describing my life in old days in Ireland and the years which I spent afterwards working in the slums in Bristol, ought, I think, to suffice to dissipate this fancy picture. As a matter of fact, it has only been of late years and since their wrongs have appealed alike to my feelings of pity and to my moral sense, that I have come to bestow any peculiar attention on animals; or have been concerned with them more than is common with the daughters of country squires to whom dogs, horses and cattle are familiar subjects of interest from childhood. I have indeed always felt much affection for dogs: that is to say, for those who exhibit the true Dog-character,—which is far from being the case of every canine creature! Their eagerness, their joyousness, their transparent little wiles, their caressing and devoted affection, are to me more winning, even I may say, more really and intensely human (in the sense in which a child is human), than the artificial, cold and selfish 616characters one meets too often in the guise of ladies and gentlemen. It is not the four legs, nor the silky or shaggy coat of the dog which should prevent us from discerning his inner nature of Thought and Love; limited Thought, it is true; but quite unlimited Love. That he is dumb, is, to me, only another claim (as it would be in a human child) on my consideration. But because I love good dogs, and, in their measure also, good horses and cats and birds, (I had once a dear and lovely white pea-hen), I am not therefore a morbid Zoophilist. I should be very sorry indeed to say or think like Byron when my dog dies, that I “had but one true friend, and here he lies!” I have,—thank God!—known many men and women, who have all a dog’s merits of honesty and single-hearted devotion plus the virtues which can only flourish on the high level of humanity; and to them I give a friendship which the best of dogs cannot share.

That there are some Timons in the world whose hearts, embittered by human ingratitude, have turned with relief to the faithful love of a dog, I am very well aware. Surely the fact makes one appeal the more on behalf of the creatures who thus by their humble devotion heal the wounds of disappointed or betrayed affection; and who come to cheer the lonely, the unloved, the dull-witted, the blind, the poverty-stricken whom the world forsakes? I think Lamartine was right to treat this love of the Dog for Man as a special provision of Divine mercy, and to marvel,—

Not a few deep thanksgivings, I believe, have gone up to the Maker of man and brute for the silent sympathy,—expressed perhaps in no nobler way than by the gentle licking of a passive hand,—which has yet saved a human heart from the sense of utter abandonment.

617But I have no such sorrowful or embittering experience of human affection. I do not say, “The more I know of men the more I love dogs”; but, “The more I know of dogs the more I love them,” without any invidious comparisons with men, women, or children. As regards the children, indeed, I have been always fond of those which came in my way; and if the Tenth Commandment had gone on to forbid coveting one’s neighbour’s “child,” I am not sure that I should not have had to plead guilty to breaking it many times.

In my old home I possessed a dear Pomeranian dog of whom I was very fond, who, being lame, used constantly to ensconce herself (though forbidden by my father) in my mother’s carriage under the seat, and never showed her little pointed nose till the britzska had got so far from home that she knew no one would put her down on the road. Then she would peer out and lie against my mother’s dress and be fondled. Later on I had the companionship of another beautiful, mouse-coloured Pomeranian, brought as a puppy from Switzerland. In my hardworking life in Bristol in the schools and workhouse she followed me and ingratiated herself everywhere, and my solitary evenings were much the happier for dear Hajjin’s company. Many years afterwards she was laid under the sod of our garden in Hereford Square. Another dog of the same breed whom I sent away at one year old to live in the country, was returned to me eight years afterwards, old and diseased. The poor beast recognized me after a few moments’ eager examination, and uttered an actual scream of joy when I called her by name; exhibiting every token of tender affection for me ever afterwards. When one reflects what eight years signify in the life of a dog,—almost equivalent to the distance between sixteen and sixty in a human being,—some measure is afforded by this incident of the durability of a dog’s attachment. Happily, kind Dr. Hoggan cured poor 618Dee of her malady, and she and I enjoyed five happy years of companionship ere she died here in Hengwrt. I have dedicated my Friend of Man to her memory.

Among my smaller literary tasks in London I wrote an article for which Mr. Leslie Stephen (then editing the Cornhill Magazine in which it appeared) was kind enough to express particular liking. It was called “Dogs whom I have met;” and gave an account of many canine individualities of my acquaintance. I also wrote an article in the Quarterly Review on the Consciousness of Dogs of which I have given above (p. 127) Mr. Darwin’s favourable opinion. Both of these papers are reprinted in my False Beasts and True. Such has been the sum total, I may say, of my personal concern with animals before and apart from my endeavours to deliver them from their scientific tormentors.

It was, as I have stated, the abominable wrongs endured by animals which first aroused, and has permanently maintained, my special interest in them. My great-grandfather had an office in the yard at Newbridge for his magisterial work, and over his own seat he caused to be inscribed the text: “Deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary.” I know not whether it were a juvenile impression, but I have felt all my life an irresistible impulse to rush in wherever anyone is “oppressed” and try to “deliver” him, her, or it, as the case may be, from the “adversary!” In the case of beasts, their helplessness and speechlessness appeal, I think, to every spark of generosity in one’s heart; and the command, “Open thy mouth for the dumb,” seems the very echo of our consciences. Everything in us, manly or womanly, (and the best in us all is both) answers it back.

When I was a little child, living in a house where hunting, coursing, shooting, and fishing, were carried on by all the men and boys, I took such field sports as part of the order of 619things, and learned with delight from my father to fish in our ponds on my own account. Somehow it came to pass that when, at sixteen, my mind went through that strange process which Evangelicals call “Conversion,” among the first things which my freshly-awakened moral sense pointed out was,—that I must give up fishing! I reflected that the poor fishes were happy in their way in their proper element; that we did not in the least need, or indeed often use them for food; and that I must no longer take pleasure in giving pain to any creature of God. It was a little effort to me to relinquish this amusement in my very quiet, uneventful life; but, as the good Quaker’s say, it was “borne in on me,” that I had to do it, and from that time I have never held a rod or line (though I have been out in boats where large quantities of fish were caught on the Atlantic coast), and I freely admit that angling scarcely comes under the head of cruelty at all, and is perfectly right and justifiable when the fish are wanted for food and are killed quickly. I used to stand sometimes after I had ceased to fish, over one of the ponds in our park and watch the bright creatures dart hither and thither, and say in my heart a little thanksgiving on their behalf instead of trying to catch them.

Fifty years after this incident, I read in John Woolman’s, (the Quaker Saint’s,) Journal, Chap. XI., this remark:—

“I believe, where the love of God is verily perfected and the true spirit of government watchfully attended, a tenderness towards all creatures made subject to us will be experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them under our government.”

To me as I have said it was almost the first, and not an advanced, much less “perfected,” religious impulse, which led me to begin to recognise the claims of the lower animals on our compassion. Of course, I disliked then, and always, 620hunting, coursing and shooting; but as a woman I was not expected to join in such pursuits, and I did not take on myself to blame those who followed them. I do not now allow of any comparison between the cruelty of such Field Sports and the deliberate Chamber-Sport of Vivisection.

I shall now relate as succinctly as possible the history of the Anti-vivisection Movement, so far as I have had to do with it. Of course an immense amount of work for the same end has been carried on all these twenty years by other Zoophilists with whom I have had no immediate connection, or perhaps cognizance of their labours, but without whose assistance the Society which I helped to found certainly could not have made as much way as it has done. I only presume here to tell the story of the Victoria Street Society, and the occurrences which led to its formation.

In the year 1863, there appeared in several English newspapers complaints of the cruelties practised in the Veterinary Schools at Alfort near Paris. The students were taught there, as in most other continental veterinary schools, to perform operations on living animals, and so to acquire, (at the cost, of course, of untold suffering to the victims,) the same manipulative skill which English students gain equally well by practising on dead carcases. Living horses were supplied to the Alfort students on which, at the time I speak of, they performed sixty operations apiece, including every one in common use, and many which were purely academic, being never employed in actual practice because the horse, after enduring them, becomes necessarily useless. These operations lasted eight hours, and the aspect of the mangled creatures, hoofless, eyeless, burned, gashed, eviscerated, skinned, mutilated in every conceivable way, appalled the 621visitors, who reported the facts, while it afforded, they said, a subject of merriment to the horde of students. The English Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals laudably exerted itself to stop these atrocities, and appealed to the Emperor to interfere; not, perhaps, very hopefully, since, as I have heard, Napoleon III. was in the habit of attending these hideous spectacles in his own imperial person on the Thursdays on which they took place. This circumstance, taken in connection with the Empress’ patronage of Bull-Fights, has made Sedan seem to me an event on which the animal world, at all events, has to be congratulated.

Some years later Mr. James Cowie took over to France an Appeal, signed by 500 English Veterinarians entreating their French colleagues to adopt the English practice of using only dead carcases for the exercises of students. Through this and other good offices it is understood that the number and severity of the operations performed at Alfort, and elsewhere in France, were then greatly reduced. Unhappily the humane regulations made in 1878 are now evaded, and the dreadful cruelties above described have been actually witnessed by Mr. Peabody and Dr. Baudry, in 1895.

On reading of these cruelties I wrote an article, The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes, which I hoped might help to direct public attention to them. In this paper I endeavoured to work out as best I could the ethical problem (which I at once perceived to be beset with difficulties) of a definition of the limits of human rights over animals. My article was published by Mr. Froude in Fraser’s Magazine for Nov., 1863, and was subsequently reprinted in my Studies Ethical and Social. It was, so far as I know the first effort made to deal with the moral questions involved in the torture of animals either for sake of scientific and therapeutic research, or for the acquirement of manipulative skill. In the 30 years which have elapsed since I wrote it I 622have seen reason to raise considerably the “claims” which I then urged on behalf of the brutes, but I observe that new recruits to our Anti-vivisection party usually begin exactly where I stood at that time, and announce their ideas to me as their mature conclusions.

The same month of November, 1863, in which my article, (written some weeks before, while I was ill and lame at Aix-les-Bains), appeared in Fraser, I was living near Florence, and was startled by hearing of similar cruelties practised at the Specola, where Prof. Schiff had his laboratory. My friend Miss Blagden and I were holding our usual weekly reception in Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo, and we learned that many of our guests had been shocked by the rumours which had reached them. In particular the American physician who had accompanied Theodore Parker to Florence and attended him in his last days,—Dr. Appleton, of Harvard University,—told us that he himself had gone over Prof. Schiff’s laboratory, and had seen dogs, pigeons and other animals in a frightfully mangled and suffering state. A Tuscan officer had seen a cat so tortured that he forced Schiff to kill it. Some 50 or 60 letters had been (or were afterwards) lodged at the Mairie from neighbours complaining of the disturbance caused by the cries and moans of the victims in the Specola. After much conversation I asked, What could be done to check these systematic cruelties, which no Tuscan law could then touch in any way? It was suggested that a Memorial should be addressed to Prof. Schiff himself, urging him to spare his victims as much as possible. This Memorial I drafted at once, and it was translated into Italian and sent round Florence for signatures. Mrs. Somerville placed her name at the head of it; and through her earnest exertions and those of her daughters and of several other friends, the list of supporters soon became very weighty. Among the English signatures was those of Walter Savage Landor (who added 623some words so violent that I was obliged to suppress them!); and among the Italians almost the whole historic aristocracy of old Florence,—Corsi’s and Corsini’s, and Aldobrandini’s and Strozzi’s, and a hundred more, the reading of whose names recalled Medicean times. In all, there were 783 signatories. Very few of them were of the mezzo-ceto class, and none belonged to the (Red) Republican party. Schiff was himself a “Red,” and, as such, he might, apparently, commit any cruelty he thought fit, inasmuch as he and the other vivisectors (we were told by a lady prominent in that party) were seeking “the religion of the future”—in the brains and entrails of the tortured beasts! The same lady expressed to me her wish that “every animal in creation should be immolated, if only to discover a single fact of science.” Another Englishwoman (also married to a foreigner) wrote to the Daily News to praise Schiff for “actively pursuing Vivisection.”

The Memorial, as often happens, did no direct good; Professor Schiff tossing it aside, and politely qualifying the signatories, (in the Nazione newspaper,) as “un tas de Marquis.” But it certainly caused the subject to be much discussed, and doubtless prepared the way for the complaints and lawsuits concerning the “nuisances” of the moaning dogs, which eventually made Florence an unpleasant abode for Professor Schiff. He retreated thence to Geneva in 1877. The Florentine Società Protettrice degli Animali was founded by Countess Baldelli in 1873, and has led the agitation there against Vivisection ever since.

Meanwhile on the presentation of the Memorial, Professor Schiff wrote a letter in the Nazione (the chief newspaper of Florence) denying the facts mentioned in the letter of the official Correspondent of the Daily News, and challenging the said correspondent to come forward and make good the statement. I instantly wrote a letter saying that I was the Daily News’ Correspondent in Florence; that the letter 624complained of was mine; and that for verification of my assertions therein I appended a full and signed statement by Dr. Appleton of what he had himself witnessed in the Specola.

It was rather difficult for me then to believe that this letter of mine (in Italian of course) duly signed and authenticated with name, date and place, was refused publication in the paper wherein I had been challenged to come forward! On learning this amazing fact, I requested Dr. Appleton to go down again to Florence and ask the editor of the Nazione to publish my letter if in no other way, at least as a paid advertisement. The answer made by the editor to Dr. Appleton was, that it might be inserted, but only among the advertisements in certain columns of the paper where no decent reader would look for it. N.B.—the Nazione replenished its exchequer by the help of that class of notices which are declined by every reputable English newspaper. After this Dr. Appleton went in despair to Professor Schiff himself, and told him he was bound in honour, (seeing he had made the challenge to us,) to compel the editor to print our answer. The learned and scientific gentleman shrugged his shoulders and laughed in the face of the American who could imagine him to be so simple!

I left Florence soon after this first brush with the demon of Vivisection, but retained (as will easily be understood) very strong feelings on the subject.

At a meeting of the British Association in Liverpool in 1870 a Committee was appointed to consider the subject of “Physiological Experimentation,” and their Report was published in the Medical Times and Gazette, Feb. 25th, 1871; and in British Assoc. Reports, 1871, p. 144. It consists of the following four Rules or Recommendations on the subject of Vivisection:—

“(I.) No experiment which can be performed under the influence of an anæsthetic ought to be done without it. 625(II.) No painful experiment is justifiable for the mere purpose of illustrating a law or fact already demonstrated; in other words, experimentation without the employment of anæsthetics is not a fitting exhibition for teaching purposes. (III.) Whenever, for the investigation of new truth, it is necessary to make a painful experiment, every effort should be made to ensure success, in order that the sufferings inflicted may not be wasted. For this reason, no painful experiment ought to be performed by an unskilled person, with insufficient instruments and assistants, or in places not suitable to the purpose; that is to say, anywhere except in physiological and pathological laboratories, under proper regulations. (IV.) In the scientific preparation for veterinary practice, operations ought not to be performed upon living animals for the mere purpose of obtaining greater operative dexterity.”

These four Rules were countersigned by M. A. Lawson, G. M. Humphry (now Sir George Humphry), J. H. Balfour, Arthur Gamgee, William Flower, J. Burdon-Sanderson, and George Rolleston. Of course we, who attended that celebrated Liverpool Meeting of the British Association and had heard the President laud Dr. Brown-Séquard enthusiastically, greatly rejoiced at this humane Ukase of autocratic Science.

But as time passed we were surprised to find that nothing was done to enforce these rules in any way or at any place; and that the particular practice which they most distinctly condemn, namely, the use of vivisections as Illustrations of recognised facts,—was flourishing more than ever without let or hindrance. The prospectuses of University College for 1874–5, of Guy’s Hospital Medical School 1874–5, of St. Thomas’s Hospital, of Westminster Hospital Medical School, etc., all mentioned among their attractions: “Demonstrations on living animals;” “Gentlemen will themselves perform the experiments;” &c., and quite as if nothing whatever had been said against them.

626But worse remained. One of the signatories of the above Rules (or as perhaps we may more properly call them, these “Pious Opinions”?),—the most eminent of English physiologists, Prof. Burdon-Sanderson himself, edited and brought out in 1873, the Handbook of the Physiological Laboratory, to which he, Dr. Lauder-Brunton, Dr. Klein, and Dr. Foster were joint contributors. This celebrated work is a Manual of Exercises in Vivisection, intended (as the Preface says) “for beginners in Physiological work.” The following are observations on this book furnished to the Royal Commission by Mr. Colam, and printed in Appendix iv., p. 379, of their Report and Minutes of Evidence:—

“That the object of the editor and his coadjutors was to induce young persons to perform experiments on their own account and without adequate surveillance is manifest throughout the work, by the supply of elementary knowledge and elaborate data. Not only are the names and quantities of necessary chemicals given, but the most careful description is provided in letter-press and plates of implements for holding animals during their struggles, so that a novice may learn at home without a teacher. Besides, the editor’s preface states, that the book is ‘intended for beginners,’ and that ‘difficult and complicated’ experiments consequently have been omitted; and that of Dr. Foster allures the student by assurances of inexpensive as well as easy manipulation.... Very seldom indeed is the student told to anæsthetise, and then only during an operation. It cannot be alleged that ‘beginners’ know when to narcotise, and when not; but if they do then the few directions to use chloral, &c., are unnecessary. No doubt should have been left on this point in a Handbook designed ‘for beginners.’ Besides, where will students find cautions against the infliction of unnecessary pain, and wanton experimentation? On the contrary, the student is encouraged to repeat the torture ‘any number of times.’ These facts are significant.”

627In the Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission we find that the late Prof. Rolleston, of Oxford, being under examination, was asked by Mr. Hutton: “Then I understand that your opinion about the Handbook is, that it is a dangerous book to society, and that it has warranted to some extent the feeling of anxiety in the public which its publication has created?” Prof. Rolleston: “I am sorry to have to say that I do think it is so” (1351). In his own examination Prof. Burdon-Sanderson admitted that the use of anæsthetics whenever possible “ought to have been stated much more distinctly at the beginning of his book” (2265), and agreed to Lord Cardwell’s suggestion, “Then I may assume that in any future communication with ‘beginners’ greater pains will be taken to make them distinctly understand how animals may be saved from suffering than has been taken in this book?” “Yes,” said Dr. B.-S., “I am quite willing to say that” (2266).

Esoteric Vivisection it will be observed, as revealed in Handbooks for “Beginners,” is a very different thing from Exoteric Vivisection, described for the benefit of the outside public as if regulated by the Four Rules above quoted!

The following year, 1874, certain experiments were performed before a Medical Congress at Norwich. They consisted in the injection of alcohol and of absinthe into the veins of dogs; and were done by M. Magnan, an eminent French physiologist, who has in recent years described sympathy for animals as a special form of insanity. Mr. Colam, on behalf of the R.S.P.C.A., very properly instituted a prosecution against M. Magnan, under the Act 12 and 13 Vict., c. 92; and brought Sir William Fergusson, and Dr. Tufnell (the President of the Irish College of Surgeons) to swear that his experiments were useless. M. Magnan withdrew speedily to his own country or a conviction would certainly have been obtained against him. But it was not merely on proof of the infliction of torture that Mr. Colam’s Society relied to obtain 628such conviction, but on the high scientific authority which they were able to bring to prove that the torture was scientifically useless. Failing such testimony, which would generally be unattainable, it was recognised that the application of the Act in question (Martin’s Act amended) to scientific cruelties, which it had not been framed to meet, would always be beset with difficulties. It became thenceforth apparent to the friends of animals that some new legislation, calculated to reach offenders pleading scientific purpose for barbarous experiments was urgently needed; and the existence of the Handbook, with minute directions for performing hundreds of operations,—many of them of extreme severity,—proved that the danger was not remote or theoretical; but already present and at our doors.

A few weeks after this trial at Norwich had taken place, and had justly gained great applause for Mr. Colam and the R.S.P.C.A., Mrs. Luther Holden, wife of the eminent surgeon, then Senior Surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, called on me in Hereford Square to talk over the matter and take counsel as to what could be done to strengthen the law in the desired direction. The great and wealthy R.S.P.C.A. was obviously the body with which it properly lay to promote the needed legislation; and it only seemed necessary to give the Committee of that Society proof that public opinion would strongly support them in calling for it, to induce them to bring a suitable Bill, into Parliament backed by their abundant influence. I agreed to draft a Memorial to the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. praying it to undertake this task; after learning from Mr. Colam that such an appeal would be altogether welcome; and I may add that I received cordial assistance from him in arranging for its presentation.

It was a difficult task for me to draw up that Memorial, but, such as it was, it acted as a spark to tinder, showing 629how much latent feeling existed on the subject. Many ladies and gentlemen: notably the Countess of Camperdown, the Countess of Portsmouth (now the Dowager Countess), General Colin Mackenzie, Col. Wood (now Sir Evelyn) and others, exerted themselves most earnestly to obtain influential signatures in their circles, and distributed in all directions copies of the Memorial and of two pamphlets I wrote to accompany it—“Reasons for Interference” and “Need of a Bill.” With their help in the course of about six weeks, (without advertisements or paid agency of any kind), we obtained 600 signatures; every one of which represented a man or woman of some social importance. The first to sign it was my neighbour and friend, Rev. Gerald Blunt, rector of Chelsea. After him came Mr. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Mr. Lecky, Sir Arthur Helps, Sir W. Fergusson, John Bright, Mr. Jowett, the Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson), Sir Edwin Arnold, the Primate of Ireland (Marcus Beresford), Cardinal Manning (then Archbishop of Westminster), the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, John Ruskin, James Martineau, the Duke of Rutland, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Coleridge, Lord Selborne, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, the Bishops of Winchester, Exeter, Salisbury, Manchester, Bath and Wells, Hereford, St. Asaph, and Derry, Lord Russell, and many other peers and M.P.’s, and no less than 78 medical men, several of whom were eminent in the profession.

I shall insert here a few of the replies, favourable and otherwise, which I received to my invitations to sign the Memorial.

“The Archbishop of York presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe and begs to enclose the Memorial signed by him.

630“‘Exception to suggestion 3rd,’ on the prohibition of publishing, which he thinks unworkable, and therefore (illegible) to the Memorial. If however it is too late to alter it, he will not stand out even on that point.

“He thinks the practices in question detestable. The Norwich case was a disgrace to the country.

“The Archbishop thanks Miss Cobbe for inviting him to sign.”

“Lady Mildred and myself trust that it is not too late to enclose to you the accompanying signatures to the Memorial against Vivisection, although the day fixed for its return has unfortunately been allowed to elapse. We can assure you of our very hearty sympathy in the cause; the delay has wholly come of oversight.

“In regard to the details of the suggestions, I must be allowed to express my doubt as to the feasibility of the 3rd suggestion. Its stringency would I fear defeat its own object. I sympathise too much with the question in itself to decline signing on account of this proposal, but I must request to be considered as a dissentient on that head.

“Believe me, dear Madam, yours very faithfully,

“B. Jowett to Miss F. P. C.

“I have much pleasure in signing the paper which you kindly sent me.

“I should have been very sorry not to join in the Protest against this hideous offence, and am truly obliged to you for furnishing me with the opportunity. The simultaneous loss, from the Morals of our ‘advanced’ scientific men, of all reverent sentiment towards beings above them and towards beings below, is a curious and instructive phenomenon, highly significant of the process which their nature is undergoing at both ends.

“With truest wishes for many a happy and beneficent year

“The Bishop of Manchester” [Dr. Fraser] “presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe, and thanks her for giving him the opportunity of appending his name to this Memorial, which has his most hearty concurrence.”

“The Bishop of Salisbury’s compliments to Miss Cobbe. He cannot withhold his signature to her Paper after reading the ‘reasons which she has kindly sent him.’”

“I have received your letter of the 31st ult. on the subject of the Memorial to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with regard to Vivisection.

“I hardly think I should be right, considering my imperfect acquaintance with the subject, in adding my name thereto at present.

“If I had a hundred signatures you should have them all!

“My heart has long burned with indignation against these murderers and torturers of innocent animals.

“Was it for this that the great God made man the Lord of the creation?

“It is incredible hypocrisy and folly to pretend that such wholesale torture is necessary to enlighten these stupid doctors!

“It seems to me peculiarly ungrateful in man, to break forth in this wholesale Animal Inquisition when Providence has so recently revealed to us several new natural powers whereby human suffering is so much diminished.

“But I must restrain my feelings, and you must pardon me. I did not know that this good work was begun.

“Only get some thoroughgoing and able friend of the animal world to tell the tale to a British House of Parliament, and these philosophic torturers will be stayed in their detestable course.

“I have an impression that the subject of Vivisection is to be brought before the Senate of the University of London, which consists mainly of great physicians and surgeons, but of which I am a member. Hence I think I hardly ought to sign the paper you have sent me.

“This, you see is an official answer, but I am glad to be able to make it, for the truth is I have neither thought nor enquired sufficiently about Vivisection to be ready with a clear opinion.

“Even if the utmost be proved against the vivisectors, I am inclined to think that they ought to be dealt with as 633guilty of a new offence, and not of an old one. I do not at all like the notion of bringing old laws such as Martin’s Act against cruelty to animals, to bear on a class of cases never contemplated at the time of their enactment. It has a certain resemblance to enforcing the old law of blasphemy against persons who discuss Christianity in the modern philosophical spirit. Perhaps I am the more sensitive on this point since a friend elaborately demonstrated to me that I was liable to prosecution for what seemed to me a very innocent passage in a book of mine!

“I have affixed my name with much satisfaction to this Memorial, and I presume that you intend that men should be in largest number on the list.

This Memorial having a certain importance in the history of our movement, I quote the principal paragraphs here:

“The practice of Vivisection has received of recent years enormous extension. Instead of an occasional experiment, made by a man of high scientific attainment, to determine some important problem of physiology, or to test the feasibility of a new surgical operation, it has now become the everyday exercise of hundreds of physiologists and young students of physiology throughout Europe and 634America. In the latter country, lecturers in most of the schools employ living animals instead of dead for ordinary illustrations, and in Italy one physiologist alone has for some years past experimented on more than 800 dogs annually. A recent correspondence in the Spectator shows that many English physiologists contemplate the indefinite multiplication of such vivisections; some (as Dr. Pye-Smith) defending them as illustrations of lectures, and some (as Mr. Ray-Lankester) frankly avowing that one experiment must lead to another ad infinitum. Every real or supposed discovery of one physiologist immediately causes the repetition of his experiments by scores of students. The most numerous and important of these researches being connected with the nervous system, the use of complete anæsthetics is practically prohibited. Even when employed during an operation, the effect of the anæsthetic of course shortly ceases, and, for the completion of the experiment, the animal is left to suffer the pain of the laceration to which it has been subjected. Another class of experiments consists in superinducing some special disease; such as alcoholism (tried by M. Magnan on dogs at Norwich), and the peculiar malady arising from eating diseased pork (Trichiniasis), superinduced on a number of rabbits in Germany by Dr. Virchow. How far public opinion is becoming deadened to these practices is proved by the frequent recurrence in the newspapers of paragraphs simply alluding to them as matters of scientific interest involving no moral question whatever. One such recently appeared in a highly respectable Review, detailing a French physiologist’s efforts, first to drench the veins of dogs with alcohol, and then to produce spontaneous combustion. Such experiments as these, it is needless to remark, cannot be justified as endeavours to mitigate the sufferings of humanity, and are rather to be characterised as gratifications of the ‘dilettantism of discovery.’

“The recent trial at Norwich has established the fact that, in a public Medical Congress, and sanctioned by a majority of the members, an experiment was tried which 635has since been formally pronounced by two of the most eminent surgeons in the kingdom to have been ‘cruel and unnecessary.’ We have, therefore, too much reason to fear that in laboratories less exposed to public view, and among inconsiderate young students, very much greater abuses take place which call for repression.

“It is earnestly urged by your Memorialists that the great and influential Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals may see fit to undertake the task (which appears strictly to fall within its province) of placing suitable restrictions on this rapidly increasing evil. The vast benefit to the cause of humanity which the Society has in the past half century effected, would, in our humble estimation, remain altogether one-sided and incomplete; if, while brutal carters and ignorant costermongers are brought to punishment for maltreating the animals under their charge, learned and refined gentlemen should be left unquestioned to inflict far more exquisite pain upon still more sensitive creatures; as if the mere allegation of a scientific purpose removed them above all legal or moral responsibility.

“We therefore beg respectfully to urge on the Committee the immediate adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the Restriction of Vivisection; and we trust that it may not be left to others, who possess neither the wealth or organization of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to make such efforts in the same direction as might prove to be in their power.”

It was arranged that the Memorial should be presented in Jermyn Street in a formal manner on the 25th January, 1875, by a deputation introduced by my cousin’s husband, Mr. John Locke, M.P., Q.C., and consisting of Sir Frederick Elliot, Lord Jocelyn Percy, General G. Lawrence, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Dr. Walker, Col. Wood (now Sir Evelyn) and several ladies.

Prince Lucian Bonaparte, who always warmly befriended the cause, took the chair at first, and was succeeded by Lord 636Harrowby, President of the R.S.P.C.A., supported by Lady Burdett Coutts, Lord Mount-Temple (then Mr. Cowper-Temple) and others.

After some friendly discussion it was agreed that the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. would give the subject their most zealous attention; and a sub-Committee to deal with the matter was accordingly appointed immediately afterwards.

When I drove home to Hereford Square from Jermyn Street that day, I rejoiced to think that I had accomplished a step towards obtaining the protection of the law for the victims of science; and I fully believed that I was free to return to my own literary pursuits and to the journalism which then occupied most of my time. A few days later I was requested to attend (for the occasion only) the first Meeting of the sub-Committee for Vivisection of the R.S.P.C.A. On entering the room my spirits sank, for I saw round the table a number of worthy gentlemen, mostly elderly, but not one of the more distinguished members of their Committee or, (I think), a single Peer or Member of Parliament. In short, they were not the men to take the lead in such a movement and make a bold stand against the claims of science. After a few minutes the Chairman himself asked me: “Whether I could not undertake to get a Bill into Parliament for the object we desired?” As if all my labour with the Memorial had not been spent to make them do this very thing! It was obviously felt by others present that this suggestion was out of place, and I soon retired, leaving the sub-Committee to send Mr. Colam round to make enquiries among the physiologists—a mission which might, perhaps, be represented as a friendly request to be told frankly “whether they were really cruel?” I understood, later, that he was shown a painless vivisection on a cat and offered a glass of sherry; and there (so far as I know or ever heard) the labours of that sub-Committee ended. Mr. Colam afterwards took immense 637pains to collect evidence from the published works of Vivisectors of the extent and severity of their operations; and this very valuable mass of materials was presented by him some months later to the Royal Commission, and is published in the Blue Book as an Appendix to their Minutes.

I was, of course, miserably disappointed at this stage of affairs, but on the 2nd February, 1875, there appeared in the Morning Post the celebrated letter from Dr. George Hoggan, in which (without naming Claude Bernard) he described what he had himself witnessed in his laboratory when recently working there for several months. This letter was absolutely invaluable to our cause, giving, as it did, reality and firsthand testimony to all we had asserted from books and reports. In the course of it Dr. Hoggan said:—

“I venture to record a little of my own experience in the matter, part of which was gained as an assistant in the laboratory of one of the greatest living experimental physiologists. In that laboratory we sacrificed daily from one to three dogs, besides rabbits and other animals, and after four months’ experience I am of opinion that not one of those experiments on animals was justified or necessary. The idea of the good of humanity was simply out of the question, and would be laughed at, the great aim being to keep up with, or get ahead of, one’s contemporaries in science, even at the price of an incalculable amount of torture needlessly and iniquitously inflicted on the poor animals. During three campaigns I have witnessed many harsh sights, but I think the saddest sight I ever witnessed was when the dogs were brought up from the cellar to the laboratory for sacrifice. Instead of appearing pleased with the change from darkness to light, they seemed seized with horror as soon as they smelt the air of the place, divining, apparently, their approaching fate. They would make friendly advances to each of the three or four persons present, and as far as eyes, ears, and tail could make a mute appeal for mercy eloquent, they tried it in vain.

638“Were the feelings of the experimental physiologists not blunted, they could not long continue the practice of vivisection. They are always ready to repudiate any implied want of tender feeling, but I must say that they seldom show much pity; on the contrary, in practice they frequently show the reverse. Hundreds of times I have seen, when an animal writhed with pain and thereby deranged the tissues, during a delicate dissection, instead of being soothed, it would receive a slap and an angry order to be quiet and behave itself. At other times, when an animal had endured great pain for hours without struggling or giving more than an occasional low whine, instead of letting the poor mangled wretch loose to crawl painfully about the place in reserve for another day’s torture, it would receive pity so far that it would be said to have behaved well enough to merit death; and, as a reward, would be killed at once by breaking up the medulla with a needle, or ‘pithing,’ as this operation is called. I have often heard the professor say when one side of an animal had been so mangled and the tissues so obscured by clotted blood that it was difficult to find the part searched for, ‘Why don’t you begin on the other side?’ or ‘Why don’t you take another dog? What is the use of being so economical?’ One of the most revolting features in the laboratory was the custom of giving an animal, on which the professor had completed his experiment, and which had still some life left, to the assistants to practice the finding of arteries, nerves, &c., in the living animal, or for performing what are called fundamental experiments upon it—in other words, repeating those which are recommended in the laboratory hand-books. I am inclined to look upon anæsthetics as the greatest curse to vivisectible animals. They alter too much the normal conditions of life to give accurate results, and they are therefore little depended upon. They, indeed, prove far more efficacious in lulling public feeling towards the vivisectors than pain in the vivisected.”

I had met Dr. Hoggan one day just before this occurrence at Mdme. Bodichon’s house, but I had no idea that he would, 639or could, bear such valuable testimony; and I have never ceased to feel that in thus nobly coming forward to offer it spontaneously, he struck the greatest blow on our side in the whole battle. Of course I expressed to him all the gratitude I felt, and we thenceforth took counsel frequently as to the policy to be pursued in opposing vivisection.

It soon became evident that if a Bill were to be presented to Parliament that session it must be promoted by some parties other than the Committee of the R.S.P.C.A. Indeed in the following December The Animal World, in a leading article, avowed that “the Royal Society (P.C.A.) is not so entirely unanimous as to desire the passing of any special legislative enactment on this subject” (vivisection). Feeling convinced that some such obstacle was in the way I turned to my friends to see if it might be possible to push on a Bill independently, and with the most kind help of Sir William Hart Dyke (the Conservative whip), it was arranged that a Bill for “Regulating the Practice of Vivisection” should be introduced with the sanction of Government into the House of Lords by Lord Henniker (Lord Hartismere). It is impossible to describe all the anxiety I endured during the interval up to the 4th May, when this Bill was actually presented. Lord Henniker was exceedingly good about it and took much pains with the draft prepared at first by Sir Frederick Elliot, and afterwards completed for Lord Henniker by Mr. Fitzgerald. Lord Coleridge also took great interest in it, and gave most valuable advice, and Mr. Lowe (who afterwards bitterly opposed the almost identical measure of Lord Cross in the Commons), was willing to give this earlier Bill much consideration. I met him one day at luncheon at Airlie Lodge, where were also Lord Henniker, Lady Minto, Lord Airlie and others interested, and the Bill was gone over clause by clause till adjusted to Mr. Lowe’s counsels.

640Lord Henniker introduced the Bill thus drafted “for Regulating the Practice of Vivisection” into the House of Lords on the 4th May, 1875; but on the 12th May, to our great surprise another Bill to prevent Abuse in Experiments on Animals was introduced into the House of Commons by Dr. (now Lord) Playfair. On the appearance of this latter Bill, which was understood to be promoted by the physiologists themselves—notably by Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, and by Mr. Charles Darwin—the Government, which had sanctioned Lord Henniker’s Bill, thought it necessary to issue a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the subject before any legislation should be proceeded with. This was done accordingly on the 22nd June, and both Bills were then withdrawn.

The student of this old chapter of the history of the Anti-vivisection Crusade will find both of the above-named Bills (and also the ineffective sketch of what might have been the Bill of the R.S.P.C.A.) in the Appendix to the Report of the Royal Commission, pp. 336–8. Mr. Charles Darwin, in a letter to the Times, April 18th, 1881, said that he “took an active part in trying to get a Bill passed such as would have removed all just cause of complaint, and at the same time have left the physiologists free to pursue their researches,”—a “Bill very different from that which has since been passed.” As Mr. Darwin’s biographer, while reprinting this letter, has not quoted my challenge to him in the Times of the 23rd to point out “in what respect the former Bill is very different from the Act of 1876,” I think it well to cite here the lucid definition of that difference as delineated in the Spectator of May 15th, doubtless by the editor, Mr. Hutton.

“On Wednesday afternoon last, Dr. Lyon Playfair laid on the table of the House of Commons a Bill for the 641Restriction of Vivisection, which has been drawn up by physiologists, no doubt in part, in the interest of physiological science, but also in part, no doubt in the interest of humanity. The contents of this Bill are the best answer which it is possible to give to the ignorant attack made in a daily contemporary on Tuesday on Lord Henniker’s Bill, introduced into the House of Lords last week. The two Bills differ in principle only on one important point. Both of them clearly have been maturely considered by men of science as well as by humanitarians. Both of them assume the great and increasing character of the evil which has to be dealt with. Both of them approach that evil in the same manner, by insisting that scientific experiments which are painful to animals shall be tried only on the avowed responsibility of men of the highest education, whose right to try them may be withdrawn if it be abused. Both of them aim at compelling the physiologists who are permitted to try such experiments at all, to use anæsthetics throughout the experiment, whenever the use of anæsthetics is not fatal to the investigation itself.... The Bills differ, however, on a most important point. It is certain that all the contempt showered on Lord Henniker’s Bill by the ignorant assailants of the humanitarian party might equally have been showered on Dr. Lyon Playfair’s. But Lord Henniker’s Bill contemplates making physiological and pathological experiments on living animals, even under complete anæsthesia, illegal, except under the same responsibility and on the same conditions as those experiments which are not, and cannot be, conducted under complete anæsthesia,—while Dr. Lyon Playfair leaves all experiments conducted under anæsthetics,—and will practically, though not theoretically, leave, we fear, those which only PROFESS to be so conducted (a very different thing),—as utterly without restriction as they now are. Indeed, it attempts no sort of limitation upon them. If a whole hecatomb of guinea-pigs, or even dogs, were known to be imported, and their carcases exported daily from the private house of any man who declared that he always used anæsthetics, Dr. 642Playfair’s Bill provides, we believe, no sort of machinery by which the truth of his assertion could be even tested.... It is, however, no small matter to have obtained this clear admission on scientific authority that the victimisation of animals in the interest of science is an evil of a growing and serious kind which needs legislative interference, and calls for at least the threat of serious penalties....”

In short, the Bill promoted by the physiologists and Mr. Darwin, was, like the Resolutions of the Liverpool British Association, a “Pious Opinion” or Brutum fulmen. Nothing more.

The Royal Commission on Vivisection was issued, as I have said, on the 22nd June, 1875, and the Report was dated January 8th, 1876. The intervening months were filled with anxiety. I heard constantly all that went on at the Commission, and my hopes and fears rose and fell week by week. Of the constitution of the Commission much might be said. Writing of it in the British Friend, May, 1876, the late Mr. J. B. Firth, M.P., Q.C., remarked:—

“If it were possible for a Royal Commission to be appointed to inquire into the practice of Thuggee, I should have very little confidence in their report if one-third of the Commissioners were prominent practisers of the art. On the same principle the constitution of this Commission is open to the observation that it included two notorious advocates of vivisection, Dr. Erichsen and Professor Huxley, both of whom had to ‘explain’ their writings and practices in connection with it, in the course of the inquiry.”

Certain it is, as I heard at the time, and as anyone may verify by looking over the Minutes of Evidence, these two able gentlemen acted, not as Judges on the Bench examining evidence dispassionately, but as exceedingly vigorous and keen-eyed Counsel for the Physiologists. On the humanitarian 643side there was but a single pronounced opponent of Vivisection,—Mr. R. H. Hutton,—who nobly sacrificed his time for half a year to doing all that was in the power of a single Member of the Commission, and he a layman, to elicit the truth concerning the alleged cruelty of the practice. At the end, after receiving a mass of evidence in answer to 3,764 questions from 53 witnesses, the Commission reported distinctly in favour of legislative interference. They say:—

“Even if the weight of authority on the side of legislative interference had been less considerable, we should have thought ourselves called upon to recommend it by the reason of the thing. It is manifest that the practice is, from its very nature, liable to great abuse, and that since it is impossible for society to entertain the idea of putting an end to it, it ought to be subjected to due regulation and control.... It is not to be doubted that inhumanity may be found in persons of very high position as physiologists.... Beside the cases in which inhumanity exists, we are satisfied that there are others in which carelessness and indifference prevail to an extent sufficient to form a ground for legislative interference.”

Yet in the face of these and other weighty sentences to the same purpose, it has been persistently asserted that the Royal Commission exonerated English physiologists from all charge of cruelty! In Mr. Darwin’s celebrated letter to Professor Holmgren, of Upsala, published in the Times, April, 1881, he said: “The investigation of the matter by a Royal Commission proved that the accusations made against our English physiologists were false.” Commenting on this letter the Spectator, April 23rd, 1881 (doubtless Mr. Hutton himself) observed:

“The Royal Commission did not report this. They came to no such conclusion, and though that may be Mr. Darwin’s own inference from what they did say, it is only his inference, 644not theirs. In our opinion it was proved that very great cruelty had been practised, with hardly any appreciable results, by more than one British physiologist.”

Nor must it be left out of sight in estimating the disingenuousness of the advocates of vivisection, that the above quoted sentences from the Report of the Commission were countersigned by those representatives of Science, Prof. Huxley and Mr. Erichsen; as were, of course, also the subsequent paragraphs, formally recommending a measure almost identical with Lord Carnarvon’s Bill. In spite of this the Vivisecting clique has not ceased to assert that English physiologists were exculpated, and to protest against the measure which we introduced in strict accordance with that recommendation; a measure which was even still further mitigated, (as regarded freedom to the vivisectors,) under the pressure of their Deputation to the Home Office, till it became the present quasi ineffectual Act.

While the Royal Commission was still sitting in the autumn, and when it had become obvious that much would remain to be done before any effectual check could be placed on Vivisection, Dr. Hoggan suggested to me that we should form a Society to carry on the work. I abhorred Societies, and knew only too well the huge additional labour of working the machinery of one, over and above any direct help to the object in view. I had hitherto worked independently and freely, taking always the advice of the eminent men who were so good as to counsel me at every step. But I felt that this plan could not suffice much longer, and that the authority of a formally constituted Society was needed to make headway against an evil which daily revealed itself as more formidable. Accordingly I agreed with Dr. Hoggan that we should do well to form such a Society, he and I being the Honorary Secretaries, provided we could obtain the countenance of some men of eminence to form the nucleus. 645“I will write,” I said, “to Lord Shaftesbury and to the Archbishop of York. If they will give me their names, we can conjure with them. If not, I will not undertake to form a Society.”

I wrote that night to those two eminent persons. I received next day from Lord Shaftesbury a telegram (which he must have dispatched instantly on receiving my letter) which answered “Yes.” Next day the post brought from him the letter which I shall here print. The next post brought also the letter from Archbishop Thomson. Thus the Society consisted for two days of Lord Shaftesbury, the Archbishop, Dr. Hoggan and myself!

“Lord Shaftesbury to Miss F. P. C.

“It is needful I am sure, to found a Society, in order to have unity and persistency of action.

“I judge, by the terms of the circular, that the object of the Society will be restriction and not prohibition.

“Possibly, this end is as much as you will be able to attain. Prohibition, I doubt not, would be evaded; but restriction will, I am certain, be exceeded.

“Not but that a little is better than nothing.

“But you will find many who will think with much show of reason, that, by surrendering the principle, you have surrendered the great argument.

“I am quite ready to join the Society for restricting Vivisection. I agree with you; total prohibition would be impossible.

646With these names to “conjure with,” as I have said, we found it easy to enrol a goodly company in the ranks of our new Society. Cardinal Manning was one of the first to join us. On the 2nd Dec., 1875, the first Committee meeting was held in the house of Dr. and Mrs. Hoggan, 13, Granville Place, Portman Square, Mr. Stansfeld taking the chair. Mrs. Wedgwood, wife of Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood and mother of my friend Miss Julia Wedgwood, was present at that first meeting, and (so long as her health permitted,) at those which followed,—a worthy example of “heredity,” since her father and mother, Sir James and Lady Mackintosh, had been among the principal supporters of Richard Martin, and founders of the R.S.P.C.A. At the third meeting of the Committee, on Feb. 18th, 1876, Lord Shaftesbury took the Chair, for the first time, and again he took it on the occasion of a memorable meeting on the 1st of March, but vacated it on the arrival of Archbishop Thomson, who proved to be an admirably efficient Chairman. We had a serious job, that day; that of discussing the “Statement” of our position and objects. I had drafted this Statement in preparation, as well as compiled from the Minutes of Evidence, a series of Extracts exhibiting the extension and abuses of Vivisection; and also evidence regarding Anæsthetics and regarding foreign physiologists. These appendices were all accepted and appear in the pamphlet; but my Statement was most minutely debated, clause for clause, and at last adopted, not without several modifications. After summarising the Report of the Royal Commission which “has been in some respects seriously misconstrued” (I might add, persistently misconstrued ever since) and also Mr. Hutton’s independent Report, in which he desired that the “Household Animals” should be exempted from Vivisection, the Committee carefully criticise this Report and express their confident hope that “a Bill may be introduced immediately by Government to carry out the 647recommendations of the Commission.” They observe, in conclusion, that they find “a just summary of their sentiments in Mr. Hutton’s expression of his view:—

“‘The measure will not at all satisfy my own conceptions of the needs of the case, unless it result in putting an end to all experiments involving not merely torture but anything at all approaching thereto.’”

Such was our attitude at that memorable date when we commenced the regular steady work which has now gone on for just 18 years. On the 2nd or 3rd of March I took possession of the offices where so large a part of my life was henceforth to be spent. When my kind colleagues had left me and I locked the outer door of the offices and knew myself to be alone, I resolved very seriously to devote myself, so long as might be needful, to this work of trying to save God’s poor creatures from their intolerable doom; and I resolved “never to go to bed at night leaving a stone unturned which might help to stop Vivisection.” I believe I have kept that resolution. I commend it to other workers.

It may interest the reader to know who were the persons then actually aiding and supporting our movement.

There was,—first and most important,—my colleague and friend Dr. George Hoggan, who laboured incessantly (and wholly gratuitously) for the cause. His wife, Dr. Frances Hoggan, who I am thankful to say, still survives, was also a most useful member of the Committee.

The other Members of the Executive were: Sir Frederick Elliot, K.C.M.G. who had long been Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office; Major-General Colin Mackenzie, a noble old hero of the Afghan wars and the Mutiny; Mr. Leslie Stephen; Mrs. Hensleigh Wedgwood; Dr. Vaughan (the late Master of the Temple); the Countess of Portsmouth; the Countess of Camperdown; my friend Miss Lloyd; my cousin, Mr. Locke, M.P., Q.C.; Mr. William Shaen; Col. (now 648Sir Evelyn) Wood; and Mr. Edward de Fonblanque. The latter gentleman was one of the most useful members of the Committee, whose retirement three years later after our adoption of a more advanced policy, I have never ceased to regret.

Beside these Members of the Committee we had then as Vice-Presidents, the Archbishop of York, the Marquis of Bute, Cardinal Manning, Lord Portsmouth, Mr. Cowper-Temple (afterwards Lord Mount-Temple), Right Hon. James Stansfeld, Lord Shaftesbury, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (Dr. Ellicott), the Bishop of Manchester (Dr. Fraser), Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Fitzroy Kelly.

Dr. Hoggan had invited Mr. Spurgeon to join our Society, but received from him the following reply:—

“I do not like to become an officer of a Society for I have no time to attend to the duties of such an office, and it strikes me as a false system which is now so general, which allows names to appear on Committees and requires no service from the individuals.

“In all efforts to spare animals from needless pain I wish you the utmost success. There are cases in which they must suffer, as we also must, but not one pang ought to be endured by them from which we can screen them.

“I shall aid your effort in my own way.”

Mr. Spurgeon wrote on one occasion a letter to Lord Shaftesbury to be read from the Chair at a Meeting; but, much as we wished to use it, the extreme strength of the expletives was considered to transgress the borders of expediency!

649We invited Prof. Rolleston to give us his support. The following was his reply:—

“I would have answered your letter before had I been able to make up my mind to do as you ask. This, however, I think I should not, in the interests of the line of legislation which I advocate, do well to do. I believe I speak with greater weight from keeping an independent position. And as I have a great desire to throw away none of the advantages which that position gives me, I am obliged to decline your invitation. Allow me to say that I am much gratified by your writing to ask me to do what I decline to do out of considerations of expediency.

“It is also a great pleasure to me to think that what I said at Bristol has met with your approbation. The bearing of parts at the end or towards the end of that Address upon the future of Vivisection was, I hope, tolerably obvious.

The newly-formed Society had been clumsily named by Dr. Hoggan: “The Society for Protection of Animals liable to Vivisection,” and its aim was: “to obtain the greatest possible protection for animals liable to vivisection.” I was obliged to yield to my colleague as regarded this awkward title which exactly defined the position he desired to take up; but it was a constant source of worry and loss to us. As soon as possible, however, after we had taken our offices in Victoria Street, I called our Society, unofficially and for popular use, simply “The Victoria Street Society.”

These offices are large and handsome, and so conveniently situated that the Society has retained them ever since. They are on the first floor of a house—formerly numbered “1,” now numbered “20,”—in Victoria Street, ten or eleven 650doors up the street from the Broad Sanctuary and the Westminster Palace Hotel; and with Westminster Abbey and the Towers of the Houses of Parliament in view from the street door. The offices contain an ante-room (now piled with our papers), a large airy room with two windows for the clerks, a Secretary’s private room, and a spacious and lightsome Committee-room with three windows. Out of this last another room was accessible, which at one time was taken for my especial use. I put up bookshelves, pictures, curtains, and various little feminine relaxations, and thus covered, as far as might be, the frightful character of our work, so that friends should find our office no painful place to visit.

We did not let the grass grow under our feet after we had settled down in these offices. On the 20th March there went out from them to the neighbouring Home Office a Deputation to Mr. (now Lord) Cross to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission. The Deputation was headed by Lord Shaftesbury, and included the Earl of Minto, Cardinal Manning, Mr. Froude, Mr. Mundella, Sir Frederick Elliot, Col. Evelyn Wood, and Mr. Cowper-Temple. Mr. Carlyle was to have joined the Deputation, but held back sooner than accompany the Cardinal.

Chief Baron Kelly wrote us the following cordial expressions of regret for non-attendance:—

“The Lord Chief Baron presents his compliments to Miss Cobbe, and very greatly regrets that, being engaged at the assize on the Western Circuit until nearly the middle of April, he will be unable to accompany the deputation to Mr. Cross on the subject of Vivisection, to which, however, he earnestly wishes success.”

651We had invited Canon Liddon, who was a subscriber to our funds from the first, to join this Deputation, but received from him the following reply:

“I should be sincerely glad to be able to obey your kind wishes in the matter of the proposed Deputation, if I could. But I am unable to be in London again between to-morrow and April 1st, and this, I fear will make it impossible.

“I shall be sincerely glad to hear that the Deputation succeeds in persuading the Home Secretary to make legislation on the Report of the Vivisection Commission a Government question. Mr. Hutton appeared to me to resist the —— criticisms of the Times on the Report very admirably!

A few weeks afterwards when I invited him to attend a meeting he wrote again a letter, to the last sentence of which I desire to call attention as embodying the opinion of this eminent man on the human moral interest involved in our crusade.

“I sincerely wish that I could obey your summons. But, as a professor here, I have public duties on Thursday, the 1st of June, which I cannot decline or transfer to other hands.

“I think I told you I was a useless person for these good purposes; and so, you see, it is.

“Still you are very well off in the way of speakers, and will not miss such a person as I. Heartily do I hope that the meeting may reward the trouble you have taken about it by strengthening Lord Carnarvon’s hands. The cause 652you have at heart is of even greater importance to human character than to the physical comfort of those of our ‘fellow creatures’ who are most immediately concerned.

The Deputation of March 20th to the Home Office was most favourably received, and our Society was invited to submit to Government suggestions respecting the provisions of the intended Bill. These suggestions were framed at a Committee held at our office on the 30th March, and they were adopted by Government after being approved by its official advisers, and presented by Lord Carnarvon in the House of Lords. The second reading took place on the 22nd May. On that occasion Lord Coleridge made a most judicious speech in defence of the Bill, and Lord Shaftesbury the long and beautiful one reprinted in our pamphlet, “In Memoriam.” The next morning all the newspapers came out with leading articles in praise of the Bill. It is hard now to realise that, previous to undergoing the medical pressure which has twisted the minds—(or at least the pens)—of three-fourths of the press, even the great paper which has been our relentless opponent for 17 years was then our cordial supporter. Everything at that time looked fair for us. The Bill, as we had drafted it, did, practically, fulfil Mr. Hutton’s aspiration. No experiment whatever under any circumstances was permitted on a dog, cat, horse, ass, or mule; nor any on any other animal except under conditions of complete anæsthesia from beginning to end. The Bill included Licenses, but no Certificates dispensing with the above provisions. Our hopes of carrying this bill seemed amply justified by the reception it received from the House of Lords and the Press; and from a great Conference of the R.S.P.C.A. and its branches, held on the 23rd May. We held our first General Meeting 653at Westminster Palace Hotel on the 1st June and resolutions in support of the Bill were passed enthusiastically; Lord Shaftesbury presiding, and the Marquis of Bute, Lord Glasgow, Cardinal Manning and others speaking with great spirit. It only needed, to all appearance, that the Bill should be pushed through its final stage in the Lords and sent down to the House of Commons, to secure its passage intact that same Session.

At this most critical moment, and through the whole month of June, Lord Carnarvon, in whose hands the Bill lay, was drawn away from London and occupied by the illness and death of Lady Carnarvon. No words can tell the anxiety and alarm this occasioned us, when we learned that a large section of the medical profession, which had so far seemed quiescent if not approving, had been roused by their chief wire-puller into a state of exasperation at the supposed “insult” of proposing to submit them to legal control in experimenting on living animals, (as they were already subjected to it, by the Anatomy Act, in dissecting dead bodies). These doctors, to the number of 3,000, signed a Memorial to the Home Secretary, calling on him to modify the Bill so as practically to reverse its character, and make it a measure, no longer protecting vivisected animals from torture, but vivisectors from prosecution under Martin’s Act. This Memorial was presented on the 10th July by a Deputation, variously estimated at 300 and at 800 doctors, who, in either case, were sufficiently numerous to overflow the purlieus of the Home Office and to overawe Mr. Cross. On the 10th of August the Bill—essentially altered in submission to the medical memorialists—was brought by Mr. Cross into the House of Commons, and was read a second time. On the 15th August, 1876, it received the Royal Assent and became the Act 39–40 Vict., c. 77, commonly called the “Vivisection Act.”

654The world has never seemed to me quite the same since that dreadful time. My hopes had been raised so high to be dashed so low as even to make me fear that I had done harm instead of good, and brought fresh danger to the hapless brutes for whose sake, as I realised more and more their agonies, I would have gladly died. I was baffled in an aim nearer to my heart than any other had ever been, and for which I had strained every nerve for many months; and of all the hundreds of people who had seemed to sympathise and had signed our Memorials and petitions, there were none to say: “This shall not be!” Justice and Mercy seemed to have gone from the earth.

We left London,—the Session and the summer being over, and came as usual to Wales; but our enjoyment of the beauty of this lovely land had in great measure vanished. Even after twenty years my friend and I look back to our joyous summers before that miserable one, and say, “Ah! that was when we knew very little of Vivisection.”

In my despair I wrote several letters of bitter reproach to the friends in Parliament who had allowed our Bill to be so mutilated as that the British Medical Journal crowed over it, as affording full liberty to “science”; and I also wrote to several newspapers saying that after this failure to obtain a reasonable restrictive Bill, I, for one, should labour henceforth to obtain total prohibition. In reply to my letter (I fear a very petulant one) Lord Shaftesbury wrote me this full and important explanation which I commend to the careful reading of such of our friends as desire now to rescind the Act of 1876.

“Until we shall have seen the Act in print we cannot form a just estimate of the force of the amendments. Some 655few, so I see by the papers, were introduced in Committee, after my last interview with Mr. Cross; but of their character I know nothing. I am disposed, however, to believe that he would not have admitted anything of real importance.

“Mr. Cross’s difficulties were very great at all times; but they increased much as the Session was drawing to a close. The want of time, the extreme pressure of business, the active malignity of the Scientific men, and the indifference of his Colleagues, left the Secretary of State in a very weak and embarrassing position.

“Your letter, which I have just received, asks whether ‘the Bill cannot be turned out in the House of Lords?’ The reply is that, whether advisable or unadvisable, it cannot now be done, for the Parliament is prorogued.

“In the Bill as submitted to me, just before the second reading at a final interview with Mr. Cross, Mr. Holt and Lord Cardwell being present, some changes were made which I by no means approved. But the question, then, was simply, ‘The Bill as propounded, or no Bill,’ for Mr. Cross stoutly maintained that, without the alterations suggested, he had no hope of carrying anything at all. I reverted, therefore, to my first opinion, stated at the very commencement of my co-operation with your Committee, that it was of great importance, nay indispensable, to obtain a Bill, however imperfect, which should condemn the practice, put a limit on the exercise of it, and give us a foundation on which to build amendments hereafter as evidence and opportunity shall be offered to us.

“The Bill is of that character. I apprehended that if there were no Bill then, there would be none at any time. No private Member, I believe, and I still believe, could undertake such a measure with even a shadow of hope and there was more than doubt, whether a Secretary of State would, again, entangle himself with so bitter and so wearisome a question in the face of all Science, and the antipathies of most of his Colleagues. Public sympathy would have declined, and would not have easily 656been aroused a second time. The public sympathy at its best, was only noisy, and not effective; and this assertion is proved by the few signatures to petitions, compared with the professed feeling; and by the extreme difficulty to raise any funds in proportion to the exigency of the case.

“The evidence, too, given to the Commission, which was, after all, our main reliance, would have grown stale; and, the Physiologists would have taken good care that, for some time at least, nothing should transpire to take its place.

“We have gained an enactment that Experiments shall be performed by none but Licensed Persons, thereby excluding, should the Act be well enforced, the host of young students and their bed-chamber practices.

“We have gained an enactment that all experiments shall be performed under the influence of Anæsthetics;^[33] and, thirdly, the greatest enactment of all, that the Secretary of State is responsible for the due execution of all these provisions in Parliament, and in his Office, instead of the College of Physicians, or some such unreachable, and intangible Body, as many Secretaries of State, except Mr. Cross, would have evasively, appointed.

“This provision under the Statutes, so unexpected, and valuable, could have been suggested to Parliament by a Secretary of State only, and I feel sure that no Secretary of State in any ‘Liberal’ Administration would listen to the proposal; and I very much doubt whether Mr. Cross himself, had his present Bill been rejected, would have, in the case of a new Bill, repeated his offer of making it a measure for which the Cabinet has to answer.

“I have seen your letter to the Echo and the Daily News. You are quite justified in your determination to agitate the country on the subject of vivisection, and obtain, if it be 657possible, the total abolition of it. Such an issue may be within reach, and it is only by experience that we can ascertain how far such a blessed consummation is practicable. You will have a good deal of sympathy with your efforts, and from no one more than from myself.

When we all returned to town in October, the Committee placed on the Minutes a letter from me, saying that I could only retain the office of Honorary Secretary if the Society should adopt the principle of total prohibition. A circular was sent out calling for votes on the point, and by the 22nd November, 1876, the Resolution was carried, “That the Society would watch the existing Act with a view to the enforcement of its restrictions and its extension to the total prohibition of painful experiments on animals.”

In February, 1877, the Committee, to my satisfaction, unanimously agreed to support Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition; and in aid thereof exhibited on the hoardings of London 1,700 handbills and 300 posters, which were enlarged reproductions of the illustrations of vivisection from the Physiological Hand-books. These posters certainly were more effective than as many thousands of speeches and pamphlets; and the indignation of the scientific party sufficiently proved that such was the case. On the 27th April we held our second annual meeting in support of Mr. Holt’s Bill, and had for speakers Lord Shaftesbury, the good Bishop of Winchester Dr. Harold-Browne, (now, alas! dead), Lord Mount-Temple, Prof. Sheldon Amos, Cardinal Manning, and Prince Lucien Bonaparte. The last remarkable man and erudite scholar (who most closely resembled his uncle in person, if we could imagine Napoleon I. commanding only armies of books!), was, from first to last, a warm friend of 658our cause. After this meeting we elected him Vice-President and here is his letter of acknowledgment:—

“I feel highly honoured at being nominated one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society for Protection of Animals liable to vivisection, and ask you to return the Committee my best thanks.

“I am a great admirer of a Society which, like yours, opposes so strongly the abominable practice of vivisection, because for my own part, I consider it, even in its mildest form, as a shame to Science, a dishonour to modern civilisation, and (what I think more important) a great offence against the law of God.

Here are some further letters concerned with that meeting or written to me soon afterwards:—

“I beg to thank you sincerely for your kind letter.

“So far as I can see there is, I fear, little chance of my being at liberty to take part in the proceedings on the 27th of April.

“However, with the names which you announce, you will be more than able to dispense with any assistance that I could lend to the common object. You will, I trust, be able to strengthen Mr. Holt’s hands. If what I have heard of his measure is at all accurate, it seems to be at once moderate and efficient.

659“I was much struck by an observation which you were, I think, said to have made the other day at Bristol, to the effect that as matters now stand everything depends upon the discretion, or rather, upon the moral sympathies of the Home Secretary. Mr. Cross, I believe, would always do well in all such matters. But it does not do to reckon with the Roman Empire as if it were always to be governed by a Marcus Aurelius.

“I am sorry I cannot undertake to speak at your meeting on the 27th April. I am not sure that I shall be in London on that day, but request you to send me any notice of the meeting.

“My time and strength are somewhat overtaxed owing to an inability, and I may add indisposition, to say No when I think I may be useful. I am, however, I can assure you, in sympathy with you in your attempt to put down torture in every form.

“I will come in at some stage of your proceedings. I am bound first to Convocation—and am engaged at Kingston before 5.

“What I should like would be to thank Lord Shaftesbury; but this must depend on the time that I come, and that must depend on the exigencies of Convocation.

“I am very sorry that through absence from home my answer to your note has been delayed. I shall not be able to take part in your meeting on the 27th, for I am not in a state of health to take part in any public meeting; but if I am at all able I should like much to attend it and hear for myself the views of the speakers. I have not expressed publicly any opinion on the question of Vivisection, being anxious at first to await the determination of the Commission, and then to see how the restrictions were likely to work.

“I confess that my own mind is leaning very strongly to the conclusion that there is no safe, right course other than entire prohibition. The more I think of it the more I dread the brutality which in spite of the influence of the best men will inevitably be developed in our young Experimenters, in these days of almost fanatical devotion to scientific research. It seems to me to more than counterbalance the physical advantages to our sick what may grow out of the practice of vivisection.

“And I am very sceptical about these physical advantages. I doubt whether the secrets of nature can be successfully discovered by torture, any more than the secrets of hearts. We have abandoned the one endeavour, finding the results to be by no means worth the cost. I am persuaded that we shall soon, for the same reason, have to abandon the other.

“I am not able, as I say, to take part in a meeting, but as soon as I am able I intend to preach on the subject, and if you can forward to me any information which will be useful I shall be much obliged to you. Believe me

By this time there were two other Anti-vivisection Societies in London, beside Mr. Jesse’s Society at Macclesfield, 661all working for total prohibition; and though of course we had various small difficulties and rivalries in the course of time, yet practically we all helped each other and the cause. Eventually the International Society, of which Mr. and Mrs. Adlam were the spirited leaders, coalesced with ours and added to our Committee several of its most valuable members including our present much respected Chairman, Mr. Ernest Bell. The London Anti-vivisection Society, though I expended all my blandishments on it, has never consented to amalgamation, but has done a great work of its own for which we have all reason to hold it in honour.

The revolt against the cruelties of science spread also about this time to the continent. Baron Weber read his Torture Chamber of Science in Dresden, and created thereby a great sensation, followed by the formation of the German League, of which he is President, and the foundation of its organ, the Thier-und-Menschen-Freund, edited by Dr. Paul Förster, now a member of the Reichstag. Other Anti-vivisection Societies were founded then or in subsequent years in Hanover, in Berlin, and in Stockholm. In Copenhagen those devoted friends of animals, M. and Mdme. Lembcké, had long contended vigorously against the local vivisector, Panum. In Italy the Florence Società Protettrice, of which our Queen is Patroness and Countess Baldelli the indefatigable Hon. Sec., has steadily worked against vivisection from its foundation; and so has the Torinese Society of which Dr. Riboli is President and Countess Biandrate Morelli the leading member. In Riga there has also been a persevering movement against Vivisection by the excellent Society of which the Anwalt der Thiere is the (first-class) organ, and Madame V. Schilling the presiding spirit.

In short, by the end of the decade, though we had been so cruelly defeated, we were conscious that our movement had extended and had become to all appearance one of those 662permanent agitations, which, once begun, go on till the abuses which aroused them are abolished. In America the movement only took definite shape in February, 1883, when, under the auspices of the indefatigable Mrs. White, the American Anti-vivisection Society was founded at Philadelphia; to be followed up by its most flourishing Illinois Branch, carried on with immense spirit by Mrs. Fairchild Allen. Mr. Peabody and Mr. Greene have since established at Boston the New England Anti-vivisection Society, which has already become one of our most powerful allies.

On the 2nd May, Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition was debated in the House of Commons, and on a division there were 83 votes in its favour and 222 against it.

At last the Committee of the Victoria Street Society formally adopted the thoroughgoing policy; and at a Meeting, August 7th, 1878, resolved “to appeal henceforth to public opinion in favour of the total prohibition of Vivisection.” We then changed our title to that of the Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection. Dr. Hoggan and his wife, Mrs. Hoggan, M.D., and also Mr. de Fonblanque retired from the Committee with cordial goodwill on both sides, and the Archbishop of York withdrew from the Vice-Presidency. But, beside these losses, I do not believe that we had any others, and there was soon a large batch of fresh recruits of new Members who had long resented our previous half-hearted policy,—as they considered it to have been.

For my own part I had accepted from the outset the assurance I received on all hands that a Bill for the total prohibition of Vivisection had not the remotest chance of passing through Parliament in the present state of public opinion; but that a Bill might be framed, which, proceeding only on the grounds of Restriction, might effectually and thoroughly exclude “not only torture but anything at all approaching thereto”; and that such a Bill had every chance 663of becoming law. To promote such a Bill had been my single aim and hope, and when it had been prepared and presented and received so favourably, it really appeared as if we were on the right and reasonable tack; much as we hated any concession whatever to the demands of the vivisectors.

But when we found that the compromise which we proposed had failed, and that our Bill providing the minimum of protection for animals at all acceptable by their friends, was twisted into a Bill protecting their tormentors, we were driven to raise our demands to the total prohibition of the practice, and to determine to work upon that basis for any number of years till public opinion be ripe for our measure.

This was one aspect of our position; but there was another. We had in truth gone into this crusade almost as our forefathers had set off for the Holy Land, with scarcely any knowledge of the Power which we were invading. We knew that dreadful cruelties had been done; but we fondly imagined they were abuses which were separable from the practice of experimenting on living animals. We accepted blindly the representation of Vivisection by its advocates as a rare resource of baffled surgeons and physicians, intent on some discovery for the immediate benefit of humanity or the solution of some pressing and important physiological problem; and we thought that with due and well considered restrictions and safeguards on these occasional experiments, we might effectually shut out cruelty. By slow, very slow degrees, we learned that nothing was much further from the truth than these fancy pictures of ideal Vivisection, and that real Vivisection is not the occasional and regretfully-adopted resource of a few, but the daily employment (Carl Vogt called it his “daily bread”) of hundreds of men and students, devoted to it as completely and professionally as butchers to cutting up carcases. Finally we found that to extend protection by any 664conceivable Act of Parliament to animals once delivered to the physiologists in their laboratories, was chimerical. Vivisection, we recognized at last to be a Method of Research which may be either sanctioned or prohibited as a Method, but which cannot be restricted efficiently by rules founded on humane considerations wholly irrelevant to the scientific enquiry.

On the moral side also, we became profoundly impressed with the truth of the principle to which Canon Liddon refers in the letter I have quoted, viz., that the Anti-Vivisection cause is “of even greater importance to human character than to the physical comfort of our fellow-creatures who are most immediately concerned.” As I wrote of it, about this time in Bernard’s Martyrs:—

“We stand face to face with a New Vice, new, at least in its vast modern development and the passion wherewith it is pursued—the Vice of Scientific Cruelty. It is not the old vice of Cruelty for Cruelty’s sake. It is not the careless brutal cruelty of the half-savage drunken drover, the low ruffian who skins living cats for gain, or of the classic Roman or modern Spaniard, watching the sports of the arena with fierce delight in the sight of blood and death. The new vice is nothing of this kind.... It is not like most other human vices, hot and thoughtless. The man possessed by it is calm, cool, deliberate; perfectly cognisant of what he is doing; understanding, as indeed no other man understands, the full meaning and extent of the waves and spasms of agony he deliberately creates. It does not seize the ignorant or hunger-driven or brutalized classes; but the cultivated, the well-fed, the well-dressed, the civilized, and (it is said) the otherwise kindly disposed and genial men of science, forming part of the most intellectual circles in Europe. Sometimes it would appear as we read of these horrors,—the baking alive of dogs, the slow dissecting out of quivering nerves, and so on,—that it would be a relief to picture the doer of such deeds as some unhappy, half-witted wretch, hideous and filthy in mien or 665stupified by drink, so that the full responsibility of a rational and educated human being should not belong to him, and that we might say of him, ‘He scarcely understands what he does.’ But, alas! this New Vice has no such palliations; and is exhibited not by such unhappy outcasts, but by some of the very foremost men of our time; men who would think scornfully of being asked to share the butcher’s honest trade: men addicted to high speculation on all the mysteries of the universe; men who hope to found the Religion of the Future, and to leave the impress of their minds upon their age, and upon generations yet to be born.”

Regarding the matter from this point of view,—as our leaders, the most eminent philanthropists of their generation, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Mount-Temple, Samuel Morley, and Cardinal Manning, emphatically did,—the reasons for calling for the total Prohibition of Vivisection rather than for its Restriction became actually clearer in our eyes on the side of the human moral interests than on that of the physical interests of the poor brutes. We felt that so long as the practice should be sanctioned at all, so long the Vice of Scientific Cruelty would spring up in the fresh minds of students, and be kept alive everywhere. It was therefore absolutely needful to reach the germ of the disease, and not merely to endeavour to allay the worst symptoms and outbreaks. It is the passion itself which needs to be sternly suppressed; and this can only be done by stopping altogether the practice which is its outcome, and on which it feeds and grows.

But (say our opponents), “Are you prepared to relinquish all the benefits which this practice brings to humanity at large?”

Our answer to them, of course, is, that we question the reality of those benefits altogether, but that, placing them at their highest estimation, they are of no appreciable weight compared to the certain moral injury done to the community 666by the sanction of cruelty. The discovery of the Elixir Vitæ itself would be too dearly purchased if the hearts of men were to be rendered one degree more callous and selfish than they are now. And that the practice of vivisection by a body of men at the intellectual summit of our social system, whose influence must dribble down through every stratum of society, would infallibly tend to increase such callousness, there can exist no reasonable doubt. For my own part, though believing that little or nothing worth mentioning has been discovered for the Healing Art through Vivisection, and that Dr. Leffingwell is right in saying that “if agony could be measured in money, no Mining Company in the world would sanction prospecting in such barren regions,” I yet deprecate the emphasis which many of our friends have laid on this argument against vivisection. We have gone off our rightful ground of the simple moral issues of the question and have seemed to admit (what very few of us would deliberately do) that if some important discovery had been made by Vivisection, our case against it would be lost or weakened. I have been so anxious to warn our friends against this, as I think, very grave mistake in tactics, that I circulated some time ago a little Parable which I may as well summarize here:—

“A party of Filibusters once proposed to ravage a neighbouring island, inhabited by poor and humble people who had always been faithful servants and friends of our country, and had in no way deserved ill-treatment. Some friends of justice protested that the Filibusters ought to be prohibited from carrying on their expedition, but unluckily they did not simply arraign the moral lawfulness of the project, but went on to discuss the inexpediency of the invasion, arguing that the island was very poor and barren, and would not repay the cost of conquest. Here the Filibusters saw their advantage and broke in: ‘No such thing! We are the only people who know anything about 667the island, and we assure you it is full of mines of gold and silver.’ ‘Bosh!’ replied the just men; ‘we defy you to show us a single nugget.’ On this there was a good deal of shuffling of feet among the Filibusters, and they exhibited some glittering fragments as gold, but being tested these proved to be worthless, and again other fragments which they produced were traced to quite another part of the district, far away from the island. Still it became evident that the Filibusters would go on interminably bringing up specimens, and some day might possibly produce one the value of which could not be well disputed. Moreover the Filibusters (who, like other pirates, were addicted to telling fearful yarns) had the great advantage of talking all along of things they had studied and seen, whereas the men of the party of justice were imperfectly informed about the resources of the island, having never gone thither, and thus they were easily placed at a disadvantage and made to appear foolish. It is true that the Filibusters had set them on the wrong track by clamouring for the invasion on the avowed ground of the spoil they should gather for the nation, and they had only tried to nullify the effect of such appeals to general selfishness by showing that there was really no spoil to be had; and that the invasion was a blunder as well as a crime. But in bandying such appeals to expediency they had put themselves in the wrong box; because to discuss the value of the spoil was, by implication to admit that, if it only were rich, it might possibly be justifiable to go and seize it!”

I have made this long explanation of our policy, because I am painfully aware that among practical people and men of the world, accustomed to compromise on public questions, our adoption of the demand for total prohibition has placed us at a great disadvantage as “irreconcilables;” and our movement has appeared as the “fad” of enthusiasts and fanatics. For the reasons I have given above I think it will appear that while compromise offered any hope of protecting our poor 668clients from the very worst cruelties, we tried it frankly and in earnest; first in Lord Henniker’s and secondly in Lord Carnarvon’s Bill. When this last effort failed we were left no choice but either to abandon our dumb friends to their fate, or demand for them the removal of the source of their danger.

It will not be necessary for me to recount further with as much detail the history of the Victoria Street Society, of which I continued to act as Hon. Secretary till I finally left London in 1884. Abundance of other friends of animals, active and energetic, were in the field, and our movement, in spite of a score of checks and defeats, continued to spread and deepen. Campbell’s familiar line often occurred to me (with a variation)—

On July 15th, 1879, Lord Truro brought into the House of Lords a Bill for the Prohibition of Vivisection. It was not promoted by us, and was in many respects unfortunately managed, but our Society, of course, supported it, Lord Shaftesbury made in defence of it one of his longest speeches. I was in the House of Lords at the time, and thought that there could never be a much more affecting sight than that of the noble old man, who had pleaded so often in that “gilded chamber” for men, women and children, standing there at last in his venerable age, urging with all his simple eloquence the claims of dumb animals to mercy. Against him rose and spoke Lord Aberdare, actually (as he took pains to explain) as President of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals! The Bishop of Peterborough, Dr. Magee, afterwards Archbishop of York, also made then his unhappy speech about the rabbits and the surgical operation; (with 669which the inventor of that operation, Dr. Clay, said they had “no more to do than the Pope of Rome”). Only 16 Peers voted for the Bill, 97 against it.

On the 16th March, 1880, Mr. Holt’s Bill for total prohibition was down for second reading in the House of Commons, but was stopped by notice of dissolution. From that time our friend, Sir Eardley Wilmot, took charge of a similar Bill promoted by our Society. Notice of it was given by Mr. Firth on the 3rd February, 1881. The second reading was postponed, first to July 13th, next to July 27th, and then that day was taken by government. In October of that year (1881) Mr. R. T. Reid took charge of our Bill, on the resignation of Sir Eardley Wilmot. The second reading was postponed on June 28th, 1882, and not till the 4th of April, 1883, after all these heart-breaking postponements and failures, there was at last a Debate. Mr. Reid and Mr. George Russell spoke admirably in favour of the Bill, but they were talked out without a division by a whole series of advocates of vivisection, of whom Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Cartwright, and Lord Playfair, were most eminent. This was the last occasion on which we have been able to obtain a debate in either House. Mr. Reid brought in his Bill again in 1884, but could obtain no day for a second reading.

One touching incident of these earlier years I must not omit. Our Hon. Correspondent at the Hague, Madame van Manen-Thesingh, had written me several letters exhibiting remarkable good sense as well as ardent feeling. One day I received a short note from her telling me that she was dying; and begging me to send over some trustworthy agent at once to the Hague, if, (as she feared) I could not go to her myself. I telegraphed that I would be with her next day, and accordingly sailed that night to Flushing. When I reached her house M. van Manen received me very kindly; but as a man half bewildered with grief. His wife’s disease was 670cancer of the tongue, and she could no longer speak. She was waiting for me in her drawing-room. It may be imagined how affecting was our half-speechless interview. After a time M. van Manen, at a sign from his wife, unlocked a bureau and took out a large packet of papers. These he placed before her on the table and then left the room. Of course I understood this proceeding was intended to satisfy me that it was with her husband’s entire consent that Madame van Manen gave these papers to me. There were a great many of them, Dutch, Russian, and American securities of one sort or another, and she marked them off one by one on a list which she had prepared. Then she wrote down that she gave me all these, and also some laces and jewellery, to further the Anti-vivisection cause in whatever way I thought best; reserving a donation for the London Anti-vivisection Society. A few efforts to convey my gratitude and sympathy were all I could make. The dear, noble woman stood calm and brave in the immediate prospect of death in its most painful form, and all her anxiety seemed to be that the poor brutes should be effectually aided by her gifts. I left her sorrowfully, and carried her parcel in my travelling bag, first to Amsterdam for a day or two, and then to London, where having summoned our Finance Committee, I placed it in their hands. The contents (duly estimated and sold through the Army and Navy Society) realised (over and above the legacy to the London Society) about £1,350. With this sum we started the Zoophilist.

The Zoophilist thus founded (May 2nd, 1881) under the editorship of Mr. Adams, then our Secretary, has of course been of enormous value to our cause. A new series began on the 1st January, 1883, which I edited till my resignation of the Hon. Secretaryship June, 1884. I also started and edited a French journal of the same size and character, 671Le Zoophile, from November 1st, 1883, to April, 1884, when the undertaking was abandoned, French readers having obviously found the paper too dry for their taste. Some of them also remonstrated with me against the occasional references in it to religious considerations, and I was frankly counselled by a very influential French gentleman to cease altogether to mention God,—a piece of advice which I distinctly declined to take! The late celebrated Mdlle. Deraismes sent me a beautiful article for Le Zoophile, of which I should have gladly availed myself if she would have allowed me the editorial privilege of dropping about half a page of aggressive atheism; but this, after a pretty sharp correspondence, she refused peremptorily to do. Altogether I was evidently out of touch both with my French staff and French readers.

Beside these two periodicals our Society from the first issued an almost incredible multitude of pamphlets and leaflets. I should be afraid to make any calculation of the number of them and of the thousands of copies sent into circulation. My own share must have exceeded four hundred. Beside these and those of our successive Secretaries (some extremely able) we printed valuable pamphlets, Sermons and Speeches by Lord Shaftesbury, Cardinal Manning, the Lord Chief Justice, the Dean of Llandaff, Professor Ruskin, Bishop Barry, Mr. R. T. Reid, Hon. B. Coleridge, Lady Paget, Canon Wilberforce, Mr. Mark Thornhill, Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Mackarness), Rev. F. O. Morris, Dr. Arnold, George Macdonald, Mr. Ernest Bell, Baron Weber, and (above all for scientific importance) Mr. Lawson Tait, Dr. Bell Taylor, Dr. Berdoe, and Dr. Clarke.

Some of my own Anti-vivisection pamphlets were collected a few years ago and published by Messrs. Sonnenschein in a volume (crown 8vo., pp. 272) entitled the Modern Rack. Several very useful books of reference were compiled by our 672Secretary, Mr. Bryan, and published by the Society; notably the Vivisectors’ Directory, the English Vivisectors’ Directory, and Anti-vivisection Evidences. Of the Nine Circles, compiled for me and printed (first edition) at my expense, I shall speak presently.

I must here be allowed to say that the spirited letters, pamphlets and articles by our medical allies, Dr. Berdoe, Dr. Clarke, Dr. Bowie and Dr. Arnold,—above all Dr. Berdoe’s contributions to our scientific literature, have been an immeasurable value to our cause. The day of Dr. Berdoe’s accession to our party at one of our annual meetings must ever be remembered by me with gratitude. His ability, courage and disinterestedness have been far beyond any praise I can give them. Mr. Mark Thornhill also (a distinguished Indian Civil Servant, author of The Indian Mutiny, etc.), has done us invaluable service by his calm, lucid and most convincing writings, notably “The Case against Vivisection,” and “Experiments on Hospital Patients.” Mr. Pirkis, R.N., has been for many years not only by his steady attendance at the Committee but by his unwearied exertions in preparing and disseminating anti-Pasteur literature, one of the chief benefactors of the Society.

Among our undertakings on behalf of the victims of science was the prosecution of Prof. Ferrier at Bow Street on the 17th November, 1881, on the strength of certain reports in the two leading Medical Journals. We had ascertained that he had no license for Vivisection and yet we read as follows in a report of the proceedings at the International Medical Congress of 1881:—

“The members were shown two of the monkeys, a portion of whose cortex had been removed by Professor Ferrier.”—British Medical Journal, 20th August, 1881.

“The interest attaching to the discussion was greatly enhanced by the fact that Professor Ferrier was willing to 673exhibit two monkeys which he had operated upon some months previously....

“In startling contrast to the dog were two monkeys exhibited by Professor Ferrier. One of them had been operated upon in the middle of January, the left motor area having been destroyed.”—Lancet, October 8th, 1881.

When the reporters who had sent in their reports to the two journals were produced, the following ludicrous examination took place in court:—

Dr. Charles Smart Roy (the Reporter for the British Medical Journal) was asked—

“Q. Did Professor Ferrier offer to exhibit two of the monkeys upon which he had so operated?

“A. At the Congress, no.

“Q. Did he subsequently?

“A. No; he showed certain of the members of the Congress two monkeys at King’s College.

“Q. What two monkeys?

“A. Two monkeys upon which an operation had been performed.

“Q. By whom?

“A. By Professor Yeo” (!!)

The Editor of the Lancet, Dr. Wakeley, was next examined:—

Dr. Wakeley, sworn, examined by Mr. Waddy:—

“Q. Are you the Editor of the Lancet?

“A. I am.

“Q. Can you tell me who it was furnished his Report?

“A. I have the permission of the gentleman to give his name, Professor Gamgee, of Owen’s College, Manchester.

“Mr. Waddy: What I should ask is that one might have an opportunity of calling Professor Gamgee.

“Mr. Gully (Counsel for the defendant): We have communicated with Professor Gamgee, and I know very well he will say precisely what was said by Dr. Roy.”

674The position of the Anti-vivisectionists on the occasion was, it must be confessed, like that of the simple countryman in the fair. “You lay your money that Professor Ferrier is under that cup?” “Yes, certainly! I saw both Professor Roy and Professor Gamgee put him there about five minutes ago.” “Here then, see! Hay Presto! Hocus-pocus! There is only Professor Yeo!”

The group of Vivisectors and their allies, Dr. Michael Foster, Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, Dr. Ernest Hart, Prof. Ferrier, Dr. Roy and many more who filled the court, all evinced the utmost hilarity at the success of the device whereby (as a matter of necessity) the Anti-vivisection case collapsed.

At last, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1884, the truth came to light. In the Prefatory Note to a record of Experiments by David Ferrier and Gerald F. Yeo, M.D., occurs the statement:—

“The facts recorded in this paper are partly the results of a research made conjointly by Drs. Ferrier and Yeo, aided by a grant from the British Medical Association, and partly of a research made by Dr. Ferrier alone, aided by a grant from the Royal Society.”

The conjoint experiences are distinguished by an asterisk; and among them we find those of the two monkeys which formed the subject of the trial. Thus it stands confessed,—actually in the Transactions of the Royal Society,—that Professor Ferrier had the leading share (his name always appears first) in the experiments; and that, conjointly with Professor Yeo, he received a grant from the British Medical Association for performing the same!

If after this experience we have ceased to hope much from proceedings in Courts of Justice against our antagonists, it will not be thought surprising. The Society has been frequently 675twitted with the failure of this prosecution, “for which” our opponents say, we “had not a tittle of evidence.” Elaborate reports in the two leading Medical journals do not, it appears, afford even “a tittle of evidence!”^[34]

Among other modes in which we endeavoured to push forward our cause, have been special appeals to win over particular churches or other bodies to adopt our principles. Enormous numbers of circulars have been addressed in this manner by our Society to the Clergy of the Church of England, and it is believed that at least 4,000 are on our side in the controversy; more than 2,000 had signed our Memorial several years ago.

Another appeal was addressed by me personally to the Society of Friends through the Clerks of the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings in England and Ireland.

It has proved eminently successful, and has led to the formation of a powerful “Friends’ Anti-vivisection Society,” which lately issued an appeal to other members of their body signed by 2,000 friends, many of them being among the most eminent in England. This has again formed the ground of a fresh appeal on an immense scale in Pennsylvania. Another recent appeal to the Congregationalists has, I hear, been very well received. On one occasion a special Petition to the House of Lords was signed by every Unitarian Minister in London. It was presented by the Archbishop of York, who 676also presented a Memorial (for Restriction) in 1876 signed by all the heads of Colleges in Oxford.

Another appeal which I ventured to make (printed as a large pamphlet) to “the Humane Jews of England,” entreating them to remonstrate with the 40 German Jews who are the worst vivisectors in Europe, was, unfortunately, a deplorable failure. Four of my own private friends, Jewesses, all expressed their sympathy warmly, and sent handsome contributions to our funds; but not one other Jew or Jewess, high or low, rallied to us, albeit I presented pamphlets to nearly 200 recommended to me as specially well disposed. I shall never be tempted to address the “Humane” Jews of England again!

One other circular I may mention as more successful. I sent to seven hundred Head Schoolmasters the following Letter, with which were enclosed the pamphlets mentioned therein:—

“Permit me respectfully to ask your perusal of the accompanying little paper on ‘Physiology as a Branch of Education.’ I have written it under a strong sense of the necessity which at present exists for some similar caution.

“The leaflet describing a ‘Specimen of Modern Physiological Instruction,’ refers to a scene in Paris which could not be precisely paralleled in an English school, so far as concerns the actual torture of the animals used for exhibition, since the Vivisection Act of 1876 provided that anæsthetics must be used in all cases of Vivisection for Illustration of Lectures.

“It is, however, to be seriously questioned whether even painless, (and therefore not shocking), operations on living animals, performed before boys and girls, by the enthusiastic English admirers of Claude Bernard and Paul Bert, may not excite in the minds of the young witnesses a curiosity 677unmingled with pity, such as may subsequently prompt them to become the most merciless experimenters; or, at least, advocates and apologists of scientific cruelty.

“Trusting, Sir, that you will pardon the trespass of this letter,

Twelve of these Head Masters, including some of the most eminent, e.g., Mr. Welldon, of Harrow; Dr. Haig, of the Charterhouse; and the lamented Mr. Thring, of Uppingham, wrote me most interesting letters in reply expressing approval of my views. I shall here insert that of Mr. Thring as in many respects noteworthy.

“I received your little pamphlet on physiology, but I hardly know what you expect me to do. My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly I feel on the subject of a Literary Education; or rather how confident I am in the judgment that there can be no worthy education which is not based on the study of the highest thoughts of the highest men, in the best shape.

“As for Science (most of it falsely so called) if a few leading minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull worker, to no more than a kind of upper shopwork, weighing out, and labelling, and learning alphabetical formulæ; a superior Grocery-assistant’s work; and has not a single element of higher mental training in it. Not to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of man and life, and therefore is eminently fitted to train men for life and its struggles! Physiology, in its worser sense adds to this a brutalising of the average practitioner, or rather a devilish combination of intellect-worship and cruelty at the expense of feeling and character. For my part, if it were true that 678vivisection had wonderfully relieved bodily disease for men, if it were at the cost of lost spirits, then I should say, Let the body perish! And it is at the cost of lost spirits! I do not say that under no circumstances should an experiment take place, but I do say that under no circumstance should an experiment take place for teaching purposes. You will see how decided my judgment is on this matter. I send you three Addresses on Education, which in smaller space than my books, will illustrate the positive side of my experience and beliefs.

Our Committee was, in all the years in which I had to do with it, the most harmonious and friendly of which I have ever heard. Lord Shaftesbury, who presided 49 times, and never once failed us when he was expected, was, of course, as all the world knows, a first-rate Chairman, getting through an immense amount of business, while allowing every member his, or her, legitimate rights of speech and voting. He never showed himself, (I have been told,) anywhere more genial and zealous than with us. Lord Mount-Temple attended very frequently, and Lady Mount-Temple from first to last has been one of our warmest and wisest friends. General Colin Mackenzie, a devout and noble old soldier, spoke little, but what he did say was always straight to the mark, and the affectionate respect we all felt for him made his presence delightful. Lady Portsmouth (now the Dowager Countess) attended in those days very regularly and Lady Camperdown has given us her unwearied help from that time to this. I have spoken of the very valuable services of Mr. E. de Fonblanque. In later years my friend Rev. William Henry Channing was a great support to me. The Cardinal was, perhaps, a little reserved, but always carefully kind and courteous, and whatever he said bore great 679weight. Lord Bute’s advice was very valuable and full of good sense. Mr. Shaen’s legal knowledge served us often. In brief, each member was useful. There never were any parties or cabals in the Committee. It was my business as Hon. Sec. (especially after my colleague, Dr. Hoggan, retired) to lay proposals for action before the Committee. They were sometimes rejected and often completely modified; but we all felt that the one thing we desired was simply to find the best way of forwarding our cause, and we were thankful for the guidance of the wise and experienced men who were our leaders. In short, the feelings which inspired us round that long oak office-table were not ill befitting our work; and now that so many of those who sat there beside me in the earlier years have passed from earth, I find myself pondering whether they have met “Elsewhere;” where, ere long I may join them. They must form a blessed company in any world. May my place be with them, please God! rather than with the votaries of Science, in the “secular to be.”

In later years the personnel of the Committee has of course been largely renewed. Lady Mount-Temple, Lady Camperdown and Mrs. Frank Morrison almost alone remain from the earlier body. Miss Marston also, who originally founded the London Anti-vivisection Society, has been for many years one of the firmest and wisest friends of the Victoria Street Society also. I have spoken above of all that we owe to Capt. Pirkis’ unfailing help at the Committee, even while residing far out of town; and of the zeal wherewith he and his gifted wife founded the first of our Branches, and have laboured in circulating our literature. Miss Monro, Miss Rees, Miss Bryant, and Mrs. Arthur Arnold have never wearied through many years in patiently and vigorously aiding our work. Of our excellent chairman, Mr. Ernest Bell’s services to the Anti-vivisection cause it is needless for me to speak 680as they must be recognised gratefully by the whole party throughout England.

We have had several successive Secretaries who sometimes took the work much off my hands, sometimes left it to fall very heavily on me and Miss Lloyd. On one occasion, we two, having also lost the clerk, did the entire work of the office for many weeks, inclusive of writing, editing, folding, addressing, and actually posting an issue of the Zoophilist! But my toils and many of my anxieties ended when I was fortunate enough to obtain the services, as Secretary, of Mr. Benjamin Bryan, who had long shown his genuine interest in the cause as editor of a Northern newspaper; and, after a year or two of work in concert with him, I felt free to leave the whole burden on his shoulders and tendered my resignation. The constant presence on the Committee of my long-tried and most valued allies Mr. Ernest Bell, Capt. Pirkis, and Miss Marston left me entirely at rest respecting the course of our future policy in the straight direction of Prohibition.

The last event which I need record is a disagreeable incident which occurred in the autumn of 1892. I had been seriously ill with acute sciatica, and had been only partially relieved by a large subcutaneous dose of morphia given me by my country doctor. In this state, with my head still swimming and scarcely able to sit at a table, I found myself involved in the most acrimonious newspaper controversy which I ever remember to have seen in any respectable journal. It will be best that another pen than mine should tell the story, so I will quote the calm and lucid statement of the author of the excellent pamphlet, “Vivisection at the Folkestone Church Congress” (page 6).

After a résumé of the notorious debate at Folkestone the writer says:—

“The main point of attack in Mr. Victor Horsley’s paper was a book called the Nine Circles which had been published 681some months before, and contained reports of different classes of cruel experiments on animals, both in England and on the Continent. To this book Miss Cobbe had given the sanction of her name, but she was not personally responsible for any of the quotations, having intrusted the compilation of the book to friends living in London, and who had access to the journals and papers in which the experiments were recorded. Mr. Horsley’s indignation was roused because in a certain number of cases—22 out of the 170 narratives of different classes of experiments, many of them involving a series, and the use of large numbers of animals in each—the mention of the use of morphia or chloroform was omitted. Miss Cobbe, in a letter to the Times of October 11th, while acknowledging that the compilers were bound to quote the fact if stated, expressed her conviction that such statements are misleading, because insensibility is not and cannot be complete during the whole period of the experiment. Dr. Berdoe also wrote in several papers defending Miss Cobbe against Mr. Horsley’s imputations of fraud and intent to deceive, &c., and explaining that the compilers of the book were alone responsible for the omissions. He added, however, a further explanation that, as it was often the painful results, and not the operations which caused them, that it was desired to illustrate, and as these results lasted sometimes for many days or weeks or months and to maintain insensibility during that period was impossible, the omissions were not so important after all.”...

“... The assailant, however, returned to the charge and in a more violent style than before. His letter to the Times of October 17th, was a tirade against Miss Cobbe, worthy, as the Spectator remarked, only of the fifteenth century, in which the words ‘false’ and ‘lie’ were freely used. It was a letter of so libellous a character that it is a matter for wonder that it obtained publication. Miss Cobbe very naturally and properly at once retired from a controversy conducted, as she expressed it in a letter to the Times, ‘outside of all my experience of civilised journalism.’ 682She concluded with these words: ‘I need scarcely say that I maintain the veracity of every word of the letter which you did me the honour to publish of the 15th inst., as well as the bona fides of all I have spoken or written on this or other subjects during my three-score years and ten.’”

After a week or two I went to Bath to recruit my health after the attack of sciatica; and the first newspaper I took up at the York Hotel, contained a still more violent attack on me than those which had preceded it. On reading it I walked into the telegraph office next door, wired for rooms at my favourite South Kensington Hotel and went up to town with my maid, presenting myself at once to our Committee, which happened to be sitting and arranging for the impending meeting in St. James’s Hall. “Shall I attend,” said I, “and speak, or not? I will do exactly what you wish.” The Committee were unanimously of opinion that I should go to the meeting and take part in the proceedings, and I have ever since rejoiced that I did so. It was on the evening of October 27th. My ever kind friend, Canon Basil Wilberforce took the chair, Col. Lockwood, Bishop Barry, Dr. Berdoe, Mr. Bell, and Captain Pirkis were on the platform supporting me, but above all Mr. George W. E. Russell (then Under Secretary of State for India) made a speech on my behalf for which I shall feel grateful to him so long as I live. We had but slight acquaintance previously, and I shall always feel that it was a most generous and chivalrous action on his part to stand forth in so public a manner as my champion on such an occasion. The audience was more than sympathetic. There was a storm of genuine feeling when I rose to make my explanation, and I found it, for once, hard to command my voice. This is what I said, as reported in the Zoophilist, November 1st, 1892:

“Now to come to the story of the Nine Circles, which I will tell as quickly as possible. When I gave up the 683Honorary Secretaryship of the Victoria Street Society six years ago, I retired to live among the mountains in Wales; and the chief thing which remained for me to do was to publish as many pamphlets and papers as seemed likely to help the cause. I have just got here my printer’s list of the papers which I have printed in those six years. I have made up the totals, and I find that the number in the six years of books, pamphlets, and leaflets has been 320—that is about one a week—and that 271,350 copies of them were printed; 173 papers having been written by myself. (Cheers.) Some of these were adopted by the Society and honoured by coming out under its auspices; and others I issued quite independently. Amongst those which I issued ‘on my own hook,’ I am happy to say, was this book called the Nine Circles. Therefore our dear and honoured Society is not responsible for that book. I am alone responsible; it was printed at my expense, and Messrs. Sonnenschein published it for me. Therefore, I am the only person concerned with it, and the Society has nothing to do with it. I am thankful to hear that the revised edition will come out under the auspices of the Society. My only privilege will be to pay for it, and that I shall most thankfully do, in order to wipe out the wrong I have done as concerns the present edition. When the present book was got up, I sketched a plan of it, and asked a lady often employed by us who was living in London, and is a good German scholar, to make extracts for me. She knows a great deal about the subject; she also knows German (which I do not do sufficiently for the purpose), and she was living in London while I was 200 miles away. Therefore I asked her to make the extracts of which this book is compiled, and it was afterwards revised,—as Dr. Berdoe has told us,—by him. The book came out; and it appears now that there are some mistakes in it. My assistant had left out certain things which ought to have been stated. I took it for granted,—I was quite wrong to do so,—that all my directions had been carried out, and I made myself responsible for the book. Therefore, whatever error there is in the matter is mine, 684and I beg that that will be quite understood. (Cheers.) But what is all this tremendous storm which has been raised, and this pulling of the house down about these mistakes? Do they wish us to understand that there are no such things as painful experiments in England? Apparently that is what they are trying to make us think—that there never has been anything of the kind; that they are perfectly incapable of putting any animal to pain. Do they really mean that? Is that what they wish us to understand? If they do not mean that, I do not know what it is they mean. It seems to me that they are raising this tremendous storm very much as if the old slave-holders were to have danced a war-dance round Mrs. Stowe and scalped her for having said that Legree had flogged Uncle Tom with a thousand lashes, when really there were only nine hundred and ninety-nine. (Laughter.) That seems to me to be the case in a nutshell.”—Zoophilist, November 1st, 1892.

I had the gratification to receive soon after the following most kind Address and expression of confidence from the leading Members of the Victoria Street Society:—

We, the undersigned, being supporters of the Victoria Street Society, and others interested in the movement against Vivisection, wish to express the strong feeling of indignation with which we have seen your integrity called in question by men who seem unable to conceive of the pure unselfish devotion of high intellectual gifts to the service of God’s humbler creatures.

It is impossible for those who know anything of the early history of this movement to forget the great personal sacrifice at which you undertook to make it the chief work of your life.

It is equally impossible for us who have watched its progress, to say how highly we have esteemed the 685indomitable courage and forcible eloquence with which you have exposed the evils inseparable from experiments on living animals.

Further, we wish to record our firm conviction that you have, throughout, recognised the wisdom and the duty of founding your attack on Vivisection upon the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as you have been able to arrive at it.

We wish, in conclusion, to assure you not only of our special sympathy with you at a time when you have been subjected to a personal attack of an unusually coarse and violent character, but also of our determination to give still more earnest support to the Cause to which you have, at so great a cost, devoted yourself:

687Looking back on this long struggle of twenty years, in which so much of my happiness and the happiness of others dearer than myself, has been engulfed, I can see that, starting from the apparently small and subordinate question of Scientific Cruelty, the controversy has been growing and widening till the whole department of ethics dealing with man’s relation to the lower animals has gradually been included in it. That this department is an obscure one, and that neither the Christian Churches nor yet philosophic moralists have hitherto paid it sufficient attention, is now admitted. That it is time that it should be carefully studied and worked out, is also clear.

Sometimes I have thought (as by a law of our being we seem driven to do whenever our hearts are deeply concerned) that a Divine guidance may have presided over all the heart-breaking delays and disappointments of this weary movement; and that it has not been allowed to terminate, as it would certainly have done, had we carried our Bill of 1876 in its original form through Parliament. Then our Society would have dissolved at once; and, after a time, perhaps, the Act, however well designed, would have become more or less a dead letter; and the hydra-heads of Vivisection would have reared themselves once more. But, as it has actually happened, the delay and failure of our earlier efforts and our consequent persistence in them, have fixed attention on this culminating sin against the lower animals, and through it on all other sins against them. A great revision of opinion on the subject is undoubtedly taking place; and while some (especially Roman Catholic) Zoophilists have diligently sought in decrees and manuals and treatises of casuistry for some authority defining Cruelty to animals to be a Sin, the poverty of the results of all such investigations, and of the anxious collation of Biblical texts by Protestants, is gradually revealing the fact that, in this whole department 688of human duty, we must look to the God-enlightened consciences of living men rather than to the dicta of departed saints, or casuists, whose attention was directed exclusively to the relations of human beings with each other and with God, and who obviously never contemplated those which we hold to the brutes with adequate seriousness,—if at all. Of course we are here met, just as the first anti-Slavery apostles were met, and as the advocates of every fresh development of morality will be met for many a day to come, by the fundamental fallacy of the Christian Churches (in that respect resembling Islam) that there is a finality in Divine teaching, and that they have been for two thousand years in possession of the last word of God to man. Protestants are certainly not bound in any way to occupy such a position, or to assume that a final revise has ever been issued, or ever will be issued by Divine authority, of a Whole Duty of Man. Rather are they called on piously and gratefully to look for fresh light to come down, age after age, from the Father of lights: or (if they please rather so to consider it) further development of the Christian Spirit to be manifested as men learn better to incarnate it in their minds and lives. As for Theists like myself, it is natural for us and in accordance with all our opinions, to believe that such a movement as is now taking place over the civilised world on behalf of dumb animals, is a fresh Divine impulse of Mercy, stirring in thousands of human hearts, and deserving of reverent cherishing and thankful acceptance.

It is my supreme hope that when, with God’s help, our Anti-vivisection controversy ends in years to come, long after I have passed away, mankind will have attained through it a recognition of our duties towards the lower animals far in advance of that which we now commonly hold. If the beautiful dream of the later Isaiah can never be perfectly realised on this planet and none may ever find that thrice “Holy 689Mountain” whereon they “shall not hurt nor destroy”—yet at least the time will come when no man worthy of the name will take pleasure in killing; and he who would torture an animal will be looked upon as (in the truest sense) “inhuman”; unworthy of the friendship of man or love of woman. The long-oppressed and suffering brutes will then be spared many a pang and their innocent lives made far happier; while the hearts of men will grow more tender to their own kind by cultivating pity and tenderness to the beasts and birds. The earth will at last cease to be “full of violence and cruel habitations.”

The too confident expectations which I entertained of my permanent connection till death with the Society which I had founded and which I designed to make my heir, have alas! been disappointed. It was perhaps natural that in my long exile from London and consequent absence from the Committee, my continual letters of enquiry, advice, and (as I fondly and foolishly imagined) assistance in the work were felt to be obtrusive,—especially by the newer members. One change after another in the Constitution and in the Name of the Society, left me more or less in opposition to the ruling spirits; and before long a much more serious difference arose. The very able and energetic Hon. Sec., Hon. Stephen Coleridge, (who had entered on his office in April, 1897), after making the changes to which I have referred, proposed that we should introduce a Bill into Parliament, no longer on the old lines, asking for the Total Prohibition of Vivisection, but on quite a different basis; demanding certain “Lesser Measures,” not yet distinctly formulated, but intended to supply checks to the practical lawlessness of licensed Vivisectors. Mr. Coleridge and his brother (now Lord Coleridge), had, twelve or fourteen years before, urged me 690to abandon the demand for Total Prohibition, and to adopt the policy of Restriction and bring in a bill accordingly. But to this proposal I had made the most strenuous resistance, writing a long pamphlet on the Fallacy of Restriction for the purpose; and it had been (as I thought), altogether given up and forgotten. It would appear, however, that the idea remained in Mr. Coleridge’s mind,—with the modification that he now regarded “Lesser Measures” not as final Restriction, but as steps to Prohibition; and for this policy he obtained the suffrage of the majority of the Council, though not of the oldest members.

The reader who will kindly glance back over the preceding pages (300–306), will see the exceeding importance I attach to the maintenance of the strict principle of Abolition,—whereby our party renounces all compromise with the “abominable sin,” and refuses to be again cheated by the hocus-pocus of Vivisectors and their deceptive anæsthetics. But an over-estimate (as it seems to me) of the importance of Parliamentary action, and certainly an under-estimate of that of the great popular propaganda whereon our hopes must ultimately rest,—a propaganda which would be paralyzed by the advocacy of half measures,—caused Mr. Coleridge and his friends to take an opposite view. After a long and, to me, heart-breaking struggle, I was finally defeated by a vote of 29 to 23, at a Council Meeting on the 9th February, 1898. The policy of Lesser Measures was adopted by the newly-christened National Society; and I and all the oldest members and founders of the Victoria Street Society sorrowfully withdrew from what we had proudly, but very mistakenly, called “our” Society. Amongst us were Mr. Mark Thornhill, Miss Marston, Mr. and Mrs. Adlam, Lady Mount-Temple, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morrison, Lady Paget, Madame Van Eys, and Countess Baldelli. To all workers in the cause these names will stand as representing the very nucleus of 691the whole party since it began its life 23 years ago. The oldest and most faithful worker of all, Lady Camperdown, who had aided me with the first memorial in 1874, and who had attended the Committee from first to last, had risen from her death-bed to write a letter imploring the Chairman not to support the demand for Lesser Measures. She died before the decision was reached, and her touching letter, in spite of my entreaties, was not read to the Congress.

After leaving the old Society with unspeakable pain and mortification I felt it incumbent on me, while I yet had a little strength left for work and was not wholly “played out” (as I believe I was supposed to be by the new spirits at the office) to establish some centre where the only principle on which the cause can, in my opinion, be safely maintained should be permanently established, and to which I could transfer the legacy of £10,000 which then stood in my Will bequeathed unconditionally to the Committee of the National Society. My first effort was to request the Committee of the London Anti-vivisection Society to give me such pledge as it was competent to afford that it would not promote any measure in Parliament short of Abolition. This pledge being formally refused, there remained for me no resource but to attempt once more in my old age to create a new Anti-Vivisection Society; and I resolved to call it The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and to make it a Federation of Branch Societies, having its centre in Bristol where my staunch old fellow-workers had had their office for many years established and in first-rate order. I invited as many friends as seemed desirous of joining in my undertaking, to a private Conference here at Hengwrt; and I had the pleasure of receiving and entertaining them for three days while we quietly arranged the constitution of the new Union with the invaluable help of our Chairman, Mr. Norris, K.C., late one of the Justices of the Supreme Court, Calcutta.

692The British Union was, in the following month, (June, 1898), formally constituted at a public conference in Bristol; and it is at present working vigorously in Bristol and in its various Branches in Wales, Liverpool, York, Macclesfield, Sheffield, Yarmouth and London. All information concerning it and its special constitution (whereby the Branches will all profit by bequests to the Union) may be obtained by enquiry from either our admirable Hon. Sec., Mrs. Roscoe (Crete Hill, Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol); our zealous Secretary, Miss Baker, 20, Triangle, Bristol; or our Hon. Treasurer, John Norris, Esq., K.C., Devonshire Club, London.

To those of my readers who may desire to contribute to the Anti-Vivisection Cause, and who have shared my views on it as set forth in my numberless pamphlets and letters, and to those specially who, like myself, intend to bequeath money to carry on the war against Scientific Cruelty, I now earnestly say as my final Counsel: SUPPORT THE BRITISH UNION!

CHAPTER XXI. MY HOME IN WALES.

694

Hengwrt.

695In April, 1884, my friend and I quitted London, having permanently let our house in South Kensington to Mrs. Kemble. The strain of London life had become too great for me, and advancing years and narrowed income together counselled retreat in good time. I continued then and ever since, of course, to work for the Anti-vivisection cause; but I resigned my Honorary Secretaryship, June 26th, 1884, and left the entire charge of the office and of editing the Zoophilist to Mr. Bryan.^[35]

A few months later I was disturbed to hear that the Hon. Stephen Coleridge (Lord Coleridge’s second son) who had always been particularly kind and considerate towards me, had started a fund to form a farewell testimonial to me from my fellow-workers. Mr. Coleridge addressed our leading members and friends in the following letter:—

“At the general meeting of the Victoria Street and International Societies for the Total Abolition of Vivisection, on the 26th June, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, for reasons set forth in the annual report, gave in her resignation of 696the post of Honorary Secretary, and it was accepted with deep reluctance.

“The executive committee, meeting shortly afterwards unanimously passed a resolution to the effect that the occasion ought not to be passed over by the Society unrecognised, and a list of subscribers to a testimonial for Miss Cobbe has been opened. The object of this letter is to acquaint you of these facts and to afford you the opportunity of adding your name to the list should you desire to do so.

“Year after year from the foundation of the Societies and before, Miss Cobbe has fought against the practice of the torture of animals with constant earnestness, conspicuous power, and enthusiasm born of a noble cause.

“That testimonials are too plentiful it may perhaps be urged with truth; but many of us who deprecate the practice of Vivisection feel that such a life as this, of honour and devotion, were it to stand unrecognised and unacknowledged, would mark us as entirely ungrateful.

In a short space of time, I was told, a thousand pounds was collected; and it was kindly and thoughtfully expended in buying me an annuity of £100 a year. The amount of labour and trouble which all these arrangements must have cost Mr. Stephen Coleridge must have been very great indeed, and only most genuine kindness of heart and regard for me could have induced him to undertake them. I was very much startled when I heard of this gift and very unwilling to accept it, as in some degree taking away the pleasurable sense I had had of working all along gratuitously for the poor beasts, and of having sacrificed for some years nearly all my literary earnings to devote myself to their cause. My 697objections were over-ruled by friendly insistence, and Lord Shaftesbury presented the Testimonial to me in the following letter:—

“The Committee of the Anti-vivisection Society, and other contributors, have assigned to me the agreeable duty of requesting you to do them the kindness and the honour, to accept the accompanying Testimonial.

“It expresses, I can assure you, their deep and real sense of the vast services you have rendered to the world, by the devotion of your time, your talents and indefatigable zeal, to the assertion of principles which, though primarily brought into action for the benefit and protection of the inferior orders of the Creation, are of paramount importance to the honour and security of the whole Human Race.

“We heartily pray that you may enjoy all health and happiness in your retirement, which, we trust, will be but temporary. We shall frequently ask the aid of your counsels and live in hope of your speedy return to active exertion, in the career in which you have laboured so vigorously, and which you so sincerely love.

I acknowledged Lord Shaftesbury’s letter as follows:—

“I find it very difficult to express to you the feelings with which I have just read your letter, and received the noble gift which accompanied it. You and all the good friends and fellow-workers who have thus done me honour and kindness will have added much to the material comfort 698and enjoyment of such years as may remain to me; but you have done still more for me, by filling my heart with the happy sense of being cared for.

“That you should estimate such work as I have been able to do so highly as your letter expresses, while it far surpasses anything I can myself think I have accomplished, yet makes me very proud and very thankful to God.

“Whatever has been done by me in the way of raising up opposition to scientific cruelty has been attained only because I had the inestimable advantage of being supported and guided by you from first to last, and aided step by step by the unwearied sympathy and co-operation of my dear and generous fellow-labourers.

“These words are very inadequate to convey my thanks to you for this gift and all your past goodness towards me, and those which I would fain offer through you to the Committee and all the Subscribers to this splendid Testimonial; especially to the Hon. Secretary, who has undertaken the great trouble which the collection of it must have involved. I can but repeat, I thank you and them with my whole heart.

This addition to my little income made up for certain losses which I had incurred, and raised it to about its original moderate level, enabling me to share the expenses of our Welsh cottage. I was, however, of course, a poor woman, and not in a position to help my friend to live (as we both earnestly desired to do) in her larger house in Hengwrt. We made an effort to arrange it so, loving the place and enjoying the beauty of the woods and gardens exceedingly. But we knew it could not be our permanent home; and a suitable tenant having come on the field, offering to take it for a term of years which would naturally reach beyond our 699lives, we felt that the end of our possession was drawing near. I was very sorrowful for my own sake, and still more for that of my friend who had always had peculiar attachment to the place. I reflected painfully that if I had been only a little better off, she might not have been obliged to relinquish her proper home.

All this was occupying me much. It was a Thursday morning, and the gentleman who proposed to become the tenant of Hengwrt was to come on Monday to make a definite offer which,—once accepted,—would have been held to bind my friend.

I went downstairs into the old oak hall in the morning and opened the post-bag. Among the large packet of letters which usually awaits me there was one from a solicitor in Liverpool. I knew that my kind old friend Mrs. Yates had died the week before, and I had been informed that she had left me her residuary legatee; but I imagined her to be in narrow circumstances, and that a few hundreds would be the uttermost of my possible inheritance; not sufficient, at all events, to affect appreciably my available income. I opened the Solicitor’s letter very coolly and found myself to be,—so far as all my wants and wishes extend,—a rich woman.

The story of this legacy is a very touching one. I never saw or heard of Mrs. Yates till a few years before her death, and when she was already very aged. She began by sending large and generous donations of £50, and £80, at a time to our Society. Later, she came up from Liverpool to London when I was managing affairs without a Secretary, and, finding me at the office, she gave me a still larger donation, actually in bank-notes. She was an Unitarian, or rather a Theist, like myself; and having taken very warm interest in my books, she seemed to be drawn to me by a double sympathy, both on account of religious sympathies, and those we shared on behalf of the vivisected animals. Of 700course I explained to her the details of my work, and she took the warmest interest in it. After I resigned my office of Honorary Secretary, she seemed to prefer to give her principal contributions personally to me to expend for the cause according to my judgment, and twice she sent me large sums, with strictest injunction to keep her name, and even the locality of the donor, secret. I called these gifts my Trust Fund, and made grants from it to working allies all over the world. I also spent a great deal of it in printing large quantities of papers. Of course I began by sending her a balance sheet of my expenditure; but this she forbade me to repeat, so I could only from time to time write her long letters (copied for me by my friend as my writing taxed her sight), telling her all we were doing. At last she came to see us here in answer to our repeated invitations, but could not be persuaded to stop more than one night. Talking to me out walking, she asked me: “Would I take charge of some money she wished to leave for protection of animals in Liverpool?” I answered that I could not engage to do this, and begged her to entrust it (as she eventually did) to some friend resident in the place. Then she said shyly: “Well, you do not object to my leaving you something for yourself—to my making you my residuary legatee?” adding to the question some words of affection. Of course I could only press her hand and say I was grateful for her kind thought. She did it all so simply, that, being prepossessed with the idea that she was in rather narrow circumstances, and that she had already given me the savings of her lifetime in the Trust Fund, it never even occurred to me that this residuary legateeship could be an important matter, after she had provided (as she was sure to do) for all legitimate claims upon her. Nothing could exceed my astonishment when I found how large was the sum bequeathed in this unpretending way. My friend thought I must be ill from the difficulty I 701seem to have found in commanding my voice to tell her the strange news when she came into the hall, a quarter of an hour after I had read that epoch-making letter!

Certainly never was a great gift made with such perfect delicacy. Mrs. Yates had taken care that I should have no reason, so long as she lived, to suppose myself under any personal obligation to her. Since then, it may be believed that my heart has never ceased to cherish her memory with tender gratitude, and to associate the thought of her with all the comforts of the home which her wealth has secured for me.

Mrs. Yates, at the time I knew her, had been for thirty or forty years the widow of Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, a Liverpool Merchant. The following obituary notice of her appeared in the Zoophilist, November 2nd, 1891. I may add that beside her personal legacy to me (given simply by her will to “her friend Miss Frances Power Cobbe,” without comment of any kind) Mrs. Yates gave £1,000 to the Victoria Street Society, as well as £1,000 to the Liverpool Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; both bequests being over and above legacies to her executors, relatives and dependents:—

“The Victoria Street Society and the cause of Anti-vivisection have lost their most generous supporter in Mrs. Richard Yates, of Liverpool; a good and noble woman if ever there were one. Born in humble circumstances, she was one of the truest gentlewomen who ever lived. Her wide cultivation of mind, broadly liberal but deeply religious spirit and sound, clear judgment, remained conspicuous even in extreme old age. The hearts of those whom she aided in their toil for the poor brutes, with a 702generosity only equalled by the delicacy of its manifestations, will ever keep her memory in tender and grateful respect.”

A warmly-feeling article in the Inquirer, October 10th, 1891, known to be by her friend and pastor, Rev. Valentine Davies, gave the following sketch of her life. It is due to her whose generosity has so brightened my later years, that my autobiography should contain some such record of her goodness and usefulness.

“On Thursday evening, October 1st, there passed peacefully away one who was the last of her generation; bearing a name honoured in Liverpool since the Rev. John Yates, in the latter part of last century and the early years of this, ministered in Paradise Street Chapel, and his sons took their places in the first rank of the merchants and philanthropic citizens of the town. Anne Simpson was born November 10th, 1805, and to the last retained happy recollections of her childhood’s home, a simple cottage in the pleasant Cheshire country. She married, in the midsummer of 1832, Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, having first spent a year (for purposes of education) in the household of Dr. Lant Carpenter, at Bristol, of whom she always spoke with great veneration. Richly endowed with natural grace and delicacy of feeling, true nobility of heart, and great simplicity, sustained by earnest religious feeling and a strong sense of duty, there was never happier choice than this, which gave to Mrs. Yates the larger opportunities of wealth and freedom in society. She shared her husband’s interest in many philanthropic labours, his care for the Harrington Schools, founded by his father, and for the Liverpool Institute, his pleasure and his anxieties in the making of the Prince’s Park, opened in 1849, as his gift to the town. She shared also to the full his delight in works of art and in foreign travel. The late Rev. Charles Wicksteed published some charming reminiscences of one 703of their Italian journeys; and still more notable was that journey through Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, recorded by Miss Harriet Martineau in her Eastern Travel.

“Since her husband’s death, in 1856, Mrs. Yates has stood bravely alone, living very quietly, but keenly alive to all the interests of the world, with ardent sympathy for every righteous cause, and generous help ever ready for public needs as for private charity. No one will ever know the full measure of her acts of kindness, her care for the least defended, her many quiet ways of doing good. She was a great lover of dumb creatures, and felt a passionate indignation at every kind of cruelty. Four-footed waifs and strays often found a pleasant refuge in her house, and for many years she was an active worker for the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The cabmen and donkey-boys of Liverpool at their annual suppers have long been familiar with her kindly face and gracious word, and many a time has her intrepid protest checked an act of cruelty in the public streets. The friend of Frances Power Cobbe, she took a deep and painful interest in the work of the Victoria Street Society for the Suppression of Vivisection, and sustained its work through many years by generous gifts. Herself a solitary woman in these later years, it was to the solitary and defenceless that her sympathies most quickly went. She desired for women larger powers to defend their own helplessness, to share in government for the amelioration of society, and to share also in the world’s work. She had a surprising energy and persistence of will in attending to her own affairs and doing the unselfish work she had most at heart. With a plain tenacity to the duty that was clear, she went out to the last, whenever it was possible, to vote at every election where she had a vote to give, and to attend meetings of a political and useful social character. Hers was a life of great unselfishness and true humility. Suffering most of all through sympathy with others, she longed for more light to dissipate the darker shadows of the world. And she herself, wherever it was 704possible to her patient faithfulness and generous kindness, drove away the darkness, praying thus the best of prayers, and making light and gladness in innumerable hearts.

“After only a few days of illness she fell asleep. A memorial service was held on Sunday last in the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth, where for many years she regularly worshipped. The Rev. V. D. Davis preached the sermon, and also on the following day, at the Birkenhead Flaybrick Hill Cemetery, spoke the words of faith at her grave.”—Inquirer, October 10th.

I have erected over her last resting-place (as I learned that she disliked heavy horizontal tombstones), a large upright slab of polished red Aberdeen granite. After her name and the dates of her birth and death, Shakespeare’s singularly appropriate line is inscribed on the stone:—

On receiving that eventful Thursday morning the news of the unlooked-for riches which had fallen to my lot, our first act was naturally to telegraph to the would-be tenant that “another offer” (to wit mine!) “had been accepted for Hengwrt.” The miseries of house-letting and home-leaving were over for us, we trust, so long as our lives may last.

There is not much more to be told in this last chapter of my story. The expansion of life in many directions which wealth brings with it, is as easy and pleasant as the contraction of it by poverty is the reverse. Yet I have not altered the opinion I formed long ago when I became poor after my father’s death, that the importance we commonly attach to pecuniary conditions is somewhat exaggerated, (so long as a competence is left) and that other things,—for 705example, the possession of good walking powers, or of strong eyesight or of good hearing, not to speak of the still more precious things of the affections and spirit,—are larger elements, by far, in human happiness than that which riches contributes thereto. Of course I have been very glad of this unlooked-for wealth in my old age. I have felt, first and before all things else, the immense satisfaction of being able to help the Anti-vivisection cause in all parts of the world while I live, and to provide for some further continuance of such help after I die. And next to this I have rejoiced that the comfort and repose of our beautiful and beloved home is secured to my friend and myself.

The friendly reader who has travelled with me through the journey of my three-score years and ten, from my singularly happy childhood in my old home at Newbridge to this far bourne on the road, will now, I hope, leave me with kindly wishes for a peaceful evening, and a not-too-distant curfew bell; in this dear old house, and with my beloved friend for companion.

The photograph of Hengwrt, which will be inserted in these last pages, gives a good idea of the house itself, but can convey none of the beauty of the rivers, woods and mountains all round. No spot in the kingdom I think, not even in the lovely Lake country, unites so many elements of beauty as this part of Wales. The mountains are not very lofty,—even glorious Cader where the giant Idris, (so says the legend) sat in the rocky “chair” (Cader) on the summit and studied the stars,—is trifling compared to Alpine height, and a molehill to Andes and Himalayas; yet is its form, and that of all these Cambrian rocks, so majestic, and their tilt so great, that no one could treat them as 706merely hills, or liken them to Irish mountains which resemble banks of rainclouds on the horizon. The deep, true, purple heather and the emerald-green fern robe these Welsh mountains in summer in regal splendour of colouring; and in autumn wrap them in rich russet brown cloaks. Down between every chain and ridge rush brooks, always bright and clear, and in many places leaping into lovely waterfalls. The “broad and brawling Mawddach” runs through all the valley from heights far out of sight, till, just below Hengwrt, it meets the almost equally beautiful stream of the Wnion, and the two together wind their way through the tidal estuary out into the sea at “Aber-mawddach” or “Abermaw,”—in English “Barmouth,” eight miles to the west. On both north and south of the valley and on the sides of the mountains, are woods, endless woods, of oak and larch and Scotch fir, interspersed with sycamore, wild cherry, horse-chestnut, elm, holly, and an occasional beech. Never was there a country in which were to be found growing freely and almost wild, so many different kinds of trees, creating of course the loveliest wood-scenery and variety of colouring. The oaks and elms and sycamores which grow in Hengwrt itself, are the oldest and some of the finest in this part of Wales; and here also flourish the largest laurels and rhododendrons I have ever seen anywhere. The luxuriance of their growth, towering high on each side of the avenue and in the shrubberies is a constant subject of astonishment to our visitors. The blossoms of the rhodos are sometimes twenty or twenty-five feet from the ground; and the laurels almost resemble forest trees. It has been one of my chief pleasures here to prune and clip and clear the way for these beautiful shrubs. Through the midst of them all, from one end of the place to the other, rushes the dearest little brook in the world, singing away constantly in so human a tone that over and over again I have paused in my labours 707of saw and clippers, and said to myself: “There must be some one talking in that walk! It is a lady’s voice, too! It can’t be only the brook this time!” But the brook it has always proved to be on further investigation.

Of the interior of this dear old home I shall not write now. It is interesting from its age,—one of the oak-panelled rooms contains a bed placed there at the dissolution of the neighbouring monastery of Cymmer Abbey,—but it is not in the least a gloomy house; altogether the reverse. The drawing-room commands a view to right and left of almost the whole valley of the Mawddach for nine or ten miles; and just opposite lies the pretty village of Llanelltyd, at the foot of the wooded hills which rise up behind it to the heights of Moel Ispry and Cefn Cam. It is a panorama of splendid scenery, not darkening the room, but making one side of it into a great picture full of exquisite details of old stone bridge and ruined abbey, rivers, woods, and rocks.

Among the objects in that wide view, and also in the still more extensive one from my bedroom above, is the little ivy-covered church of Llanelltyd; and below it a bit of ground sloping to the westering sun, dotted over with grey and white stones where “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” together with a few others who have been our friends and neighbours. There, in that quiet enclosure, will, in all probability, be the bourne of my long journey of life, with a grey headstone for the “Finis” of the last chapter of the Book which I have first lived, and now have written.

I hope that the reader, who perhaps may drive some day along the road below, in the enjoyment of an autumn 708holiday in this lovely land, will cast a glance upon that churchyard, and give a kindly thought to me when I have gone to rest.

The grey granite stone is standing already in Llanelltyd burying ground, though my place beneath it still waits for me. The friend who made my life so happy when I wrote the last pages of this book, and who had then done so for thirty-four blessed years,—lies there, under the rose trees and the mignonette; alone, till I may be laid beside her.

It would be some poor comfort to me in my loneliness to write here some little account of Mary Charlotte Lloyd, and to describe her keen, highly-cultivated intellect, her quick sense of humour, her gifts as sculptor and painter (the pupil and friend of John Gibson and of Rosa Bonheur); her practical ability and strict justice in the administration of her estate; above all to speak of her character, “cast”—as one who knew her from childhood said,—“in an heroic mould,” of fortitude and loftiness; her absolute unselfishness in all things large and small. But the reticence which belonged to the greatness of her nature made her always refuse to allow me to lead her into the more public life whereto my work necessarily brought me, and in her last sacred directions she forbids me to commemorate her by any written record. Only, then, in the hearts of the few who really knew her must her noble memory live.

I wrote the following lines to her some twenty-five years ago when spending a few days away from her and our home in London. I found them again after her death among her 709papers. They have a doubled meaning for me now, when the time has come for me to need her most of all.

God has given me two priceless benedictions in life;—in my youth a perfect Mother; in my later years, a perfect Friend. No other gifts, had I possessed them, Genius, or beauty, or fame, or the wealth of the Indies, would have been worthy to compare with the joy of those affections. To live in companionship, almost unbroken by separation and never marred by a doubt or a rough word, with a mind in whose workings my own found inexhaustible interest, and my heart its rest; a friend who knew me better than any one beside could ever know me, and yet,—strange to think!—could love me better than any other,—this was happiness for which, even now that it is over, I thank God from the depths of my soul. I thank Him that I have had such a Friend. And I thank Him that she died without prolonged suffering or distress, with her head resting on my breast and her hand pressing mine; calm and courageous to the last. Her old physician said when all was over: “I have seen many, a great many, men and women die; but I never saw one die so bravely.”

It has been possible for me through the kindness of my friend’s sister, to whom Hengwrt now belongs, to obtain for my 711remaining months or years a lease of this dear old house and beautiful grounds; and my winters of entire solitude, and summers, when a few friends and relations gather round me, glide rapidly away. I am still struggling on, as my friend bade me (literally with her dying breath), working for the cause of the science-tortured brutes, and I have even spoken again in public, and written many pamphlets and letters for the press. I hope, as Tennyson told me to do, to “fight the good fight” quite to the end. But there is a price which every aged heart perforce must pay for the long enjoyment of one soul-satisfying affection. When that affection is lost, it must be evermore lonely.

INDEX

• A
• Abengo, 243
• Adams, Mr., 670
• Adelsburg, Cave of, 265
• Adlam, Mr. and Mrs., 661
• Airlie, Lord, 639
• Aitken, Mary Carlyle, 539
• Ajalon, Valley of, 243
• Aldobrandini, 623
• Alexandria, 229
• Alfort, 620
• Alger, Rev. W., 499
• Allbut, Dr. Clifford, 600
• Allen, Mrs. Fairchild, 662
• “Alone, to the Alone,” 408
• American Visitors, 499
• Amos, Sheldon, 461, 657
• Amphlett, Mr. Justice, 593
• Amsterdam, 670
• Ansano, 376
• Apennines, 268, 375
• Appleton, Dr., 373, 624
• Apthorp, Mr. and Mrs., 225, 269, 499
• Archer, Mrs., 337
• Archibald, Mr. Justice, 593
• Ardgillan, 12, 197
• Argaum, 20, 210
• Armstrong, Rev. R., 421
• Arnold, Mr. Arthur, 430, 436
  • Mrs., 679
• Arnold, Sir Edwin, 629
• Arnold, Matthew, 180, 390, 469, 486, 497
• Arnold, Dr., 672
• Ashburton, Lord, 7
• Assaye, 20, 210
• Assisi, 365
• Athens, 254, 256
• Ayrton, Mr., 464
• d’Azeglio, Massimo, 365, 369, 395, 444
• B
• Baalbec, 243, 246, 248
• Babbage, Mr., 458, 559
• Bacon, 94
• Bagehot, Mr., 468
• Baldelli, Countess of, 661
• Balfour, J. H., 625
• Ballard, Mrs. Laura Curtis, 592
• Balisk, 137, 144, 147, 156
• Barbauld, Mrs., 37
• Barmouth, 706
• Barnum, 565
• Barry, Bishop, 671
• Baths (Introduction of into England), 169
• Bath, 16, 20, 24, 40, 682
• Bath and Wells, Bishop of, 629
• Bathurst, Miss, 275
• Beard, Rev. C., 421, 524
• Becker, Miss, 586
• Beddoe, Mrs., 607
• Beddoe, Dr. John, 607
• Bell, Sir C., 538
• Bell, Mr. E., 661, 677
• Belloc, Madame, 586
• Bellosguardo, 269, 375
• Bennett, Sir Sterndale, 532
• Bentley, Mr., 575–576
• Berchet, 66
• Berdoe, Dr., 671, 672, 681
• Beresford, Marcus, Primate of Ireland, 11, 629
• Beresford, Lady, 11
• 714Beresford, Sir Tristram, 11
• Berkeley, Bishop, 19
• Berlin, 661
• Bernard, Claude, 637, 676
• Bert, Paul, 676
• Bethany, 243
• Bethlehem, 236
• Bewick, 179
• Beyrout, 243, 250
• Bhagvat-Gita, 495
• Biedermann, Rev. W. and Mrs., 269
• Bilson, Bishop, 7
• Bishop, Mr., 379
• Bishop, Mrs., 496
• Blackburn, Justice, 593
• Black Forest, (Poem composed in), 270
• Blagden, Miss, 269, 352, 375, 376, 622
• Blunt, Rev. Gerard, 629
• Bodichon, Madame, 171, 466, 577, 638
• Boehmen, Jacob, 17
• Bologna, 365
• Bombay Parsee Society, 421
• Bonheur, Rosa, 393, seq., 708
• Bonaparte, Prince Lucien, 635, 657
• Borrow, George, 479, seq.
• Boston, 113
• Bost, M. Theodore, 496
• Botticelli, 225
• Bowie, Dr., 672
• Bowen, Lord Justice, 383
• Bowring, Sir John, 480
• Boxall, Sir W., 560, seq.
• Brabant, Dr., 352
• Brahmos of Bengal, 491
• Bramwell, Baron, 593
• Bray, Mr. and Mrs., 92
• Bright, John, 461, 589, 629
• Bright, Mrs. Jacob, 587
• Brighton, 57
• Bristol, 57, chapter x. 617
• British Union, 691
• “Broken Lights,” 400
• Brooke, Stopford, 93
• Brookfield, Mrs., 478
• Brown, Baldwin, 660
• Brown, Dr. J., 9, 224
• Browne, Mrs. Woolcott, 360
• Browning, Robert and Mrs., 263, 269, 365, 374, 378, seq., 457, 466, 556, 575, 577, 629
• Brunton, Dr. Lauder, 626
• Bryan, Mr., 672, 680, 695
• Bryant, Miss, 679
• Buckley, Mrs., 308
• Burleigh, Celia, 592
• Bunsen, 365
• Bunting, Mr., 421, 595
• Burntisland, 387
• Bute, Marquis of, 653, 679
• Butler, Mrs. J., 577
• Buxton, Mr., 461
• Byfleet, 471, 446
• Byron, 257, 258, 383, 475, 616
• Byron, Lady, 275, 291, 475, seq.
• C
• Cader, Idris, 346, 705
• Cahir, Lady, 167
• Cairo, 231
• Cairnes, Professor, 461
• Calmet (Dictionary), 82
• Campbell, 668
• Camperdown, Countess of, 629, 647, 679
• Canary, 311
• Cardwell, Lord, 627, 655
• Carlow, 8
• Carlyle, Thomas, 538, seq., 558, 629, 650
• Carnarvon, Lord, 653, 668
• Caramania, 240
• Carpenter, Mary, 275, seq., 475, 577, 583
• Carpenter, Professor Estlin, 287
• Carpenter, Philip, 287
• Carpenter, Dr., 452, 454, 482
• Cartwright, Mr., 669, 675
• Castlemaine, Lady, 192
• Cavour, 366, 389
• Cellini, 391
• Cervantes, 179
• Chambers, Robert, 195
• Champion, Colonel and Mrs., 23, 24
• 715Channing, Rev. W. H., 492, 499, 524, 678
• Charles, Justice, 593
• Charley, 40, seq.
• Chaloner, James, 7
• Charcot, Dr., 321
• Churchill, Lord R., 15
• “Cities of the Past,” 399
• Clarke, Rev. J. Freeman, 499
• Clarke, Dr., 671, 672
• Clay, Dr., 669
• Clewer, 322
• Clerk, Miss, 337
• Clifton, 338, 352, 360
• Close, Dean of Carlisle, 632
• Clough, Arthur, 90, 374
• Cobbe, Frances Power, Birth, 31;
  • School, 57;
  • Mother’s death, 99;
  • First book, 110;
  • Leaves Newbridge, 213;
  • in Bristol, 275;
  • Settles in London, 395;
  • Leaves London, 580
• Cobbe, Lady Betty, 11
• Cobbe, Frances Conway, 388
• Cobbe, Rev. Henry, 13, 44
• Cobbe, George, 43
• Cobbe, William, 41, 43
• Cobbe, Thomas, 10, 43, 578
• Cobbe, Charles, 20, seq., 100, seq., 206, seq., 212
• Cobbe, Sophia and Eliza, 464
• Cobbe, Helen, 204, 212
• Cockburn, Lord, Chief Justice, 593
• Colam, Mr., 626, seq., 636
• Colenso, Bishop, 97, 400, 404, 451, 540
• Colenso, Mrs., 453
• Coleridge, Hon. Bernard, 671
• Coleridge, Lord, 549, 560, 561, 593, 629, 648, 695
• Coleridge, Hon. Stephen, 689, 690, 695, 696
• Collins, Wilkie, 558
• Combe, George, 576
• Comet (of 1835), 52
• Condorcet, 187
• Constantinople, 261
• Conversion, 88
• Conway, Captain T., 7
• Conway, Adjutant General, 43
• Copenhagen, 661
• Corsi, 623
• Corsini, 623
• Corfu, 264
• Coutts, Lady Burdett, 636
• Cowie, Mr. James, 621
• Cowper-Temple, Hon. W., 318
• Cox, Sir G. W., 452
• Crabbe, 11
• Craig, Isa, 316
• Crampton, Sir Philip, 46
• Crawford, Mr. Oswald, 421
• Crimean War, 173
• Crofton, Sir Walter, 291
• Crosby & Nichols, 113
• Cross, Lord, 639
• Cross, Mr., 653, seq.
• Cunningham, Rev. W., 373, 374
• Curtis, Mr. George, 499
• Curraghmore, 12
• Cushman, Charlotte, 365, 391, 392
• Cyon, 553
• Cyclades, 240
• Cyprus, 252
• D
• Dall, Mr., 496
• Daly, Miss, 50
• Damascus, 243
• Darwin, Charles, 180, 423, 485, seq., 540, 618, 640, 643
• Darwin, Erasmus, 485, 490
• Davies, Rev. V., 702
• “Dawning Lights,” 483
• Dead Sea, 240
• Dean, Rev. Peter, 375
• Decies, Lord, 22
• Denison, Archdeacon, 542
• Denman, Mr. Justice, 593
• Deraismes, Mademoiselle, 671
• Devis, Mrs., 23, 58
• Devon, Lord, 194
• De Wette, 452
• Dicey, Mrs., 478
• Djinns, 247
• Donabate, 100, 137
• Donegal, 101
• Donne, W., 576
• 716Donnelly, Mr. William, 141
• Dorchester House, 26, 143
• Downshire, Marquis of, 193
• Drumcar, 169, 192
• Dublin, 8, 104
• Durdham Down, 303
• “Duties of Women,” 570, 601
• Dyke, Sir W. Hart, 639
• E
• Eastlake, Lady, 391
• Easton Lyss, 445, 578
• Edgeworth, Miss, 44, 179
• Edwards, The Misses Betham, 558
• Edwards, Passmore, 436
• Egypt, 219
• Eliot, George, 92, 444, 578
• Elliot, Dean, 359
• Elliot, Miss, 277, 307, seq., 333, 359, 385, 387, 448, 458
• Elliot, Sir Frederick, 635, 639, 647, 650
• Ellicott, Bishop, 648
• Emigration, 157
• Empson, Mr., 300
• Enniskillen, Lord, 194
• Erichsen, Dr., 642, 644
• Escott, Mr., 380
• Essays and Reviews, 89
• Euphrates, 40
• Evans, Mrs., 186, seq.
• Evans, George H., 186
• Exeter, Bishop of, 629
• F
• Fairfax, Ursula, 7
• Fairfax, Sir William, 385, 387
• Fauveau, Mademoiselle F., 222
• Fawcett, Mr. and Mrs., 459, 466, 467, 578, 586
• Ferguson, Mr., 423
• Ferguson, Mr. J., 559, 560
• Fergusson, Sir W., 345, 627, 629, 633
• Ferrier, Professor, 672, seq.
• Ferrars, Selina, Countess of, 17
• Ffoulkes, Edmund, 178
• Fiésolé, 375
• Finlay, Mr., 254, seq.
• Firth, Mr. J. B., 642
• Fisherman of Loch Neagh, 48
• Fitzgerald, Edward, 576
• Fitzgerald, Mr., 639
• Flood, 15
• Florence, 221, 268, 320, 365, 375, 388, 389, 622, seq., 661
• Flower, William, 625
• Fonblanque, Mr. E. de, 648, 662
• Fontanés, M., 496
• Förster, Dr. Paul, 661
• Foster, Dr. Michael, 626, 674
• Francis, Saint, 536
• Froude, J. A., 8, 421, 478, 510, seq., 621, 650
• Furdoonjee, Nowrosjee, 421, 491
• G
• Galton, 423, 466, 483
• Gamgee, Professor A., 625, 673
• Garbally, 16, 193
• Garibaldi, 366
• Garrett, Miss E., 467
• Gaskell, Mrs., 577
• Geist, 470, 471
• Genoa, 365, 384
• Germany, 46
• George IV., 16
• Ghiza, 232
• Ghosts, 13
• Greene, Mr., 662
• Gibbon, 52, 74, 89, 97
• Gibson, John, 268, 365, 390, 708
• Gladstone, W. E., 446, 504, seq., 551
• Glasgow, Lord, 653
• Godwin, William, 257, 466
• Goethe, 555
• Goldschmidts, 237
• Goodeve, Dr., 338, 361
• Gothard, 269
• Grana Uaile, 139
• Granard, Lady, 14, 44
• Grant, Isabel, 435
• Grant, Baron, 436
• 717Grant Duff, Sir M., 536
• Granville, Lord, 587
• Grattan, 15
• Green, Miss, 195
• Greg, Mr. W. R., 524, seq.
• Grey, Mrs. William, 578, 586
• Greville, Henry, 576
• Grisanowski, Dr., 383
• Grove, Sir W., 482
• Guillotine (Nuns chanting at), 293
• Gully, Mr., 673
• Gurney, Mr. Russell, 589, 595
• Guthrie, Canon, 359
• Guyon, Madame, 17
• H
• Hague, The, 669
• Hajjin, 278, 617
• Hall, Mrs., 482
• Hallam, Arthur, 553, 555
• Hamilton, Nichola, 11
• Handel, 8
• Hanover, 661
• Harcourt, Sir W., 669
• “Hard Church,” 196
• Harris, Mr., 401, 501 seq.
• Harrison, Frederic, 377
• Harrowby, Lord, 636
• Hart, Dr. Ernest, 674
• Harvey, 538
• Hastings, Lady Selina, 13
• Hastings, Lord, 43
• Haweis, Mr., 430
• Hazard, Mr., 499
• Headfort, Marquis of, 264
• Hebron, 236
• Heidelburg, 270
• Helps, Sir A., 629
• Hemans, Mrs., 258
• Hengwrt, 392, 485, 699, 704, 706, 710
• Henniker, Lord, 639, seq., 668
• Hereford, Bishop of, 629
• Herodotus, 588
• Herschell, Mr., 596
• Higginson, Colonel, 499, 592
• Hill, Alfred, 595, seq.
• Hill, Frederick, 586
• Hill, Sir Rowland, 586
• Hill, Matthew D., 285, 347, 586
• Hill, F. D., 327, 337, 347, 578, 586
• Hill, Miss, 347
• Hill, Miss Octavia, 578
• Hobbema, 26, 143
• Hoggan, Dr. and Mrs., 468, 538, 545, 617, 637, seq., 647, seq.
• Holden, Mrs. Luther, 628
• Holland, Sir H., 596
• Holloway, Mr., 322
• Holmes, Dr. O. W., 499
• Holmgren, Professor, 491, 643
• Holt, Mr., 655, 657, 662, 669
• Holyhead, 40
• Holyrood, 9
• “Holy Griddle,” The, 147
• Hooker, 113
• Hooker, Mrs., 457
• Hooper, Mr. G., 207, 208
• Hopwood, Mr., 595
• Hope, Mr. (“Anastasius”), 22
• Horsley, Mr. Victor, 680
• Hosmer, Harriet, 289, 392, 499, 577
• Houghton, Lord, 537
• Hough, Bishop, 14
• Howe, Mrs., 499, 591
• Howard, John, 495, 564
• Howth, 139
• Hume, 97
• Humphry, Sir G., 625
• Huntingdon, Earl of, 10
• Huntingdon, Lady, 81
• Hutton, Richard, 469, 627, 635, 643, 647, 652
• Huxley, Professor, 642, 644
• I
• Isle of Man, 7
• Italy, 222
• J
• Jaffa, 234, 243
• James, Mr. H., 575
• 718Jameson, Mrs., 576
• Jericho, 242
• Jerusalem, 220, 234
• Jesse, Mr., 660
• Jewsbury, Miss, 558
• Jones, Martha, 37, 268
• Jordan, 242
• Jowett, Benjamin, 316, 318, 349, 351, 402, 540, 629
• K
• Kant, 115, 122, 487
• Keats, 555
• Keating, Justice, 593
• Keeley, Mr., 173
• Kelly, Chief Baron, 593
• Kelly, Sir Fitzroy, 629, 648, 650
• Kemble, Fanny, 4, 197, seq., 257, 360, 439, 446, 553, 555, 575, 580, 695
• Kemble, John, 553, 555
• Kempis, Thomas à, 149
• Keshub Chunder Sen, 455, 491, seq.
• Kilmainham, 25
• Kingsley, Charles, 401, 454, seq.
• Kingsland, Lord, 9
• Kinnear, Miss, 39, 50
• Kitty, 290
• Klein, Professor, 626
• Kozzaris, Lady Emily, 264
• Kubla Khan, 47
• L
• Lamartine, 90
• Landsdown, Lord, 359
• Landor, W. S., 257, 269, 382, 622
• Landseer, Sir E., 394, 561
• Langton, Anna Gore, 586
• Lankester, Mr. Ray, 634
• Lawrence, Lord, 493, seq.
• Lawrence, General, 635
• Lawson, M. A., 625
• Lebanon, 243, 250
• Leblois, Mons., 496
• Lecky, Mr., 179, 478, 629
• Lee, Miss, 13
• Leffingwell, Dr., 502, 666
• Le Hunt, Colonel, 155
• Leigh, Colonel, 593
• Leitrim, Lord, 194
• Lembcké, M. and Mdme., 661
• Le Poer, John, 11
• L’Estrange, Alice, 500, seq.
• Levinge, Dorothy, 17
• Lewes, George H., 63
• Lewis, Sir George, 528
• Liddon, Canon, 651, seq., 659, 664
• Lindsay, Lady Charlotte, 44
• Livermore, Mrs., 591
• Liverpool, 51, 52, 624, 625, 701
• Llandaff, Dean of, 671
• Llanelltyd, 707, 708
• Llangollen (Ladies of), 197
• Lloyd, Miss, 200, 392, 395, 471, 438, 574, 647, 680, 708, seq.
• Locke, 94
• Locke, John, M.P., 463
• Lockwood, Mrs., 499
• London, 40, chapters xvi., xvii., xviii.
• Longfellow, 500
• Longley, Bishop, 184
• Longman, Mr. W., 111, 579
• Loring-Brace, Mr. and Mrs., 499
• Louth, 8
• Louis Philippe, 222
• Lowell, J. R., 234, 392, 551
• Lush, Justice, 593
• Lux Mundi, 89
• Lydda, 234
• Lyell, Sir Charles and Lady, 446, seq., 481
• Lyell, Colonel and Mrs., 446, 447
• M
• Macdonald, George, 145, 671
• Machpelah, 237
• Macintosh, Sir James, 646
• Mackenzie, General Colin, 629, 647, 678
• Mackarness, Bishop, 671
• Mackay, R. W., 472, seq.
• Madiai (Family of), 565
• 719Madras, 7, 20, 282
• Magee, Bishop, 668
• Magnan, M., 627, 634
• Maine, Sir H., 478, 633
• Majendie, 538
• Malabari, 611
• Malone, Mary, 32
• Malta, 228
• Mamre, 236
• Manchester, Bishop of 629, 631, 648
• Manen, Madame von, 669
• Manning, Mrs., 423
• Manning, Archbishop, 540, seq., 629, 657
• Manzoni, 66
• Mario, Madame Alberto, 383
• Marsh, Archbishop, 112
• Marston, Miss, 690
• Martin, Richard, 178, 646
• Martineau, Dr., 93, 412, 446, 519, seq., 629
• Martineau, Harriet, 577
• Mar Saba, 238, 247
• Masson, David, 314, 421
• Matthew, Father, 147
• Maulden Rectory, 445
• Maurice, F. D., 401
• Mawddach, 706
• Maxwell, Colonel, 209
• May, Rev. Samuel J., 282, 583
• Mazzini, 257, 366, 367
• M‘Clintock, Lady E., 160, 169
• Mellor, Mr. Justice, 593
• Merivale, Mr. Herman, 446, 478
• Messina, 228
• Michaud, Madame, 65
• Michel, Louise, 498
• Mill, J. S.,411, 457, 486, 540
• Milan, 269, 365
• Minto, Lord 369, 650
• Minto, Lady, 639
• Mischna, The, 473
• Mitchell, Professor Maria, 591
• Moira, Lady, 14, 174
• Moncks, 17
• Monsell, Hon. Mrs., 155, 322
• Monro, Miss, 679
• Monteagle, Lady, 478
• Montefiores, 237;
  • Sir Moses, 475
• Montriou, Mademoiselle, 52
• Montreux, 269
• Moore, 37, 48
• Morelli, Countess, 661
• Morgan, Mrs. de, 478
• Morley, John, 421
• Morley, Samuel, 659, 665
• Morris, Rev. F. O., 671
• Morris, Lewis, 558
• Morrison, Mrs. Frank, 679, 690
• Moth, Mrs., 14
• Mount of Olives, 243
• Mount-Temple, Lord and Lady, 318, 561, 578, 636, 648, 657, 665, 679, 690
• Moydrum Castle, 192
• Mozoomdar, 493
• Müller, Max, 423
• Mundella, Mr., 650
• Murray, 112
• N
• Naples, 226, 365, 384
• Napoleon, 368, 621
• Newbridge, 9, 20, 25, 46, 75, 154, 169, 203, 209, 264, 304
• Newman, Cardinal, 97, 371, 530
• Newman, Francis, 95, 97, 103, 406, 415, 530
• Newspapers, 169
• New York, 157
• Nightingale, Miss, 262
• Nile, 234
• Noel, Major, 4
• Norris, Mr. John, 691
• Norton, Sir Richard, 7
• Northumberland, Duke of, 629
• Norwich, 627, 634
• O
• O’Brien, Smith, 153, seq.
• O’Connell, 182
• Oliphant, Laurence, 500
• Ormonde, Marchioness of, 194
• Owen, Sir John, 7
• 720%center%P
• Padua, 268
• Paley, 94
• Palestine, 234
• Palmer, Susannah, 432
• Palmerston, Lord, 563
• Paris, 224, 320
• Parkes, Miss Bessie, 586
• Parker, Theodore, 97, 103, 225, 351, 353, 371, 502, 622
• Parnell, Sophia, 186
• Parnell, C. S., 186
• Parnell, Sir Henry, 189
• Parnell, Thomas, 189
• Parsonstown, 194
• Parthenon, 255
• Pays de Vaud, 269
• Peabody, Mr., 499, 662
• Pécaut, M. Felix, 496
• Pelham, Mrs. H., 11, 16
• Pennington, Frederick, 595
• Penzance, Lord, 596
• Percy, Lord Jocelyn, 635
• Perugia, 365
• Pfeiffer, Mrs., 577
• Philæ, 234
• Pigott, Baron, 593
• Pilgrim’s Progress, 84
• Pirkis, Mr., 672, 679
• Pisa, 365, 369
• Playfair, Lord, 640, 669
• Plutarch, 52
• Poggi, Miss, 60
• Pollock, Baron, 593
• Portrane, 8, 189
• Portsmouth, Countess of, 629, 647, 678
• Poussin, Gaspar, 26, 143
• Powers, 42
• Primrose, (in Bonny Glen), 101
• Probyn, Miss Letitia, 435
• Putnam, Messrs., 457
• Pye-Smith, Dr., 634
• Pyramids, 231
• Q
• Quain, Mr. Justice, 593
• Quarantania, Mountains of, 242
• R
• Ragged Schools, 286
• Ramabai, 495
• Ramleh, 234
• Rawdon, Colonel, 14
• Red Lodge, 275, seq.
• Remond, Miss, 283
• Renan, Ernest, 400, 404, 535
• Reville, Albert, 371
• Reid, Mrs., 485
• Reid, Mr. R. T., 669, 671, 675
• Rees, Miss, 679
• Rhine, 269
• Rhodes, 252
• Rhone, 269
• Riboli, Dr., 661
• Riga, 661
• Ritchie, Mrs. Richmond, 478
• Roberts, Lord, 7
• Roberts, Miss, 60
• Robertson, Frederick, 93, 423
• Rolleston, George, 625, 627, 649
• Rollin, 52
• Rome, 224, 365
• Roscoe, Mrs., 692
• Rosse, Lord and Lady, 194
• Rothkirch, Countess, 359
• Roy, Dr. C. S., 673
• Runciman, Miss, 60, 74
• Ruskin, John, 629, 671
• Russell, Mr. Patrick, 147
• Russell, Lord Arthur, 460, 545
• Russell, Lord John, 369
• Russell, Lord Odo, 534, 544
• Russell, Mr. George, 669
• Rutland, Duke of, 629
• S
• Salisbury, Bishop of, 629
• Sanderson, Burdon, Dr., 625, 626, 640, 674
• Schœlcher, M. le Sénateur V., 497
• Schiff, Professor, 383, 622, seq.
• Schilling, Madame V., 661
• Schuyler, Misses, 499, 577
• Scott, Sir Walter, 11, 47
• Scutari, 262
• 721Sedan, 621
• Selborne, Lord, 629
• Sesostris, 39
• Shaftesbury, Lord, 81, 294, 561, seq., 645, seq., 657, 671, 697
• Shaen, Mr. W., 647, 679
• Shaen, Emily, 579, 606
• Shelley, 50, 92, 225, 383, 466, 555
• Shelley, Sir Percy, 466
• Shirreff, Miss, 578, 586
• Shore, Augusta, 594
• Simpson, Mrs., 478, 535
• Skene, Miss Felicia, 26, 27, 109
• Sleeman, Mrs., 224
• Smith, Horace, 63
• Smith, Sydney, 179
• Smith, Joseph, 401
• Smith, Sir W., 421
• Smyrna, 253
• Somerville, Mrs., 172, 263, 269, 365, 383, 446, 575, 622
• Somerset, Lady Henry, 496
• Sonnenschein, Messrs. Swan, 671
• Southey, 13, 47
• Spedding, James, 559
• Spencer, Herbert, 485
• Spezzia, 384
• Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., 648
• Stael, Madame de, 187
• Stanley, Dean, 97, 237, 385, 402, 465, 496, 529, seq., 563, 659
• Stanley, Lady Augusta, 534
• Stanley, Miss, 541
• Stanley, Lady, of Alderley, 587
• Stansfeld, Mr. and Mrs., 367, 646, 648
• Stebbins, Miss, 391
• Stephen, Miss Sarah, 328, 333
• Stephen, Leslie, 421, 478, 618, 635, 671
• Stephen, Miss Caroline, 578
• Stephens, Sir Fitzjames, 419
• Stewart, Delia, 186
• Stockholm, 661
• Story, W. W., 365
• Stowe, Mrs., 365, 382, 457, 575, 577
• Strozzi, 623
• St. Asaph, Bishop of, 629
• St. Sophia, 262
• St. Leger, Harriet, 4, 111, 180, 197, 205, 211, 214, 275, 298, 384, 388, 576, 579
• St. Paul’s, 112
• Sunday, (at Newbridge), 82
• Swanwick, Anna, 577, 607
• Swarraton, 7, 20
• Swedenborg, 401
• Switzerland, 222, 269
• Symonds, Dr., 286
• Syra, 264
• Syracuse, 282
• T
• Tait, Archbishop, 631
• Tait, Mrs., 318
• Tait, Lawson, 671
• Tayler, Rev. J. J., 375, 524
• Taylor, Rev. Edward, 12, 197
• Taylor, Jane, 37
• Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. P. A., 283, 457, 459, 461, 586
• Taylor, Sir Henry, 557
• Taylor, Miss, 199, 411, 456
• Taylor, Dr. Bell, 671
• Templeton, 13, 44
• Tennyson, Alfred, 551, seq., 611, 629
• Tennyson, Emily, 556
• Tennyson, Frederick, 383
• Tennyson, Hallam, 555
• Thebes, 234
• Theism, 93
• Themistocles, Tomb of, 261
• Thompson, Archbishop, 629, 645, 662, 675
• Thornhill, Mark, 671, 672
• Thring, Mr., 677
• Trelawney, Mr., 258
• Trench, Anne Power, 16
• Trench, Jane Power, 176
• Trench, Archdeacon, 177
• Trench, Archbishop, 553
• Trevelyan, Sir C., 541
• Trieste, 264, 267
• Trimleston, Lord, 8, 137
• Trimmer, Mrs., 38
• Trollope, Adolphus, 263, 269, 365, 381
• 722Trollope, Anthony, 558
• Trübner, 113, 400, 421
• Truro, Lord, 668
• Tufnell, Dr., 627
• Tuam, Archbishop of, 12, 22, 177
• Turin, 365
• Turner, Mr., 210
• Turvey, 8, 9
• Twining, Louisa, 318, 327
• Tyndall, Professor, 482, seq.
• Tyrone, Lord, 12
• U
• Umberto, 368
• Unwin, Fisher, Messrs., 205, 422
• Upsala, 643
• Usedom, Count Guido, 365, 368, 371
• V
• Vambéry, Mons., 484
• Vaughan, Rev. Mr., 87
• Vaughan, Rev. Dr., 647
• Venice, 258, 267, 365
• Verona, 365
• Vestiges of Creation, 194
• Vesuvius, 226
• Victor Emmanuel, 368, 388
• Villari, Madame, 269, 381
• Virchow, Dr., 634
• Vivisection (Movement against), chapter xx.
• Vogt, Carl, 490, 663
• Voltaire, 94, 97
• W
• Waddy, Mr., 673
• Wakeley, Dr., 673
• Walker, Dr., 635
• Warburton, Elliot, 183
• Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 524
• Warren, Mr., 464
• Waterford, Marquis of, 12, 23, 174
• Watson, William, 558
• Watts, Dr., 37
• Watts, G. F., 456
• Weber, Baron, 661, 671
• Webster, Mrs., 577, 586
• Wedgwood, Mr. H., 646
• Wedgwood, Miss Julia, 578, 646
• Weiss, Mr., 375
• Wellborne, 7
• Welldon, Mr., 677
• Wellesley, 20, 209
• Wellington, Duke of, 629
• Weston, 20
• Whately, Archbishop, 196
• White, Blanco, 97
• White, Rev. H., 532
• White, Mrs., 662
• Wicksteed, Rev. P., 524
• Wilberforce, Canon, 671
• Wilhelm, Emperor, 366
• Willard, Miss, 607
• Williams & Norgate, Messrs., 422, 471
• Wilmot, Sir Eardley, 669
• Windeyer, W. C., 334
• Winchester, Bishop of, 629
• Winkworth, Misses, 580
• Wilson, Miss Dorothy, 214
• Wister, Mrs., 499
• Wollstoncraft, Mary, 466
• Wood, Colonel Sir Evelyn, 629, 635, 648, 650
• Woolman, John, 619
• Workhouses, 286, chapter xi.
• Wynne-Finch, Mr., 500
• Y
• Yates, Mrs. Richard Vaughan, 699, seq.
• Yeo, Professor, 674
• Z
• Zachly, 244
• Zola, 369
• Zoophilist, 670, 680, 682